The Search

"Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows nought;

and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad."

~~Henry Wordsworth Longfellow~~

Bill didn't get in until long after dark. It was summer, blistering summer, in California's vast Desert Conservation Area, the temperature that day soaring above one-hundred-ten degrees. His brown and tan uniform was crusted with alkali, as was his skin, which was crazed with bloody scratches. His voice was a whisper, all but gone. Although he washed off the salt and the blood, and although it's now been years, his eyes still grow hollow, his face still contorts when he recalls that day.

As a law enforcement ranger, his patrol sector included large stretches of desert, including the Imperial Sand Dunes, a monstrous recreational area where visitors from San Diego, Los Angeles, and elsewhere still congregate on holidays and weekends, bringing with them an assortment of off-road vehicles in which to enjoy the great outdoors. Southern California is dotted with many areas where off-roaders congregated to enjoy the outdoors. On this particular day, dispatch received a frantic call from a family group camped near Salt Creek Marsh on the north end of Salton Sea. Two seven-year-old boys had gone missing. They'd been riding their child-sized motorcycles in the camp. "Get out of here," the grownups said. "You're making too much noise." So they did.

But that had been before lunch; now past noon, they still had not returned.

The location was miles from Bill's patrol sector, but the ranger in that area, one of Bill's best friends, activated search and rescue, so rangers, including Bill and others, rolled in from other sectors, other counties, to assist. Border Patrol sent in aircraft. Civilian search and rescue teams were activated, and local deputy sheriffs joined the search. Long before he arrived at the location, Bill started 'loading up', drinking water and sports drinks as fast as he could choke them down, knowing. Just knowing. It was too hot…too hot.

At the scene an hour or so later, heat rose off the desert floor in undulating waves. Nothing moved. There was no comforting sound of motorcycle engines in the distance. Bill's stomach plummeted.

Still, trained to save, they all held out hope. If they could just get to them in time…if the boys stayed together they had a better chance…maybe they'd come back to camp…maybe they were in another camp…maybe…maybe.

They tracked the bikes for miles, in and out of gullies and washes, eventually into the Salt Creek Marsh, an isolated alkali swamp, maze-like and thick with tamarisk and salt cedar trees, the ground temperature over one-hundred-thirty degrees, the air stifling, nearly unbreathable, humidity over ninety percent.

They searched on foot, almost frantically, pushing through stickery thickets, wading through noxious, stagnant pools—calling out the boys' names until they had no voices left. A deputy sheriff collapsed and had to be air-lifted out, overcome by heat. Bill carried another one out. He and the others kept on, walking, sometimes crawling. Hours later, exhausted and broken-hearted, they found the children a few yards apart, their little motorcycles nearby.

Both of the boys were dead.

Like everyone I know who deals with death, who hands out grief—who has to be the one to tell, to professionally inform, to see the dreadful dawning of knowledge on the faces of  loved ones that life will never be the same again—Bill was stoic, his regret efficiently compartmentalized, tucked down in his gut, there next to Vietnam, next to car crashes, house fires, murders; nestled in with dozens and dozens of little boxes of other people's pain all mingled with his own—a lumpy, broken mosaic of unuttered woe.

That night, we sat together in the dark for a long, long time. As always, there were no words.

There was just us.

Mud Running and Other Fashion Disasters

"Time is the longest distance

between two places."

~~Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

My phone vibrates, skittering around on my bedside table, playing the opening riff to Ain't Goin' Down 'Til The Sun Comes Up, thus giving me my first opportunity of the day to choose. I dismiss the alarm, roll over and go back to sleep.

An hour later, I awake and realize I'm about to miss my dental cleaning. (Now wouldn't that be a tragedy?) But I am too parsimonious to pay for an appointment I do not keep, besides, it could be six months before I can get scheduled again, so I leap out of bed, stub my toe on one of Simon Winchester's fabulous books, race into the bathroom without my glasses where I step on something that obviously should have stayed in the litterbox in the corner, but did not.

With a sudden and probably terminal case of the Shivering Disgusteds, I jump into the shower and wash my foot, inadvertently wetting my hair in the process, so I shampoo it, too. The blow dryer is for sure going to cut into the window of minutes I have to get to Dr. Allegretti's office on time.

I am out of the shower. I yell to Bill that we're going to need a clean rug in the bathroom, because even without my glasses I can now see the very large smear my misstep created. The cat sits in the window, grinning in the sunshine. I am compelled to poke him, but I don't.

