UNDER A GLOWERING SKY

Here at Chez Finn in Santa Rosa we are under the weather, both literally and figuratively. Literally in the sense that we seem to have moved inside a giant steel ball bearing. All we see overhead is a dirty scrum of dark clouds. The weather is gray, cold and wet. And it has been this way for nearly three weeks. Which coincides with the figurative portion of this allusion; we came down with a nasty bug at the same time the sky went irretrievably into Seattle-mode. And true to the holiday spirit of giving, we have been passing said bug back and forth between the three of us – wife, child and self – since then.
For those keeping score, this is my fourth cold of this fall. Ah, the joys of fatherhood!
I have been stuck indoors busying myself with filling hankies full of yellow phlegm and reading every book in sight. I knew I topped out on the boredom meter when I spent a full weekend watching high school football championships – and enjoying them. If there has been any football game of even moderate interest on television in the last 3 weeks, trust me, I have seen it.
Vivienne has a good old fashioned case of the croup and we have installed a vaporizer in her room in the hopes of getting her back to normal. For someone as sick as she, there hasn’t been a lot of whining and complaining. She has left that to the 2 adults she lives with. My wife and I have hourly illness comparisons in a futile effort to determine who is sicker; and therefore in need of the most sympathy.
I think I’m winning.
The regal Akita’s reaction to all this has been to ignore the lot of us. She can smell the sickness on our breath and when any one of us tries to give her a hug she gently but firmly slides away with a sidelong glance that says; “You’re nuts if you think you’re giving me that disease.” Then she climbs the stairs, leaps upon the bed and falls asleep. Smart dog.
If I were still a skier I could at the very least be all excited about this miserable weather, figuring that if nothing else it was dumping truckloads of snow in the Sierra. But now I don’t even have that going for me. No, now I get to appreciate fully how grey and wet Santa Rosa is during the winter. And to add final insult to injury during one of the recent windy storms part of our roof blew away and we sprung a leak. I called out a roofer and learned the sobering news that, while they could put a temporary fix to my current problem, my roof was 25 years old and I would need a new one soon. All for the not inconsiderable price of fifteen thousand dollars.
It’s enough to make a man want to lie down and weep like a lovesick schoolgirl. But if I did that I’d need a clean hankie and they are all in the dryer.

FIVE THINGS I LIKE ABOUT MY TODDLER

1. She eats; anything and all the time. My wife insisted that Vivienne have no processed sugar in her diet for at least the first year, having read that this would mean the child would eat more vegetables, fruits, etc. And you know what? It worked. This child will eat whatever is put in front of her. Broccoli; loves it. Cauliflower; can’t get enough. She did have a sweet once; a cupcake on her 1st birthday, and promptly smeared it all over her face and hair. We were in Safeway the other day; I had Viv strapped in a shopping cart as I went up and down the aisles. I was talking to the guy behind the meat counter when I noticed a couple of women giggling behind me. I turned around to see that Vivienne had grabbed a large stalk of broccoli from the cart and was eating it raw. She had green speckles all over her face and chest. One woman said; “I wish my kids would eat vegetables like that.” And the other woman chimed in with, “If only.” So as I watched my darling daughter the epicurean eat uncooked broccoli straight off the stalk, I thought; “This is a good thing. She’s not yanking large bottles of Prego sauce off the shelves where they will shatter on the floor, she is not frightening the other shoppers with her Banshee shriek, and to top it all off, she is eating raw broccoli, which is probably good for her. I can live with this.” And for a moment I almost felt lucky.
2. She sleeps; 12 hours per night and usually a 2 hr. nap in the afternoon. I didn’t realize how big a deal this was until we were at a party recently talking to a couple whose daughter did not sleep a full night until she was 3 yrs old. During the course of the conversation my wife innocently asked if they were planning on having any more children and they both said in unison; “We will never, EVER have another child!” So, yeah, the sleeping is a big deal.
