Happy Memorial Day weekend to all, and humblest thanks to those who have given their lives for our freedom:
“I am anti- war, not anti-warrior”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Bernie Sanders
“America will not be cheated any longer, and especially will not be cheated by foreign countries charging people much lower prices for medicines”………………………..Donald Trump
“People who live in glass houses should not throw stones”……………………………………………………………………..Geoffrey Chaucer
“What I am, I am: and let it be enough”……………………………………………………………………………………………………..D.H. Lawrence
“Jews on safari —
Map, compass, elephant gun,
Hard sucking candies.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Haikus for Jews
Ah, life in the mountains. Yesterday was a hot and sticky mid to high 80s-summr in blooming….this morning is in the mid 40s and going to just crack 50 later….ya just never know.
This week was a sad week for us. After months of downward spiral, injections and forced pill taking, we had to put our beloved old kitty, Niko, to sleep. She had quit eating and was basically living under the bed. Once a robust 15 pounds, she was down to five and half. So, we took her on Wednesday, and had her put gently to the next kitty world. The house feels a lot emptier without her prowling around, talking nonstop to us. Niko was originally Jenn’s mom’s cat, but we have had her since she passed ten years ago, and it always felt like a little bit of grandma Pat was with us in the house. A very sad moment, as we hovered over her on the table, dripping tears down, as she drifted off to sleep. She was one of a kind.
But it wasn’t all sad, as life rarely is.
I am in the process of having the full Monte Vermont medical experience. Having had some pretty debilitating muscle and joint problems for several months, and not finding an exact reason, have been exploring some alternatives to try and deal with it, apart from taking steroids and walking around in a perpetual state of road rage. This has led to some interesting experiences. I found an eccentric doctor with non-traditional methods at Dartmouth, who I spoke with several times this week. Let’s just say the man is precise and quite unequivocal in his view of his own magical cures. When dealing with him, it feels very much like talking to Frazier’s’ bother, Niles , on the old TV show, if you know what I mean. I cannot get in to see him for three months (apparently quite the demand for the magic bullet), but he emphasized (at least five times) that I have “express, consent permissions” (he really said that) to call him daily to see if he has had a cancellation. This may be quite an experience . I also have at least six different mountain folks offering to make me potions guaranteed to rid my joints of all toxins…and our friend, Linda, made a trip down from the lake, to offer her healing in the form of a large suitcase filled with some kind of hydro-electric, ultrasonic, photon-enhanced electronic device with wands that light up blue (like in Star Wars) that you wave around your body parts for ten minutes and ostensibly clears out all the bad juju. Once we warmed up the device, I immediately got a jolt of electric shock for unknown reasons before having the wand miracle for the allotted ten minutes. All of this to be able to get out of bed a little easier in the morning……
As a result of the joint issues, I sometimes cannot find a comfortable sleep position, and one night this week, after lots of tossing and turning, headed off to one of the other bedrooms to try and sleep without mowing Jenn or Lucy down. I went to one of the small dark bedrooms and snuggled in for few hours of sleep, only to wake to find I had been lying in a vast pile of mouse turds that had been gifted over the winter. Apparently, we had not gotten to cleaning out this room yet. Jenn was horrified….but I wondered if there was not some possible healing component to this?
Thursday, we had young Ian over to work with us on some outdoor projects. Ian is the son of our friends John and Linda, and maybe gets a bit fuzzy at times from a slight overuse of psycho active substances. Initially, he showed up the day before for his Thursday appointment time, and then, once here, fought with our old weed Wacker for about an hour to get it started. I had left him to it and was in the house finishing a work project, and could hear him screaming at the machine, so went out to check and found him circling it and periodically kicking at it, while lashing out with various creative epithets. I gave him some Gatorade and got the machine started for him, which seemed to go well until he ran out of line, and shut it down to re-string it. At which point, the screaming and pacing began again. I again went out to assist and coach him to get it started without beating it to a pulp, which he did, and went out to resume whacking, which seemed to be going very poorly. So I again went out to help him and found that he had no string line on the whacker to make it work, which he had apparently forgotten was why he had had shut it off in the first place. Ian is a nice kid, but good help is hard to find in the mountains.
While he was in mortal struggle with the Wacker, I managed to get out the chainsaw and cut down and cut up a tree…mountain work is never done…..
Wednesday night, after putting Niko down, we were blessed to have the Jewish Fish Monger offer to have us come over and watch the Cavs- Celtics game 5 with him and have him feed us. So- went over to his classic bachelor shack (we cleared the couch of piles of dirty clothes to sit down) and had a totally Yiddish inspired version of Italian food and then had to endure his whooping as the Celtics trounced the Cavs. It was a good distraction and only required four or five Tums apiece after the ethnically challenged meal.
Thursday night, we continued our mission at home- remedying our broken dishwasher. We went to Home Depot in Rutland after talking them into giving us 10% off the already drastically reduced sale price on a new Whirlpool- so that we would not have to make the dark of night, sneak-over drive to the hated New Hampshire….. just to save the sales tax. The HD manager was slightly incredulous at our request, but probably thought we were so strange that he agreed to the “tax abatement” discount. So we now have all out supplies to hard wire the dishwasher; including a special medical kit for mid-level electrical shock treatment. After an hour in Home Depot, we were so exhausted, we had to go to have Chinese at our beloved East.
So…back from a break from my early morning Sunday scribbling- after a short trip down to the lovely town of Wallingford for their annual town wide yard sale day. We had no needs per se- but still came back with a car filled with other people’s junk, to add to our own junk ….including some kind of early-Americana schlock, painted wood liquor cabinet, that is now searching for a home. It is truly amazing the shit that people collect, and then sell to other people to collect and then sell, etc., etc., ad nauseum….
And then…yesterday the JFM and I had made an all-day drive down to Boston to see the Sox play at Fenway. He got second row field box tickets for free from one of his fish guzzling customers, so we set off early in the morning for the 3 hour plus drive down to his hometown of Newton, where we parked and took the T (short for “train?) down to the city. But first, we had to make quick stop at Barry’s Village Deli (his boyhood haunt) to pick up $100 worth of deli sandwiches, which we initially consumed sitting on the floor of the packed train to the delight of our fellow travelers who stood all around us smelling the air to figure out what in the hell was happening in that train car. The stadium seats were incredible (and cushioned), it was incredibly hot and muggy, and the Sox won big. The crowd was delirious and we saw a couple of balls pounded off the famous Green Monster. Steve had four tickets so he invited two old rock and roll playing friends to meet us ….brothers Johnny and Vince from the Boston North end classic Italian gene pool. The guys vaped their way (not tobacco) through the whole game and kept a nonstop dialog going for three hours…..Goodfellas, good fun. On the trip back we stopped at a roadside park to have part two of the deli deluxe, with corned beef, pastrami, brisket, sour tomatoes, pickles, cole slaw, rugalach (you get the picture), sitting on a park bench at sunset while the mosquitoes had an orgasmic frenzy over both us and Barry’s Deli. As part of my herbal recovery, Jenn had had us trying to not consume carbs or sugar, which I had done very well on for a week (losing an amazing 7 pounds)…and which was more than reversed with yesterday’s eating frenzy (totally worth it).
Jenn, meanwhile volunteered for another community supper at the Oddfellows hall, and came back with 14 pounds of leftover baked ham…which is probably dead on for the caveman diet….
And now, my friends, I do believe it is nap time on bleak Sunday afternoon.
Be well, try to love one another right now, right now, right now…..
RIP…..Niko-Niko………………………
Ferlin’ Stu-Man
