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We sure class up the Park.

Published by wideeyedfunk

That’s right. When the WideEyedHousehold hits Buffalo’s historic Delaware Park for walkies on a Sunday afternoon, the classiness level escalates. As it should. Olmsted designed this park for promenading. For nodding at neighbors. This past Sunday was cold and rainy. The wind slashed and our rain gear rustled. I made my standard comment, “This is just like weather the Aleutians!” Usually we have the park to ourselves in foul conditions, but after the Big Storm people were out running, skating, strolling like it was a sunny summer day.

Miss Tibbit displayed her manners and deportment for everyone by hooting and baying at a big, white pony-sized dog, an ancient Golden Retriever, a large piece of blowing trash (no one has ever claimed she is smart), a brownish dog, and a yellow lab who ran past with a ball in his mouth. Each time she heaved her 35 pounds against her little pink harness and jumped around on her hind legs while caroling out her high pitched psychopathic singing yelps. “Cookie?” I asked each time. Her butt plonked to the ground. See, classy.

I smiled at passersby, all of whom seemed particularly eager to meet my eyes. I wondered if my new mascara sample along with my bright green coat made my eyes stand out. Maybe it was my relentless good cheer despite the nasty weather. It didn’t matter, I was happy with the world and smiling like a maniac all over the park. Then, “why is your zipper down?” the WideEyedSpouse asked me as we stood in the kitchen after walkies. I snapped my eyes down to look and hands down to feel. Sure enough, below my tidily belted waistline, my jeans weren’t zipped. All those maniac smiles to all those strangers meeting my eyes…you can’t buy that kind of class.

Hamish the Dignified and Well-Mannered Corgi found himself a French fry wrapper along the walkies. I only noticed when I heard strange snuffling noises. He had forced his nose deep into the empty packet to lick any remaining molecules away. The little french fries printed on the packet wiggled and squirmed with his efforts. Miss Tibbit crept over to get some tastes. Hamish snarled out of the wrapper and bit her. Noisily. She cried.

Yipping, snarling, trash-eating, and ineptly clothed. That’s just how we roll here.

Leaving home. For good.

Published by wideeyedfunk

The WideEyedParents must have been insane in 1980. Or incredibly tired of Philadelphia. Because they bought a ramshackle Victorian farmhouse that stank of dog pee and had questionable electrics in a rural New Jersey town along a remote marine estuary. The paint peeled. The ticks out in the yard bit. The lights flickered when the wind blew too hard. I for one, preferred to avoid the spooky front hall – still don’t like it to this day.

Our fictive kin the WideEyedHeinrichs, came for the first annual Memorial Day picnic in 1981. We kids drank ourselves sick on store brand orange and grape soda while our parents lounged on the epically huge screen porch. We didn’t know it yet in 1981, but that screen porch would become the summer epicenter of our lives there. Last week I couldn’t watch when two of the WideEyedBrothers moved the old wicker furniture off of the porch and onto the moving truck.

We all expected my parents to die there. Not, like, tomorrow, but eventually. But then all of the WEFs moved away, Virginia, Arizona, New York (for now) and the parents were left rattling around with an attic full of junk and decades of memories tied into all of the rooms, decades of stuff weighing down the spaces. They are moving on.

The old blue boat we had left rotting in the yard for 30 years, gone. The brown boat we all water skied on during our high school and college years, gone. Brother J’s old blue pickup, still there. Maybe the new owners will like it.

I scrubbed and packed every room of the house last week. It went on the market today. Everyone believes I went down to help out my parents and sure, that’s true. I think I also went to spend time with the places and spaces of my childhood. My old bedroom is green now instead of a nasty peeling blue wall paper. But the light shines just as brightly into the room and when I crawled out the window onto the porch roof to wash windows, I could clearly smell and taste the Camel shorts I secretly smoked out there as a teenager. Yes, I got caught.

The living room, where I lurked as a sullen teen with MTV, is now an elegant parlor. The study hasn’t changed much since the Christmas we got Tetris and Brother M played it for 8 straight hours on the computer in there. When I was washing woodwork in the front hall, I snagged my fingernail on one of the nails that we used to hang our Christmas stockings as kids. When we moved there, we were seriously concerned that there was no fireplace for Santa, but allowed ourselves to be convinced that the steps in the front hall would work ok.

Hamish the Corgi and I walked down the lane every day while I was there. The same lane I ran down to catch the school bus and trudged home on after long, boring days of sitting still and listening, listening, listening. Hamish and I went down to the dock for dawn and evening light each day. I listened to the wind in the marsh grasses and together we took big sniffs of low tide. Birds cheeped. Fish jumped. The weirdly salty sound of the tide against the dock gurgled. One day was clear and still, another day I saw bands of fog that let in nature and the sky but erased the other houses down along the river. I think I realized why I feel so comfortable in the remote Aleutian Islands for research – they smell like home.

The home of my childhood is on the market. The house where my parents dreamed of a better life. The place where they gave us a good life. I hope it sells richly and fast, to a family looking for what we had there. Good bye Tuckahoe house. See you in my memories.