3. She knows sign language. From birth my wife has been teaching Vivienne American Sign Language. I was pretty skeptical of this effort and may have made a few snide remarks about an infant’s inability to learn. But my wife insisted that even if the kid couldn’t do the signing now, as soon as she got to a certain level of motor control, it would kick in. And she was right: two months ago Viv began to signal for milk and food. She can tell you when she has had enough of something, and when she wants more (and with her, it is usually more). She can make the sign for banana and my wife is teaching her to sing ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. All of this is more or less amazing to me and I take no credit for it. My wife is turning out to be a child raising genius, while her husband, who raised 3 kids from a previous marriage, is basically a useless doofus.
4. She is happy all the time. This kid wakes up singing in the morning and babbles to herself all day in sort of a happy giggling voice. She can entertain herself. This is especially helpful when I am mired in the dumps. Some mornings when the black dog is hounding me I can put Viv down after her breakfast and tell her, “Go play, honey, Daddy needs to go in the other room and sob for a while.” And she will look at me with that solemn expression children sometimes get and then she will waddle over to her play area and amuse herself.
5. She tells us when she is ready for bed. Most nights around seven o’clock she will make the hand sign for milk and then begin crawling up the stairs towards her bedroom. This means it is time for Rochelle to make her a bottle of milk and put her to bed. At the landing on the stairs Viv will stop and blow me a kiss through the green netting I have installed on the railing to keep babies from tumbling to their death. Then she continues her progress up the next flight to her bedroom, all the while babbling happily. It you don’t think this is a big deal, try put a cranky baby to bed sometime.

BABY ROT

Because our baby had never had diaper rash, my wife and I had been congratulating ourselves on what a sterling example of parenthood we were turning out to be. Of course the very next morning when I went to change Vivienne’s diaper, her perfectly formed vulva was covered in an unsightly scarlet rash. It reached from, oh roughly her bellybutton right down through her crotch and into her bung hole.
Just seeing this virulent stain brought back to me the many times I had jock rot in high school; probably because I never bothered to wash my jock for weeks on end. But that’s another story.
Enough digression.
Several days later we had tried a variety of cures for the dreaded baby rot, with varying degrees of success. Alas, our previously serene baby was not so unruffled any more. Now she cried, and with good reason, for the rash was a bright crimson swath that screamed to be scratched until raw. I knew, from my previous experience with such disease, how it must burn and itch.
And for one of the few times in my life I actually felt some compassion for another human being. But I was powerless to fix the problem and this feeling of failure tapped into my core insecurities and made me feel inadequate; and so I learned the sorry truth that compassion isn’t such a swell thing after all. I mean, maybe it’s great for the Dali Lama, who can practice it in a general sort of all encompassing way, but he doesn’t have kids with baby rot.
But back to the tale at hand.
A week into our travails I was changing Vivienne one morning as she was sobbing with pain and frustration. And I thought to myself as I stood hunched over the changing table and the writhing baby, “Self, when I have had jock rot, what would have helped make it feel better?”
Without hesitation my Self answered; “Scratching it!”
“Alas, poor Self, we both know that scratching the rot only makes it worse. And even though we want to succor our miserable baby, we don’t actually want to spread the rot any further. No, esteemed Self, you will have to think of something else.”
And then my Self had a true moment of inspiration, “Blow on it”
And so I bent my head over my daughter’s inflamed crotch and I blew cool air on it. And lo and behold, the crying stopped. Again I gently blew and again Vivienne stopped her sobbing. And as I maintained my ministrations my daughter let out a sigh of something close to contentment for the first time in a very long time.
For many minutes I kept on with the gentle blowing of my daughter’s reddened crotch. And during this time my daughter was at peace. Finally she fell asleep, a beatific smile on her face. And I thought to myself; “Self, if anyone ever sees me doing this they just might get the wrong impression.”
And my Self said, “Then why don’t we keep this to ourselves, Bunkums.”
And so we did. Every time I changed the baby I gave her a good blow and she was contented and happy and for some time thereafter she was relieved of her throbbing pain. And all was well in our world and no one was arresting me for practicing unseemly acts on a small child.
A few days later divine providence blessed me with a sparkling opportunity to practice my basic nature; which is never a pretty thing.
