Humor

Some things I never thought I’d say ~

/ Marilyn Davis / Leave a comment

All teenagers, however precocious, are shortsighted. It can’t be helped. As a teenager, I never would have thought I’d say any of these things.

  1. “I’ll have the broccoli.”
    (I’m not sure I ever saw broccoli until I left home. My mother never acknowledged its existence, or that of most other vegetables. I’m still confident I will never eat turnips, beets, rutabagas, chard, or many other healthful things. That goes double for kale, the celebrity vegetable du jour.)
  2. “I’m here to get my ears pierced.”
    (When I was in my mid-30s, two friends of mine finally dragged me to the mall to undergo this rite of passage. Convinced that it would hurt like hell, I’d never worked up the courage on my own.)
  3. “Okay, I’ll sing in the recital.”
    (I have terrible performance anxiety. In high school I had two mandatory piano recitals. Knowing I’d play worse if my parents were there, I banned them from attending either one.)
  4. “Let’s go ahead and color my hair.”
    (My parents derided women who tried to disguise their age by coloring their hair. Of course, that was before women of all ages, not to mention teenagers, began coloring their hair just for fun. When you don’t have much to feel good about physically, it’s a real boost to know that most people guess you’re at least 10 years younger than you really are. I’ll take it.)
  5. “Is a biopsy really necessary? It isn’t cancer.”
    (For years and years, before I began taking antianxiety medication, I was convinced that “it,” whatever it might be at the moment, was cancer. Unless it was heart disease.)
  6. “I do.”
    (I was adamant that I would never marry, although I wanted a lifelong relationship. I figured my soulmate and I would just live together. So why, when I was semi-proposed to, did I say okay, without any meaningful reflection whatsoever? Simple: I was still a teenager.)

Bursting bubbles ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 1 Comment

It does seem to be true, at least in my case, that pride goeth before a fall, although one could predict that due to probability alone. For the past two days I’ve been congratulating myself on learning a new skill: giving subcutaneous injections. Last Friday a nurse came to my sister’s house to give her the first of five injections of an insanely expensive drug that may reduce inflammation, thereby increasing her mobility. (Heartfelt thanks to the Chronic Disease Fund, which paid the $2,000 for 5 milliliters of this medication.)

The remaining four injections would be my responsibility to do, so the nurse walked me through all the steps, which were more numerous than I’d anticipated. Warm the refrigerated vial between your palms for three minutes. Disinfect the rubber top of the vial with an alcohol wipe. Attach an 18-gauge needle to the syringe. (The smaller the number, the bigger the needle, I learned—just like camera apertures.)

Draw back the plunger to the 1 milliliter mark to fill the syringe with air. Twist the protective cap off of the needle. Push the syringe into the vial. Push the plunger to force out the air. Upend the vial and, making sure the tip of the needle is submerged within the liquid, draw back the plunger to the 1 mL mark. (Yes, this is a long and boring explanation, but it’s necessary to the point of the post. Pun intended.)

Then comes the tough part: checking for bubbles. Tiny bubbles are okay, but anything bigger should be dealt with by flicking your finger against the syringe repeatedly until the bubble slides toward the business end of the syringe. Push the plunger a bit to ease the bubble up through the needle. Draw the plunger back down to 1mL and repeat. This process turned out to be both tricky and tedious: there is an area at the end of the syringe where there’s some plastic threading, and it always looks empty, as if there’s a bubble there. Often, though, it’s just an optical illusion.

When you’re satisfied that no substantial bubbles remain, remove the needle from the vial. Put the protective cap back on the needle and twist it off the syringe. Replace it with a smaller gauge needle and take off its protective cap. (These seem to resist removal.) Make sure a tiny droplet of medicine shows at the end of the needle, supposedly indicating there’s no air in the syringe.

Then swab your victim’s thigh (in this case) with an alcohol wipe, pinch a goodly bit of her flesh between thumb and forefinger, and make the stick. The needle should go almost all the way in, but not quite. Turn loose of her flesh and pull the plunger back slightly to make sure no blood enters the syringe, which would indicate that you’ve hit a vein. If everything looks good, inject the liquid, remove the syringe, and slap on a bit of gauze.

