Dear 2010:

Let me begin by saying I had high hopes for you. I wanted to give you a chance to be the Year of Great Things. But you made your choices and became the Year of Disaster instead. Even though you're in the death throes of your last week, I'm going to lay my litany of complaints at your door. Because I deserve to have my say.

Kudzu's illness and subsequent passing shaded the whole year. From February when I first noticed his weight loss to March when he first went to the doctor to June when he finally lost the fight. Pretty much the whole of you, 2010, was spent enduring the decline of my sweet furry friend or mourning his death. That's a lot of kleenex.

There was the house I bought in February that I still don't quite absolutely live in full time, a fact I lay entirely upon your doorstep, 2010. And just to add insult to injury, I remind you of the delightful $800 water bill that resulted from the running toilet in the guest bathroom and found its way to my mailbox the week after Kudzu died.

And speaking of that week, heartbreak just heaped on heartbreak when I once again found myself in the general vicinity of Singledom. My poor heart, already in shreds, took another hit when The Barrister and me parted ways. At that point, I pretty much emotionally flat-lined.

Just when I thought I might stop living every second on the Verge of Tears, I found out that a dear friend from high school had taken his own life. I felt guilty for failing to be in touch with him more recently than I had. And I felt his absence profoundly. Even as I worked to verify that the rumors were true, I knew their truth in my heart. He was gone. I struggled through the service and the drive home, filled with questions that had no answers.

Your July also brought my 31st birthday, a rather pitiful affair. A mere two weeks after Kudzu died, after D.'s death and The Barrister and me disintegrated, and I was not only getting older, I was alone. Until the end of the month when I was briefly kind-of-sort-of stalked by a loose-cannon photographer.

The next month, there was the news of the final demise of The Old Job and STGD suddenly finding himself unemployed after more than a decade of faithful employ. Even though I'd heard rumblings of its approach, the actual arrival of The End made me more sad than I anticipated. Somehow, it was like the last crumbling of the life I once lived.

In September, I was mistaken for a pregnant woman. Kill me now. And my pregnant friend Hilary gave birth far too early and had me in a vigil of prayer and concern. On a bright note - though don't think you're off the hook, 2010 - little Aubri is doing just fine.

By October, I was over you. Not over all the havoc you'd wreaked on my life, but totally. over. you. Dunzo.

Unfortunately, you were not through with me. Why else would I have suffered through not one but two embarrassing setbacks on the road to romantic recovery? I mean, really, 2010. Was the humiliation and EPIC FAIL really necessary at this point in the year? I guess you figured a time when I had no dignity left was as good a time as any to send me down into the dumps.

And finally, December arrived. The light at the end of this 12-month tunnel of darkness. But just to get in your last one-two punch, you decided to claim another friend of the family, sending me to the funeral home mid-month. And you managed to even taint my beloved job to the point that I was desperate for a vacation by the time the holidays rolled around.

In closing, I would like to bid you not adieu. Or farewell. Or even good riddance. I prefer instead to bid you get the hell gone and don't ever show your face around here again.

Love (yeah, right),
Ashley

Job Security

As we all know, my life has taken a deep nosedive straight down to the gutter. No matter how optimistic one tries to be about the series of unfortunate events the last six months have wrought, there's really no two ways about it: it's been hell.

And that is why I would like to express my deepest and truest gratitude to the person who wrote to my boss in response to his solicitation for feedback for my annual performance review..."She completes me." I know not who you are, oh anonymous soulmate colleague, but I thank you for saying in three words that, despite it all, I can still do my job well.

And you had me at "raise."

One Two Five-O Let It Go

After much ado, I finally took approximately ten minutes on Saturday afternoon to pack up my hard drive. On Monday, The Barrister delivered it to the post office and sent it on its two-day priority way.

Today, I received the estimate - $1,250. One thousand, two hundred, fifty dollars. One-point-two-five-K. Twelve fifty (no decimal).

Now I know why I didn't send it. Something told me that it wouldn't be recovered so easily. That there would be a catch to the free evaluation and no-data-no-fee policy. That the fatal click was, in fact, fatal.

I called Mom, and then The Barrister. I choked up a bit talking to The Barrister. Partly over what I'd lost. And partly because I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that I could've backed it up. That I knew it was dying. And yet, I didn't do anything.

I was talking to The Linguista about it later in the day.