As I walked by the baby’s room I happened to glance in and see my wife with her head bent over the baby on the changing table. I remained quite as I watched Rochelle gently blowing on the baby’s crotch. She was cooing softly as she did this, in the way only a truly loving mother can croon. And the baby’s cries were stifled as she descended into a state of blissful harmony and all was at peace in the Finn household.
Naturally I couldn’t let this opportunity pass me by and so I sidled up to my wife and said: “East of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon Line you could be incarcerated in a grimy women’s correctional institute for doing that to a child.”
Between breaths she told me just where I could put the Mason-Dixon Line.
“No, seriously,” I said to her, “that is totally perverted.” I didn’t tell her that I had been doing the very same maneuver on the baby earlier in the day.
“There’s only one pervert in this room and it is not Vivienne or me, Buster.”
“Hey, I’m not the one blowing the baby!”
This clever rejoinder finally got a rise out of her and she stopped her comforting long enough to fix me with a glare. Her cheeks were flushed, either from blowing on the baby or from anger; I like to think, in my humble way, that it was the latter.
“That sounds disgusting,” she said to me. “I am not blowing the baby.” And then she bent over the table and continued to blow the baby.
“You’re lucky you live in California,” I said, knowing how much she appreciated it whenever I begin to list the ways in which she is lucky. “We are enlightened in this state. But you better believe me, Sister, there are plenty of states in the South where you could do hard time for blowing a baby.” She loves it when I call her Sister too.
Her head snapped around in a gratifying fashion and she said; “Then why don’t you hop a plane to Alabama and go fuck yourself!”
“Whoa there, Sister.” I recoiled in mock horror. “I’ve told you before how I don’t want you using filthy language around our child.”
Rochelle was silent.
“I should get my camera and film this, then upload it to UTube. It’d probably go viral overnight. I can just see the headline; Woman Blows Baby!” I don't even own a camera and I couldn't find UTube on the internet if my life depended upon it.
I took her silence to mean that she had surrendered the field to superior forces and in my magnanimity I put my arm around her shoulder and asked innocently; “So does it work?”
“Does what work?”
“Blowing the baby”
“Just look at her, she’s peaceful.” And my wife gazed on our perfect daughter with a look that, I, in my Roman Catholic Catechism scarred brain, imagined the Blessed Virgin fixed upon the Baby Jesus.
And indeed, Vivienne was the picture of contentment. Lying on her back, her legs spread, her wicked red rash temporarily appeased.
“Yeah, I know,” I told her. “I’ve been blowing her for a week. Works like magic.”
She pinned me with a look that she reserves for truly special occasions and said sweetly; “I meant that about Alabama, you should really find somewhere to go and fuck yourself.”
And I left the room with a new bounce in my step.

TYPHOID MARY

I used to be a healthy guy.
I got sick maybe once a year. You know, your typical seasonal cold, good for 5 days of runny nose and itchy eyes, and then back to normal; or in my case what passes for normal.
But now I have had 3 colds and a sinus infection in the past 10 weeks. This may cause you to ask; “Dude, what is going on with you?”
And I would answer; “Dude, I live with Typhoid Mary.”
Actually her name is Vivienne Esperanza Finn and she is a total germ factory. Although she never gets sick herself – just like the original Typhoid Mary – she is something much worse; a carrier. In fact, she is an aircraft carrier of viral illness; sending out squadrons of deadly microbes in search of uninfected victims to contaminate.
Since she is 14 months old and as yet possesses absolutely no social graces, when she sneezes she just lets fly. And, brother, when you are bending over the changing table and catch one of her sneezes right in your kisser and feel the bacteria-laden droplets spraying across your mouth, nose and eyes; well then, brother, you will know that you are well and truly screwed. Because within 24 hours you will feel a tickle in your nostril and shortly thereafter the sneezing and waterworks will begin.
In order to prevent all of the above, I have resorted to using a saline nasal rinse once a day, taking pro-biotics daily and chewing Vitamin C tablets twice a day.
