Ben Franklin Was Right

Shrek is dead.

We killed him, but we didn’t mean to.  We just didn’t know how to take care of him. And chances are pretty good he wasn’t doing too well before we even knew of his existence. We don’t even know if he was a he, and none of us were getting close enough to find out. Not to mention, he smelled really bad, even before he died.

Shrek was the name we gave the accidental hermit crab we brought home from the beach. I guess he was kind of like that kid who stowed away on a flight to Hawaii, only I don’t live in Hawaii, and I am pretty sure that hermit crab had no desire to leave the comfort and relative safety of his own spot on the beach. Which is to say, it was nothing like that stowaway kid in Hawaii.

Anyway, enough about Hawaii and Shrek for now. Here’s the part where I tell you how we had the opportunity to kill him, unintentionally of course. What kind of monsters do you think we are?

My family went to the beach for the first week of summer break, a week often referred to around these parts, cleverly, as “First Week.  After several days of beautiful weather, we decided to do something a little different to break the monotony that is a relaxing beach vacation. My husband found a shelling and lighthouse cruise in nearby Georgetown, South Carolina, which involved an hour ride to a deserted island, an hour romping around, and an hour ride back.  We packed a cooler with drinks and sandwiches, put on some old sneakers and a generous slather of sunscreen, and drove down to the marina where the cruise launched.

The boat could hold thirty uncomfortably, but luckily we had less than that on our voyage. We got settled for the ten mile ride out of the harbor, a surprisingly slow trip with lots more wave and splash that we had expected. Our boat had a captain and a naturalist who sat on some steps near the front and shared all sorts of fascinating historical tidbits and shelling advice to entertain and enlighten us. We headed for North Island, a federally protected island that houses a solar powered lighthouse and some old ruins from better times. We were not going to have enough time to explore the island proper, but with the fifty some odd minutes, we should have been able to find a pretty shell or two, which was the whole idea.

We finally got to the island and disembarked using a rickety plastic staircase that was chucked on the beach. I followed the naturalist’s advice and headed towards the jetty around the side of the island, passing fellow tourists who stopped to pick up every ugly oyster shell along the way, because, as one rather obese mother put it, “Them rocks is too far for Mama to walk.”

Just as the naturalist had said, all sorts of things could be found near the jetty. I saw an old whelk shell and dipped my hand into the water to grab it, only to find a rather large spotted crab taking refuge there. My younger daughter still delights in the memory of my shrieking and jumping. I’m not scared of crabs, but that doesn’t mean I like them skittering across my hand.

 Along another tide pool, I found what looked to be a leg bone. I showed it to the naturalist, who told me it was a deer femur, but I am still not convinced it wasn’t the remains of a medium sized child. I found another whelk and a couple of moon snail shells, also called shark’s eyes, which I put in the bag along with the bone.  

My younger daughter and I joined my husband and older daughter along a sand bar, where my husband was doing this little shuffle dance in his all-terrain Keens. He might have looked silly, but he found an intact sand dollar and another large whelk to add to the bag. After almost stepping on a skate, which is kind of like a sting ray without the sting, followed by another scream, I traipsed behind my family back to the boat.  We boarded and rinsed our hands with bottled water before settling onto our plastic benches to eat our sandwiches and drink our real sugar Mexican Cokes.

After returning to Georgetown, we went back to our condo and tossed the bag of shells we had collected on the table, whereupon we proceeded to ignore it for the rest of the weekend before we packed it, along with the rest of our crap, for the drive home.    

After an uneventful five hour drive, we pulled into the driveway and unloaded all of the crap, along with the bag of shells. We each unpacked our suitcases, and as I started a load of laundry, my husband decided to look through the bag of shells and clean them. He put a dish towel on the counter, filled the sink with some warm water, and rinsed them each by swishing them around to get the sand off of them.  When he had finished cleaning one, he  would set it on the dish towel to drain before getting another shell out of the grocery bag and rinsing it.