"I'm sorry about your hard drive," she said. "Just think of it this way - you didn't lose your best writing because it's yet to come."

I half-smiled. "It's not the writing so much as the pictures."

"Of Dillon?"

"Yeah...of everything. Irreplaceable things. Wilmywood. But I've got no one to blame but myself."

"Well," she said. "I'm Buddhist, but you could always blame God."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah...or maybe just think of it this way. It's God's really cruel way of telling you to let it go."

I know she was kidding, but I still thought about the implications of it, were it true. The laptop was given to me as a graduation gift a summer early so that I could write my thesis on it. And I did. I wrote my thesis - the culmination of my need to "pursue the writing thing." I'm not saying that I'll never write, because I believe I will. I am saying there was a certain way of pursuing it that I exorcised myself of during grad school.

Then there was after grad school - a time of soul-searching. Of trying to find happiness that eluded me again and again. Of writing the same thing about myself and to myself over and over and over again in journal entries. I started the blog and stumbled my way through finding my way. I wound up back home, single, jobless, clueless. I found my job. I found The Barrister.

So perhaps The Linguista is onto something. Perhaps that this cataclysmic hard drive failure is more than motherboard deep. Perhaps it is time to let go of the memories I'm holding onto so tightly. Consign them to the cyber morgue - may they rest in peace - and let myself go in peace.

Hard Drive Goes the Hard Way

I heard the ominous whirring. The fan gunning and wheezing to a stop. But I ignored it and pressed onward. I could feel it dying every time I turned on the computer, its arduous start-up process. And it was made all the more pitiful by the broken hinges that meant I had to prop the lid on the couch arm to use it.

For Christmas, Mom gave me a ridiculously large external hard drive for backing up my photos. I left it in the packaging under the table by the bed until the night that the whirring turned to clicking.

Oh, the click of a withering hard drive.

I panicked, willing it to turn on just one more time. Just long enough for me to plug a USB in and drag all my precious files to safety. But instead, they drowned in a sea of rhythmic clicking. Like a life preserver tossed into a tempest, Mom (who's quite tech savvy) tried to reboot from the system disk. Alas, there was no hope. And so, I sat there on the couch, with my hand on the lid of the laptop and thought of all of the photos of Dillon and Reese and Wilmywood, all of the half-started stories and poems, all of the downloaded-only music, sinking down through the cyberspace abyss.

I carried it to the mall to a rather chaotic looking little shop where a harried Asian lady attempted to start the failed piece of crap. Instead of success, she shook her head sadly and repeated, "I don't know. It's the hard drive. I don't know." And I thought to myself, Don't say it again. And two weeks later, she declared it a lost cause.

I had flashbacks of the Sad Mac and poor Carrie Bradshaw's lost files. The Barrister guided me out of the mall while I alternately tried to console myself and contemplated quickly dispatching myself in front of a moving vehicle. I sat in the car, the hunk of plastic and circuits tucked inside the Belk bag that held my newly purchased "fat" shorts (adding insult to injury), and looked out the window. I felt stupid. Hard drive failure had happened to me at work. And I knew that the laptop was on its last leg. I remarked nearly every time I started it up that I needed to back it up. Instead, I let myself down.

Now, the hard drive is sitting on the dining room table, deftly removed from its casing by my mom. There's a box in one of the chairs. There's some packaging materials I've tossed on top for when I get ready to ship it to the ridiculously high-priced data recovery center. There's probably a thin film of dust on it - it's been weeks.

So why I haven't I sent it? I don't know. It's not that I don't want those memories back - I desperately want to be able to look again at the photos I took of Dillon at the playground the day before the hard drive died and the pictures I took at the work retreat and the autumn leaves at last year's trip to Valle Crucis and mine and The Barrister's Valentine's Day and, perhaps most desperately, the pictures I took of the Grace Street apartment that can never be replicated. I want the words I never finished, and the drafts of my thesis that lead me to what I published. And yet, if I don't send it, they are still alive, somewhere in cyberspace limbo. And if I do send it, I might have to hear that they're gone forever, little bytes of life vanished as though they never happened.

My Mom, My Champion

"So I talked to The Professor on the way home from work today," I say. "And I felt kind of bad. He had a really terrible day - his car battery died, and he had to wait 20 minutes for roadside to come and give him a jump...he was almost late to his class, and he wasn't prepared. He sounded pretty miserable."