Simple, right? The nurse allowed me to do everything except the one thing she could not, because of some financial rule or other, allow me to do: make the stick. Naturally, this was the part of the procedure that scared me the most. As I poised the needle above C.’s thigh on Saturday, I hoped fervently that I would not spear her and produce a bloody mess. I steeled myself to hear howling, and I made the stick. No sound from C. The needle might have gone all the way in, which was wrong, but it turned out beautifully.

I injected the medication, pulled out the needle, and marveled that at first I couldn’t even see where the injection had been. A dot of blood much smaller than a pinhead soon showed itself. No bigger than the nurse’s had been! I did an abbreviated victory dance while C. pressed gauze on the spot, and then a completely unnecessary Band-aid went on. Woohoo!

Things went equally well on Sunday—except that I remembered just after I gave C. the injection that I’d forgotten to pull back the plunger to check for blood. But chance saved me: there was again just a teensy dot showing where the needle had gone in. I was pretty good at this, hey? I could be a sub-Q shot giver, were there such a job. What competence!

Then today rolled around. I drew the medication into the syringe and there appeared to be no major bubbles. This seemed suspiciously lucky, so I flicked my finger against the syringe a few times and tried to determine if a bubble was lurking at the hard-to-see end. After some fiddling around with the plunger, I finally decided that there wasn’t. I switched needles. In the process of struggling to remove the thinner needle’s protective cap, however, I realized that I didn’t have 1mL in the syringe. I had closer to 0.9 mL. The nurse had specifically told me this was NOT okay.

Crap! What to do? With considerable misgivings I decided to switch the needles again and draw more medicine out of the vial. I was pretty sure the nurse would have told me not to do this, but I couldn’t think of an alternative. I also didn’t see how anything would be contaminated, since the first needle had gone back into its protective cap. After making certain I had 1mL, I checked for bubbles again. Flicked again. Switched the needles again and ascertained that a droplet of medicine clung to the tip.

I remembered this time, after making the stick, to check for blood. There wasn’t any. To my consternation, however, when I drew the plunger back slightly, a large, sinister-looking bubble appeared at the needle end and slowly made its way up the syringe.

OH CRAP. OH CRAP.

I had quizzed the nurse extensively about this entire bubble subject, because it worried me so much. “What if I miss a big bubble and inject it into her?” I asked. “Am I going to kill her?”

Undoubtedly the nurse was laughing on the inside, but she kept a straight face. “No,” she said, “but the shot will be more painful. It’s if you have an air bubble inside a vein. Now that’ll get you.”

Frozen in place with the needle in C.’s thigh, I reasoned that since there had been no blood, I could not have hit a vein. I warned C. that this shot might hurt—the others hadn’t—and I pushed down on the plunger. There was a bigger spot of blood this time when I removed the needle, but no spurting—in fact, no Carrie-type scene of any kind. C. hadn’t made a sound.

“Did that hurt?” I asked her anxiously.

“Not really,” she said.

“I don’t think I killed you,” I said with relief.

“Oh well,” she replied. I almost expected her to add, “Nobody’s perfect.”

One more injection to go. Then I should be done with wielding needles for awhile. Maybe forever, if I’m lucky. And if anybody asks me about the experience, I’ll say modestly, “I did reasonably well. We both lived.”

Addendum: After the final injection, I had to revise this post because I still had a step wrong. Perhaps this is why I never taught Technical Writing.

The closest I get to wildlife photography ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 5 Comments
Wolf Spider

Wolf Spider

I found this beauty outside my local Kohl’s store. It was dark, but I had parked under a light near one of those little shrubbery-covered islands with the curb around them. (What are those things called, anyway? Shrubbery islands, I guess.)

I wanted to photograph the spider because two friends of mine had, a few months ago, found such a spider in their house, had captured it and photographed it as well as they could through a Ziploc bag, and had posted the photos on their respective Facebook pages with a plea for information. (It was revealing of their personalities that one of my friends wrote “THIS IS THE BIGGEST FUCKING SPIDER I HAVE EVER SEEN” on her Facebook page while the other one simply but eloquently wrote “This thing. What???”) I was pretty sure theirs was a wolf spider, and I knew this one was.*

For once, I had my camera bag in the car. The wolf spider was near my car door, so I wanted to proceed cautiously. Wolf spiders can move pretty damn fast. They can’t jump, but something in the limbic area of my brain persists in believing that they can. Besides, darting doesn’t differ much from jumping, if a large spider is darting in your general direction. To assess the situation, I tapped my foot on the curb a safe distance away. The spider stayed put. I then made an awkward kicking motion (which I hope no one saw) toward the spider, and it still stayed put. So I edged the quarter near it for scale.