By the time he reached the bottom of the sack to get out the bone, he noticed that one of the shells was walking along the counter. It was one of the small moon snail shells. Despite our best efforts to make sure all the shells were uninhabited, a small hermit crab had slipped by unnoticed and hitched a ride some two hundred and fifty miles from the coast. He had not only gone undetected, but he also had been surviving on air in a plastic grocery bag for three days.  You can’t even imagine the guilt.

My husband, being the caring sucker he is, set up this whole elaborate terrarium environment for him. He used playground sand from an old bag in the garage. He made a salt water solution using the finest of organic sea salts. My  younger daughter helped out by researching what hermit crabs eat on the computer. She opted for organic green grapes, diced finely and set inside a cockle shell for a food dish. You know, his normal diet.

The hermit crab, which my fourteen year old daughter named Shrek, seemed shy at first. After a day in his new home, however, it became pretty obvious that he was not going to be with us for a long time. He ate all the grapes and excreted something unusual in his water, but then he stopped doing much of anything. We put him in the water, but nothing. I suggested mouth to mouth, but no one could tell where his mouth was, plus he stank. He stank of sorrow and death and low tide.

It was up to him whether he lived or died. It was out of our hands.

The next morning, his shell had moved, but no one took credit for it. We decided he preferred the privacy that nighttime afforded him, and perhaps he would live to see another day. About an hour later, he left the safety of his moon shell, which I learned about through frantic texts I received from that teenager of mine. They were full of hyperbole and exclamation points.

Have you ever seen a hermit crab out of the shell? I am pretty sure that was what the alien from the movie “Aliens” is based on, not the full sized one, but the one that pops out of the guy’s stomach.  It was just nasty, with its curled up body that just kind of ends, a disgusting living comma. If it were on the floor, I would have stepped on it with no hesitation or guilt.

 

But it wasn’t on my floor; it was on my kitchen counter. Stinking. Dunking what I think was its head in the water bowl. No one wanted to put it out of its misery, but no one wanted to do anything to save it, which seriously, wasn’t even a possibility. Shrek didn’t even attempt to go back in his shell, opting instead for the comfort of the sand. He couldn’t bear the weight of it anymore. Shrek was just so tired, so tired.

And then, the next morning, it happened. Shrek had passed in the night. I couldn’t find a black cloth to drape over the cloche of the terrarium, so I just avoided the kitchen, hoping my husband had the time to dispose of his remains. The teen said Kaddish for the crab, which might be considered good practice, because you just never know when you might need to say Kaddish. 

Around dinner, I noticed my husband had very kindly taken care of the situation on the counter. My younger daughter commented that Shrek had gone on to a better place.  “Yeah, the trash can,” I smirked. 

I can promise you one thing. Never again will I hold a shell to my head to hear the ocean.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

A Crying Shame

I love going to the movies. I love everything about it, the anticipation of waiting in line for a ticket, the little stub that you forget in a pocket for a few weeks, the ever present smell of popcorn, the dark cold room filled with strangers, the  endless previews that make you think the feature presentation will never start. It always feels like an event, an experience, one that just can’t be replicated at home even with a big screen television and an HD projector.

Alas, my love for going to the movies only applies to going to a movie that I actually want to see.  If all that's playing is a G movie based on a board game or a bunch of robots destroying large American cities with lots of explosions, well, I'll stay at home, thank you. If I do find myself forced to sit through what I call a bad movie, I try to rationalize that at least I get some dark and no talking for a good two hours. In theory, it is enough time to sleep, but who can sleep with all that exploding and jarring music and laughing or shrieking or crying or some other loud expression of emotion? Plus, movies aren’t cheap. I don’t want to pay ten bucks for a crappy nap, so I sure don’t want to pay that for a crappy movie.

Spoiler alert: I am going to talk about a movie now. If you are reading this, chances are good you have either already been forced to see this movie, or you have no intention of ever seeing it, or you have never heard of it. In all cases, it’s not really that much of a spoiler alert. "The Fault in Our Stars" was the last movies I wanted to see, somewhere under Spiderman 2 or anything with Tom Cruise.  If you are familiar with it, you already know it’s a love story about two kids with cancer. Someone is going to die. Duh.