I rush back into the bedroom and pull a clean bra out of the basket of clothes Bill brought up from the laundry room the night before. Grabbing a single beige strap, I come up with a gigantic, mutant wad of brassieres. "Looks like these got pretty tangled," I remember him saying. "You'll have to figure them out." I drop the wad to wrench open my lingerie drawer, latching onto the only thing that pops out: a sheer red number that has the support attributes of overcooked pasta—which would be why it's still lurking in my drawer instead of tangled in the wad in the basket. At my age and vastness, I need a hoist, not a hanky. I struggle into it. It's going in the rag bag as soon as I get home, I tell myself, trying to ignore the generous amount of 'me' jiggling in the dresser mirror.

I rummage through the closet and pick a blouse and slacks. Black, of course. I could wear one of my other colors: gray or navy blue, but it's turning into a black kind of day, so black.

Back in the bathroom, I brush and floss, doing my best to erase three months of slothful neglect. I toss on an assortment of skin products, all guaranteed to make me look younger, brighter, less mottled. Wrinkle free. In the unforgiving glare from the professional makeup lights I had installed years before (now that was brilliant, wasn't it), I just look greasy. I dust on some mineral face powder which immediately settles into the hills and valleys of my face. No blush, no eyes. Anyway, I figure, by the time the dentist and his henchmen finish with me, even the powder will be gone, so why bother?

I dry my hair, applying the goop my hairdresser entices me to buy every four weeks when she cuts it. Once it's dry, I mush it around into a spiky, swirly arrangement. I call it Wyoming Hair  because whichever way the wind blows it, it's fixed.

I am out the door, on the phone. "Tell Dr. A I'm on my way," I beg his receptionist, knowing I have a twenty-minute drive and ten minutes to get there. I glance down at myself only to see a long, foamy glob of toothpaste gracing the right front of my black moleskin tunic. In the truck, I grab a tissue and wipe it up. Barreling down our dirt drive, one-handed, with the front of my shirt in my mouth, I try to wet it enough to get the spot completely off. (Oh, c'mon - you've done it, too!)

I pull out onto the unpaved and pothole infested road to the highway, only then recalling that the county maintenance crew turned and plowed the roadbed two days before, and it's been raining off and on ever since. I put the truck in four-wheel drive, gear down, and work on my shirt, which now has a huge, wrinkled wet patch on it—as though I've been assaulted by a moose—but the toothpaste is gone. I turn the heater up to high and twist the vent toward my chest.

There are two sets of foot-deep ruts in the roadway—one set going north, the other south. Between them are glistening slicks of mud. The bottomless kind that steals shoes, steals car keys, steals balance. It's two miles to the highway and I see the dollar signs involved in a tow if I...Make...One...False...Move. Besides, if I get stuck, I know I'm going to end up on my face in the road.

By the time I reach asphalt, my blouse is dry, but I've been sweating like a pig in the heater air, wrestling the steering wheel, nervous about the road, and I realize I forgot to put on deodorant. So, for the rest of the trip, I alternately smooth the wrinkles out of my shirt front and sniff myself to see if I stink. Do I smell? Do I not smell? Is my blouse dry? Will Dr. A notice? Oh, God! I stink; I know I stink. I'll just keep my arms down. How are my teeth? Are my teeth OK?

I wheel into the parking lot and leap out of my old truck, failing to take preventative action against the stalactites of mud hanging from the vehicle's undercarriage and rocker panels. Thick, oozing glop plasters the back on my left pant leg. I knock off the biggest lumps and hurry into Dr. A's office.

Sitting in the waiting room, because, as the receptionist said with a sniff, "You're really late. They will have to work you in," I try not to get mud on the chair as I consider how my morning, how my day, might have been better had I not turned off that alarm. "Choices," I sigh.

"What voices?" the old lady across from me asks.

“The ones in my head.”

She moves to another seat.

Finally, my teeth gleaming, my dental hygiene habits firmly chastised, lies about flossing, water-picking, and brushing hopping out of my mouth like wiener dogs at their first race, I have my new toothbrush in hand and drive home, the ruts in our country road not nearly as intimidating. Once arrived, I stand in the pasture and scrape off as much of the dried mud on my trouser-leg as I can before I go inside.

I drop my purse in the living room, and go down the hall to the bedroom where I begin changing my clothes, disgruntled at my harried morning. I am standing there, my tunic hanging open, my slacks in the clothes hamper, when Bill walks in. "Wow," he says. "You haven't worn that in a long time." He smiles that crooked smile of his, gesturing toward my chest and the sheer red nylon and lace, which (still failing to perform its primary function), peeks brazenly out of my shirt. He saunters in, closing the bedroom door and then the distance between us.

I still have that bra.

Rebecca's Journal

"You don't die from a broken heart,

you only wish you did."