Since the spider remained motionless—either dying or depressed, I figured—I got braver with my shots. Finally I put the camera on super macro mode, which required putting the lens scarily close to the spider. But I was emboldened by its apparent indifference. I recently bought a little Fuji X10, a very capable retro-looking point-and-shoot with a bright lens and lots of controls, and that’s what I used here. The image needed a little lightening and a little sharpening, and I cropped it.

It’s fortunate for me that I prefer abstracts and semi-abstracts for my “serious” photography work. Several of my friends excel at wildlife photography, and I admire their work greatly. I don’t have the patience to do it myself, however. I hate using tripods, and my weak hands don’t like dealing with the weight of long lenses either. But those are mostly excuses; I simply lack the talent for photographing wildlife, just as I lack the talent for leading a wild life. This is as close as I get on both counts, and it’s good enough for me.

* Wrong again! I have now seen a much better picture of my friends’ arachnid, and it was in fact an orb weaver. They have assured me that it was much bigger and much scarier than my wolf spider. B. swears it was as big as her face. This seems hard to credit, but okay. It’s also possible that one’s perception of spider size is at least slightly influenced by whether said spider is outside where it belongs or inside one’s house.

Failures of a book evangelist ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 1 Comment

At book sales and thrift shops I sometimes collar complete strangers who are perusing a book I’ve admired and urge them to buy it. Although this degree of enthusiasm doesn’t seem to have endeared me to anyone, I can’t seem to stop—encouraged, possibly, by the fact that no one yet has told me flat-out to shut up. Sometimes someone will talk to me, briefly; often people just sort of nod and edge away. As a confirmed book evangelist, I should perhaps add snake handling and talking in tongues to my efforts, because I’ve made only one convert to date. That is, on only one occasion have I known someone to read a book I’ve recommended. It’s #2 below, and my friend liked it very much, so at least I’m 1-0.

Since blogs seem an ideal platform for both evangelism and didacticism, and since the well of inspiration has run dry in other areas, I thought I’d push…um, recommend…a couple of dozen novels or short story collections published since 1980 that I can’t imagine anyone not admiring. How arrogant, eh? But I love these books. I LOVE THESE BOOKS and I want to share them with others, even JUST ONE PERSON. Most of these authors are well known, but some of the picks I’ve made haven’t gotten the attention they deserve.

  1. The Risk Pool, Richard Russo
  2. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
  3. Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
  4. The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
  5. Juliet, Naked, Nick Hornby
  6. Charms for the Easy Life, Kaye Gibbons
  7. Lighthousekeeping, Jeanette Winterson
  8. Postcards, Annie Proulx
  9. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, Brady Udall
  10. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories, Alice Munro
  11. The Gold-Bug Variations, Richard Powers
  12. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
  13. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, Julian Barnes
  14. Illumination Night, Alice Hoffman
  15. Jazz, Toni Morrison
  16. Collected Stories, T.C. Boyle
  17. Moo, Jane Smiley
  18. The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
  19. Apologizing to Dogs, Joe Coomer
  20. Felicia’s Journey, William Trevor
  21. I Was Amelia Earhart, Jane Mendelsohn
  22. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
  23. Skippy Dies, Paul Murray
  24. The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker

As long as I’m pushing, here are four more excellent books from this period that, amazingly enough, were made into excellent movies that stayed true to the source.

  1. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
  2. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
  3. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
  4. The Hours, Michael Cunningham

(I haven’t yet seen Life of Pi, but given the reviews I’ve read, it should be on this list as well.)

Because I’m the daughter of a champion list-maker, I keep a list of the books I read. It reminds me of authors I’ve enjoyed and books I’d like to re-read. At the same time, however, it’s a source of embarrassment, because I’ve forgotten every detail of many of these books.