My daughters were dying to see “The Fault in Our Stars,” and I, as usual, couldn’t say no to them. They made plans to go with friends, and I begged for the other parents to take them, but apparently I am the only mom with nothing better to do. I picked up other people’s children and we headed to the local theater for an afternoon of first love, melodrama, and death.

I have heard the book is awesome, and no one has anything but glowing words to say for its author, John Green. I didn’t read the book, but both my girls did, along with their entire demographic, so this movie was a big deal in the under 17  girl world, which I allegedly was a part of a long time ago. I sucked it up because, shit, at least they don’t like Justin Bieber, so the amount of horrible teenage girl crap to which I am exposed could be hella worse.

I didn’t exactly hide the fact I didn’t want to see the movie. Mostly, I whined like one of them. Why do I have to go? I don’t have anything to wear. How long is this going to be? Don’t you have anybody else to go with? Why are you making me do this? Why do you hate me?

I am sure it could be a beautiful love story for some people, inspirational as the young lovers put aside their diagnoses for regular life experiences, like falling in love and making out and listening to indie music and aren’t our parents clueless? It encompasses so much of what it means to be a teenager, and if you take out the literal dying of cancer part, isn't growing up like a dying of sorts, a metaphor for the loss of childhood, of innocence? And also, the lead actress has short hair, so should we all cut our hair short for the summer? Boys will still like us, or maybe just boys with one leg, or no, wait, her hair is growing back in, so never mind.

I don’t need to pay money to see that, I live with most of it, except the cancer part, knock wood. But watching it? Ew. I don’t want to watch kids making out. I especially don’t want to watch kids making out WHILE SITTING NEXT TO MY KIDS. I haven’t seen my own daughters kiss, yet, but I would equate it to watching your parents make out. No one wants to see that. It's jarring.

What really made the movie horrible for me was the undeniable fact that, no way around it, I would cry, and even worse, I would do it in front of my daughters’ friends. I can’t even get through a Publix Mother’s Day commercial at home without tearing up, so there was no way that a cancer flick would leave me dry eyed. And once I start, I don't really stop.

So I cried. I wasn’t the only one in the theater, judging from the very loud sniffling that surrounded us, but I was the only one in my row that cried. The problem is, I can’t just tear up at the movie. My mind started racing with all sorts of suppressed reasons to cry, which set me up for some significant sobbing if I couldn’t get myself under control. I was able to bring up the memory of being a teenager at my father’s funeral, which fit in well with the theme of the movie and the general feelings it induced. Yes, I was a teenager once, and cancer affected my life, and killed my father at a ridiculously young age. Wahh.

I took it a step further, though, as much as I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t shake the thought of watching a movie about teens with cancer while sitting with my own teens. The idea of losing my children, of watching them struggle with a terminal illness, of having to let go and say goodbye, those were the worries that fueled my tears. No amount of concentrating on the lead character’s narcissism or the awkward smiles or the hand holding or the overly clever dialogue could stop the emotional breakdown that I was ramping up while sitting between my daughters in the dark. Parents should not outlive their children. Bad things shouldn’t happen to innocent young people. No one deserves cancer, especially not young men and women who don’t even know their own potential. Why didn't I remember to stuff some Kleenex in my purse?

I cried, for the movie, for my daughters, for people with unhealthy children, for my father, my own loss and pain and forgotten youth, and even at what I perceived as my daughters' insensitivity for not crying. I cried in the theater, in the bathroom after the movie ended, on the car ride on the way home, dropping the other kids back home, later in the shower, and after my daughters went to bed.

The last thing I wanted to do was cry at the movies, especially over a movie I didn’t want to see that I didn’t even like.  It was predictable and histrionic, much like me. Also, it didn’t make me laugh, and the lead actors played siblings in the last movies in which I saw them, which made the whole in love thing borderline incest.

Don't waste your money, unless you need a good cry.

Graven Images

[The following post contains grammatical errors, specifically subject/pronoun agreement surrounding the use of "everyone/everybody...their." I am aware. It just sounds better. Deal with it. If you know the rules, you can break them.]