~~Unknown~~

He disappeared a little over a year ago. He kissed me goodbye and left the house and simply did not come back. Since then, there has not been one word from him. Not a phone call, not a letter.

We've been married 31 years. He has a natural foods-type grocery store in the city, and a small recycling center, too. Thanks to his management team, I've been able to keep them going, so I still have income. We have two children, a boy and a girl, both grown with families of their own. They keep me strong. They are what I live for. Our youngest grandson, Ryder, looks just like his grandpa. Sometimes that makes me cry.

When I reported him missing, the sheriff's department came out to the house. A couple of detectives questioned me while their CSI people went through every room. They searched his clothing, his personal items. "Did he take anything with him?" they wanted to know.

No, he didn't, I tell them. Except my heart, of course.

I can't sleep. I sit on the front porch in our old glider, thinking I'll see him come out of the woods where he has always loved to wander. Or maybe he'll be in the garden patch, preparing the soil for a new planting. Sometimes, my daughter drives over to see how I'm doing and she finds me out there, just sitting in his old bathrobe, and she takes me into the house and puts me to bed, staying with me until I go to sleep.

Once, the sheriff's department made a statement that he had 'vanished without a trace'. For weeks after that I was bombarded with calls from magazines like The Enquirer and The Star, asking foolish questions about kidnapping and whether or not my husband believed in extra-terrestrial life. His disappearance was featured on Most Bizarre on TV. Ridiculous stories appeared online, suggesting he'd been the victim of alien abduction. There were spurious quotations in them attributed to me. My lawyer is seeing to that, now.

Ridiculous.

My family and friends tell me it's time for me to move on. My lawyer says I can do a couple of things: I can wait, and then have him declared legally dead after seven years, and be able to collect his life insurance; I can also divorce him on the grounds of abandonment.

I don't want a divorce, though. I love him. I have since the first time I saw him. Besides, he told me this would happen one day. That he would only be here, conducting experiments and passing on his genetic information, for a few of 'our' years.

He said it would only be a matter of time before our species destroyed itself. He's seen it countless times over the centuries. I asked him how old he was, but he told me I couldn't possibly understand the concept of his age, and not to worry about it, so I haven't.

He'll be back to pick up our children and grandchildren before society breaks down completely. They all know. They have always known.

I am, he told me, too fragile physiologically for the trip, and would die of old age long before arrival at a hospitable planet. But my genes, he said, have added to the strength of his own kind, and our children and grandchildren will become part of a race that will perhaps return to repopulate the earth when the time comes.

In the meantime, my son, thanks to his dad, is marketing technology that composts waste more effectively, turning the byproducts into fertilizer and fuel. My daughter works in cancer research, developing gene therapy for tumor eradication. She has also patented a water recycling method that uses solar energy and works faster than any means heretofore seen on the planet.

I would love to hold him one last time. As I sit here in our old glider, I wonder which of the stars I see is the sun that warms him now. I wonder how many other wives and families he has on other spheres. I wonder what he really looks like.

The bastard.

When Worlds Collide

"Let's be careful out there."

Sgt. Esterhaus

Hill Street Blues

Author's note: Yeah, that's me up there~~back when the earth was still cooling. I'd just walked in the back door of the police department. Jerry Clark, one of our ID techs, caught me in the hall in order to snap a photo for my new sergeant's identification. This was the picture.
Flash forward several years and halfway across the country.

I hope you enjoy the story...

He was lying on his side, half under his big old Harley. From behind the wheel of my truck, I could see he had suffered an open fracture of his right leg, just below the knee and just above his boots—a common injury for motorcyclists hit from the side. The sharp, bloody end of his tibia protruded from his grimy denim pants.

It was bitterly cold. I pulled to the curb and stopped. That old rush of adrenaline slugged me, my heart rate tripping up. “Stay in the truck,” I told my little girl. “Do not get out.” She nodded, goggle-eyed. I turned off the ignition, took the keys and locked the car, trotting over to the injured man. He was trying to kick his way out from under the bike, lost in a maelstrom of excruciating pain. His foot-long, scraggly hair blew in the wind. I dropped down next to him on the asphalt and put my hand on his shoulder. “I’m here to help you, buddy” I said. “Lie still.”

Angry, confused, terrified, he looked up into my face and realized he wasn’t out there on the pavement alone anymore, and stopped fighting the bike. “Are you burning?” I wanted to know, wondering if his uninjured leg, trapped under the motorcycle, was making contact with hot bike parts, quickly assessing whether it could be moved if that was the case. “Are you hurt anywhere else?” I ran my hands down both his arms.

