Not blogging to my potential

I keep jotting down notes about topics I want to blog about, but I don't have a computer at home, so I can't blog till I get to the library, and then I can only blog when I'm not actually supposed to be working. Doesn't matter anyway, I always leave my little cryptic notes
("B-winkle"; "quack"; "bounce/window") at home.

I wonder, if I blogged more often, would my blog zoom around the internet faster and would people start finding it and reading it and leaving comments and making me feel wonderful, or awful, but at least noticed? I crave your attention!

I've read other blogs. Some were nothing I was interested in. Others were the products of people who are far more skilled as writers, or far more skilled in some particular skill, or far more knowledgeable in some specific area, than I could ever hope to be. But a lot, a lot, of blogs are just personal journals. Some are boring, some are funny, some are cute or cutesy. Some are pretty darn cool, as in No Impact Man, a journal about trying to live green, and dragging your family along with you. Lots of good information, well written, entertaining, timely, inspiring, worth your time.

In contrast, my blog, this blog, is a Whiner blog. I mean, really, who'd want to read a whiner blog? I've got nothing new or unusual or important to say. I just complain about the unfairness of life. I haven't even really written about all the really beautiful and wonderful and neat stuff about life, mostly because I'm in too much of a "life's not fair" fog to notice anything except how unfair life is. Plus the weather has been really sucky, I'm so damn tired of rain. Blah, blah, blah, Ginger.

But then, you know, I also come across other whiner blogs, and they have tons of activity going on, lots of people writing comments, I mean like dozens and dozens of comments on all of the posts, sometimes hundreds of comments. So how'd they do it? How does one attract so many people to one's whiner blog? I crave that attention! No, I should say it like this (very nasally),
"I want people to read my blog, tooooo, why isn't anyone reading my blog, huh, huh?"

You know, I'm not a social animal. I am, to use an old fashioned term, a wallflower. Put me in a party, and I back up to the wall and try to fade into the wallpaper. Unless you give me a drink, in which case I get tipsy and try to impress everyone with how funny I am when I am drunk and uninhibited. Embarrassing. On the other hand, here I have attempted to present myself in a very public forum-available, literally, to the whole world. And I write well enough, I'm not great, but I can string sentences together better than the average bear. (I've tried to read blogs that made me gnash my teeth and grumble, "go do your English homework!") And while many writers are shy, we still want our writings to be read, to be noticed, to be talked about. (Okay, so I'm not a professional writer, but I do write, have always written, it's a personal need, a desire, something that satisfies me, an avocation, if you will.) mmm - someone just engaged me in conversation and now I have lost my train of thought, bye bye choo choo.

Never mind. I will attempt to blog up to my potential from this point forward. And someday maybe I will also remember what I was going to write in this post.

Today, Labor Day, my husband and I were sitting at our table looking out over the back yard, watching our dogs play. Rocky has been barking a lot, but not overmuch, it seemed to us. He barks at everything, squirrels, birds, insects, leaves fluttering in the breeze. Usually I bring him indoors when I think he's barking too much. I don't want to annoy the neighbors. I try to be a good dog owner, a good neighbor.

But then we saw the neighbors behind us looking over our fence - it's a double fence, we built the new fence inside the old fence, so there's a "zone" between the neighbors' yards and ours and our dogs aren't allowed in the zone. Anyway, a police officer was standing with our neighbors looking into our yard. Three of our dogs were facing them, but not barking, just watching. Patrick and I wondered what was going on. "It's the dogs," he said, "they're complaining about the dogs." But they didn't seem to be looking at the dogs, I thought they were looking at the plants. "Is there a stray hemp plant growing in the yard," I wondered. (Hemp is a type of marijuana, and used to be farmed here in Iowa. It's not unusual to find it growing in yards or along roadsides.)

After a few minutes the police officer walked away and Pat went outside to the driveway, knowing the police car would pull up in front of our house. By the time I walked outside, the officer and Pat were having a conversation. "It's the dogs," Pat said, "barking too much."