Last year about this time, Facebook was taken over by everyone professing their love for their fathers. People began changing their duck faces to old photos of their daddies, in an effort to let all their friends know how much their fathers meant to them. At some point it became unbelievable. Was it possible that every person with a dated picture of Father really felt that close bond? Weren’t some of those dads unavailable emotionally? Didn’t some of them take a spanking too far? Wasn’t at least one of them cold and distant, or a drinker, or a wife beater, or just a run of the mill adulterer? Was it possible that so many people of the world were that lucky to have good daddies that loved them?

I wasn’t one of those lucky people. My father was a generous combination of all of those unpleasant traits, a real rat bastard, in a nutshell. Generally, I don’t really give him much thought at all, seeing as how he’s been dead since I was seventeen, and was barely alive before that, as far as I could tell. I saw him maybe three times a year, and though I went eagerly most every visit, it wasn’t about seeing him so much as wanting to have a father that also wanted me. We don’t always get what we want, some of us more so than others.

But enough about him. He’s dead, and nothing is really going to change that. I don’t think about him much, which is the way I like it, until , well, Father’s Day rolls around, and everyone I know celebrates their fathers and puts up their pictures and reminds me of what I never had.

So last year, about a week before Father’s Day, I was lamenting to myself about how tired I was of seeing all those damn daddy pics. If everyone was going to change their profile pics to showcase Daddy, I would do it too.

I decided to do a little online research to see if I could find a photo of my father’s grave. I figured if I could find a copy of someone’s term paper in California or a woman fellating a donkey, surely I could find an image of a headstone from the late 1980’s. I did a little Googling and stumbled across a website that would be the key to my search, www.findagrave.com. What an amazing find. Armed with only my father’s name, year of death, and city and state where he currently rests in peace, I located the cemetery wherein he is contained. Isn’t the Internet a remarkable thing? Thank you, Al Gore.

But wait, that’s not all. This amazing website could do more than just find my father's grave. I could also request that someone take a photo of his final resting place. Here was the very opportunity for which I searched. I could ask someone to snap his headstone, and then bingo, new profile pic. Take that, people on Facebook with your happy fucking childhoods! I filled out all the information for my photo request, and sat back and waited.

And waited and waited. After a few days of waiting, I heard nothing, decided that feature of the website was a crock of shit, and avoided Facebook until the third Sunday of June had passed. After a few more weeks, I totally forgot I even requested the information, much like the rest of my childhood memories of Dad. Life continued as normal.

Until one day in May, almost a full year later, when I had an email in my inbox. It was from www.findagrave.com, and the subject line was Success! It wasn’t so much that the internet had every photo of every person living or dead at the ready, but rather a small army of kindly strangers who kind of enjoy going to cemeteries and don’t mind snapping the occasional head shot, if you will, if someone requests it.

In my case, a lovely couple in the York, Pennsylvania, area were frequent explorers of my father’s haunting grounds and graciously took it upon themselves to locate Dad on my behalf.  I sent them an email to say thank you for taking the photos, an opportunity I doubt I would have any time in the foreseeable future. I left out the part where I only wanted the photo for a dig against Father’s Day on Facebook, not just because it makes me look like a schmuck but also because I truly did appreciate what they had done for me, a complete stranger with a small request on the Internet, the modern day message in a bottle. They replied it was merely by chance that they even found him, which is why it took almost twelve months to respond. Apparently, my father shares a final resting spot with a great many other dead folk in the south central area of Pennsylvania. Go figure.

I looked over the two photos they had uploaded to the website, my father’s headstone, a sight I only saw the day of its unveiling several decades ago. I marveled at its Jewishness, its boasting of loving family, its odd layout and cryptic Hebrew inscription. There lies my father.

I decided to forward the email to my two sisters, along with a brief explanation of how I came by that particular information to share, a story I find odd more than amusing, more funny weird than funny haha. I think they appreciated it, although, as one of my sisters said, “It certainly stirs up a cocktail of emotions, doesn’t it?” Sister, you said a mouthful.