He shook his head. “Just can’t get out.” He ground his teeth, growling with the pain.

A couple of other passersby stepped into the street to divert traffic. A slow parade of vehicles drove past in both directions. A few looky-loos congregated on the sidewalk nearby.

Sirens blared in the distance. “The ambulance is coming. We’ll get you moved as soon as they get here.” I asked him where his ID was and he scrabbled helplessly for a wallet on a chain protruding from his back pocket. With his permission, I removed his license and proof of insurance. I bent over him, sheltering him from the biting wind. He was growing shocky, trembling.

“Jesus Christ, it hurts,” he said, clutching my arm, his eyes filled with tears.

“I know,” I said. “I know. I’m so sorry.”

The ambulance and a couple of squad cars slid up. “They’ll take it from here,” I said, trying to stand, but he hung on. “You have to let me go so these people can do their work.” I handed his papers to a police officer and tried to get up again. The man pulled me down, our faces inches apart.

“Thanks, lady. Thank you so much,” he said, his voice and face fierce with agony. His head rolled against the pavement. I patted him and he let me go. I stood and told the police officer I had not seen the accident occur, and trotted back to my vehicle, where my daughter sat, mouth agape, her hands and face pressed against the driver’s side window.

She was silent as she buckled herself back into her seat belt and we continued on our way, passing the man in the street, now being ministered to by a couple of EMTs. Police officers had quickly set up a pattern and were diverting traffic. I turned the heater up to full. Finally, my daughter spoke. “Is that what you used to do, Mommy?”

I smiled. “Yeah. That’s what I used to do.”

We went home.

Strings

'Here we are, trapped in the amber

of the moment.

  There is no why."

~~Kurt Vonnegut~~

I stood in the darkness and watched them moving together, arms and legs intermittently intertwined, grins, grimaces--frowns flashing, eyebrows twisting--silent but for the clashing of their bodies. Eyelids fluttered down over bulging eyes, only to slide open again, looking too wise, too smart.

The performance ended, the dusty footlights on the outdoor stage going dim. Everyone turned away, back to the sound and excitement of the midway, except for me. I wanted to meet the puppeteer, the man who so masterfully pulled those strings.

He was busy putting props away, his black suit coat draped over a chair, muscles playing across his shoulders under the white broadcloth of his shirt as he packed first one dummy and then another into their cases. He was a severe-looking man, abrupt in his movements, his hurried packing, his stiff-necked turning making me inexplicably uncomfortable. A cigarette dangled from his bottom lip. "You want something?" he asked, looking me up and down. He turned away, humming tunelessly, the music drawing me, pulling me.

I moved closer. "I'd like to learn more about the marionettes."

He smiled, looking back at me over the top of his shoulder, his eyes shining as he pivoted and came to sit along the edge of the stage. He took one last drag on his smoke, then tossed it away in the darkness. All the people were gone now. "Per—perhaps I should be going," I said, stepping back, feeling nervous. But he reached for my arm, his mouth a moue of disapproval.

"No, no, ma petite, come sit beside me and ask your questions. I will answer if I can."

So I—hesitantly at first, growing braver as the evening died—asked him about his job and the dolls he controlled so expertly, while he discovered the curls behind my ears, and how the silky auburn hair there wrapped his fingers like a baby's fist.

He confided how much he loved his dolls, how his craft, his talent, was ancient and had been passed down from father to son. He told enthusiastically of growing up in the Pyrenees, honing his skill at country shows alongside his grandfather. Between the stories, he hummed that tuneless music, his face glowing as he talked about the next town, the next show, his life on the road exactly what he wanted to do, how he wanted to spend his time.

I scooted nearer, seeking his warmth, the treasury of his thoughts. His arms came around me in the hour before dawn, his lips, his strength, pressing me urgently onto the boards of the small stage, his puppets forgotten, watching us solemnly from their cardboard suitcases.

It never was an interest in marionettes that drew me to him, but rather all those lovely muscles beneath that white broadcloth shirt. They dwindled, though, when he took a desk job at Hanley's Insurance so we could stay right here at home. I haven't heard him hum in thirty years, but he makes a decent living. Me and the kids are fine.

Once in a while he'll go up into the attic and just sit up there on an old chair, the four suitcases at his feet, tears licking at their dusty tops as he looks out the dormer window facing north.

Big Brother is ALWAYS Watching

I was in the produce department at Safeway when I saw a small uproar down at the end of the aisle. A handful of women gathered around a grocery cart in which reposed an infant. She was swaddled in pink and attended by her mother, who basked in the glow of appreciation for the beauty and perfection of her newborn, expressed by the women who'd apparently been attracted by new-mother pheromones or perhaps the smell of formula.