I recently read an article about Philip Roth and thought that I really have given Roth short shrift and should read some of his later books. Consulting my list, however, I see that I’ve read The Anatomy Lesson and The Human Stain and The Dying Animal. (Plus Patrimony, which I do remember, perhaps because it is a memoir of Roth’s father’s aging and death, and it includes a horrifying scene that will stay with me forever.)

Recently, too, I decided that it was high time I read The Golden Notebook. And I guess I will have to, because evidently I retained nothing from reading it—as I just now discovered—in 2004. Dozens of other books have escaped my memory completely. What is Once Removed, by Mako Yoshikawa? Or American Fuji, by Sara Backer? Or True Enough, by Stephen McCauley? Is that even fiction? I forget most of the nonfiction I read, too.

There are novels I’ve read three times that I cannot recall the ending of. This bothers me no end (pun not initially intended), especially since my memory has always been my strong suit. When I complain to friends about this odd impairment, they make little soothing sounds instead of acknowledging the truth: Apparently I tear through books like candy, not stopping to savor them or contemplate them. When I try to discuss books, I sound like an amnesiac with little unconnected sparks of memory. (Fortunately, this is less true of classics than of contemporary fiction, which strikes me as a subject for rumination and possible tedious philosophizing).

Given these limitations, it may be arrogant for me to have set forth a list of books that I like so much, I literally want to push them into people’s hands. It’s probably arrogant even absent these limitations. But the books above I can vouch for. I can even talk about some of them.

Trust me.

I’m dying here ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 4 Comments

I’ve had little time lately to think about this blog, but as I grow older I’ve been thinking about my deficiencies and when life started going south. Flunking childhood had a lot to do with that. Take a look at the wondrous things I never mastered:

1. Blowing bubble-gum bubbles.
2. Whistling.
3. Hula-hooping.
4. Crossing the monkey bars.
5. Rollerskating, except for rollerskating on rough gravelly sidewalks.
6. Turning a cartwheel.
7. Standing on my head.
8. Throwing a softball.
9. Catching a softball.
10. Hitting a softball.
11. Sledding.
12. Swimming with any degree of competence.
13. Climbing trees.
14. Eating bugs.

What a dud! Even I wouldn’t have chosen me for teams in gym. (Interesting, the proportion of adults who claim the experience of being chosen last. Either their memory is impaired, or the last-chosen are very disproportionately represented among writers and actors and such.)

I could run, and I could ride a bicycle….I did love riding my bike. And I achieved one other near-mandatory childhood accomplishment: hurting yourself badly enough to require stitches. Yet even that I did in a sedentary way. Did I launch myself off the roof in a brief but glorious belief that I would fly? Sadly, no.

I was sitting on the back porch steps and somehow fell off, putting my front teeth cleanly through my….whatever the area between your chin and lower lip is called. But it hardly counts, since I did that when I was 2 and it couldn’t be chalked up to bad behavior. I had to be told some years later what happened, although I have a wispy memory—probably my earliest memory—of my mother rushing me to the doctor’s office across the street, and sitting on her lap across the desk from the doctor when all the painful stuff was over. I carry the scar to this day but can’t point to it as a badge of courage. Such a waste!

Like so many childhood duds, I found solace in books. I began reading at age 3, which led to several cringeworthy episodes, such as my mom making me read to my nursery school teacher to prove I could do it (they didn’t call it pre-school then). Yet both of my parents took a strong ethical stand against showing off or bragging in any context. It could get me or my sister into trouble, so we didn’t do it. My mother, the hypocrite! Dad wouldn’t have made me read for anyone.

Much more embarrassing was the day my kindergarten teacher sent me, alone through the echoing hallways, up up up to the eighth-grade class to read, sort of like a circus freak giving a show. This was not only humiliating, it was scary, because written on the blackboard was an equation, something like 8 + n = 14. Math with letters??! This was a truly alarming concept, and I was sure I’d never to able to comprehend it. Eighth grade would be my downfall. My struggles with performance anxiety may date to this episode.

Still, my early childhood was generally happy, especially during road-trip vacations in my family’s blue Volkswagen Beetle. But when I was 8 I learned that, like bugs and birds, I would someday die. On the instant I became terrified of death. Thus the end of Eden.