And now, here it is, the eve of Father’s Day again. This time I have a photo that I could use for a profile picture. I am choosing not to, in the same way I choose not to use an actual photo of my father while alive. Not every man who sires children is a father. Not every memory is for a blessing.

Instead, I am choosing to share that picture here. My rabbi tells me the Hebrew inscription is his Hebrew name, Pesach something or other, and the date of his death in the Hebrew calendar, not the regular one. It seems pretty standard headstone information, in two languages no less, but I am still having trouble with that Beloved husband and father part. I am not the only one who continues to take issue with that claim.

 

 

 

Bless Their Hearts

I have some very good friends with young children. Poor little things, those mothers. It’s not that their kids are bad; it is that they are just, well, three. Each of them has a three year old son, and, well, three year olds are kind of dicks.

My children, now fourteen and twelve, were three at some point, which means surely I had a taste of hell, but like any victim of PTSD, I have blocked out the majority of the trauma. I prefer to remember the positive things, like the cute clothes they used to wear and how adorable their speech impediments were.

Little did I know it at the time, my girls were easy. They mostly followed the rules. They didn’t get in trouble at school. They weren’t bundles of energy. Mostly, they dressed up and colored and played with toys and puzzles, quietly. If they were irritable, they would be soothed by a Disney movie, or at the worst, the Wiggles. Remember them? God, I’m dating myself.

My friends with the three year olds don’t have it so lucky. Their boys are much more physical than my girls ever were. For example, EL’s little boy likes to express himself with words for adults, but with his peers, he prefers biting. Chomping down on his classmates has become the go-to way for him to show his displeasure, shock, surprise, or anger, depending on the situation. Every day EL waits for the school to tell her not to bring him back anymore. So far, they are convincing her that it’s all good, mostly age-appropriate, and something he will hopefully outgrow soon. He’s only broken skin a couple of times, so he shouldn’t have to be put down, but he might need a muzzle.

My other friend with a three year old son, MJS, has a different set of issues. Her child has decided to accept the challenge that preschool is offering his immune system. This kid has been sick at least once a month since August of last year, and sometimes violently. There is not much worse than a little kid puking. They don’t quite understand what’s going on yet, not enough to run to the bathroom and hang their heads over the toilet. I can only imagine what that Restoration Hardware sofa that she had to have looks like these days.

I know someone who bought her furniture at Big Lots specifically because she knew it would be ruined in less than two years. We refer to it as disposable furniture.

Yesterday, MJS’s son refused to get dressed for school. Adamantly refused. She was late for work and basically didn’t have time for that shit. She strapped him in the car seat, buck naked, his clothing in the front seat next to her. She talked to me while on the way to his day care. I could hear him screeching like a baby dinosaur in the background. Later, she told me that he had crumbs from the car seat stuck to his bare ass. Also, she forgot his sneakers.

The other day, I saw a picture on Facebook of him pooping in the backyard, under a tree. He is literally being raised by dogs.

I’m not judging, because that’s something I prefer to do in line at Walmart. These are people I love, both my friends and their children. But every time I hear another tale of horror, I thank the gods of all the major religions that that isn’t me. I have done my time, and I don’t want to wipe anymore adorable little asses or fight over irrational things like cutting the sandwich in squares instead of triangles.

Now, if a child of mine says, “I think I am going to throw up,” I can scream back, “Don’t just stand there; do it in the toilet!”  If I make them turn off the television so we can go run an errand, they don’t throw a car at me. If no one wants to eat the fabulous Brussels sprouts I am making for dinner, then they don’t. What the fuck do I care? I like Brussels sprouts, dammit, and I am going to slice them thinly and sauté them in a good Spanish olive oil and dust them with Pecorino, and if the children don’t like it, then they don’t have to eat it. I know they aren’t going to starve. They also aren’t going to break down crying, turn their plates over their heads and collapse on the floor in a heap of kicks and flails. They can get up and make their own goddamn dinners, right after they get over their fear of knives and the toaster oven.