The officer was very polite and chatted in a friendly fashion. "Your neighbors are trying to enjoy their holiday in their garden and your dogs have been barking all morning." He offered some options. "Thin out the dogs. Two would be plenty. Try a bark collar or put up a solid fence. Keep them quiet or I'll have to come back."

My dogs are only out in the yard when one of us is home. And we bring them inside if they get on a barking rant. We don't let them just bark constantly all day or all night. I really didn't think
Rocky was barking that much, perhaps I just wasn't paying attention.

This is what I think. If you have a problem with your neighbor, you go to your neighbor and say, "I'm sorry, but I have a problem." You give your neighbor the benefit of the doubt - you allow them to fix the problem, maybe they didn't even know there was a problem. You try to work it out together. You don't treat your neighbor like a criminal. You don't go to the police first.
When you go to the police first, it creates bad feelings.

I went in the yard with the dogs and played quietly with them for awhile. Meanwhile, over in my neighbors' yard, the neighbors who had complained about our barking dogs, their little dachshund was going, "yapyapyapyapyap!"

home

A friend asked me the other day if I was settled into my new house - she said, "are you all organized yet?"
I laughed and said, "I wasn't organized before the move, why should I be now?"

A few days after that someone else said in surprise, "Aren't you unpacked yet?"

I moved into the house on May 20. You'd think I'd have everything done. But I don't.
Boxes are piled up in corners, in the middle of some floors, in closets and the stairwell and the garage. Every once in a while I'll make a half-hearted attempt at unpacking. I'll pull out a box and open it up, look at the contents, sigh, close it back up and shove it back into its place. Sometimes I actually manage to unpack a box. I put the contents on counters and in drawers, because I don't know what else to do with them. I'm not putting them away - I'm just storing them someplace different than a box.

Every once in awhile I drive over to the old house and walk through the dark, ashy, smoky rooms and pick something up and put it down, open a closet door and shut it, bring an empty box upstairs in order to fill it, then leave it empty on the floor. Dirty pieces of furniture are shoved haphazardly in rooms. Clothing, bedding, trash, papers and toys are scattered here and there. Books sit patiently in stacks near the door. I walk into the kitchen which my husband has gutted.
I look out the windows to the lush, overgrown back yard. Then I walk back through the house and shut the door behind me, get in my car and go home.

Quack, quack, seat back!

(Life happens so fast lately I can't keep up. Here's something I wanted to share several weeks ago, not long after our house caught on fire, and our 11 year old daughter woke up her brother in time to escape from the fire.)

My kids fight incessantly over the best seats in the house, recently that means 2 recliners, which is basically all we have since our house caught on fire. "Quack, quack, seat back," one of them will chant as he or she leaves the desirable seat in order to get a snack from the kitchen. Invariably, one of the other kids will immediately slip into the vacant chair, causing a huge fuss when the original occupant returns.

One evening 11 year old Mary hopped up to go to the kitchen, chanting the quack quack as she went. Her 15 year old brother David hopped up and flopped down into Mary's chair. When Mary came back and surveyed this disaster, her face turned stony. "Quack Quack Seat Back," she said sternly. David shrugged his shoulders and smiled, "nope." Mary repeated the chant and Davy continued to smile.

Finally Mary stood up very straight and glared down at her brother with narrowed eyes, "I saved your life!"

Quack quack, she got her seat back.

First, do no harm

Copy of the letter I sent to my mother's doctors.

June 24, 2007

Texas Cancer Center

Aparna Chacka Kumar

Mark Saunders

910 East Houston, Suites 100/100-C

Tyler, TX 75702

Dr. Charles Perricone

Family Medicine

511 North High

Henderson, TX 75652

To Drs. Chacka , Saunders and Perricone:

I am writing this on behalf of my mother, Sara L. Hafner. She wishes to let you know that you have caused her great harm. She feels she was treated inhumanely and discourteously. On many occasions over the years my mother has told all of her family members that she would never agree to radiation therapy or chemotherapy for cancer treatment. When she received a diagnosis
of DCIS this past winter, she told each of her children that she would not receive radiation. She decided she would have the surgery only, wait six months and see how her health was before making any further decisions about therapy. We were all shocked and dismayed when she told us that she would be undergoing radiation therapy after all. But my mother is an intelligent, strong woman who has generally made wise and informed decisions, and so we didn’t try to dissuade her.

