Author: wideeyedfunk

Dogs like cookies.

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Crooked Hank the Young Corgi and Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog arranged themselves nearby while I put on the Superga kicks this morning. (Note: this is the first day suitable for kicks rather than snow boots, rain boots, hiking boots, or warm-knee-high leather boots in living memory. Sing praise and joy to the kicks.) I held each sock for Hank’s inspection, prior to getting my foot inside of it. Tibbit sniffed shoelaces and inspected soles. I cleared my throat and leaned back, the aging settee creaked and the comfy pillows squashed around me. I smiled to the congregation before me, and opened the liturgy of the Church of the WideEyedDogs. I chanted, monophonic, “All the dogs should have cookies, all the time.” In my mind I heard the congregation chant the response, “Cookies all the time.” Hank and Tibbit sat up, ears perked in a participatory manner. And, “The dogs should have the good kind of cookies with liver and bacon, not the cheap wheat flour ones.” Response, “The expensive liver cookies, all …

Get to going!

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It has been 352 days since I stepped onto a plane. Outrageous. I’m not saying I’m a jet-setting travel-mad wanderer, but I go here and there. Lately, it has been all here with wheels-on-the-ground there exclusively. Two weeks ago the WideEyedSpouse and I were so desperate to get out of town and move at more than 40 miles an hour that we drove 57 miles to a mall in Rochester to return a mail-order pair of pants that fit so poorly I wonder if they were even engineered for humans. Rochester. Surely you feel that pain as keenly as I? Numbed by the inconceivably boring stretch of the 90, we didn’t speak out loud for the whole return journey. Clinka-clinka-clinka every now and again as I wolfed among the the highway herd (baaaah!), signaling my intentions. Soon though, soon I fly again! Saturday I stood in the attic examining the luggage options as though I were preparing for an expedition. I’m going somewhere for three days. I could take a toothbrush and a credit card. …

Aggressive decency.

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Most days I tell myself, today feels good. Birds chirp during morning dog walks. Hankie Smalls the Corgi and Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog – innocent and protected – are untroubled by politics, economics, or impending societal collapse. They are cheerful and hopeful every single morning. Interesting adventures in the confounding universe await. They smile at me and expect love back. So I smile and feel good, breathing deeply in the cold, hydrocarbon scented city air. Then comes the newspaper. The morning news on the car radio. The news synopsis emails. The Facebook feeds. From them I learn who died and how. Who was assaulted, harassed, or disempowered. Who has had their legal rights, access to medicine, or control over their own bodies stripped from them in the night as our political leaders sneak sly, lobby-fueled, religion-fired legislation into the system. The senators must be tiring of my letters. Ugh. I grit my teeth and work through it, distracting myself with the minutiae of academic program management and research. Time is passing and …

Provisions

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We ripped through the night in the Mighty Pathfinder, Enrique Iglesias’ Bailando thumping from the speakers, windows open, warm winds blowing. The WideEyedSpouse didn’t slow for a mad-big construction bump and the Mighty P lurched and waggled excitingly. “Bailandoooo!” the Spouse wailed. An old man on a porch swing creaked back and forth in time to the song when our crazed journey paused at a traffic light, and a flashing neon sign wanted to be on the beat but couldn’t get there –an electric version of me trying for the rhythm but never finding it. Cracked sidewalks sketchy bus stops stinky gas stations barking dogs blatting broken muffler cars – they are all better in the languid warm of long summer evening. I smiled out into the evening air, crumpling my reusable grocery sacks tight to me.  My heart felt full and light and easy. Buoyant. Which was nice because there hasn’t been much joy in the WideEyedHomestead since my pal Hamish the Corgi died a few weeks ago. It’s my big question, my conundrum again, …

Garden avatar

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With a near supernatural restraint and indomitable force of WideEyed will, I did not buy new plants for the front garden this year. Ok. I did not by many plants for the front garden – only two sedum tiles which I cunningly split into a few pieces each resulting in six new plantings. Hah. Instead, I hacked bits from the Shasta daisies to fill in holes. These bits are droopy excuses for plants. I stare at them as the dogs and I stroll past them. I am distracted by them as I pull into the driveway after a long day of being Chained To An Office Chair.  They better perk up or I’m hitting the garden store down on Main Street. (Sounds charming, right? Like Main Street is some kind of throwback with interesting shops, flowers, smiling people. Uh. Nope. Major traffic artery right through the city. Lotta red lights and screaming and enormous potholes. The garden shop is nice though.) I tiled inferno weed zones with flagstone scraps and bricks reclaimed from a sadly …

Cats and Plants

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Yep. That’s a Maranta leucomeura. A scraggly specimen, too. The WideEyedSpouse espied it lurking on the back of a table at the Home Depot. “Special Buy” the tag said. I snorted. What a mess. The Maranta lives in the WideEyedHousehold now. You may be unimpressed by this prosaic moment. So would I be except for one extraordinary and upsetting fact. The Maranta can live here because Ancient Wiggins the Cat no longer does.  Old-struck, life-weary, that creaky, foul-tempered and steadfast pal of mine left the building on Saturday morning. By Sunday afternoon the Maranta had moved in, that opportunist. For eighteen years the household could harbor no plants without inevitable hoorka, hoorka, hoorka noises and slimy green piles on the carpets. Always on the carpet, never on the tile. Eighteen years of raptor intensity attacks on even ears of corn from the farmer’s market left unguarded on the counter. (We once hid them in the oven to prevent the hoorkas, forgot them, found them two weeks later moldering, warm, soft.) “As soon as that cat …