The fear of death has ruled and ruined my life. Some of my friends know this and some don’t. Medication has helped a lot over the years, but now I’m debilitated and the end isn’t somewhere beyond the horizon anymore. I don’t plan to write about it. I didn’t set out to write a confessional blog or a memoir. Bathos is pathetic (ha!). But like pitcher Nuke LaLouche in “Bull Durham,” I seem to be starting out with erratic control. You may remember this: In one game, after Nuke’s control has improved dramatically, the catcher (Kevin Costner, in what I think is his best role) instructs him to hit the team mascot with his next pitch. And so he does. Costner looks at the hitter and says, “I wouldn’t lean too far in.” He pauses as the hitter looks at him. “I don’t know where it’s going.”

So it goes ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 3 Comments

Q: Why did your blog take a turn for the serious side after only a few posts?
A: So I didn’t want to be all directive about the evolution of this thing, and certain personal events intruded, and…

Q: Did you hear what you just said?
A: Huh?

Q: Your answer. You started it with “so.” Why did you do that?
A: I don’t know. What difference does it make?

Q: “So” implies continuation, but that was my first question to you. No continuation involved.
A: Um…

Q: This wouldn’t have happened two years ago. In just the last few months, I’ve noticed countless guests on talk shows starting their answers with “so,” to absolutely no purpose.
A. O-kaay…

Q: It’s irritating. It’s incomprehensible. It’s everywhere. I watched a Charlie Rose interview recently in which the guest was asked five questions, and every one of his answers began with “so”—completely unnecessarily. How did this habit get started? Why has it spread so rapidly? One day everyone seemed normal, or at least as normal as everyone normally seems, and the next day it’s suddenly “so, so, so.” Why?
A: What are you, the language police? This really matters to you?

Q: Yes! “So” serves no purpose in these instances. It’s like watching someone who has the hiccups and can’t get rid of them. It’s maddening!
A: I hadn’t noticed. Maybe it’s just you.

Q: It isn’t just me. My sister has noticed the same thing, and she has the attention span of a gnat.
A: Oh. Can I get out of this interview? It’s turned kind of negative. I’m not into negativity.

Q: Negativity can be a positive thing if used properly. What’s your problem with it?
A: So okay, it’s bad for the skin, and your skin reflects your whole inner state of well-being, so—

Q: You did it again, you moron! But to resume talking about the blog—
A:  So it evolved in an unexpected direction, and I plan to get back on track any day now.

Q: I’m warning you, I’m going to knock all your “so’s” into next Tuesday.
A: You really need to get a life, you know?

Q: That’s your job. You’re the one writing the blog.
A:  Coulda fooled me, word freak. Get out of my space! This interview is terminated.

The things he gave me ~

/ Marilyn Davis / Leave a comment

Two posts ago I mentioned that my first husband had inadvertently done a great deal to shape my later life. Of course, he left me with many brightly shining, enriching things. (Not jewelry; we were grad students.) He took me to my first Monty Python movie. He introduced me to “The Basement Tapes” and to “Layla” and to Elmore James. He converted me into a lover of “Star Trek.” He bought me books by Virginia Woolf.

But if you tenaciously follow the thread of causation—which, admittedly, is to walk a fine line amidst a tangle of other contributing threads—he gave me three bigger things that brought me where I am today.

1. When we were both in college, two years before we even began dating, he introduced me to an acquaintance from his part of Missouri.

2. When we were at graduate school, he told me about an open editorial internship at our university’s scholarly press.

3. He left me.

The acquaintance was the young man who, eight years later, became my second husband. I might have met and talked to him otherwise—all three of us, for a brief time, worked for the campus literary magazine—but I easily might not have. I was quite shy then. Although our marriage was figuratively bumpy and ended badly, our literally bumpy road trips took us to beautiful places together. Maine, New Mexico, Utah, Michigan, South Carolina. The museums of D.C. We stayed together a long time. My second husband had much more music to introduce me to, as well as art, as well as a huge reinforcing dose of Monty Python. (I sing the philosophers’ drinking song upon request and sometimes, to people’s dismay, not upon request.)