Late in May my mother called me. She didn’t feel good, she was experiencing a lot of pain and she felt troubled and alarmed. Her body, she said, was telling her that something was seriously wrong. And the doctor’s office (your office) was harassing her, calling her and insisting she come back for more radiation treatments. “I stink,” she told me, “I smell like burnt flesh. And I have so much pain. When I tell the doctor and nurses at the clinic, they just pooh-pooh my concerns, they don’t listen, they don’t care.”

On June 4 my mother was admitted to the hospital with elevated blood pressure & dangerously fast heart rate with fibrillation. Mother told me that the doctors at the hospital told her that they suspected the radiation had reached the heart and damaged it. When she was released from the hospital she was told to take aspirin, and given an appointment to see Dr. Perricone on June 28.

Someone please explain this to me: a 79 year old woman being treated with radiation for breast cancer has an emergency admission to a hospital for heart fibrillations, and she is patted on the head and told, take some aspirin and see me in three weeks???? What the hell??

When I next talked to my mother she told me she wished she had never agreed to the radiation. She said her family doctor, Dr. Perricone, had told her he never advised his patients to have radiation therapy. I asked her why he hadn’t said this before she started radiation, and she told me she hadn’t seen him. “He’s a family doctor, not an oncologist. I was told these people were specialists in breast cancer. I thought they knew what they were talking about. But all the papers I signed said that ‘all radiation is experimental’. I wish I had never started this. And the clinic keeps calling me and leaving messages and harassing me about finishing up the radiation. They don’t care about me at all. They don’t listen to me. They don’t care that they hurt me. This whole process has been dehumanizing and brutal.”

On Friday, June 22 at 5:00 p.m., my mother suffered a massive stroke which damaged almost all of the right hemisphere of her brain. Her left side is paralyzed. She will never walk or dance or paint again. She is facing months or years of therapy. She will probably never return to her beloved home and her favorite things. She may lose her home and all her antiques and property in order to provide skilled nursing care for the rest of her life. It’s possible she will suffer another stroke which will kill her, depriving her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, husband, sisters and brothers of her love and companionship. Or she may contract pneumonia or influenza in the nursing home which may also kill her.

When she was life flighted to Mother Frances in Tyler, the doctors were astonished that she had been released from a hospital a week earlier for heart problems and not given blood thinner medication. “Just aspirin?”

When I saw her a few days after the stroke, she said, “they’ve killed me. Those doctors. That Dr. Saunders, that asshole, praying over me before the radiation. He’s a phony, he’s a jackass. I wish someone would put hookwires in his balls and radiate him. None of them ever cared about me as a person. They didn’t listen to me.”

I said, “Mama, why did you have the radiation?”

She said, “They intimidated me. They bullied me.”

I have never seen my mother intimidated in her life. She is a strong, opinionated, assertive person. My mother is usually the one doing the intimidating.

I did a little bit of research on treatment of DCIS. While radiation is standard protocol, I was interested to note that 75% of women who do NOT receive radiation after surgery do NOT have a recurrence of the cancer. My mother is 79 years old – how many extra years of life were you hoping to give her by aggressively treating a slow-moving, non-invasive precancerous condition?

By treating her with a therapy that I’m certain she told you she didn’t want?

I don’t know what you said to her to make her agree to radiation, but know this: she never wanted it. She didn’t need it. She didn’t deserve what you did to her. My mother has hardly been sick a day in her life – she was active, intelligent, interested in the world around her, and tried to take good care of herself. I fully believe that her condition now is a result of your bullying, lack of concern, and carelessness in your medical treatment of her. At the very least you need to personally and sincerely apologize to her. Not that she will accept it or forgive you, but you still need to offer it. Groveling is encouraged.

