Mothers Day

In Love and Remembrance...

5 Years Gone

Mom died 5 years ago today from common old age problems.  I miss her as a friend.  She "mothered" me for 18 years, and she became more of a friend after that.  Does that seem strange?

For almost my entire adult life (18-55), we corresponded almost weekly.  She and I are writers, and letters were our "talk".  We both loved words, their origins, and their changing meanings.  It runs in her side of the family; one of her sisters worked on a major dictionary.  If there was a pun to be made, we made it.  If there was some older meaning of a word, we played it.

It ended 5 years before she died.  She could no longer write even with the help of a machine.  I suppose it didn't matter, her mind was going wrong along with her fingers.  The last 5 years, she couldn't communicate.  I kept writing letters that Dad read to her until he said she couldn't understand anything anymore.

I miss her as my Mom.  But I miss her as my friend more.  I don't want that to sound wrong.  Its just that we had a special similar sense of humor-wordplay, and top-this-doggeral poem that lasted for so many years..

I got my sense of the dramatic from her.  When she was middle-aged, the social group she was in had theme parties.  One was Wild Hats.  Mom had Dad take a straw hat and add a big plywood ring around it.  She took our Ben-Hur chariot set and glued them around the ring.  First Prize!  I learned from that. 

Thanks for everything, Mom...  I carry on the tradition.

Remembering Dad

I just received The Call from my sister yesterday.  Dad is dead; my sister was pretty upset, but she’s been keeping the vigil there.  I've been expecting this call for months, but it doesn't make the reality any different.  For whatever it means, I am suddenly the oldest person in my immediate family. 

How to you interpret news like that?  It's not like I'm the patrirach or anything.  Sister is the executrix of dad's estate but mostly because she was nearest to him in his last year at the assisted living home, and she has some experience at this stuff.  According to family traditions, there will be a cremation.  I suppose as eldest, I might get his ashes.  Well, I have Mom's, they might as well be together.  Each of us kids have our own lives.  I mourn of course, but it wasn't unexpected.  I even expected it earlier.  Dad was physically incapable, in diapers, and demented.  I think he no longer knew who he was.  I consider his dying a relief from the struggle to continue living.  He didn’t want to keep surviving, himself.  It was kidney failure at the end.  He was 92.

But beyond that, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do, if anything. We don't have a family tradition of funerals.  Dad will be cremated, and since I have Mom's ashes, I will probably receive Dad's.

I wrote the obituary.  Its hard to pack a life into a short space.  So that’s why I’m writing now.  He deserves more than an inch on newspaper column space…

Where to start?  Well, when I was a child, Dad was the most perfect person (next to Mom, of course).  He was the fixer of things, the person who built things, the person who just taught me how to DO stuff.  He knew EVERYTHING, until I was about 16.

Fast-forward some years...  Dad wasn't the genius when I was 30 that I thought he was when I was 10.  Well, who is?  I had my own thoughts at 30, and they weren't Dad's.  Some guys have the same political views as their Dad.  I didn't.  Mom and Dad were at my house when Barrack Obama was elected in 2006.  I cheered while Dad declared Obama "the most dangerous man on Earth".

I won't discuss our different political views other than to say Dad said "sink or swim" (and he meant it) and I said "I won't watch someone drown".

For all my adult life, I have had imaginary arguments with Dad in the privacy of my own home.  I always won those arguments of course.  But there will be no more even imaginary arguments now.  He's gone.  It is hard to imagine that.

He had great strengths and talents.  I feel stupid trying to even list them, and I can't do him proper justice.  He was an engineer and could build about damn near anything he wanted to build.  My early life was enriched by things Dad built.  30 years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the house we lived in in the 1950s.  The stone wall he built was still standing solid and proud (and I’m sure that, at 8 years old “I helped”).  There was no one home, and I decided not to trespass.  I wish someone had been there to talk to.  But I did look at the yard through Google Earth and some of the 1950’s work is still there.  My friends joke about me that I "over-enginneer" everything I build.  Well, I have a tradition to maintain.