Well beyond that age when babies caused my hormones to scamper, I was about to drive on past when I saw him, drooping outside the stage lights, his eyes pools of abandonment as he waited for his mother to recover from post-partum notoriety and finish the shopping, so he could go home to his Legos. He was about four and every bit of the self-esteem that had ever been in him had been sucked out by the squirming alien in the pink blankie, who'd clearly brainwashed all the adults on the rock.

I was equally ignored by the squealing, cooing herd, so I squatted next to the boy and nodded toward his mom. "She told you yet what an important job you have?"

Surprised by this unwarranted attention, he shook his head, watching me, probably figuring any second I'd spring up and hand the new baby the keys to a car or something.

"Well, you know you're the big brother, don't you?" He nodded, so I went on, warming to my subject. "Why, that's about the most important job in the universe. That baby over there only showed up because there was already a big brother in place to take care of her. Fine babies like that one don't just get dropped into a family without a very important and capable big brother around to make sure she stays out of trouble. Besides, no matter what she does, no matter how many people thinks she's special, she's never, ever going to be anything but your. Little. Sister."

He seemed to stand a little straighter, looked a little bit proud, putting a possessive hand on the cart as a grin broke out on his face.

"She a pretty good baby?" I asked.

"Yeah, she's OK," he replied, with an almost geriatric sigh, leaning toward me to whisper, "But I looked and she ain't got no winkie."

"Figures," I said, grinning in return, tossing a head of lettuce in my cart as I ambled away.

A Casualty of Pride

“I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. 

We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, 

it was important and beautiful and not ours. 

It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. 

There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” 

~Cheryl Strayed~

She knew he was gone.

Belinda Carrick turned Jackson and Buck into the round pen and walked across the dooryard toward the house.  Bundled in her short canvas coat, she watched the chimney, wishing for a puff of smoke, a puff of hope. There wasn’t even the smell of a fire gone cold.

She went in through the back door, unlocked as it always was. Snow had blown in between it and the threshold and now sparkled across the kitchen floor. The house was still, even the furniture frigid, radiating cold in the late afternoon gloom. She put her hands to the stove in the corner. It hadn’t been hot in days.

“Richard?”

Her voice rippled against undisturbed air.

She stood in the kitchen, examining the tired oak flooring his father put down fifty years back. There was a clear path in it now, worn by Richard’s mother Kay, and then Richard’s wife Barbara, as they’d each taken their turn as lady of the house.

Belinda had missed her chance.

She stuffed paper and kindling in the stove and turned open the damper, then struck a wooden match against the underside of the kitchen table, lit the lamp setting in its center, and then the paper in the stove. She left the stove door ajar while the fire caught and roared in the stovepipe. She added more wood, finally shutting the door and turning the damper down. In moments, heat wafted through the room. She filled the coffeepot with water from the pitcher pump at the sink, blindly reaching for grounds in the drawer of the wooden grinder setting nearby.

She was delaying and she knew it.

Richard had taken sick in February. She found him one afternoon, resting in a wan patch of sunlight on the porch. It must’ve been no more than twenty degrees. He was coughing. Still, he managed to smile at her, those agate-brown eyes of his brightening as she came to help him up. “I’m glad to see you, Belle,” he’d whispered hoarsely against her temple.

She pulled his arm over her shoulder and took as much of his weight as she could, but he towered over her, outweighed her by sixty pounds at least, the two of them stumbling drunkenly into the house and into the bedroom. She was uncomfortable there. There where they had been so urgently intimate years before, while his mother was busy with her Sunday school class and his father was running the disk in the east pasture. Richard had told her he loved her then. Asked her to marry him. It was the only time he ever did.

And she said no.

She had her own place to take care of, her own stock, her own fields. Pride had stolen the years they might have had together. Nothing, however, could rob them of friendship.

She rubbed her arms and glanced toward the hallway. She’d put Richard to bed and stayed for two days, which was all the time her place and her stock could spare. He’d stripped down to his skin while she stood and watched, and she would have, too, if he hadn’t been so sick. Instead, she killed a chicken and made soup, along with some of the noodles she knew he loved. She went out to the smokehouse and brought up a ham so he’d have some meat in the house, then she baked two loaves of bread.

By the end of the second day, he looked and sounded better and was dressed and sitting up in the parlor. She had to fight him to keep him from going out to feed stock and break water. “It’s already done, Richard,” she told him. “I’ll go take care of things at my place and be back as soon as I can.”