My mother told me she regretted ever getting a mammogram, ever listening to what you doctors had to say. She regretted the biopsy, which she said was like medieval torture, she regretted the surgery, more brutality, and most of all she regretted having the radiation. “Don’t you ever do it,” she told me and my sister. “We won’t, Mama,” we said. “You’ll regret it if you do,” she said.

“I already regret it, Mama,” I said, looking at her sorry state.

With all the media attention on breast cancer and mammograms, pushing, pushing, pushing women to get mammograms...this experience with my mother makes me wonder how much the medical profession genuinely cares about women. It seems our breasts have become one of Big Medicine’s great cash cows. You can bet that my sister and I will be telling every woman we know about this horrific and tragic experience.

Here are my mother’s instructions to you and your staffs:

· Treat people humanely

· Listen to your patients

· Respond appropriately to what people say (not, “oh, you’ll be fine, the side effects will go away, don’t worry about it.....”)

· Show some sincere concern

· Practice good medicine, as opposed to “this is the way we always do it (& we get paid so much more when we do it this way)”

· OR GET OUT OF THE HEALTH CARE FIELD

We are also including an attractive sign for you to hang on your office wall where you can see it every day. Sorry we couldn’t afford a frame, we have to save our money for our mother’s nursing care.

Sincerely,

Brenda G. McDonald

The sign was simply the words : First, do no harm.

Tremendous fun to tragedy & trauma

I had a wonderful weekend in Chicago with my 3 younger children and my oldest daughter, her husband and their baby, Guthrie. I got to babysit - yay! Except poor little Guthrie won't take a bottle, he just wants his mommy's booby. So we had a few tragic hours when he was sure he had been abandoned to his heartless, empty-boobied grandma. But when Mommy reappeared there was rejoicing in babyland!

More about Chicago later.

On Sunday morning in Chicago I received a phone call from my brother - our mother had had a massive stroke and they didn't think she would survive. We drove home to Grinnell, I talked with my sister, and on Monday my sister and I started driving toward Texas. Tremendous thunderstorms all the way down through Missouri on Monday. Hot, hot, hot on Tuesday. We arrived at my mother's house late Tuesday afternoon.

So now there is more to do than I understand. I am angry, sad, confused, helpless. Mother is coherent, sad, angry, funny, depressed. She gave us instructions for her funeral : no sadness, no hymns, only music by the Tijuana Brass. Pitchers of margaritas, chips and salsa. She told us what she wants on her tombstone and started to cry. "I loved to dance," she said.

But she could survive many more years - just paralyzed on her left side. No painting, no dancing, no walks in the park. I asked about wheelchairs and the neurologist said, probably not. I don't understand. I don't know what to hope for.

Hold fast

A few nights after the fire I couldn't sleep. I sat in the living room of our new house, amid the packing boxes and junk we've already accumulated and left in piles here and there...and wondered, what do I do, what do I do. Not about insurance or repairs or replacing things. But what do I do with my dream?

For 45 years I've nurtured a dream, and for about the past 10 years I've known in my heart that my dream just ain't gonna happen. Choices I made, or choices others made for me that I accepted, however half-heartedly, have altered the course of my life and pushed my dream ever further away. But I kept remembering that line from the Langston Hughes poem: Hold fast to dreams... But what if you can't hold fast anymore? What if holding fast hurts more than letting go?

So I sat in the dark and cried a little. And remembered that I used to pray, and that when I prayed I felt closer to God, and when I feel close to God, I feel safe and cherished. And I thought about so many of the books about prayer that are popular today, and how they make all sorts of promises: If you just pray the right way, you can have everything you want, wealth and success, all your dreams will come true, because that's what God wants for you! Anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to the news knows that prayers don't work that way. Many people will say that prayers don't work at all. Just look at Darfur - you think those people don't pray?