"Good," Mom says.

"Mom!"

"What? He's an idiot. He deserves a bad day."

Emotional Pickpocketing

Yesterday was the Rockstar's last day. Last week, I went to his farewell outing - a bowling extravaganza filled with shouts and razzing and toasts and a definite sadness tinging the whole affair. A part of me absorbed it...felt sad because he is leaving, and after a year, I'd like to think I could call him a friend. But it was also the memory of all that I went through last year seeping from the corners of my mind. As the departure was unfolding, I could see little flashes of my own life layered over his. When he hugged me yesterday, and I wished him luck, I felt like I was talking to myself a little bit...a little bit letting go of that person I was then and wishing her luck as she tries to become the person she is now.

***
More and more lately, I've been feeling the quiet beginnings of the panic. The disrupted stomach. The irrational anxiety of anticipating "it." I went to the doctor last week who asked if I wanted to up my dosage. And I said no, I should try and do this. I should try and do this life thing without having to adjust my medication up and up and up. So I'm pushing through, pushing up the threshold of discomfort and willing myself to work through it, one deep breath at a time.

***
I turned 29 earlier this month. And while I flogged my coworkers for the lack of festivities surrounding my birthday, it was really me that caused the disappointment. It was really me who didn't celebrate myself. It was really me who let my birthday be a reminder of all the things I'm not, all the things I lack, instead of all the things I am and all the things I have. What an empty feeling to be consumed by absences on a day that should be spent building a totem of great memories and accomplishments.

***
My laptop has been a source of immense frustration of late. One of the hinges has cracked and the lid won't stay upright, falling instead into an almost horizontal position. On top of that, some part of Microsoft Office is malfunctioning, auto-launching, and utilizing 99% of my CPU capacity. And it's like, Really? Is everything in my life broken?

***
Yesterday, on the drive home, I felt restless. I shifted in the seat. I peered through the grubby windshield at the searing cerulean sky. I saw a few blue-black crows perched in the naked branches of a dying tree. It felt like someone might cue the classic Sergio Leone whistle in the background. It was a showdown between me and waiting. It's been so long on this precipice, me perched, angled forward, looking for what's next. And held back by the gravity of all that's happened. I'm waiting for something - something good and hopeful. Something that gives me an indication that there is a way out of this valley of the shadow of death and not just endless wandering.

***
We start looking at the weekends coming up through the end of the summer and the fall and planning out who has to do what when and where. I realize how scheduled we are with this and that family obligation - things I would normally look forward to, but now seem like just another outing that will perpetuate our togetherness. I could stay home, stay away, but even the thought of it starts the guilt to gnawing away at me. In my mind, coulds and shoulds and wants and needs get so tangled up that I don't know what to do. So I stay tied up in where I am right now, resenting all the hands on the other ends of the strings that are pulling me in every direction.

***
Despite my bravado, I realized the other day that there's almost no chance that I'll even be married before I'm 30. And that's okay. Really. It is. I know that. But sometimes - just sometimes - I want to let my guard down and say that's not how I imagined things.

***
Last week, I had a really, really super important client meeting with the client I landed awhile back. I thought everything went well. I was nervous leading up to it, felt pretty A-game in the midst of it, and relieved as soon as the meeting participants filed out the door. I headed from the office to have a beer with some friends. I missed a call from my boss while I was in the bar. I called him back to find that at least one of the participants was disappointed and felt like we didn't deliver. And that fragile euphoria came crashing down around me, and I felt 16 tons of disappointment fall upon my shoulders.

***
This weekend, I woke up early to go to the salon with Anna, and when I got back home, I said, "I have to take a nap." And it was true. I was bankrupt.

With every passing day, it seems there's emotional thievery going on. These unexpected strains slip in and steal little pieces of me. There are those things that I face everyday that I know I'm going to spend my time and energy and willpower on - some that I even choose to exert some emotional funds for. But these stealthy hands that swipe my reserves are tearing me down a piece at a time, leaving me penniless. I'm utterly broke, with nothing left to give and not even enough for myself.

Father's Day

"It feels like I swallowed a baseball," Dad says.

"A baseball? That's not good," I say.

"Now don't get all excited. I'm not having a heart attack."

