I used to temp at a large company before I was hired as a permanent employee. When I quit the job for another part-time position, my boss asked if I’d be interested in doing some temp work for them later on. I needed the money, so I said yes.
By now, the temp agency at the company was a new one, so I had to sign on with them. This involved filling out a 3 page application, providing references, documenting the last 10 years of my work history, and taking a drug test.
The drug test took place at a walk-in laboratory in Andover. I had never worked at a company that required drug testing, and thought maybe the test would involve some kind of blood test or breathalyzer. Or maybe they’d be able to just look at me, and know that I’d never touched an illegal drug in my life. Drug dealers could certainly tell, and it was a sore point with me that none of them had ever offered me any cocaine. I didn’t want to take it, but I sure wanted to be given the opportunity to, politely and firmly, with a touch of Nancy Reagan, just say no.
When I walked into the lab, an older man was sitting in the waiting room, reading a magazine. I figured he was waiting to get a blood test or something, but it turned out he was just waiting for his daughter. She flounced out in a few minutes, bearing a cup with less than an inch of pale yellow liquid in it. She handed the cup to the nurse, who shook her head.
“Not enough,” the nurse said.
“I didn’t have enough,” the girl told her father.
“Can’t you drink a few cups of water?” he asked. “I took the whole day off from work to bring you here!”
“Dad! It won’t work! I don’t have to pee!” she said, with the certainty of a teenager who knows her parents are idiots.
They walked out, grumbling at each other, and the nurse called me in. She examined my driver’s license, and then pulled out a plastic cup.
“Do you think you can urinate enough to cover this sticker?” she asked me seriously.
I looked at the cup. I looked at her. The sticker was about an inch from the bottom of the specimen cup. She was asking me–Jane of the Tiny Shrunken Bladder, who drank about 80 ounces of water a day — if I could pee an inch? I didn’t want to brag, but I felt I had finally found my life’s calling; the one task I had trained for since I was, well, toilet trained.
“Yeah, I think so,” I told her.
“Okay, go into the bathroom and wash your hands. Just with water. Then come back here.”
Puzzled, I did as she said.
She opened a cabinet door, revealing stacks of empty and sealed specimen cups.
“Please pick one.”
I wanted to move all the specimen cups and pick one at the very back of the cabinet, just for fun, but I had too many things to do that day so I just grabbed the one closest to me. I handed it to the nurse.
She peeled off the foil lid and returned the cup to me.
“Go into the bathroom and don’t run the water in the sink or flush the toilet. You need to urinate at least above this line– ” she indicated the sticker again, “and if you have extra, you can go in the toilet. But don’t flush it afterwards or wash your hands.”
No flushing? And no hand washing? How gross! This drug testing was inhumane! Illegal! Infringing upon my right as an American to have clean hands after using a toilet!
I went into the bathroom and locked the door. I peed carefully into the cup. I was tempted to show off by filling up the entire cup, and then perhaps cracking open the bathroom door to say, “My good lady, could I trouble you for another receptacle? I fear this one is not quite large enough for my prowess at this task.” But I restrained myself, and modestly went just over the stickered line.
I opened the bathroom door and gave the cup to the nurse. I desperately wanted to wash my hands, but the nurse wouldn’t let me.
“You have to stand here until I seal up the cup,” she explained. “The cup’s not really supposed to be out of your sight at all.”
Gradually it dawned on me that her odd instructions, which I’d chalked up to the nurse attempting to liven up her day, had a point to them. There were some people who might (and this was hard for me to grasp) try to fake their drug tests.
I wanted to ask the nurse how it was done (dissolving something in water? Flushing something–what?–down the toilet?) but was afraid she would think I was a drug user who wanted to know how to circumvent the system.
Instead, I stood by silently as she poured my urine into a tiny beaker and sealed the lid. She placed a tamper-proof sticker over the opening, and then had me initial the sticker and sign another document.
“Now you can wash your hands,” she announced. Thank goodness. I was beginning to feel like a criminal.
She pushed a dispenser of liquid soap toward me, and I squeezed a few drops of soap into my palm. I went back into the bathroom and held my hand under the automatic faucet. Nothing. I waved my hand in front of the laser viewer. Nothing again.