Dad built ships during WWII and started college when he was 20 and met Mom at the Univ of NH when she was a freshman (freshwoman?).  She said she didn't date men who didn't play golf.  So he learned to play golf.  And with his usual determination, he was a 0 handicap golfer in a few years.  Damn he could hit a golf ball perfectly.  It would start off low and then rise as it went straight down the fairway as if drawn on the golf map with a ruler. 

He succeeded in almost everything he turned his attention to but he failed at some.  He was a terrible gardener , for example – Never paid much attention to the soil because there was FERTILIZER!  I learned my organic habits from Grampa.  Dad was bad at most cards, too.  You could practically see his tail wag when he had a good poker hand.  His Mom was a demon card-player; Dad didn't get those genes (so neither did I).  But he was a killer at any game that involved logic.  You could not beat him at Clue, for example.  He had a SYSTEM for showing cards (took me a year ta figure it out).  And we both got so competitive at stadium checkers together that we could call every marble drop for a full 360 degree ring rotation. Ruthless at cribbage, but I finally got about even with him by the time I left for college.  

Logic isn't strategy though.  Mom taught me chess and when she couldn't beat me at it anymore at age 10, she turned me over to Dad, who, when he couldn't beat me by age 12, decided it was a stupid game and never played me at it again.  Yeah, some Father/Son dynamics there.  Dad never had any sense of board strategy.  Hey, he was a engineer.  He wanted RULES to figure out, and strategy isn't about "rules".

But I owe him so much.  I know guys who can't drill a hole in a board because their dads didn't know how or never showed them.  But I do.  Yet he was better at it at 30 than I am now at 64.  Engineers study “perfection”.  I was a Political Science major and “What Works” was good enough. 

He hated the way I played golf.  He was methodical and I "went for it".  Golf course cards show straight lines to where par shots should go.  He lived by those lines.  I didn’t.  Sometimes MY ball went into the deep woods, but sometimes I could slice a 5 iron 200 yards and it landed on the sweet spot of the green while he did his usual methodical single-digit handicap round.   Drove him crazy...  But in 1988, I had the hot round of my life in the rain, and we won his Club's Member/Guest tournament.  Proud moment for us both.  Literally, “different strokes for different folks”, LOL!  Also the last time we ever played golf together.  He couldn't stop trying to "improve" my game (make it like his) and I was done letting him try.

I'll never be an engineer like Dad.  But he taught me enough that there is darn near nothing I'm afraid to try.  There's a fence surrounding the whole back yard, a 2 layer deck, and a toolshed (among other stuff) to prove that.  And he taught me a basic rule.  "If you need a hole in the ground, you dig one".  Which means, do what needs to be done, and sometimes plain hard work is important and pays off.

He taught me how to hunt.  I don't anymore for personal reasons, but I know how to.  Because of Dad, I can follow a trail of faint drips of blood every few yards through the woods.  If things went bad, I would not starve.  But there is more to the hunting story.  When I was 15, Dad decided that shooting deer with guns was “just too easy”.  So we (Dad, Me, and Matt) took up using bows.  I wasn’t really good with a bow (can’t recall about about Matt and I apologize for that). 

They say you practice something 10,000 times and you get good at it.  Dad did, I didn’t.  Hey, I was having more fun playing football with friends.  But he had an advantage.  In 1966, he was 44; I was 16.  He used a 60 LB bow with a 30” draw.  I could only use a 45 LB draw bow at 26”.  At 16, I was smaller and weaker than he was.  He was 5’10” and 170 pounds, I was 5’4” and 125.  Stronger bow and longer draw makes the arrow trajectory flatter and faster (meaning way easier to aim).  He could hit a 10” paper plate 80% of the time and didn’t miss the other 20% by much.  I was lucky to get 30%.  But I was game and decent in the woods (Matt was better in nature).  But it was also because he just practiced more.

Dad could always get a deer the first time we went out.  But I did have a talent and there were raised stands at some places we hunted.  I could stand silently for hours.  I did well on those.  One spot where I stood in the rain all morning, a single deer came by right under the stand.  I almost (REALLY) jumped on it from above holding a arrow to spear it.  I still regret I didn’t.  It would have been a family story for 2 generations.  But I shot straight down and it drove the deer to the ground.

And it got up and ran away and we never found it.  I was shocked, and so was Dad.  And while searching for it, I lifted a leg over a fallen tree and stabbed my self deeply on my very sharp 3 bladed hunting arrow head.  End of hunting for that year.