But I digress. I must have my little rants at those other Christians. Where was I?

Dreams. Prayers. Oh yeah.

I needed to pray. But what should I pray for? All the usual stuff, but for this specific time in my life, when I don't know what to do with my dream, how do I pray about that?
And I picked up a pen and a notebook and I scribbled: "Pray for what God wants for you, not for what you imagine you want."

Last night I was reading a book by one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott (I call her Annie, as if we're friends), and she quoted another one of my favorite writers, Kathleen Norris:
"Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine." I sat up really straight when I read that passage. And read it again, and again. Okay, I'm listening.

When I feel my mind exploring that sore, tender spot where my dream used to be, I catch my breath until I remember. And I hold fast.

"For I know the plans I have for you, for your welfare and for good, to give you a future and a hope." Jeremiah 29:11

The pinprick of light at the end of a very long tunnel

I had been wondering why our credit union hadn't responded to our house fire. It seemed very weird to me that they weren't interested in their investment. They've made a lot of money from us, since we were incompetent in watching our mortgage payments and hadn't realized years ago that the loan had gone into a reverse amortization. (We now owe $27,000 more on the house than what we agreed to pay for it in 1991.)

Anyhoo...come to find out, our credit union reps had been avoiding us, because they made a very serious error, and so did we. Years ago our homeowner's insurance was cancelled. At that time we received a letter from the credit union informing us that we must have insurance on our mortgaged house and if we didn't procure it, they would apply insurance to the house and add the premium payments to our house payments. Being ridiculously ignorant and lazy we thought, okay, do that. And we assumed they had. But they had not. Not only had they not procured insurance for the house, they actually filed a paper waiving the insurance, without informing us.

So now we have a burned up house, no insurance and a mortgage we still have to pay for a house that is unlivable, unsellable and unrentable. Do we have savings to fix it up ourselves or raze it? We do not.

My dreams of being debt-free are wisps of mist. The credit union may pay for damages out of their own bigger pockets. We may have to take them to court. Either way we are exposed as extremely incompetent folks. Our life is wide open to judgment and criticism. I want to leave for Tahiti and forget the whole thing. But I can't. Somehow I have to overcome my claustrophobia and start crawling through that very long and narrow tunnel and working my way toward that tiny pinprick of light. There is hope yet.

P.S. We found our 2 missing cats, safe and sound. The 2 injured rats have recovered. Whoopee.

My house burned this morning

My house caught fire. My kids are safe, my dogs are safe. Two cats are safe, two cats are missing.
Two rats died, two rats were crushed and injured. My kitchen is destroyed. My house is smoke damaged.

My kids were home, and I was gone, working at the church nursery. My daughter woke up and smelled smoke. She opened the kitchen door and saw fire. A cat ran out of the kitchen into the house, we haven't seen him since. My daughter called 911, then she ran upstairs and woke up her brother, whose bedroom is right above the kitchen. They scrambled to get outside, grabbed a few dogs on the way, 2 dogs remained closed up in separate rooms.

The neighbors said flames were shooting up into the sky. My kids said there were explosions as windows buckled and burst. The weirdest thing, said my 15 year old son, was hearing the crash of dishes as shelves burned and collapsed.

The firefighters got my other two dogs out, and found 2 of my cats. They went into my stinky, dirty basement and heaved the rat cages up the stairs and out into the yard. The firefighters were amazing, kind and amazing. I keep picturing them pulling out those disgusting rat cages.
They were afraid we had a huge snake, because of all the rats, like we were breeding rats for snake food. I said, "no, we don't have a huge snake, we just made a huge mistake."

I am raw, and sad, and worried about money and feel so sorry for my poor old house.

But I am so grateful, and counting my blessings, and thanking God, my kids are alive. They came so close to death.

I called my mother and told her my houses caught on fire. She said, "well I hope you have fire insurance."
Not, "how are you?"
Not "did everybody get out okay?"
Not "oh, my God, I'm so sorry, tell me what happened."
My mother is probably kicking herself now. She does this all the time. A few days from now I'll get a very sympathetic letter from her.