Lucky me, I am going to get a real-time test of how all this proactive prevention works, because this morning Typhoid Mary came down with her first head cold. As I look at her now, she has snot running down her nose and she is sneezing non-stop. I am wearing one of those white masks you see on the denizens of Tokyo when the smog gets really bad. I wash my hands frantically after being near her.
Now, do you think any of this is going to actually work? Am I going to get out of the next four days of child care scot-free? Or should I say, germ free? Could all my ministrations possibly protect me from this germ laden little factory of snot? Do I like my odds?
Nah.

VENUS & MARS

We were making a spectacle of ourselves at a table outside of Starbuck’s; Kebu, the toddler and I. Cheerios and dog treats dotted the pavement. Vivienne repeatedly threw her bottle to the ground with a look that said, “I like the sound of hard plastic hitting cement and then echoing all through the square and disturbing one and all and I defy you to stop me.” I retrieved it a few times then tired of the game; which only made her unleash the dreaded Banshee screech from hell.
I can assure you it was quite a show.
Well-dressed women coming for their daily brew hauled small dogs on the end of ornate leashes. Invariably these toy dogs displayed ‘small dog complex’ and went into a virtual barking frenzy at sight of Kebu. Our regal Akita would sniff the air in their general direction and then turn her head and ignore them. Strangers stopped by to admire the baby or the dog and each would perform their requisite tricks; shaking hands for Kebu and smiling and waving for the baby girl. It was a real three ring circus.
My good friend Bill arrived and from fifteen feet away I could tell he had on new shoes; bright white and gold sneakers that reminded me of the Puma track shoes I wore while running the ½ mile in high school. These shoes would have stood out anywhere, but especially on my buddy. Bill, like me, is an ex business executive, and, again like me, thinks the height of sartorial splendor is a crisply pressed – lots of starch, please -- long sleeved button down shirt matched with khakis whose crease could cut paper, all bottomed out by sensible dark hued shoes. In other words he worked for IBM his entire career and he still dresses as if he were going out to make a sales call on a customer.
I think he looks first-class.
When he had got his coffee, said hi to Viv and given Kebu a treat, I said to him, “Those are some nice shoes. Where did you get them?”
He looked at me with a hangdog expression while a shudder passed through his lanky frame and said, “My wife took me clothes shopping.”
“You poor man.”
“Brother, you don’t know the half of it. I was minding my own business, watching the Auburn – Alabama game…”
“Best game of the year,” I interjected.
“Don’t I know it,” he agreed. “And the next thing I knew, Tess walked into the room and announced she was taking me shopping for some new duds.” At this he stopped and shook his head with a slightly dazed expression, the way a person will when they have seen a really ugly traffic accident.
“And shortly after that,” he continued. “I was driving us to the mall. And shortly after that I was wearing these new shoes.” And he looked down at his snazzy shoes as if their presence in his life still surprised and offended him.
Personally, I liked the shoes, but I could see how they were hauling some heavy baggage for Bill. I mean, on the one hand, he had football, which most men love to watch endlessly, and on the other hand, he had shopping for clothes, which most men find excruciating.
Later that day I was thinking of Bill and I was reminded of the tired old maxim: women are from Venus and men are from Mars. And there is just enough truth to this venerable trope to lend it merit today. And I can think of no better example than my wife’s attitude toward shopping as opposed to mine.
Succinctly; she loves it, and I hate it.
I should first make some disclaimers; my wife is not a shopaholic, nor am I a total slob. I think we are probably fairly representative of your average couple. We hold similar views on many important subjects but when it comes to shopping we could not be more dissimilar.
It is not rare for my wife Rochelle to go shopping for an entire day and come home with a pile of clothes that she then hangs in her closet. Make note; she is careful not to remove the tags from the clothing. Over the course of the next year she will occasionally dip into this cache of clothes, try an outfit on and then decide to wear it. Only then does she remove the clothing tag. If at the end of a year she has not worn an outfit she takes it back to the store for a full refund.
She promises me that this not unusual behavior for a woman.
Now contrast this with my history of shopping. In October 2004 Rochelle and I were in New York City, visiting with our fashionable friend Bruce who ran his eyes up and down my clothing (yes, khakis, button shirt, etc) and said; “Jeff, really?”