He slumped in the chair, his brown gaze burning her. He reached forward, leaning to pull her close, his big arms lashing her to him, his voice muffled, thick. “You’ve always been here, Belle. No matter what. No man could have asked for a better friend.” He coughed, the sound rumbling deep in his chest. “You’ve been the one constant in my life, besides this place, this land.” He looked up at her, his face as familiar as her own. “You were my first love.”

She swallowed, then swallowed again before she could speak, her fingers in his hair, sifting through the thick silver strands as she tried to smile. “You promise me you’ll stay in the house. I fed everybody up. The troughs will freeze over tonight, but I’ll be back the day after. They won’t die without water for a day.”

Richard pressed his forehead against her waist, nodding as he held her. She felt him taking in great drafts of air, breathing her in.

As she promised, she was back in two days. Richard was up and moving, but he’d kept his promise and stayed in the house. He seemed thinner.

“Let me take you into Laramie to see Doc Fletcher,” she said.

“I’ve seen Doc Fletcher.” He turned away toward the window. “Come to bed with me, Belle,” he said, gazing out across the long pasture. Ice spiked the weeds, heavy mist rising from amongst the naked cottonwoods along the creek.

She stayed for another two days, at the end of which Richard seemed much improved, although the cough nagged him. “No need for you to wear yourself out driving that team back and forth, Belle. I’m fine. Truly. I’ll be fine.”

They sat across from one another at the kitchen table that should have been theirs. Her eyes slipped to the chairs that should have held their children, their grandbabies.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too.”

She’d gone then, returning to her place along the Little Laramie. “I’ll be back in a few days.”

“I’ll be here.” He stood in the doorway and watched her go.

The stove ticked as it warmed, the metal expanding. The coffeepot began to perk. Belle took off her coat and hung it over a kitchen chair, then went up the hall.

Richard was in bed. At the last, he’d thrown the blankets back. Belle covered him to the chin, smoothing his mother’s wedding quilt close around his shoulders.  Stiff-backed and efficient, she went to the dresser and withdrew clean drawers, clean socks. She went to the wardrobe and pulled out his Sunday suit. She lifted the hanger on which he kept his ties, and did not begin to weep until she saw the note he’d pinned to the old blue one with brown dots—the very color of his eyes.

“This one, Belle. It was always your favorite. Love, Richard”

WINDOWS HAS CRASHED~NOTES FROM MRS. FIX-IT

He storms into my office and I take off my headphones. "What's wrong?"

"The damn thing won't work, that's what! Can you come and look at it?"

Of course I can. I walk the twenty feet from my computer to his, where it sits in the next room. It's a sleek new beauty with a huge flat screen and all the bells and whistles. There is no blue screen of death, so I know whatever's wrong isn't fatal.

"What were you doing?"

He takes that personally, as though I've accused him of something like maybe pouring hot coffee into the CD-ROM drive, or having an online affair with Pamela Anderson. "Nothing! Not a damn thing; it just froze up."

I hit Control/Alt/Delete and the Task Manager pops up. I see that the IE browser is open at least twelve times and resource use is at 100%. "Were you trying to get online?"

"Yeah, but it wouldn't go!"

"So, how many times did you click on the IE browser icon?"

He folds his arms and stares at me. He has no idea what an icon is. I've explained to him a hundred times that a computer is like a small child. You give it a direction and let it do what it's told. If you tell it over and over again - if you bully it - it will give up in frustration. It would have a tantrum if it could, but instead it just stops working.

I shut the machine down through the Task Manager, restart it, flush the DNS cache, clean the registry, update the safety software and run a sweep. It's fine. Everything works perfectly, which always makes him mad. He is, I'm sure, convinced that his computer and I have some sort of illicit relationship going on wherein it stops working on purpose so I can come in and be a show-off. Neener. Neener. Neener.

He, in the meantime, has stomped off in a huff to the next room where he works on some reloading parts he's been restoring. He doesn't care why his computer works, or why it doesn't. He has no interest in learning how to take care of it. He just expects it to do whatever he wants it to do, when he wants it to do it, and at the speed of light.

He is an utterly brilliant man. He knows more about the earth than anyone I've ever known. His knowledge of geography, geology, and ecology is astounding. When he reads something, he enjoys almost total recall -forever, as far as I can tell. Yet he is mystified, stupefied, terrified by computers, and when it comes to them, we are complete opposites.

Computers are a joy to me. I love to build them, tweak them, master them. To him they are scary metal monsters; to me, they are knowledge at my fingertips, entertainment at the touch of a button, and a boon to my profession, allowing me to conduct most of my writing business electronically. They were the future, decades ago, and now their basic technology is part of the past.

"Your machine's fixed," I tell him.