***
Two hours later, we are in the van - Anna is driving, and I'm in the passenger seat. It's raining. Mom and Dad sit in the second row of seats. They are holding hands. Dad shifts again and again in the seat. At exit 12, he tells Anna to put the hazards on.

The windshield wipers slice through the tense silence. There is nothing to say. I lean forward in the seat, willing the van to go faster. The speedometer needle tickles against 90. The hazards tick on and off. Rain pelts the windows.

Five more exists pass. Dad asks how much longer. Mom asks, her voice trembling, "Can we call for a police escort?"

Anna's voice comes out flat and hollow. "No...they won't do that anymore."

***
When we get off one highway and onto another closer to the hospital, I call Justin. He is waiting in the ER dropoff with a wheelchair.

Dad is laboring to breathe, his face greying. He is scared. Concern and fear are etched in every line on Mom's face.

I want to scream. I want to throw up. I close my eyes, squeezing the threatening tears out to wet the fringe of my lashes. "Please, God," I pray silently. "Please, please don't take him. None of us can bear it."

***
The ER is chaos. The walking wounded limp and roll and cough and sputter through the aisle. Wheelchairs weave through the crowd, driven by harried orderlies. They do not have a room. Dad is taken back into a hallway to be settled on a gurney. Only Mom can go with him.

***
In the aftermath, those settling moments of quiet heavy realization, me, Anna and Justin sit on little square chairs. Crammed together in silence. Each of our minds are torn: between what is happening now and the fate of our father, and what was happening nearly four months before in the very same ER.

Anna sits quietly between us. I don't know whether to say it or say anything but his name - Ronnie.

***
It is not a heart attack. The EKG is clear; the blood gas is devoid of the telltale enzyme present during cardiac arrest. They order a chest x-ray and a CT scan. We wait.

***
Hours later, they have still not seen a doctor. I make a few phone calls. Justin opens his briefcase, pulls out the crossword puzzle books he keeps for airport waits. I begin filling in the tiny squares with letters. He and Anna work logic puzzles - as though making sense of a set of facts will make sense of what's happening.

***
The x-ray shows pneumonia in the lungs. Just barely. But it is there. When Justin delivers this news, Anna looks as though she will crumble into a million pieces.

***
Dad is admitted to the hospital for the night and finally transitioned into a room in the ER while waiting for a private room to open elsewhere. I go back to see him. He is weak and tired. But still in good humor. The phlebotomist is looking for veins in the crook of his elbow. She runs fingers to his wrist. "You've got some good ones down here," she says. "Well, honey," he replies. "You just pick you one out."

***
Outside his room, the shift change is taking place. I see a familiar face. The charge nurse is now the woman who told us that Ronnie died. Of all the nurses in the Atlanta hospital, it is her. My stomach burns and my heart aches. I want to run from the building.

***
Anna never goes back into the ER. I know she wants to, but she cannot. It is too soon. It is too much. And she has nothing with which to fight.

***
Sunday morning, Anna and I listen to her church service on the internet. The preacher talks about light in dark times. "Is anyone in dark times?" he asks. We pretend not to notice each other crying.

****
By the middle of Sunday, we have a guesstimated diagnosis of pericarditis: an inflammation of the heart's lining. The inflammation increases the amount of fluid around the heart and squeezes it - resulting in pain under the breastbone, intensified by drawing deep breaths.

We have a Father's Day lunch - Dad on hospital food. Anna and I order take out. We celebrate with mini-Snickers. We try to laugh. We know we are at least all together. We are hopeful that there is light in the darkness.

***
The cardiologist comes in and says, yes, he thinks that the problem is pericarditis. An echo cardiogram to be sure that there are no abnormalities. A stress test to make sure the heart is functioning properly. This name, the assurance that it is treatable, eases the tension in the room.

***
Late in the afternoon, Anna insists that Mom needs a break from the hospital. Dad is doing better but assured another night in the hospital. I tell them to go, that I'll stay with him. Shortly after dinner, Dad falls asleep. I lay on the rock-solid excuse for a couch reading the 2004 Fodor's guide to London.

The phlebotomist comes in to collect for another round of blood gases. "Dad," I say gently, touching his shoulder. "They need to take some more blood."

While the phlebotomist goes about donning the latex gloves and stretching the band that makes Dad's veins bulge, the new charge nurse comes in. "What has he been doing," she asks me.

