Interrupted Road Trip

Living with Cats

Friday morning I packed up enough clothing for a long weekend, fished my cat from his hiding place under the bed (he hates road trips, with a passion), and set out on a six-hour drive to my parent’s house. We’ve been having incredibly stormy weather lately, so that morning the clear blue sky and intermittent puffy white clouds seemed like some special and undeserved gift. I’d also just turned in the two major and very scary projects I’d been stressing over at work, so with my iPod feeding episodes of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” and “This American Life” to me over the car speakers and my cat sleeping in his carrier on the seat next to me, everything seemed aligned in my favor. I don’t remember the last time I was that care-free. I didn’t have to think about anything. I didn’t have to make any decisions. And I know the route from my place to my parents’ so well that I don’t even have to think about which lane to be in any more. Vacation had begun.

Three into my trip I realized the I hadn’t actually copied all the episodes of my radio shows onto my iPod. So I pulled off at a gas station, fired up my computer, and started transferring the files I needed. And just when I was chuckling at modern technology and how easy it is to make a good road trip even better… my cat let out a few distressed cries and then proceeded to gasp and pant with his mouth wide open.

It’s been two years since his last asthma attack (which was also his first asthma attack), but I recognized the signs. He was also spiking a fever. Suddenly the iPod, the blue sky, and puffy white clouds weren’t very interesting. I was three hours from my vet and three hours from my family’s vet, and Pippin was struggling to breathe.

With the help of my cell phone, my dad, and his internet connection, we located the phone numbers of 5 vets in the two small cities nearest me on the highway. But none of them had any openings. Openings? You have to schedule openings for a cat who can’t breathe? Each gave me other phone numbers to call, but pretty soon I’d called everyone in a 20 mile radius. So I called my dad again and told him I was going to start driving and to get back to me when he’d found a vet that could see me. Poor Dad. But he was a good sport and within 15 minutes had located a vet in a town 40 minutes from me, and had called up directions so that he could guide me in. Thank goodness for cell phones.

So a full hour after Pippin had started breathing strangely, I pulled into a teeny little vet clinic in the last real town for the next 70 or so miles. By this time the cat was simply breathing quickly and shallowly, not rasping and gasping like he had been, and I’d calmed down quite a bit. So I was able to carry him into the little front room of the vet clinic and more or less calmly wait for the vet to finish up with a previous patient (a large adolescent black lab).

The vet’s cat wandered up to great me and was only slightly put off by Pippin’s grumpy hisses. He sharpened his claws on the chair next to me, and then wandered off to stretch luxuriously in full view of my caged cat. A sign advertising a horse for sale hung on the wall. Lambing bottles lined the shelves. This wasn’t like my vet’s office…

Mail Pattern Badness

Me and My Life

I’ve only put my mail on hold a few times since moving into this mail district. The first time it worked as I supposed it should. I told them when I’d pick up my held mail, and it was there waiting for me when I went to get it. The second time was a comfortable repeat of the first. But the third time, things didn’t work out quite so well.

I stood in line over my lunch break pondering the vaulted ceilings and intricate woodwork that adorn our tiny post office, listening to one woman expound on the post office’s ill-advised habit of having only one attendant on duty over the lunch hour, and watching another woman lift her twin boys up so that they could drop pieces of mail one by one into the mail slot. When it was finally my turn to request my held mail, the woman behind the desk disappeared for so long that we began to wonder if she’d decided to eat lunch back there. But no. It was just that my mail wasn’t there. She came back with the news that my mail carrier had “messed up again” (which I thought was an interesting choice of phrase) and would I prefer to go to the distribution center myself to pick up my mail? She gave me directions and I headed off to the low and somehow dead-looking building that is the regional distribution center. I had to be buzzed into the entry way, where a lone chair stood between the outer doors and the inner (and separately locked) doors. Lying on that displaced chair was my tiny bundle of held mail. I left feeling that I’d somehow forgotten to leave a suitcase full of money by that chair in exchange for my released mail.