I was beginning to panic (WHY WON’T THEY LET ME WASH MY HANDS? WILL I NEVER BE CLEAN AGAIN?) when the nurse noticed I was having trouble.
“Oh, it’s not coming on?” She flicked a switch behind her. Miraculously, the water began to flow, and all was right in the world again.
I fractured the little toe on my right foot a few years ago when I walked into a badly-placed wall in our bathroom. When my tears and screams of pain subsided, I became furious at the wall and at our house. Why was there a wall there, anyway? And why hadn’t the stinking builder made the bathroom big enough so that the door could swing open and close again without a potential user having to walk around the door first? Didn’t he realize that people who wanted to use the bathroom would probably want to close the door as well?
When I hobbled into my doctor’s office, the doctor gave it a quick look and taped the two smallest toes together. I thought something that hurt this much should have required a cast that I could decorate, or at the very least, a pair of crutches, but my doctor disagreed.
So when I fell down the stairs in our new house and smashed the little toe on my left foot, I knew better than to rush to my doctor’s office right away.
I was coming from the computer room and walking down the stairs to the living room, holding a cup of water. I was thirsty all the time, and I also had a thing about water sitting around in cups. I liked cups to be covered so that weird dusty things wouldn’t fall into the water, and before meeting Chris I had used little plates to cover my cups. Then Chris’s mother found a set of glasses she didn’t need, which all came with lids. I’d broken one cup already and didn’t have that many left.
The dogs were basking in the sun on the couch in the living room, and I was smiling at them. And yes, maybe I was talking to them a little bit as I came down the stairs.
“Hey, bubs, how ya doin’? Enjoying the sun?” I said. I looked at them as I stepped onto what I thought was the last step. And it was the last step, just not quite where I thought it was.
My foot came down hard on the floor instead of on the step, and I fell down. I screamed. Paco barked and came over to investigate.
As I moaned on the floor, Flacko also got off the couch and examined me. I had visions of a story I’d read about a Saint Bernard who wore a little Thermos filled with hot chocolate around his neck and rescued people buried in avalanches, but my dogs apparently hadn’t read that one. Instead of delivering hot drinks, the two dogs left me and got back on the couch with Mina, who hadn’t even bothered to move. They eyed me curiously, then closed their eyes to get back to the important business of napping.
Maybe I didn’t get a thermos, but I hadl managed to save my precious cup of water with its lid. Sure, a lot of the water spilled over the floor, but the cup was fine. My toe was not.
By the way the pain abated within five minutes, I could tell I hadn’t hurt it as badly as the time I walked into the bathroom wall, but I knew I’d have a monster of a bruise. I iced my foot and taped the toes together that night.
I had work the next day, so I limped around and didn’t bother seeing the doctor until another day had passed. I already had an appointment to get my cholesterol checked, so I asked the doctor to take a look at my toe.
“How you do that?” he demanded.
“I fell down the stairs in my house,” I said.
“You an old lady,” he pronounced, and I agreed.
As I’d thought, there was nothing to be done for the toe but to tape it. If I had some time, maybe I would scrawl “Best Friends 4-Eva!” on the tape, and ask Chris to sign it. There wouldn’t be room for the dogs to add their pawprints, but they didn’t deserve space on the toe, anyway. Not until they brought a steaming cup of cocoa for me.
Yesterday was glorious. The sun was brightly shining, the air was warm, and I put on a t-shirt for the first time in months.
Naturally, Flacko chose yesterday to break out of our yard and take himself on a little walk.
Because we’re planning on adding a garage this year, we haven’t fenced in the yard yet. We’ve got chicken wire staked around the septic system and connected to the deck as a temporary prison for the dogs, but Flacko has discovered he can get to the 2nd step of the deck, wiggle through the gap between the hand railing and stair, and bypass the chicken wire by leaping to the ground.
We recently added air conditioning to the house and when the HVAC guys cemented the compressor in place, they had to dig up some plants to make room for it. Our neighbor, who lived in the house before she sold it to move next door, mentioned a few times that we’d better replant the plants soon or they’d die.
Given how much we’ve got going on (the lawsuit, jobs, fixing up the other stuff that needs to be done to the house), the yard was going to be at the bottom of my priority list this year. Evidently our neighbor felt differently, so yesterday I replanted the plants.