"Sleeping. I just woke him up to have blood drawn."

She pulls out the monitor that he's been wearing around his neck and says that his heart rate is up over 160 bpm. "What should it be?" I ask.

"We'd like it to be 80."

My mouth goes dry.

I look at Dad. He turns to the nurse, "You're scaring me."

"Well," she says, "You're giving us a scare."

She leaves the room. I can see the fear in his frame, the way he tenses against the bed. "Please, God," I plead once more. "Please no."
***
Hours later, the red light is still flashing on the monitor. The number drops to 117 and flashes back up to 130, 140 and then 108. The erratic heartbeat is all over the board.

Anna, Mom and I sit on the couch together. I lean against Mom's arm. With her free hand, she pushes my bangs out of my eyes and tucks them behind one ear.

***
Anna and I head home. The nurse has just been in to tend to her "problem child." She calls the cardiologist on call who agrees to send his PA. This is not uncommon, she assures us; for us, the whole scenario is uncommon.

By the time we reach Anna's house, Mom calls and tells me that the medicine the PA ordered over the phone has taken effect. The monitor is now showing a steady green light. And an exhausted Dad has already fallen asleep.

***
Overnight, the pericarditis seems to lose its grip. Despite another 3 a.m. episode of "atrial flutter", his color returns. He is more himself. A nurse helps him take a pseudo bath and washes his hair. By 11 a.m., they have let him know he will be discharged.

I got up at 5 that morning to ride back to Athens with Chris, who is taking a class at UGA. This news of the discharge is like the letting out of a long-held painful breath. Everything inside me starts to collapse.

Chris comes and picks me up and takes me home. I fall asleep on the couch for an hour.

***
Around 4, I hear the door open. Dad comes in, looking tired and worn. He has a three-day beard salt-and-peppering his face. He's walking a bit slowly and looking for somewhere to sit down. "Hi, Daddy," I say. "Welcome home."

***
At 9 o'clock, we all head for bed. All of us are exhausted beyond comprehension. Before I go to my end of the hall, I take care to hug both Mom and Dad, tell them I love them. As if I needed another reminder how swiftly the tides can change...the sense of having narrowly escaped catastrophe burns inside me, spurring me to live for a few moments with the knowledge of how the story could've ended.

Baby Got Back Pain

To add insult to injury (quite literally), cruel fortune has dealt me another blow. The chronic back pain that I've experienced for years, that seemed to have faded into a dull ache, has reared its head with wincing sharpness. Right at the base of my spine, it feels for all the world like someone has smashed me with a lead pipe.

It started on Saturday, a twinge here and there. But Sunday morning, I was stepping gingerly, and by the post-church walk to the car, I almost took Justin up on his offer to carry me. Every step sent shooting pain right up to my shoulder blades. I was holding my breath and my whole body tensed in an effort to keep me from moving in the wrong direction. The ride home yesterday was excruciating. I had no choice but to drive, having headed to Anna's house straight from the ATL office on Friday.

This morning, I almost couldn't get my socks off. I couldn't bend. I couldn't lift my leg. I went to work with an IcyHot patch the size of my lower torso stuck to the offending area and giving off an offending odor. I walked slowly and carefully today. And when I came home, I sat in the recliner on the heating pad. Tomorrow morning, I'm going to have to break down and call the doctor - even if the last place I want to be is a medical office of any sort. It's either that, or consider going House-style and picking out a cane for myself.

A Letter to the Wretched Wanker Who Parked Next to Me

Dear Idiot Oversized Tank Driver:
I cannot believe that you parked next to me in the impossibly small space clearly marked for "compact cars only" in the Parking Deck of Death. I mean, I've only been in it three times now, and let's face it, there's hardly room in those spaces for a moped. So what were you thinking, you yuppie sleezeball, parking in that tiny, tiny space and effectively trapping me in the space next to the poor unsuspecting somewhat-used Camry? Because I had no way to get out. I mean, it was an Austin Powers moment times ten, but as careful as I was, I still scratched the Camry's bumper and mine. That's right, King Suburban. Your craptastic parking job forced me to hit a parked car in order to get out of my parking space - and I was there first. What was the problem? Couldn't put down your Starbucks long enough to figure out your behemoth car couldn't fit in the space? So then I stood there, wringing my hands and wondering what to do and left a hastily scrawled note for slightly-used Camry that said, "I hit your car. If you need to reach me, call me. My apologies."