The dogs will not have the last peanut butter cup.

Published by wideeyedfunk

The vastiness of the cosmos has been replaced by wonderment at the intricacies of mammalian interiors around here lately. The WideEyedLaundry is full of gored up shirts and khakis. My mind, in moments of distraction, traces ropey muscles, rubbery tendons, and white bones rather than the sparkle of faraway stars and dark matter. I imagine muscles flexing, tendons pulling, and mighty bison hooves stomping on dusty ground.

A buffalo died at the zoo a week or two ago. The strange nature of my job calls on me to transform this creature from fur and flesh to clean, white skeleton. The process involves waterproof shoes, a U-Haul van rental, several students, many scalpels, and protective gloves.

Defleshing a bison used to be normal. Well, not yesterday normal, not for me. But most of our human past required the ability to make dinner from something that used to be walking around. Personally make dinner, not abstract-grocery-plastic-wrapped-into-a-frying-pan-dinner. Now, it’s a little strange for most people.

I just can’t help but notice the way things go together in there, under the skin. I can’t help but marvel that it all works. I can’t help but realize that the bison and all of the creatures who passed through the lab before it this past year smell like food. Except the woodchuck. He had been on the side of the road for a bit too long and he smelled greenish. Not grass greenish. Bile greenish.

Smelling dinner all day, being up to my elbows in what is now biological waste rather than forthcoming meals, makes me want to dine on things that didn’t once have perceptions.

Yesterday after the bison I was standing in line at Trader Joe’s buying pizza dough, cheese, and beer. (Not, you’ll notice, plastic wrapped meat). My eye fell on the impulse buy shelf at the checkout: “Perfect for the ride home!” the little sign said. I peered closer – ah, a little bag of dark chocolate peanut butter cups. Perfect indeed!

This evening there was one left. One. I poured myself a glass of wine and shuffled the little guy out of the packet. I don’t know what happened but it flew out of my hand. I heard it ping against the microwave door, knock against the front of the fridge. I saw a gleam of the foil wrapper as it spun to the floor. To the Dog Zone. That peanut butter cup is safe in my belly now, but I’m telling you that there was an ugly period of fending off Miss Tibbit and Hamish and scrambling around to beat them to it. We won’t discuss that further.

For better or for worse, I know what the inside of a bison looks like. Therefore, I, not the dogs, get the last peanut butter cup.

Fruit flies, a nasty old chair, and 100 years of fine art.

Published by wideeyedfunk

Coffeeshopchair I’m sitting here in an anciently ugly wingback not quite as nice as Hamish the Corgi’s chair at home and I’m paying for the privilege. Sort of. The price of the chair is probably included in the cost of my vanilla latte and slice of spiced apple cake.

My WideEyedButt is squashing this hard used feathered cushion as a my second choice of morning activities. First choice, oh happy happy first choice, was a bust.

I went to the museum to hang around with Anselm Keifer’s Der Morgenthau Plan. I intended to stand in front of Jackson Pollack’s Convergence. I read a biography or two about him since I was last in front of the image and I wanted to see if it felt different. Giacomo Balla’s dachshund in Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash missed me, I think, and I intended to visit.

None of them were there. On loan, gone, packed up. Who knows.

Now I find myself, sitting in a cloud of fruit flies and regular flies (a real problem this coffee shop might want to attend to), thinking about school kids on field trips to art museums around the country. Right NOW some 10-year-old’s phone is slack in his grubby kid-hand because Convergence squeezed past his texting, gaming, compulsively digitally-linked consciousness. A cackling 15-year-old girl has stopped giggling, mouth hanging open, because Der Morgenthau Plan’s vastiness and deep thrumming power interrupted her ability to be young and feckless for just a moment. And Bella’s dog, that little dog and his owner walking along a sidewalk one hundred and two years ago, that little dog is charming tiny babies in carriers, changing the snapping synapses in their little brains.

I was sad that I couldn’t be with the paintings this morning. I was ready to sulk here in my smelly coffee shop chair that is infested with public-ness. But I think I can share them. I think my day is better and my world is bigger knowing that other people’s hearts are pounding because of the paintings. Other people are going to lie in bed tonight with the memories of them floating in their dreams.

Numb.

Published by wideeyedfunk

The leaves on the ground are red and orange and gold and wet in the rain. The air stinks of fall, of soil going to sleep and grasses falling into dormancy. The squirrels stash nuts on my hose reel, on the little ledges of decorative trim all over the house, in the compost heap. Hamish the Corgi races smiling through the fluttering heaps of leaves at top speed, he thinks the rustling noises make it seem like he is going faster, faster, faster. Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog stands at the back door testing the temperature with her nose, holding one dainty foot above the rain-wet stoop. Maybe, maybe not. She can’t decide if she really wants to go outside.

I should feel something when I look at all this charm but for the next day or three or four I’m numb. Numb at best. A many-months long project finished up this morning when the grant proposal was submitted. I balanced working on it with other writing projects, other lab work, the start of archery season, and the rest of the WideEyedLife.