Friends and neighbors have been incredibly generous, people keep bringing us food, and items we need like toilet paper and cat litter and paper plates and silverware and offering hugs, even though I'm covered with dirt and blood from where the kitten scratched me in his panic.

My mind is reeling - too much going on inside. If only, if only. If only I hadn't taken that nursery job, I would have been home, or maybe not, I might have been at church anyway...

It could have been so different. We might all have been gone, the house would have burned, and all our pets with it. Mary might not have awakened in time to notice the fire, and she and Davy might both be dead, or burned terribly.

No time for if only or what if. Just the facts ma'am: we are alive. And I am so thankful.

even in my dreams I'm incompetent

Afternoon naps produce the most bizarre dreams. Unpleasant dreams.

I dreamed I was letting my dog Beau in - every time I let him through the door I hurt him. I slammed the door on his neck, or punched him in the face - not on purpose, but I still hurt him.
He started growling at me - really snarling, snout wrinkled, lips curled back, big teeth bared. I couldn't believe it - Beau is a most loving dog. When I tried to talk to him, to apologize, he snarled. A couple of times he stood up on his hind legs (he's almost as tall as I am) and snarled right in my face, even mouthed the words "I'm sorry". It was hideous, like a horror movie, and I was terrified. My dog was talking to me, but I couldn't tell if he was truly sorry because he couldn't control his fear and contempt of me, or if he was being sarcastic and making fun of me. (dream logic) When I woke up and went downstairs, I was relieved to find that Beau still liked me.

I dreamed I got into a car to drive a short distance away - I couldn't see, I couldn't find the road.
I was afraid, my passengers (my daughters) were afraid. I couldn't turn the wheel properly. I was swaying in my seat, half asleep. Usually in dreams I'm wide awake - I may be doing weird stuff or in strange situations, but I'm not a freaking half-asleep zombie. But in afternoon dreams, it's like the character of "me" is played by my actual sleeping self. I can't drive when I'm asleep.

PS - I actually have recurring car & driving dreams, and I know what they mean - but that's for another post.

I put it right there!

I lose things. Important things. Like tax returns.

Then I throw tantrums, scream, yell at myself, slam doors, slam doors, slam doors, SLAM!
Feel stupid, stupid, stupid.

Why am I so disorganized? I think I put something away properly, where it can be located
easily when I need it. I'm sure I remember putting it away.

But then when I go to get it, it's not there, I can't find, I need it, right now, and, and, and...

Let the tantrums begin.

Tripping over the light fantastic shoe

I tripped over my shoes this morning. No, I hadn't left them tumbled in the middle of the floor - I was wearing them at the time, and one of them slipped off my foot. Damn clogs. How do other women walk in these things? I've never been able to master the art of walking in backless shoes. So why did I buy them? Because everyone else was wearing them! Because my friends say, "oh, they're so comfortable!"

Actually, I bought them because I'm extremely lazy. Who wants to have to bend over or squat down and tie or buckle anything? I once heard of a young woman who complained that her shoes were tripping her up. When her friends looked at her feet, they started laughing. She had her shoes on the wrong feet, with the buckles facing each other from her inner ankles. Everytime she took a step, the buckles clashed and caught on each other. I can relate to that. Do they still make buckle shoes? Or are they all fake buckles with velcro underneath? Never mind. I don't even like velcro - you still have to bend over and press it in place. Nope. I like slip on shoes. Slip on, slip off, slip on, slip off. (I'd also love to have a clapper - clap on, clap off, clap on, clap off.)

Unfortunately, I just may be clumsier than I am lazy. I walk into walls. I am forever bumping my head on the cupboard door I left open (does anything hurt more than that? A paper cut maybe). I slip down the stairs, I bang my hips against counters, my knees on coffee tables, my ankles knock together when I try to jog. I don't try to jog anymore.