And this is my note to you. I hate you, King Suburban. I was already having a vile, miserable day. Thanks for making it even better. Because of you, I cried on the way home. I hope you can live with that.

Have your insurance people call my insurance people.

Ash

As Meg pointed out recently, having the blog often presents a predicament over what parts of life to chronicle. And sometimes, leaving life events off the blog feels odd when you know they're what are coloring that moment in time. I've struggled over whether or not to blog about what happened to me last week, and if I did, how to blog about it. To tell the whole story or just the essence. In the end, for better or for worse, I decided to blog it because I couldn't seem to get past it to write something else.

On Wednesday, Mom and I drove to Atlanta to stay with Justin and Eva for the night so that they could go out on a date while we kept Dillon. The night before, their oven element had burnt out (read: caught on fire), and Eva asked me to ride along with her to get the replacement part. And it was a totally normal sunny hot June afternoon.

When we returned and pulled into the garage, Eva rolled to a stop, put it the car in park, and we heard a very strange noise. A noise of something bumping up under the car. The sort of noise you hear when a cardboard box is caught underneath the car. She turned off the motor. We both exited the car. And it was no longer a totally normal sunny hot June afternoon but a blur of panic and anguish and andrenaline.

Seizing underneath the car was Justin and Eva's cat, Booker. I could tell it was bad. I yelled at her to get Mom. He was under the middle part of the car, and I'm not even sure how I reached him - I have bruises on the top of my feet where I pressed them to the concrete trying to get him. And when I did get him into my arms, he stilled and was quiet and there was blood in his mouth and coming from his nose and his pupils dilated and I laid him, as gently as I could in my panic, in the backseat and got in the car.

I don't know how many times Eva backed from the garage and pulled forward trying to get angled out of the driveway before I said, "You can't drive." I ran inside to get Mom, told her I didn't think he was going to make it as she passed me.

Inside, I looked at my hands and forearms spattered with blood and blood down the leg of my jeans. I washed up and then I sat in the floor in front of Dillon in the Exersaucer and wept. When Justin called the house, I told him Booker had been hit by a car, for some reason, unable to confess that it was Eva and me. Cowardly, I know, but I had to hold it together while in sole possession of Dillon.

When they came back forty-five minutes later, Eva told me he had died instantly and that the vet said all his subsequent movement was reflex. We scrubbed the car and the garage and my pants and wondered over how this had happened.

I haven't been able to stop replaying it all in my head. To try and sort out what exactly did happen, examine the forensic evidence and reconstruct the incident. And in doing so, determine the million points along the timeline at which, if we'd only done x differently, it wouldn't have happened. But the truth is, it isn't possible, no matter how many ways you write the equation, to prevent all terrible things from happening. No matter how careful you are, how closely you look, how slowly you're going, how many times you've pulled in before, the fact that we just didn't see him. And on top of it all, between the lost dog and the car accident and now this, I am unable to shake the feeling that some terrible karmic energy is hovering over me and that somehow I'm to blame for making this happen.

Justin loved Booker so much. He entered their lives as a stray when Justin was in grad school, and they started to feed "Myrtle" who looked terribly dirty and mangy. Until one day, they took him to the vet and found out "he" wasn't a "she." Booker had a tiny meow that earned him the moniker Mr. Meepers and so much fuzz on his back legs that we used to say it looked like he was wearing chaps. And he loved to sit on Justin's stomach and knead and knead. He let Dillon pull his hair, sitting calmly while we extracted Dillon's fist from his fur. On the day he died, he'd been sunning on their back deck and played with the neighborhood kids.

Holding Booker after the accident, knowing that life was literally seeping out of him, was somehow intensely profound for me. I'm sure some people will read this post and think it ridiculous, with all that's going on in the world, that I was so shockingly affected by a dying cat. But somehow, it was a reminder that the innocent suffer for no apparent reason. That in an instant, something that brought great joy into this world was gone. That there is no rhyme or reason to it. That it's not anyone's fault. And perhaps worst of all, that something like this, some inexplicable terrible thing, will happen again. Sooner or later. And there's nothing I can do it stop it. Death creeps up; it lurks around the corner. Whether it comes for the pets or the people that you love, when death comes, you just have to live with it.