I expressed with some incredulity that I was dressed quite spiffy. My wife laughed in the background. This didn’t help my cause any.
“No, you are not well dressed,” Bruce told me. “We’re going down to Soho to get you some clothes.”
“Yahoo!” Rochelle the traitor enthused. “I can never get him to go shopping.”
“Girlfriend,” Bruce said to Rochelle, “we are gonna dress Grampa up!”
So I spent that afternoon being hauled around Soho by the two conspirators. I got the full ensemble, Polo Jeans that cost me $70 (I had never paid more the $15 dollars for Jeans), stylish shirts – sans button down collars – handsome belts and even shoes. I spent more money for clothing that one afternoon than I had paid in the previous two decades. And though I thought it a horrible scandal to pay the exorbitant prices, I went along good naturedly because the two of them were having so much fun playing dress up with a live mannequin.
If you didn’t mind constantly stepping into undersized changing rooms and contorting your body to fit into ever-tighter jeans and shirts, it was even kind of fun. I got into the spirit of the thing and for an ephemeral instant experienced the joy that shopping must bring to untold women. Then I got grumpy again.
And here is the absolute truth; I haven’t been clothes shopping in the six years since.
In fact, as I write this I am wearing a pair of jeans that I bought that afternoon. It would horrify Bruce to know that I am still wearing clothes I bought over 6 years ago, but they still fit, and they are still the most stylish clothes I own.
Here is another fact; I frequently wear a Pendleton shirt that my mother gave me on Christmas Day in 1970. It fits me to this day, and doesn’t have but one hole in it.
I doubt any women are wearing clothes from that time period, unless to a 70’s retro party on Halloween.
When my jeans wear out I will buy replacements, I promise you. And I will most likely be wearing the stylish shirts from NYC to parties for at least another decade or two. Bruce has great taste in clothes and they are by far the most fashionable clothing I possess.
To net it out – men are best at watching football and women are best at shopping.
Each sex should stick to what it does best.
And then guys like my unfortunate friend Bill won’t end up wearing shoes that remind people of a 1970’s high school track meet.

OUR TODDLER – A.K.A. FRANKENSTIEN’S MONSTER
At our daughter’s one year check up our pediatrician observed her shambling gait across the examining room floor and pronounced judgment: “Yes, she has the Frankenstein walk down to perfection. Perfectly normal.”
And as I studied Vivienne later that same day at our home, I had to agree. For though she is but 25 lbs and barely reaches my knee, she is our own tiny imitation of Dr. Frankenstein’s fabled monster; lurching in a stiff legged gait, arms outstretched as she pursues her innocent victim – in this case our long-suffering Akita, Kebu – from pillar to post.
I tell you, it is the reign of terror in our home; unearthly screeches shatter our peace as our daughter Vivienne hunts down her prey. And when she catches the dog she sinks her pudgy-fingered fists deep into the thick ruff of Kebu’s chest and then lets all her weight fall to the ground; imagine a lion on the African Savannah bringing down a water buffalo four times her size and you’ve got the picture.
While her parents frantically plead with her to; “Pet the down gently, Vivienne,” she pays no mind but, shrieking with joy, plunges her face into the fur an inch from the dog’s ear. My wife gets down on her knees and demonstrates to our daughter how to gently stroke the dog. In a twisted parody my ham-handed daughter then proceeds to clobber the dog with both fists.
All the while I am maintaining eye contact with Kebu and speaking to her in a soothing voice. “Good Kebu, good Kebu,” I say. “What a good dog you are.”
You’d think this commotion was stressful enough, but then, you don’t live with Vivienne Esperanza Finn; for my lovely daughter subsequently developed an unhealthy fascination with Kebu’s bung hole. Like a heat seeking missile Vivienne will enter our great room, search out the dog and follow around behind her, arm outstretched towards the Akita’s nether regions. And when the dog stops moving, my daughter plunges her fist into the thick fur surrounding Kebu’s butt while squealing with delight. The dog leaps as if touched with a live wire (wouldn’t’ you?) while I hurry over to hustle the tiny fiend away.