While I was dragging the nearly-dead plant to the new hole I’d dug at the back of the yard, the dogs were enjoying themselves in their fenced area. Suddenly Mina and Paco began to bark. This wasn’t their usual “I see a squirrel! Let me out to eat it!” bark, but an annoyed, “Hey, that’s not fair” bark. I looked up and saw Flacko sniffing the bushes–the bushes that were outside of the chicken wire area.
“Hey! Get back in there!” I yelled.
Flacko looked up at me, determined I was full of bullshit, and continued examining the bushes. I popped the plant in the hole and hurriedly swept the dirt back around the roots. No time to water it. Heck, no time to even check if all the roots were covered.
Flacko raced around the yard as I ran to put Mina and Paco inside the house. If Mina had been the escapee, it would have been a simple matter of picking her up and popping her back in the yard. If Paco had escaped, he would have merely run to me, and then obediently followed me back in the house.
But Flacko? Flacko had issues.
1. No one was allowed to pick him up. This stemmed from prior abuse before he’d landed in the rescue group from which we’d adopted him.
2. If anyone tried to pick him up, he would bite. And bite hard. (During one of his early visits to my parents’ house, I’d tried to leash him to take him outside to potty. He bit me, leaving bloody marks on my hand. My father said, “You better return him!”)
3. He was afraid of his leash. And would bite if it came close to him. See notes 1 and 2.
I came back outside with a leash and a piece of cheese. Flacko was now happily running along the back of the yard, and as I watched, he disappeared into the trees between our yard and the surrounding neighbors.
“Flacko!” I yelled. “Cheese! Treat! Come!”
I ran along the back yard and into the neighbors’ yard next to us. No Flacko.
“FLACKO!”
I rattled the plastic around the cheese. Flacko wasn’t biting. Cheese? Who cared about cheese when there was a whole stinky world to sniff?
I got in the car with the leash and cheese. I started up the car. Down the street, a man wheeling a baby in a carriage and walking a large dog glanced at me curiously. I drove slowly behind him, trying to subtly follow him, because I knew a tiny black dog named Flacko might explode out of the trees at any minute, and try to kill the large dog.
Eventually the man started looking nervously back at me and I figured I’d better pass him or he’d think I was trying to steal his baby or dog or maybe even both. I drove around him and circled onto the next street, which ran behind our street. I rolled down the window and shouted “Flacko! Cheese!” as I drove.
As I came to the house that was directly behind ours, Flacko came trotting, three-legged*, from the house. “Oh there you are,” his face said. “It took you long enough.”
I opened the car door and he leaped inside, just as if he’d been waiting for a taxi.
I snapped his leash on while he was eating the cheese and took him back home. Mina and Paco greeted him with snarls and angry sniffing. Why should he get to roam freely while they were trapped at home?
Sniffing and barking over, Flacko jumped onto the couch and gave a deep sigh. He closed his eyes. The Great Adventurer had returned home, and if the other dogs were good, he might tell them what he’d sniffed–after he got in a good nap.
*No, we didn’t cut off his leg. For some reason, he likes to walk and run on three legs. He alternates which back leg he holds up. Surprisingly, he can run very fast on three legs. Yes, he has issues.
The music flows over me, piano notes sliding past each other in a shimmering cascade. As Vienna Teng sings “Harbor” from my computer, I can’t help but join in, although all I know so far is the chorus.
all I want, is to be your harbor
I’d only heard of Vienna that day, when she was mentioned in a brief article in The Boston Globe. She was playing locally that night, and when I checked out her website and listened to some clips, I knew I wanted to go. I hadn’t heard music like this in a long time — music that made me sit up because I could feel it moving through me. But the 7 pm show was sold out, and the 10 pm was all that was left.
Given the drive into the city, that my husband would have to get to work early the next day, and that I didn’t want to spend the money for the concert until my new job started, I decided not to go. 10 PM was late for me now, though truthfully I had never liked to go out late, and did it when I was younger because it was the only way to see the bands I liked.