Things That Make You Go Whoops

I've been remiss in posting the last couple of days while I was in Atlanta with Justin, Eva and Dillon. I went to keep her company on Wednesday because Justin had to entertain clients late into the evening. Around 7:30, Eva and I headed for the car to dash out for dinner. We had been waiting on my cousin to show up when she called and cancelled due to work obligations. We had just a tiny window before Dillon was going to put on his fussy pants and demand his last bottle and bed. Did I mention we were voraciously hungry?

All of these things - the hunger, the lateness of the hour, the impending fussy pants episode, and the position of the garage in relation to the driveway - combined for a collossal oops. As we pulled out of the garage, Eva smashed into the back end of my Rav.

Now, some of you may know that Eva's a little bit notorious behind the wheel. For my grad school comrades, you may remember that I catalogued another famous car accident of hers in my short story "Car Crashes." And there's another story we like to tell about her driving when she had a tiny Ford Probe (totalled in aforementioned story accident) when I was on the way to her apartment with my boyfriend at the time. We were a little turned around when this silver bullet whipped around us, nearly clipping the corner of the car. And while my boyfriend was swearing at her, I said, "Follow her! That's Eva!"

The weird thing was that I knew it was going to happen. As the garage door lifted up and I spied the Rav behind us in the driveway, it just clicked in my head that she was going to hit it. But when she started easing out of the garage, I thought she saw it. When she cleared the trash can, she accelarated, and though I called out her name, she didn't have time to hit the breaks before she hit the car.

Bless her sweet heart. She felt so awful. And I felt so awful, looking at the bumper pulled away from the body and crumpled underneath. She couldn't stand the suspense and interrupted Justin's dinner meeting to tell her what she'd done. Between losing the dog last week and the accident this week, I'm doubtful that I'll be invited back to their house for awhile.

Adventures in Babysitting

Yesterday morning, I left my sister's house in approximately the middle-of-nowhere and headed to my brother's house with three small dogs. Jake, almost 9, a pomeranian poodle mix, and Eli and Zeke, two small black schipperkes almost a year old. Some of you may remember that my sister lost her first schipperke, Ben, last summer. And that these dogs are the loves of her life.

So you can imagine how I felt, about forty-five minutes after arriving, when I realized that only one of the three dogs was in the house with Eva and me. She had come in from outside minutes before, setting the dogs to barking. We were trying to keep them quiet because Dillon was napping. I kept fussing at Zeke, as he seemed the most agitated. But then, I realized he was the only one barking.

The other two were gamboling about in the backyard - unleashed. Jake was no problem; he comes when called. But Eli is a runner. After about an hour of chasing him around the house with Eva and me acting the part of the Two Stooges and trying all sorts of useless plans to trap him, Eli made a run for it. And disappeared.

At roughly 12:30, I broke down and called my sister and told her that he was lost. At roughly 12:32, I called my mother and had a hysterical breakdown. All the while, Eva is tromping through backyards with Dillon strapped to her front in the Baby Bjorn, and I'm cruising the neighborhood calling. And calling. And calling.

Finally, at 1:30, I spot him, thanks to a tip from a landscaper. He's crossed the main road and sitting in a yard in the adjacent neighborhood. At first, I'm not sure whether I should believe my eyes. I hadn't had anything to eat or drink all day. But there he was, sitting calmly in the yard, like it was his own. As slowly and calmly as I could, I got out of the Rav and approached him. And he ran. Ran like the devil was after him and vanishes around the corner.

I search another neighborhood. It is 90 degrees. My sister has left work and is on her way. I am nearing an absolute meltdown. Eva calls me and says that the dogs are barking at the front of her neighborhood. I drive back that way, and I see him. He's by a fence on the opposite side of the road. Now, when I was first shopping for the Rav, one of the salesman insisted on demonstrating its turning radius. I was fascinated at the time. But yesterday, I slammed the brakes, turned on a dime, and parked it in the ditch.

Eli chose that moment to go under the fence, but luckily, he took shelter in a fenced in backyard. Moments later my sister arrived. Moments after that, I was wiping the hysterical tears from my grimy face. In my defense, he ran from her a bit when she arrived. Bad dog. Very, very, very bad dog.

Moral of the story: The Dog Whisperer, I am not. I will be striking dog-sitting from my resume and subsequent job search.