The internship, which I jumped at, gave me the background to do freelance book editing. That in turn gave me the qualifications to eventually land a job producing publications for the grants office on campus. Those for the public, like the magazine I reshaped, featured campus research; those for researchers were geared to help them find funding and run their projects.

I worked in the same office for 23 years because I was compensated decently, considering that a master’s in English usually gets you nowhere fast, and because my job constantly evolved and expanded. It spanned the transition from typesetting-and-pasteup to desktop publishing, as well as the transition from “What’s the Internet?” to the ubiquity of web sites. I ended up doing editing, technical writing, feature writing, graphic design, web management—the whole catastrophe, as Zorba the Greek said in a different context. It was often stressful, sometimes scary, seldom boring.

Without the divorce, I would have had no reason to join a divorce coping workshop on campus. There I met a woman, K., who would become one of my best friends. Interestingly, K. was then working at—you got it—the research publications job I would later hold. The grants office happened to be housed one floor above the office where I was toiling as a “word processing operator” and copyediting books in my spare time. Meeting K. in the lobby one day when our acquaintanceship hadn’t yet bloomed into friendship, I learned that she was being promoted and that her job would be up for grabs in a couple of weeks. This heads-up enabled me to be excruciatingly well-prepared when I applied for and then interviewed for the job. Which I got. Worried that I’d been favored because K. knew me, I asked her about that one time. She told me that the committee’s decision was unanimous and that my editorial experience was the crucial factor. Thank goodness. Thank FH.

I remember saying goodbye to K. and her husband, L., when they moved away more than a decade ago. I gave them both long hugs and then marveled to L., “If it hadn’t been for [FH], I’d never have known you. Isn’t that weird?!” The world seemed sad and smiling and mysterious all at the same time. Had I been wearing a hat, I might well have tossed it up, Mary-Tyler-Moore style, right into the wondering breeze.

How Bondo wrecked my marriage ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 1 Comment

Well, okay, that’s not true. Seven posts into this blog, I have lied already. Bondo, a fine product used for auto body repair, did not wreck my marriage. Serious problems, most of them originating with me, did that. But Bondo played a prominent role, like a sinister musical motif that repeats again and again under the main melody.

Not long before our wedding, my future first husband (FH) and I received signs that we should rethink what we were about to do. These signs, constructed by our friends mainly of posterboard, all read the same thing: “Turn back!”

No, that’s ridiculous. FH and I received no literal signs, although I think I came close to getting one from my father. But signs in the figurative sense—those we got plenty of.

The most obvious one was that we had begun arguing long before the wedding date was set. But such a mundane sign, although the one we should truly have paid attention to, is far less fun to write about than the others.

Like this one: Two months before our wedding, FH spent his small pool of car-designated money on a vehicle that only one of us could drive: a used Triumph Spitfire. This noisy, bumpy ride delighted him and terrified me. I could not then drive a stickshift, and I wasn’t about to learn via the Spitfire. So I was upset and distressed at his choice.

My distress reached new heights when I received a call, only two or three days after this purchase, telling me that FH would be in the hospital overnight due to a wrenched back. He had taken the Spitfire out for a little spin on icy back roads near his home and had wrecked the car.

At that point, lights should have appeared in the sky spelling out a message: “This boy-man is not ready to get married. He needs his freedom.” The fact that I recognized FH’s irresponsibility but chose to overlook it should have produced additional lights in the sky saying: “This girl-woman is too stupid to get married. She needs independence.” Sadly, none of our friends or relatives reported seeing such messages.

Another sign was that my mother, instead of suggesting that we abandon ship, proposed that we move up our wedding date from May to January and hold the wedding at my parents’ small bungalow in Perryville, Mo. This odd suggestion was presumably motivated by the fact that my father was in the middle of a trial year teaching at a community college in Colorado, and he could be back for Christmas break. Much later I suspected that another motivation was to ensure the wedding would be small, very inexpensive, and a done deal before my father could grow more cantankerous about it.

FH and I blithely agreed to Mom’s suggestions, for reasons that now elude me, even though it meant we would be living apart for the first few months of our marriage—FH finishing his bachelor’s degree in Missouri, me finishing the first year of my master’s degree in Illinois.