Then the dog gives me her most aggrieved expression, which says; “Why am I singled out for this indignity? We had a good thing going here before you brought the succubus into our home. And you, Pack Leader, how can you let this misconduct continue? I know my place in the pack, why can’t this revolting little creature know its place?”
And since I really don’t have an answer for Kebu I feel vaguely guilty. I trained her to be the perfect Social Therapy Dog; gentle, calm and obedient. And thank God that I did, because now her good nature is being put to the test.
When Vivienne is not busy trying to embed her hand in Kebu’s rectum her next favorite pastime is stealing Kebu’s toys. Any plaything Kebu takes an interest in, well, that is just the thing that Vivienne suddenly decides she must have; and so she promptly rushes over on her fat little legs and snatches the toy from the dog’s mouth.
And then shoves it in her own mouth.
Our daughter has also discovered a fevered fascination with any food that has come into contact with Kebu’s mouth. I have to feed treats to the dog in private, because if Vivienne is present she will immediately grab the food right out of the dog’s mouth and, you guessed it, thrust it promptly into her own mouth. When an adult asks her to give it back to Kebu, she proceeds to first plunge it into the dog’s mouth, then back into her own, back and forth, back and forth; sort of like Indian Giving, only with sharp teeth to add the element of imminent danger to the proceedings.
Watching this travesty, I think; if I were a dog that would probably infuriate me. And once again I thank my lucky stars for this somewhat aloof and essentially cautious dog; for never once has she snapped, growled or barked at the diminutive monster tormenting her.
And then I take a moment to thank the Japanese Samurai centuries past who first domesticated this breed and taught it to guard the home and children. However they did it, they inculcated a tolerance in this breed that nearly defies comprehension.
My reverie is interrupted by a clatter from the kitchen and I turn to see the dog gazing with mute forbearance at my daughter, who is down on all fours and has her face buried in the dog’s food dish; where snuffling sounds indicate that, yes indeed, she is eating the dog’s food.
Who could ask for more?

SENSORY DEFENSIVE MALE

After we had been living together a while, my wife said to me one day, “You are sensory defensive.”
Because she is a health professional she can get away with using big words like this. But I put her in her place by saying; “More sex will cure that.”
“Hm, that seems to be your answer to everything.”
Well, as they say, when your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
But yes, I am sensory defensive, which means sharp noise, clutter, bright lights, they all set me off. If we start off on a trip somewhere and there is the faintest noise in the car I will pull over and find the noise and silence it. I like to walk into a room where everything is neat and shipshape, and if my house is messy I have to clean it; and not later, but right now. And just to complete the trifecta, bright glare from a windshield can bring on a migraine.
And, frankly, outside of sex, I’m not so crazy about touching.
So you can imagine what having a 14 month old toddler is doing for a man like me. Our house has become clutter central. And now that Vivienne has ‘found her voice’ (the wife’s words) and begun screeching like a flight of Banshees let loose from the gates of hell to inflict a pernicious din on the unsuspecting, I am seriously considering using my Black & Decker adjustable speed drill to drive wood screws into my forehead.
Which is all a long way of saying that I lost my mind last weekend.
It wasn’t pretty, but then, it has been my experience that my life rarely is. However, I do have some tools I use when my hardwiring shorts out and the bad tapes start to play in my head. And so the first thing I did upon losing my mind on Saturday was to call my friend Louis; mainly because I needed someone well-adjusted to speak with.
I know Louis is more balanced than I am because he; listens to public radio, flosses his teeth, practices yoga and meditation on a daily basis, is unfailingly kind and considerate to others, has street smarts from being raised in Queens, can parallel park a car better than any man alive, successfully runs his own business, and eats no processed sugar. Oh, and he is a graceful dancer too.
If he weren’t such a nice guy he would be insufferable.
Still, I called him anyway, and then lay on the couch in a dark room with the cell phone pressed to my ear. It was sort of like a psychiatric visit, only over the phone and without the hope that any real progress would ever be achieved.