Back then, I was dating a guy who was more into music than any human being had a right to be. We didn’t have much besides music in common, and even then, because he wasn’t one to discuss feelings, I had to extrapolate those feelings from his multiple bins of cassettes and CDs. We never talked about it, but I thought he felt the same way about music as I did, with that inexpressible fullness of the soul as the right song came on.
As far as I knew, he’d never played any instruments, and I only heard him sing once. But he loved nothing more than discussing the minutiae of music. I loved to sing, but I didn’t keep track of B-sides or back-up guitarists, and just as we finished covering the extent of my limited knowledge, we broke up.
the safety of shoreline fading away
The funny thing was that when I stopped seeing him, I found that the only way I could express my feelings was through music. I bought a four-track recorder, borrowed my sister’s synthesizer, and dragged out my dusty guitar. I’d never learned to play the guitar, but I didn’t let that stop me. Randomly plucking open strings, I spent my nights holed up in my room, writing and recording.
The first song I wrote was so bad that I never bothered to listen to it again after I’d finished it. During that year, I recorded maybe twenty songs, of which only two or three songs were actually presentable to the public. These few turned out to be the ones I’d collaborated on — one, a song to which my younger sister had added accompaniment with her reclaimed synthesizer, and the others by the ex’s best friend, who had recorded his guitar parts separately before passing the tape to me for vocals and lyrics.
When I met Chris, I stopped recording my songs. I didn’t do it deliberately, but it happened immediately. All of my songs revolved around the same theme, that of unhappiness, so it wasn’t surprising that as I became happier, I ran out of things to say in my music. Chris and I didn’t have the same taste in music, and I started to forget how it felt when a song moved me. For a while I was busy living with him, raising our puppies, being married. All I needed was a career, and my life would be complete.
Five years and six jobs later, I knew I was wrong. Work was important, but it didn’t fill me up the way I’d expected. Life with Chris was better than I had ever dreamed, but there was still something missing that I couldn’t name.
you’ve got a journey to make, there’s your horizon to chase
I listened to Vienna Teng’s concert live that night, from the Club Passim website. I stayed up until midnight listening. I couldn’t sing like her and I couldn’t play any instrument like her. But when she sang and played, I felt something inside me answering her.
The songs I recorded years ago were about boys who’d done me wrong, the anger left inside me, and the sadness. They were told in the only language the first boy could understand, a language driven by dissonance and heartbreak.
Today I don’t have anyone with whom to collaborate, and my guitar skills have remained at the same terrible level after all the years. But as Vienna’s fingers dance up and down in a syncopated cascade of joy, I hear the truth I can’t ignore. I think back to the songs I wrote so long ago about a boy who left, and as I forgive him and forgive myself, I can hear singing inside me again. And finally, I understand that the songs are different now, and I’m ready for them.
Pros:
- You can sleep until 1 PM if you feel like it.
- Once you get up, you can wear sweat pants and a t-shirt. Hell, you can wear the same thing you wore yesterday if you want!
- There are no bosses to tell you re-type something that has already been typed once on the computer, but now lost due to a “misplaced” email.
- Your commute from your bed to your computer is now approximately five minutes, the length of time required to perform your morning ablutions, including the time spent looking up “morning ablutions” on Google.
- You save water, gas, and electric on laundry by simply wearing the same thing for two days in a row. You can save even more water if you skip showering every day, but thus far I have not sunk so low.
- You now have the world at your feet, being free to schedule appointments during the day with electricians, plumbers, doctors, and go to the post office or do all those things that regular people have to do on Saturdays or not until vacation. (Because you’re so busy sleeping in, you may find that you end up doing none of these things and saving them for a Saturday, but still. The option exists. And isn’t life really just about options?)
- You save money on food. Two large meals a day will suit you just fine, instead of the traditional three meals a day. Who needs three meals when you get up after lunch?
- Additionally, meal planning becomes easier. You’d be surprised at how filling potato chips and ice cream are for lunch.
- Your work consists of listening to samples of William Hung’s new album, and wondering if people will really buy it. And if they do, why?
- Did I mention you can sleep in?
Cons:
- No paycheck.
- Sometimes you can’t remember how to talk to anyone who isn’t a dog, thus leading to uncomfortable conversations like, “Aw, who’s a good person! Who’s a good person! YOU are…Mister HVAC Repair Guy! Yes, you! Did you want me to pay by check or is credit card okay? Because the check is going to bounce.”