The next year, I was hunting with a friend of Dad’s, had a long shot at a doe, hit her right in the heart and she dropped like a rock.

But this is not about me.  I’m telling you that so I can tell you this about Dad.  When Dad decided we should start bow hunting, he went all the way.  Well, almost, we didn’t make our own bows.  But we made our bowstrings and arrows.  And Dad designed and built stuff to do that from scratch.  He made an adjustable bowstring maker with knobs to twist the bowstrings in 2 directions, a metal spool holder to twist heavy thread around the bowstring at the nocking point, a cutter template for making leather bowstring silencers, a gadget to attach feathers in a very slightly curved arc around the arrow, and even a heated metal wire to burn off excess feathers down to an aerodynamically perfect shape.  I came up with the idea of heating arrow nocks in hot water then squeezing them on a popsicle stick so that they barely held on to the bowstring but released easily. 

Yeah, there’s a “like father like son” thing going on too.  But the point is, he created ideas in his mind and then just casually went and BUILT them. I have to work HARD to do that, and I don't do it as well.

I recall Mom saying a few times that Dad endeared himself to her parents.  He would visit for a date and would spend an hour just “fixing things around the house “.  Bad light switch, radio antenna, leaky basement pipe, etc.  Drove her crazy at first, and apparently they arrived at movies and dances late sometimes.  And while impressing “the parents” is not the usual way to win a woman’s love, it WAS “some guy who was not her Dad or my brothers”, and seems to have worked.

And there was some religion involved.  Mom’s family was ferociously French Catholic.  As she used to say she was taught “If you were BAD, you went to Hell.  If you were worse, you became a Protestant"  But she didn’t like that idea very much and Dad was a Protestant (of no particular group – I think his Mom was a Quaker).

So in spite of the fact that her parents liked Dad a Whole Lot, they threw her out of the church for marrying a Protestant.  And amazingly, they were happy all their lives in spite of that.  And I mean, as close as I can tell as a child living at home, and as an adult afterwards, they were happier together than any 2 people I have ever met.  Things worked out VERY well...

One thing I can say for sure; I wouldn't be the person I am today without both of them...

So ends the story of Burdell Dodd Spencer and Doris Ursula Beaulieu, loving husband and wife for 61 years, both now gone from this world forever.  Unusual and special people both.  Their descendents remain to have our own stories, but we will never be them.
 

Its Been A Hard Week

Well, I should summarize the week...

Sunday - Ayla suddenly started extruding pus from her vulva.  I spent the afternoon and night keeping her as clean as I could.

Monday - Brought Ayla to my regular vet first thing in the morning.  He did some tests to eliminate urinary infections, then did x-rays to search for a reproductive tract problem.  He scheduled surgery for Tuesday.

Tuesday - Ayla was opened for exploratory surgery first thing in the morning.  At noon, the vet called to say that he had found the spayed uterus remnant was infected, which led him to discover her left ovary was intact.  He removed both.  Considering that the breeder's vet had done both a first and a followup spay operation, he was quite surprised!  I was very angry towards the breeder's vet.

Ayla (and I) have gone through frequent and lengthy heat cycles for 3 years.  Most times lasting for 10 days separated by 2 weeks of calm.  Occasionally, there was a whole month between heat episodes.  The news that my vet had found the cause was a matter of extreme joy.  I was thrilled.  The $800 was well worth all the trouble.

Tuesday night I picked Ayla up to give her the antibiotic, and I discovered she was dripping with red stuff all over the incision.  I assumed it was blood and brought her to an emergency pet hospital.  I was there for 2 hours.  The ER vet put a pressure bandage on her, did some tests, and decided she should see my regular vet in the morning. 

Wednesday - My vet was upset and distressed that I had had to go through all the ER stuff.  He explained that scar tissue is difficult to seal and that sometimes there is seepage.  But he apologized for not having advised my of that, and I am OK with the apology.  It DID cost me $1,000 at the ER hospital to learn that Ayla COULD have just lain on a thick towel all night.  The ER vet COULD have told me that, but he is running a business and I DID request service.  It was still pretty shoddy, though.

Anyway, my vet kept her for observation and examination all day at no charge. 

