True to form, I adopted a cat from the Bucks County SPCA in February. Also true to form, said cat has a chronic leakage of her left eye. The vet says nothing will be accomplished by subjecting the poor cat to testing and treatment for the leakage. It's not bothering her. It doesn't affect her daily activities. Today, she sat, for a time, toying with a spider before viciously annihilating the interloping arachnid.
And fortunately, Son has appointed himself our resident veterinary opthamologist. He and Daughter have a whole system for clearing out Kitty's left eye.
Daughter - in a rare supporting role - holds Kitty and sings a song of Daughter's own composition. Son procures a paper clip-sized bit of toilet paper. He approaches Kitty, telling her it will all be OK in a voice that is impossibly falsetto for a boy of his age. He then uses the minuscule wad of TP to wipe Kitty's eye. Afterward, he and Daughter give Kitty cat treats to reward her bravery while I, the germ freak, pretend none of this has taken place in Daughter's bed.
Bizarrely enough, Daughter also has a chronic condition of the skin around her left eye.
I was speculating on the commonality of Daughter and Kitty's ocular ailments when Husband pointed out that maybe everybody in our house had a left eye affliction because we were being haunted by Left Eye Lopes. I had never considered this possibility, but I am certainly happy to see Husband coming around to my way of thinking.
I told Husband that our children playing at amateur vet was reminiscent of my great-grandmother, who took in stray animals as well as people, and my grandfather, who had a pet store that sold monkeys, sharks, and ducks, along with the standard pet store fare.
Was there a significant demand for sharks in Mayfair of the 1950's? I guess, because he had that pet store for a long time and my mother assures me that her parents were quite financially secure.
Husband, not for the first time, expressed incredulity that I was related to many of the people who claim me. How could sensible, practical me be related to a seller of monkeys, a refuser of evacuations, a sharer of conception stories?
I rushed to assure Husband that my family was chock full of people like me, they were just mostly dead.
Husband has long maintained that, based upon the stories he hears, I am temperamentally like my maternal grandmother. I took this opportunity to point out that my dad's long-deceased sister, the devoted Aunt X, was quite practical in her own right.
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| My maternal grandmother and Aunt X. How I miss you girls! |
Aunt X was our matriarch, the anchor that lashed us all to shore. It was she, I believe, who recognized that my parents were ideally suited and therefore sold my dad on my mom like the car salesman her son turned out to be.
Listen, my dad is wonderful and any girl would have been lucky to have him. But he insists on retread tires, he never throws anything away - did I tell you about the time he ate a jar of jam that his mother made shortly before her death 20 years before? - and he never talks except to say you need to use retreads because they're cheaper and he thinks maybe he's sick from his mother's jam. You have to look past all that to see the beauty in his soul. Cause he sure as hell isn't going to tell you it's there.
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| Notes my father made on the back of one of his military photos. Thank God he gets verbose somewhere. The bottom notes indicate what he was wearing in the photo. |
The only thing, I tell Husband, that may have qualified Aunt X as unusual was all the heads and hands on her front porch.
"I like," Husband said, "how you say that like I know what you're talking about."
You know, to my mind, Husband did know what I was talking about. How could he not? This was such a big part of my life. Surely, in 16 years together, I'd told him about Aunt X's hobby. But then I never knew Husband had a standard fake name, so....
"The heads and hands. On the porch. It was screened in. You had to walk through it to get into the house. The heads and hands were there because that's where Aunt X kept the oven."
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| Relax. It's a porcelain doll. She's old. She's missing an eye. And a hand. And a finger. |
See, Aunt X made porcelain dolls. Their bodies were soft, but their heads and hands were made of porcelain. The kiln was on the porch, and the heads and hands waited patiently on the porch to be joined with their corpus. Often, the heads had not had their glass eyes placed yet; the journey into Aunt X's house was an excursion through bald, eyeless, pink heads, their empty stares surely Billy Idol's inspiration.