Some days nothing funny or entertaining happens, and it falls upon me to create my own amusement.
Actually, to be truthful, what I do first is complain to Chris.
“Chris, I’m bored,” I whine. “Entertain me.” If necessary, I am not above pouting and occasionally I will even pull on his sleeve to get his attention.
“I have enough to do!” Chris says, busy flying helicoptors on his computer. “Entertain yourself!”
“But I’ve got nothing to read,” I cry. “And there’s nothing on TiVo except all your old sci-fi and Egyptian history programs. When are you going to watch those, anyway?”
“Later, later,” Chris says. By now he has killed 32 peasants and organized his friends into a crack squad of assasins. In the same time, I have accomplished examining Paco’s ears for excess wax.
“Why don’t you just get some hobbies?” Chris asks.
I don’t answer him, but I do wonder where all my hobbies have gone. Lately reading seems to be my only hobby. I love reading, and the book I’m reading now, It Must’ve Been Something I Ate, is a hilarious collection of essays about food.
But some days I get tired of reading. I want to go out to the movies, go dancing, go out to eat! I want to be young and social and have witty conversations with intelligent people. I want to do something that doesn’t involve dogs.
Then I remember I don’t really like to do any of those things, except possibly go out to eat. And I sit down and pick up my book, and then I remember why I love reading so much, because one great book can transport you to places a witty conversation will never lead.
With the recent deluge of rain, the garden at our new house has started to bloom. While I’m curious to finally see what the yard will look like, I’d be willing to give that all up if the rain just disappeared. There’s just something about the grayness of the sky that makes me want to stay snuggled in bed with a good book and a cup of hot chocolate.
The dogs seem to feel the same way. At first they joyfully ran toward the door when I shouted “Let’s go outside!” but then stopped in confusion when they noticed how wet they were getting. Luckily, the momentum of their initial run was enough so that by the time they realized it was raining, they were already out the door, across the deck, and on the grass, and from there it was but a brief step to a good pee spot, and then back in the house.
Once inside, I chased them around and around the house with a brightly colored towel in an attempt to keep them from getting everything wet. Mina ran to sit by the heat vents and Flacko shivered as I wiped him off. Paco, meanwhile, thought the towel meant it was playtime, and kept grabbing the edge of the towel and trying to run away with it while I dried the other dogs.
But as the rain continued, the dogs began to learn that going outside was wet, muddy, and altogether disgusting. When I managed to chase them outside, they would creep toward the edge of the deck, if at all, and then race back into the house when I wasn’t looking. If I remembered to close the door behind me on the way out, the dogs huddled against the wall of the house, occasionally scrabbling furiously at the door to remind me that they wanted to go in. “Hey, if you want to stay outside, that’s up to you, crazy lady,” was their attitude.
The dogs felt that the rain meant they needed to go into hibernation, and all they did was sleep when I wasn’t yelling at them to go outside. Even getting the mail, normally an activity accompanied by furious barking and whining, garnered only a perfunctory bark from Paco, who didn’t even bother getting out of his blankie to see what was going on.
In these rainy days, all I see of the dogs are their butts, hanging out of blankets they’ve wound tightly around their heads. Once in a while, if I’m really lucky, I might see a tail twitch as a dog burrows deeper into a bed.
Yesterday during their last trip outside, Chris called the dogs to go outside. Flacko decided the rain was more than he wanted to deal with and ran upstairs and into bed. Chris rounded up Mina and Paco and carried them outside, where he unceremoniously dumped them in the yard to pee.
Flacko, who never let us pick him up, stayed in bed. I tried to pick up his bed and carry him outside, but he was too clever for me and jumped out of bed, growling angrily at me.
Back inside, Chris tried to help me chase Flacko outside, but he dodged us skillfully and huddled in front of the heat vent, growling whenever we looked at him. Eventually we got him into his crate, and I carried it outside and dumped him on the ground.
Flacko looked a bit startled, but obediently peed on the ground. He turned around and raced back into the house without even bothering to see if I was following. Hibernation was calling, and there was no time to waste.