The essence of our conversation was that we stumbled upon the disturbing truth that in our century plus of cumulative living, neither of us had as yet attained an understanding of women.
At first we found it unfathomable that two smart guys like ourselves could have gone this long without a clue about women. But the more we talked it, the more we realized that we were probably not likely to get a clue any time soon either.
Lying on the couch in the dark talking to Louis and realizing that I wasn’t the only one without a clue about a subject some might consider vital, well, that made me feel a lot better. So much better, in fact, that I decided to call another male in the hope that my recovery would gather speed. And the lucky recipient of my call was my younger brother Matt in Atlanta, and I talked to him about football for so long that my cell phone battery died.
You would think that it would take a lot of talking to kill a cell phone battery. And you would be right. Still, I wasn’t done talking, and so I called my brother back on the land line and we spoke football some more.
And here is a remarkable fact; after the first 5 minutes of our conversation, neither of us offered a fresh insight or original slant on football over the next 2 hours of talking time. We just kept repeating the same pithy observations over and over, first me and then him. But it did not bore us, or at least not me; I found it strangely comforting.
After we had beat the dead horse of football to death he talked about his job for a while and then happened to mention that his BMW was on the fritz and he was looking into a new car, and so we exchanged sage advice on cars for another half hour with, again, neither of us offering a fresh view after the first couple of minutes.
Now this is a crucial difference between men and women; when women talk on the phone for hours on end they talk about three things; their feelings, their relationships, and their feelings about their relationships.
Feelings and relationships did not come up in my conversation with my brother. Unsurprisingly, this omission did not bother either of us. We are guys, and guys talk about sports, work, and machines, and sometimes, if we are really desperate, action movies and rock and roll bands. So you can see, we had touched nearly all the bases, so to speak, in our dialogue.
When I awoke on Sunday I was sane until the Banshee began to sing and the sound bounced off the walls and dug into my brain through the right ear I damaged back in 1973 at a Black Sabbath concert by sitting too near the stage while totally stoned on Panama Red.
And then I lost my mind again. And it stayed lost all day until my son called me from New Zealand where he and his wife are traveling for a year and we talked about…….you guessed it……….sports. And since my son is a pretty high brow fellow we followed the mandatory sports dialogue with a thorough exploration of Bruce Springsteen’s music and the best zombie movies of all time.
Again I felt better until Monday morning whence the Banshee sang her hideous song. Luckily I was going to lunch with my buddy Mike and when I described being sensory defensiveness to him, and how I even had to pull the car over to detect and silence any stray noise, he just nodded his head and said he was exactly the same way.
Mike has a thoughtful, reasonable mien, as befits a man who teaches Political Science to college students. He said he lived his life in fear of being proved dissolute.
I just loved that. It felt just right to me, the perpetual perfectionist.
So once again I felt better, having demonstrated the old chestnut that misery loves company. And I stayed feeling better right through swimming 2500 meters at my gym and donating blood down at the Redwood Blood Bank—a place where I am welcome even when disturbed because, let’s face it, they are desperate for my blood -- and coming home where the Banshee still sang here hellish song and, to my surprise, it did not bother me.
On Tuesday I reached out to my old friend Bill and he reminded me that before adopting Vivienne I had told him that my job was to write the checks and provide a safe and stable environment for my family. I needed to be reminded of this. He said my duty was to provide the setting in which the chaos of childhood could occur; as it is predestined to do. And he suggested that within this space I carve out my own room – a ‘man cave’ he called it – to retreat to when it all got a bit much for me. Again, sound advice.
So you can see that it helps to have friends who are not loony.
On Wednesday I went to see my therapist, because, let’s be honest, a guy like me needs all the help he can get. When I described losing my mind, my therapist didn’t seem particularly surprised or alarmed. Either this is because he has seen it all before, or he just figures Jeff is going to lose his mind and there is no sense in getting all worked up about it.
I’d prefer to think the former.
And when I described my efforts to regain my mind he nodded approvingly and said, “A guy like you, you probably need a lot of friends.”
Now, what do you think he meant by that?