Thursday - Brought Ayla back to my vet for further observation.  He found the incision healing, not seeping, and he removed the IV catheter.  No charge, more apology, and lots of discussion.  And he gave me his home phone number in case of night time problems.

I hate the cone she has to wear, so I went out and bought an inflatable collar (XS dog collar, if you want to find one for a small cat, S for a regular size cat).  Ayla doesn't mind the inflatable collar, it even seems to make a decent pillow!

Friday - Ayla is alert and walking around, eating, and drinking.  She seems fine now, healing well with no "sera" seepage.

I spent the morning giving her lots of attention and scritching the itchy incision area that she can't get at with the inflatable collar.  She enjoyed that a LOT!

In the afternoon, I unwound by watering the veggie and flower gardens.  I have a nice system.  Stab a spading fork with a "D" handle in the ground, fit a hose nozzle in the handle (most will fit one way or another), and turn the water on for 5 full minutes at each spot.  Move the spade and repeat.  All afternoon!  Sit in a chair in the shade and drink a beer while listening to classical music on a little boom box.  Very relaxing and theraputive. 

It was 100+ outside, but I was sitting in the shade and there was a slight breeze.  There was water spraying, birds around, etc.  I NEEDED that!

Speaking of the gardens, the reason I was watering was because we are so dry here in MD.  There have been rains, but brief and hard and not much for several weeks.  How dry has it been?  The hosta bed still has dry crunchy leaves from last Fall.  They won't decompose!  Too dry.

More bad news!  A sign at the entrance to my neighborhood advises that electricity will be turned off for 5 hours August 1st!  Oh joy...  The forecast for that day is over 100 again.   I see that Verizon is digging up the neighborhood for some reason, so that must be the cause.

More bad news!  Have you ever used a garden hose and forgotten to turn the water off?  And the hose burst?  And not gone out there for 2 days?  That happened to me Tuesday.  I don't know exactly when the hose burst.  If I am lucky, it burst just before I went out and noticed.  If I am unlucky, it happened shortly after I went inside and it spewed water for 2 days.  And, of course, the water was not even spewing near any of my plants...  I will find out on the next quarterly bill.

More bad news!  Because of Ayla's apparently finally successful spay Tuesday, I contacted a radio vet show (The Animal House).  I had been a guest in June of last year discussing unsuccessfully "Twice-Spayed Ayla, and they asked for followup.  So I was scheduled for a taping Wed afternoon.  Well, Wed morning I had been up all night and morning, so I had to call to cancel (because I needed to collapse in bed).  They didn't want to reschedule for the next week, so they are just going to read the email I sent them.  I sure wish I could have been on-air to talk to them.  That would have been thrilling!  I guess I missed my 15 minutes of fame...

It will be broadcast in August and I will give details for that later.

I think it is finally safe to have "too much to drink tonight"!  And I plan to.  I just haven't decided whether it will be my favorite cheap wine (Twisted vine Zinfandel) or my own Sling recipe (1/2 oz gin, 1/2 oz pomegranate liquer, a shot of real pomegranate juice, fill up the glass with ginger ale over ice, and drink through straw).

I HAVE had worse weeks, but not often, and this one ranks way up on the list.  My baby sister died last Summer, Mom died last Fall, Skeeter died in Dec 2008, LC died in Jan 2010, I failed out of college in 1975 (I returned and graduated in 1993), and I got fired from a job because I couldn't roll tires off a truck fast enough.  All considered, I think this week places 5th.  Maybe 6th because I think at least Ayla IS finally spayed and that's good.

Mothers Day

I feel a bit odd today.  This is the first year I don't send a Mothers Day card...

She died last Fall of "natural causes" at age 83.  Her death was not unexpected.  I've already not sent one birthday card.  But somehow Mothers Day seems more specific.  It shouldn't.  She had her own birthday, and every mother shares Mothers Day.  Maybe that's the problem.  So many children got to send a Mothers Day card this year and, for the first time, I didn't.

I don't feel forlorn or lost or abandoned or anything.  I'm too old and sensible for that.  I miss her, of course, but it's that I had been making or sending cards to her for, oh, 55 years and it feels odd to stop.

Happy Mothers Day, Mom...