Back to shoes. Clogs. So what do other women know about clogs that I don't? It can't possibly be just about grace or lack thereof. Can it? Do other women buy them a half size too small, so that one's feet are wedged so tightly into the shoe that it cannot possibly fall off and trip one? Is there a glue strip one wears on the sole of one's foot? I just don't get it. I was attending a conference with two of my coworkers, and we were all wearing clogs. Walking from the car to the entrance of the hotel, my 2 friends were striding masterfully, fifty yards or more ahead, while I was mincing across the parking lot like an 19th century Chinese woman with bound feet. Tell me! Tell me now!! How do you keep clogs on your feet??? I have to squinch up my toes and attempt to grip the slick insole with each step, and they still fall off, or fly ahead, or just dangle off my toes as I lift my foot to take a step. And wham! Whumpity, whumpity, there I am, arms windmilling, nose headed for a smashing, clogs tangled up under my feet.

Perhaps I could blame my lack of shoe grace on growing up in warm climates - I went barefoot an awful lot as a child. Shoes were for school and church, any other time, I was shoe-free. My toes just aren't used to being confined. Nearly the first thing I do when I get home for the night, is kick my shoes off.


But I do love shoes. Some years ago when I was still young and attempting to pass myself off as sexy, I wore high heels. I loved my shoes, my sexy, strappy little 3 inch pumps. I loved my gorgeous black leather spiky heeled boots. I dreamed about red f-me heels. But the truth was - I couldn't walk in these things, at least not far. I could get from the car door to the cocktail table or bar, but once I reached a chair or stool, I was in place, legs crossed prettily, dainty foot swinging. If asked to dance, I kicked the damn shoes off and hoped the guy thought it was sexy.

I once tried to walk four blocks in my beautiful, beloved boots. I had made it to my destination and was gamely attempting the walk back to my house. My feet were screaming at me as I staggered from tree to fence post to fire hydrant, hobbling, swaying, falling toward the next vertical object. People driving by stared as they passed me - if cell phones had existed then, I'm sure they would have been tapping out 9-1-1, "there's a disgraceful drunk woman falling down on respectable neighborhood lawns".

So what is this infatuation that women have with shoes? I've been reading a lot of chick lit lately, and half the books seem to be about shoes, designer shoes, designer shoes for babies, shoe cupboards and closets, credit cards maxed out on 1 pair of shoes, shoe sale frenzies. And the reason women find this entertaining and funny, is because we can relate to it!

When I was nine, I insisted that my mother buy me a certain pair of dark red shoes. I loved those shoes - they didn't fit right, they pinched and hurt my feet, but I wore them anyway. I didn't understand then why I had to have those shoes, and I don't understand now, why certain shoes just tickle something in our brain - it's erotic and primitive and undeniable. Is there a shoe lobe in the brain?

I have reached the age where all I really look for in a shoe is comfort, but I can be stopped dead in my tracks in front of a shoe shop window featuring a beautiful and usually high-heeled shoe. I will daydream in front of that window, and maybe even enter the store and try the shoe on (if my socks are clean and my toe nails clipped). What is it about shoes and women? What do shoes represent?
Why are shoes "sexy"? How can feet be considered sexy? I don't think feet are sexy, I think feet are damned funny looking. If you stare at a foot long enough, you just have to wonder. Except for baby feet, baby feet are excruciatingly adorable.
And feet can be really ugly and stinky too. Well, I guess that's true of other body parts, too. Clean is sexy. But then, why do we call something sexy, "dirty" ?
Now I'm confused. Feet should definitely be clean, though, I'm not confused about that.

But while I'm mulling over all this sexy feet/sexy shoe stuff, take a look at this really cool book - I love it, my kids love it (though I have to censor some pages for them!) Some of the shoes are real shoes, some are artifacts, some are designers' fanciful creations, and some are just art:

Shoes: A Celebration of Pumps, Sandals, Slippers & More by Linda O'Keeffe (Paperback - Jan 12, 1996)

Postscript: Years after I stopped going dancing and stopped wearing high heels (I almost typed high hells - ha ha Freudian slip!) - I still kept my high heels in my closet - through several moves, one half way across the country - I still kept those spiky little heels. Every once in a while I would take my strappy little pumps out of hiding and just look at them, remembering. They weren't comfortable, but I felt great wearing them, feminine, sexy, and even powerful. I will never feel that way about clogs.