As the wedding approached, signs fell fast and furious.

There was the impressive thwack, a cross between a thud and a bullwhip crack, made by the back of FH’s head as he hit the wall when he fainted post–blood test at the doctor’s office.

There was our music selection for the wedding, a Bach prelude (suggested by me) and the theme to “Midnight Cowboy” (suggested by FH). I readily approved the latter, a lovely piece of music, without considering the inauspicious nature of its wistful, mournful, high-lonely sound. This musical combination, possibly unique in the annals of weddingdom, undoubtedly mystified our guests.

But there were not many guests to mystify. The wedding was being held at least an hour’s drive away for everyone except my grandfather. More guests dropped out when our wedding day was ushered in by snowfall that soon became a blizzard. Everyone has heard old-wives’ tales about whether it is lucky or unlucky to get married on a rainy day, but I’ve never heard any such axioms concerning blizzards. I’d be forced to guess that they are highly inauspicious. So the gathering was family-only except for my best friend, T., who served as piano player. (This was payback, since she had browbeaten me into playing at her wedding two years earlier, an experience that had thrown me into paroxysms of anticipatory anxiety for weeks.)

Not long after the wedding, Bondo made its appearance as part of a heroic effort by FH and one of his brothers to repair the extensive body damage on the Spitfire. FH had not done a thorough job: he had wrecked the car but, unfortunately, had failed to total it. I soon grew to flinch whenever Bondo, which we bought in alarming quantities, was mentioned. It stole away at least half of our weekends, necessitating trips to FH’s mother’s house so that he and my brother-in-law could work on the car.

Eventually the car was more Bondo than metal. Numerous parts were needed for the car as well, a seemingly endless chain of them, including (if I recall correctly) a new top. This auto odyssey continued through the majority of our marriage, which lasted less than four years before we separated for good. Subconsciously I began to associate the Spitfire with our marriage: Neither would ever be in working order.

The Spitfire was FH’s property after the divorce, but I don’t remember what became of it. However it ended up—whether junked and scavenged for parts, left to rust in someone’s gravelly side yard, or cubed by one of those giant car-crusher things—I imagined it feebly calling out for more Bondo.

When FH left—and he had good reasons—I was devastated. My bitterness lasted for years. But he contacted me on rare occasion, like a dot of Bondo here and there maintaining a slender connection. Both of us made second marriages that ultimately failed. The rare conversations or e-mails continued. In due time, as technology advanced, we became Facebook friends. Now, I believe, we may be on better terms than we ever were during our marriage, though we seldom talk and only occasionally e-mail. As the great short-story writer Alice Munro has said, “Nothing changes really about love” (“Amundsen”). Of course, FH hasn’t yet read this post, and life can turn funny on a person. But we’ve talked about these things in various marriage post-mortems, and I have faith that he’ll see the humor in it.

He is happily married now. He is an excellent attorney, a superb poet, an accomplished photographer. As far as I know, he is good at everything he does, and he remains the most intelligent person I’ve ever known. Quite unbeknownst to him, he shaped my subsequent life pretty decisively. But more of that in my next post. Are you still with me?

Working forever for free, or Why I’m so tired, part 2 ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 2 Comments

Talking about dreams is a chancy enterprise. Armchair dream analysts are a dime a dozen. I’ve always had lots of repeating dream motifs, like tornado dreams (relatively common, I’ve found), sliding-off-the-top-of-the-Gateway-Arch dreams (this motif from my childhood seems to be an original), and so forth. But who wants to unwittingly reveal something embarrassing, like the fact that they have the “teeth dream” motif? (Oddly, to my knowledge I’ve never experienced this. When I read what all the variants supposedly mean—see http://www.dreamdictionary.org/common/teeth-dreams—I’m surprised I don’t have this dream running like a tape loop in my head every night.)

So I figure it’s always dangerous to write about dreams. But people tell me to take more chances in life. And I do have a problem.

I worked as a writer, graphic designer, and webmaster for a research university. Since my early retirement in 2009, I have dreamed about work in some manner every night. Let me put that the way someone half my age would: Every. Single. Night.