"What was wrong with it?"

"Nothing," I say, smiling, telling him what he knew all along. "Just operator error."

Man, that pisses him off.

It Helps If You're Disturbed

Whelping a child late in life is transmogrifying. No, I didn’t deliver her on a blanket in the garage, if that’s what you’re thinking. Still, the event changed me—from a ferociously feminist freedom fighter, forever festooned in khaki, jingling with keys and handcuffs, smelling of eau d’ pepper spray and Hoppe’s Gun-Cleaning Solvent—into a diaper-carrying, talcum-wearing, book-reading, night-walking, fried-weenie-cooking mommy.

Having given up my lengthy and successful career, I found that rattling around in a country house with a nattering infant for company was enough to turn my brain to whirled peas. I plastered, painted, and wallpapered. I ripped up carpet and put down ceramic tile. I decorated and redecorated. I cleaned cabinets, refinished woodwork, rearranged furniture and wondered what the hell I was going to do with the rest of my life. But, gazing in thrall at the child with whom we’d finally been gifted, I knew that even if Bill came home to find me gibbering in the corner with my eyes rolling around like ball bearings on a linoleum floor, I was not going to work away from home until our daughter was much, much older. Forty seemed like a good, round number.

Looking at the skill set I brought with me from my ‘other’ life, I found that I could do any of the following: drive an automobile at blinding speeds, on two wheels, sometimes on no wheels; recite the Miranda Warning by rote in both English and Spanish—‘You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say…Tu tienes el derecho de silencio…’; shoot, reload and shoot some more while running, squatting, falling down and/or hiding; creep into dark buildings, climb in or out of broken windows, kick in doors, crawl in dirty crawl spaces festooned with black widows and scorpions all waiting for an opportunity to bite or sting me; talk down drunks and dope addicts; talk up the depressed; interview victims and witnesses; interrogate suspects; collect the dead; process crime scenes; kick, hit, wrestle, and do anything else to stay alive; write tickets, end arguments, break up fights, testify in court, and restore family harmony. I could also write reports.

So I took over a room in the house, proclaiming it ‘my office’. I bought a computer and every other piece of office equipment I could imagine ever needing, and I became a writer.

Oh, I know; it sounds so glamorous, so exciting, so lucrative!

This is how my day sometimes went:

1. 0530: Arise (think ‘Dracula’ or ‘Night of the Living Dead’), and get dressed—a generic term meaning, ‘put on one of several ratty-but-endearing caftans’.
2. 0535: Prepare breakfast, working around the dinner dishes from the previous night because the grown-ups in the house were mesmerized by the child in the house and so unable to perform simple tasks.
3. 0600: Drink coffee while sitting in the living room rocker, strategically placed in a shaft of sunlight, book basket at hand.
4. 0605: Baby awakes, demanding instantaneous and solicitous diaper change.
5. 0610: Return to rocker with baby.
6. 0610-0700: Read to and feed baby, pretending she has any earthly idea of what is going on. Baby plays with feet, blows bubbles at father, makes interesting intestinal noises, husband exists room swiftly as though pursued by a gang of killers. Make requisite trip to the changing table down the hall.
7. 0700: Husband leaves. Large production made of his departure, with liberal baby kisses, etc.
8. 0705: Drag baby swing into dining room, strap baby in place, wind up swing. Give baby small white bear.
9. 0706: Begin cleaning kitchen.
10. 0706: Baby throws small white bear into dog water dish.
11. 0706: Respond to crying baby. Retrieve now water-logged bear. Squeeze bear out in sink. Comfort crying baby. Put baby back in swing. Put bear in bathroom for drying in clothes dryer later in the day. Give baby hard plastic rattle.
12. 0707: Baby throws rattle into dog water dish.
13. 0707: Decide to let baby fuss. (I worked in the jail. I can do this.) Baby wails, screams, squirms. Dog becomes concerned. Dog checks on baby, gives me a dirty look and grabs rattle out of dish.
14. 0708: Take broken rattle away from dog. Retrieve pieces scattered in living room. Clean up water in dining room. Baby still crying. Give baby a pacifier. Pick up water dish, carry it to bathroom. Return to kitchen. Note that pacifier is on dining room floor. Baby crying again.
15. 0710: Pick up baby, take her down the hall to her crib. Wind up mobile, give baby another stuffed animal. Take walkie-talkie-sized baby monitor to kitchen. Baby sleeps.
16. 0740: Dishes done, kitchen clean. Dishwasher running. Slug down last of cold coffee. Hungry. Eat handful of dry cereal.
17. 0740: In bathroom, brush teeth, brush hair. Observe mascara and eye shadow cooties on face due to failure to use makeup remover the previous night. Apply makeup remover. Dog whines and barks at front door.
18. 0742: Rush to living room to avert canine chemical spill. Open door, dog runs out and immediately races off after a rabbit. Stand in yard, screaming at dog drawing attention of neighbors leaving for jobs in town. Dart—barefooted and wincing—into neighbor’s pasture where dog’s rear end is protruding from old car body. Bottom half of caftan now full of cattails, dead grass and sticks. Grab dog, drag him back toward our property. Dog thinks this is a game, wrenches free and begins running in huge circles. Catch him, but run through a red ant hill, the occupants of same finding that caftan has some appeal.
19. 0750: Step into foyer as a red ant bites me between the shoulder blades. Pull robe off over my head and throw it on the porch. Dog immediately grabs it and drags it around the front yard while I, naked, realize the baby monitor is in the pocket. Run down hall and grab another caftan, go outside, retrieve baby monitor which is now lying in middle of yard. Dog and discarded caftan are missing. Begin brief but fruitless search. Hope dog chokes on caftan or gets run over by the county truck—or both.
20. 0800: Go back inside. Realize that makeup remover foam has dried on face and I look like I have rabies. Clean off face, apply moisturizer, brush dead grass and sticks out of hair. Sweep bathroom and foyer floors.
21. 0815: Baby still asleep. Creep quietly to office, turn on lights, boot up computer. Reread acceptance of on-spec query for magazine article. Type cover page, set up document, build headers. Poise hands above keyboard, crafting opening. Dog barks furiously at front door.
22. 0825: Let dog in. Caftan still missing. Baby awakes.
23. 0825-0900: Change and feed baby.
24. 0900: Put on actual clothes and shoes. Put baby in backpack and dog on leash for a short walk. Open front door, find brutalized caftan on porch with note. “Saw you wearing this yesterday morning, so figured it must be yours.”