See ya later, alligator! (and hey, those aren't alligator pumps you're wearing, are they?) Here's another fun book:

Alligator Shoes (Reading Rainbow) by Arthur Dorros (Paperback - April 1, 1992)

Urine trouble now!

It’s morning, I’m late, as usual, and hopping around trying to brush my shoes and tie my teeth and round up the books I need to return to the library (where I work) when I notice something. A noise. Something drumming softly in another room. It’s an odd noise, and out of place in my morning routine. It sounds like...water running, no, splattering.

I cock my head trying to place the location of the noise. I creep from doorway to doorway and follow the sound into the dining room. Liquid is splashing onto the dining room table. From the table it bounces up and flies in thousands of tiny droplets out into the room, spraying the floor, the walls, the piano, me. My eyes follow the stream of liquid up, up, up to the ceiling where it is pouring through the exposed lath. My brain is exceedingly slow to puzzle this out. Why is there liquid up there? Above this area of the dining room, there is only the hallway and my bedroom door. No plumbing. No pipes.

A dog brushes against my legs. A lightbulb goes off in my head – it’s one of those jarring, noisy warning bulbs that lights up and honks when nuclear power plant protocol has been breached. Wonk! Wonk! Wonk!

I race up the stairs, all six dogs scrambling up with me, bumping into me, nearly knocking me all the way down the stairs again. I turn the corner at the hallway and slide to a stop in front of my bedroom door. Where there is a rapidly disappearing pool of dog pee. Rapidly disappearing because it is draining through the cracks of the old wood floor and through the broken plaster and exposed lath of the dining room ceiling and onto the dining room table (did I mention that this is a dining room table – people eat food from this table!)

Cursing at the dogs, I slosh a mop through the mess and finish it off with a towel – a towel, I might add, that I had just laundered the night before. A clean towel that has been folded on the bathroom shelf for a mere 8 hours, before being used to wipe up dog piss.

Downstairs (where each dog is now cowering in its own corner, trying to look small and vulnerable and innocent), I rapidly clean up the table, chairs, floor, piano, then realize I need to change my clothes as well. I am late for work.

This is my morning. This is not an unusual morning.

I have six dogs, obviously untrained, and every morning when I wake up I have six dogs with full bladders. My own bladder is also full. I used to drag myself out of bed and to the back door to let dogs out to pee before I had used the bathroom myself. But since our yard is not fenced, and there is a leash law, I can only let one dog out at a time. Have you ever watched a dog choose a spot to pee? They can be interminably slow. Sniff the rock, hmm, no, maybe the garbage can, hmm, no, not there, oh, a stick of wood. Nope. “Just go potty, damn you!” I yell, startling some early morning joggers passing by the house. Times that by six, and you can see my problem. After I’d peed in my pajamas a few times, I made an executive decision: the one who buys the dog food gets to pee first.

But a dog whose bladder has been filling up all night long is a worried dog and an anxious dog. There are mornings I can hear the dogs milling about outside the bathroom door, almost hear their fretting, almost see them squeezing their furry legs together, pinching their doggy lips together in an attempt to tighten all bodily sphincter muscles. Some mornings, such as this one, somebody failed. Or, I suspect, somebody didn’t try hard enough.

My life is clearly out of control. I am not living up to my potential. And I am late to work again, thinking, how did I get here? Why do I have so many dogs? Why are there holes in my ceiling? How do I sanitize the dining room table? How do I get the odor of dog pee out of my unfinished wood floors? And how do I escape?? But then I arrive at work, and must think about other things, like earning enough money to feed my dogs, repair my ceiling, buy a new table, finish my floors and book a one way ticket to Tahiti.