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| Aunt X and my dad, circa 1938. He was very old when I was born. Very, very old. |
I was failing miserably in convincing Husband that Aunt X had surely been one of the genetic procurators of my sensibility. That was when he went in for the kill. He was Kitty, and I was the spider.
"Was Aunt X," Husband queried, "the one who was named for a carnival clown?"
In Aunt X's defense, does her comically obtained moniker mean she was less grounded? I'm pretty sure being named after a clown means my grandparents maybe weren't so down to earth. I'm betting she, like me, was probably the recipient of a phone call 20 minutes into a run that her parents drove her to in order to ask a question she'd already answered three times. Or some 1930's equivalent of such an event.
My grandfather, Aunt X's father, was a chemist for DuPont. Apparently, a prerequisite for DuPont chemistry is employment with a carnival.
Yes. My grandfather was a carny.
I do not know how long he was a carny, nor where his carny employment fell in the timeline of his marriage and child rearing. While a carny, he had become enamored of a clown we'll call Ximena. I do not know - nor do I want to know- the extent or nature of this fascination with Ximena. But when my grandparents finally had a daughter to join their two sons, my grandfather had one thing on his mind. Ximena.
I'm guessing my grandmother got her way first, because Aunt X bears the same first name as her grandmother. But we never called her by that name. No one in our family did. We all called her Aunt Ximena.
Well, Aunt Ximena's husband called Aunt Ximena by her first name. But I get it. I don't think you can look at your life partner and call them what you know to be a clown's name every day. You can't use a clown's name on your kids' school forms. You can't write out Valentines to a clown.
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| My grandfather, sans Ximena, with my dad, about 1940. |
Am I the inheritor of my grandmother and aunt's sensibilities? Were they sensible? Comparatively, I believe they were. But I'm not so sure about me. I wanted to name my kids Scarlett and Sodapop. My professional lectures have been edited because I tell really inappropriate stories (in my defense, you try to keep 100 people interested in current guidelines for the treatment of neurovascular disease and see if you don't throw in an inappropriate story or two or seven). My house is a revolving door of animals. I've read the novelizations of Adventures in Babysitting, The Karate Kid Part 2, and Jaws 4.
I think maybe Aunt X and my grandmother reined in, by direct action or inspiration, some of the cockamamy. Once they passed, I looked to locate another with such influence. That would be Husband, who vetoed both Scarlett and Sodapop, refuses to even discuss hitting the SPCA for another cat, and gently ribbed me for buying - for a whole penny on Amazon - the novel upon which the film Orca was based (couldn't get through the first chapter).
I have a thing for killer whales. Good thing they're not at the SPCA.
And the edited lectures? That would be my mom's doing. My mom, who thinks it's perfectly acceptable to text me that this picture:
which in a previous blog I had suggested may be from her wedding night, was, in fact, from the night after. That very same mother ran the conference I gave the aforementioned lectures. And told me that I couldn't say "penis" that many times when I'm lecturing about the brain. And said I was lucky she knew the tape editor. And then had the tape editor edit out my very funny stories.
She also tries to edit this blog, ex post facto.
Fortunately, I don't have the good sense to keep these stories to myself. And I maintain editorial control.
I called my dad today. I asked if he knew when my grandfather was a carny.
"No."
Did he know the nature of his relationship with Ximena?
"No. He never talked."
Hmm.
Pretty sure I don't have those genes.
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| My great-grandmother. My dad found this photo from 1904 in his laundry room. You know, where most people keep old family photos. Doesn't look too thrilled, does she? |
The Binge
....is less of a binge and more of a recommendation. Go see Bad Moms. You'll laugh your ass off, and you can ignore all the I'm-not-joining-that-bandwagon and it's-written-by-men expositions online. It's funny, only mildly trite, and has a great soundtrack. Stick around for the credits, and be aware that, in addition to being rated "R", it should also come with a warning that "Can I go down on you again?" is an actual line in the movie. Just in case you were planning on seeing it with your mother-in-law. Like I did.
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