Over the years I’ve been met with skepticism, of course, about being a writer. Unlike a physician or an attorney, I have no diploma with which to proclaim my expertise. I have no local covey of clamoring clients, all chiming in with stories of my skill. I have, nevertheless, prevailed. That baby grew up, unscathed by my scattershot parenting. The dog lived a long and irritating life and has been replaced with a succession of other dogs, and I’ve managed to produce a very diverse body of work, sometimes only a syllable at a time. I don’t carry a baby monitor anymore; I have a ‘smart phone’ instead—which proves daily that it is much smarter than I. Life continues to interfere with my work, simultaneously short-circuiting thought and providing fodder for other stories.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Birds and Other Critters

This morning I've been in the kitchen. Outside the window is a bird feeder my husband built a couple of decades ago. Sometimes the feeder has been a combination bird feeder-squirrel feeder and other times it has sadly been a combination bird feeder-cat feeder, when some dim bulb manages to find his or her way out to our rural neighborhood in order to abandon a family pet or two. That's fodder for another post; so back to my tale.

My husband and I have a lot in common. One commonality is that we were both raised to use things up, wear them out, and use them again. So this morning I made Bird Bread. Yes, I bake for our wild birds.
Simply put, I have a covered, gallon-sized rubber container that we keep in the garage. Into it goes leftover flour or any other dry mix I would otherwise discard. I also keep a container of used cooking oil. This time of year, when it turns cold and the birds huddle on the feeder like winos around a trash barrel fire, I bring in the flour and the oil, along with a couple of cups or more of wild bird seed, then mix it all in my big mixer, along with water and some baking powder. Once the bread is baked and cooled, I cut it into squares. We put it out every day and watch what would have undoubtedly ended up in a landfill, otherwise, become a treat for our birds. Yes, I know~~the critters at the landfill would have eaten it in its original form. But that wouldn't be any fun for me, would it?

We also put out suet cakes and seed, and farther out, in a spot in the garden, vegetable peelings, stale bread, and other scraps. This morning I watched a big, raucous blue jay make off with an entire biscuit. The jays stay with us all year (actually, this is their place, we just squat here), along with sparrows, larks, finches, grackles~~and collared doves, and starlings~~the last two being invasive species.  We're visited by a wide array of migratory birds this time of year, too. It's hard to imagine these fragile, tiny creatures flying thousands of miles, some nearly to the tip of South America, on their annual  trek to warmer climes. With their departure, winter sweeps in. Our days are frigid and windblown, but there is always entertainment to be had watching our beloved birds clamor and jostle for food.

There is great pleasure to be had in small things.

Gotta run~~they're pecking on the window. The bread must be done!~

For now, I'm just Linda