One nightmare that, thankfully, doesn’t recur too often, and that long preceded my retirement, is the one in which the printer delivers a seriously flawed publication. In most cases I start paging through a sample copy and realize that I don’t recognize any of the material. Sometimes the material actually changes as I peruse it, becoming more and more unfamiliar and bizarre.

Given the inevitable problems with printers, this nightmare is pretty rational. In real life, I was once looking at a sample copy of our research magazine only to find that the ink had largely washed off one of the spreads. Another time I was paging through a copy delivered to my home, flipped by an illustration of a fish, and then a few pages later flipped by an illustration of the same fish. Wait. What? WHAT?! Indeed, the copy had one missing signature and one repeated signature. Because the campus’s mailing center got its shipment from Central Receiving before my office got ours, and because they had been exceptionally efficient, hundreds of copies had been mailed out before I had seen one. I spent a sleepless night not knowing if EVERY SINGLE COPY was screwed up. (Sleuthing later revealed that perhaps only a couple of hundred copies were, but those included copies delivered to legislators’ offices.)

If I had this dream every night I’d surely be in a mental institution by now. Fortunately, I only have it on occasion.

But back to retirement. Initially, for two years or so, I had dreams in which getting to my office was a labyrinthine exercise. Older readers will probably remember the overturned-ship disaster movie “The Poseidon Adventure,” where the floors became the ceilings and survivors had to negotiate upside-down staircases and improvised passageways. A great many of the dreams were like that.

Or I would find the office only to see that it was completely renovated in a confusing way. Or that my office had been moved to a bizarre place. Or that we had hired new people working in a far-off corridor whom I never saw and whose names I never learned. Each one of these motifs, plus a few others, made dozens of nightly appearances.

But the one that’s troubling my sleep the most over the past year or two is this: I’ve continued to work voluntarily, without pay, and I can’t stop because the research magazine is not quite done. It’s almost done—just a few more design editing changes to make—but I can’t get in touch with the designer. (In my job I did a multitude of publications and websites, most of which I designed myself. But in my dreams the reason for staying at work is always the research magazine, which took pride of place in real life and required collaboration with an honest-to-god, truly good designer.)

Until recently in these dreams I had worked voluntarily for a year or so, something that even my boss didn’t seem to recall. Lately—alarmingly—the time has increased to two years or even more. Sometimes my dream self wonders in a panic how I’m supposed to make a living when I’m not getting paid. Sometimes I wonder if I should lobby for a way to get paid retroactively, but I know this is impossible. Sometimes I remember that I can walk out the door any time I want without repercussions, because I’m not employed. But I always come back.

Clearly I feel I’ve lost my identity without my job. Clearly I feel I’m still needed. In fact, the publications portfolio I’d built up over the course of 20 years was largely dismantled after I left, and the research magazine is no more—ripe grounds for a sense of futility. You’d think that, since I understand what the dream means, it would stop. But no. Last night I had been working voluntarily for almost three years.

How long am I going to be slaving away when I’m supposed to be sleeping? I’ve done it for two years already. I’m 55; let’s suppose I make it to 60. Must I endure this dream 1,800 more times? Will it eventually reduce in frequency, like the others have? And if so, will something even more nightmarish come to the fore?

I can hear the advice most people would give: I should get myself to a shrink as soon as possible and exorcise this demon.

It would have to be pro bono, though. After all, I haven’t gotten paid for quite some time.

Why I’m so tired ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 2 Comments

Technically, this is cheating, because I wrote the same thing on Facebook. But I like it so much, I want to preserve it here as well.

I recently read about an online site (deathclock.com) that estimates your remaining years of survival. The site is probably a front for something even more sinister, like identity theft—but, being the fool that I am, I tried it out. It turns out that I’ve been officially dead for almost a full year. I hope my friends will now be willing to cut me more slack for my moodiness.

Just for kicks, I plugged in a much lower body mass index and discovered that this state of affairs would render me alive again, but give me only four more years of estimated survival.

Then, since I’m really a scientist at heart, I did three more trials with the original data, everything exactly the same, and discovered that the Death Clock is consistently pessimistic about me—but also is a bit wishy-washy. It’s possible I’ve actually been dead for four years, which would explain why there is so much dirty laundry lying about the house. Alternatively, I may have one year to live, or possibly three. Cheers!