The next time I returned from a short trip and braved the lunch line at the post office, my mail was missing in action yet again. This time upon calling the distribution center, the woman behind the desk suggested that there were so few pieces of mail held that they could just deliver it to my address later that day. Which they did.

So this morning, when I entered the post office to be greeted by a long line of people waiting to send packages and buy stamps, I was more than a little concerned that I’d be leaving empty handed. In fact, I was so convinced that my mail wouldn’t be there when I had told them it should be that I’d tried to work the system a little. I requested that my mail be ready for pick-up on Friday, and then I went to pick it up Saturday morning. So there was no way there wouldn’t be mail for me, right? Wrong. The man disappeared into the back room, and presently we all heard him call to somebody to see if there was held mail that had just come in. No, she answered. No held mail today. Great. So he returned and called the distribution center only to find that they’d decided I wanted my mail held for 5 extra days. I said no, I’d wanted it held until yesterday. “Well, it has April 25th written on it,” the man protested, “But we can deliver what’s there, if you like. And do you want us to cancel the remainder of the hold?”

Now I realize that I really had been expected to leave a suitcase full of money that first time.

Feeling Caught Out of Time

Randomness

It’s been far too long since I’ve written, and for that I’m sorry. But I’m not good at thinking of things to write. If topics don’t jump up and yell “write about me!” I’m pretty much powerless to conjure them.

But April is National Poetry Month, so I thought I’d reproduce a poem I wrote long ago. It’s not an April poem. It’s a February poem. But with all the untimely snow we’ve had lately, I thought it might still be strangely appropriate.

New Style

Me and My Life

I got my hair cut on Friday and actually changed up my style for the first time in a few years (no sense doing anything rash, you know). To be fair, it’s not much of a change. I didn’t go for the asymmetrical cut the stylist suggested. And I didn’t color my hair or anything. It’s still brown and just below shoulder length. But now I have bangs and layers.

I haven’t had bangs in years, and the ones I have now are those long ones that are supposed to swoop out to the sides of my face. You know, like you see on all the stars… Yeah. Well my hair has always had a mind of its own, so it’s playing with me right now, just to get me back for messing with it. My bangs alternate between looking awesome and falling in front of my eyes. And they do this minute-to-minute. One minute I’ll be thinking, “Why didn’t I do this sooner? It’s a great look!” The next minute I’ll be cursing them and running for bobbie pins. Now I’ve got bobbie pins in most of my pockets, I’ve vacuumed them up from the most unlikely spots in the apartment, and there are never any left when I go to look for one in the drawer where I keep all my hair stuff. (Whenever I don’t find them in my drawer, that’s exactly when I’m not wearing pants that have pockets.)

Well, this morning it’s rainy and wet. A true spring day. And I got into my car reveling in the fact that the humidity was doing good things for my curls rather than the nasty things it normally does. And my bangs were gorgeous.

Getting out of my car when I arrived at work, the wind kicked up and the rain came down, and now it looks like I was trying to go for Meg Ryan, but failed. Miserably. I would say that it looks like I only spent 2 minutes on my hair this morning, but I only did spend two minutes on my hair this morning… because that’s all I ever spend on my hair in the morning. And I didn’t want to look like a brunette Meg Ryan.

Skipping Spring

Portraits of People and Places

It was too warm to stay indoors tonight, so after dinner I went walking for over an hour in the breeze and the sunset. Somebody was flying a kite. Somebody else was flying a plane in lazy circles around the town. And in one diminutive ranch house with greying asbestos siding and scraggly lawn scattered inside a warped chain-link fence, a two-foot tall porcelain doll swathed in yards of white satin and lace, gazed serenely out of a dusty bay window.

My bum leg doesn’t quite agree that jumping from winter to summer in 48 hours is a good thing. It feels like I’ve gone running, pumped some iron, and been mildly beaten, all on only one leg. But this too shall pass, and I wouldn’t have given up the chance to be part of a steady parade of couples pushing strollers, children on bikes, college students, and residents of the retirement center. No, not for anything.

[Update: The six blisters on my feet say that my feet would have preferred either a) a shorter walk, or b) a walk in something other than the sandals I haven’t worn in 6 months.]