Consequently, the life isn’t feeling WideEyed. It feels more like dragging the self with shattered nails and scraped raw nerves up splintered steps to the office and chaining the hands with rusty, clattering blood soaked manacles to desk and keyboard, moving fingers up and down and hoping something useful comes from the hacking and clacking while paired hounds of leftover stress and residual anxiety howl in my cold and shivering emptiness.

Nice.

Tomorrow’s a new day. I’ll practice smiling in preparation.

My work colleagues are dogs. And no, I’m not a sheepherder.

Published by wideeyedfunk

Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog and Hamish the Corgi work with me all the day long. And they work hard on their dog chores. Miss Tibbit holds the cushion down on the chair. Hamish holds the chair in position. They sigh and stretch and mumble over their tasks. Every now and again, Hamish has to squirm into a better holding position, Miss Tibbit must squeeze herself tighter into her little dog-round position.

Today Miss Tibbit worked in the window seat in the front parlor. Hamish occupied himself with holding down the old red settee.

Dogs

I was so lonely. The keys wouldn’t type right on the keyboard. The words wouldn’t come in my careful writing. The day was bleak.

Dogcolleagues Now we’re back up here for the evening round of work. Sweet Tibbit is snoring and twitching with her full post-dinner belly and Hamish looks like he may have actually passed out. And, sure, the WideEyedSpouse is across the room, sighing and creaking around in his chair doing mysterious Spouse office things. But he’s with me in here only a couple of hours a day. My real work colleagues are over there on the floor and in the corner chair.

Sometimes I think it might be smart to haul myself up to the University to work. There are people there. It is just barely possible that I would benefit from some human interaction in my puzzling life.

…time is passing at an accelerated rate –

Published by wideeyedfunk

I looked out my office window this morning and saw yellow maple leaves scattered all over the yard. The borage in the garden is barely clinging to abundant life. The bees are a little less busy in the blooms. It isn’t summer anymore.

Time is passing.

Normally I don’t think much about the seasons changing, except to contemplate on the untidy lack of straightness in our planet’s axis relative to the orbital plane. That bothers me kind of a lot. Things should be straight, not at weird angles making everything all tilty and awkward and winter and summer.

But I keep noticing – time is passing.

Yesterday was trash day. Our junky old dishwasher didn’t last even an hour out on the curb. And that’s fine, except that I would be willing to swear that it just was trash day the day before that. It only comes once a week so if every day is trash day in my mind, what is happening to the days in between?

Time is passing in a blur of researching and writing and analyzing ancient tools and remnants of dinners eaten thousands of years past. There’s joy in the accelerated time phase. I’m confused a lot and rely on daily lists written in a little purple Moleskine. When the lists fail to direct my actions, I stand and pat my pockets, “where am I going?” I ask WideEyedResearchAssistant B. “Upstairs to the talk,” she tells me. I stagger out of the lab to find the seminar room.

I sort of wonder how long this superquick passage of time will last.

What day is this?

When deadlines physically manifest.

Published by wideeyedfunk

BusyDesk When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall deadline grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the office wall, and she looks you crooked in the eye and she asks if you finished your draft yet, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol’ WideEyedFunk always says at a time like that: “Is your draft done yet, WEF?” “Yes ma’am, it’s uploaded to dropbox.”

Misquote adapted from Big Trouble in Little China. 1986. Director John Carpenter. Twentieth Century Fox.

Chickens three ways.

Published by wideeyedfunk

Chickens. The WideEyedSpouse won’t let me have any. We have the space for a microflock and someone has to eat all of those extra worms in the worm bin. Which, if you recall, was also forbidden by the Spouse. He believes he has some power over the goings on of the WideEyedHousehold. Funny.

Chickens were in my life three ways today.

Chicken1 The Caribbean chicken spends most days with me. I carried that one from his home rolled in a tube. I took the Caribbean chicken to a frame shop here in Buffalo and I’m pretty sure that when we unrolled the canvas, sunshine and cheer glowed out at us. The framer laughed, couldn’t help herself. Sometimes I worry that I brought only one Caribbean chicken home. There were a dozen or more – we were left in the back room of a little gallery to flip through the canvases and pick which chicken would be moving to Buffalo with us. Do the others miss our little red chicken? Have they moved to homes in Paris, Kansas, Toronto, Heidelberg?

The next chicken in my life today simultaneously was glorious and wretched. Chicken 2, yeah we’ll call it Chicken 2, was a well-picked over carcass reeking of Myron Mixon’s smoked chicken rub. Except that that happy delicious reek which originated in our backyard smoker was overlain by the stink of rotting meat. And visually, I can’t even begin to explain the nightmare of the appearance of Chicken 2. See, Chicken 2 currently resides in the flesh eating dermestid beetle colony in the lab at the university. We’ve taken to roasting whole chickens around here so that I have food for the little beetle guys when our road kill supply runs low. They ate the Canada Goose and we haven’t skinned the raccoon yet, so bony little carcass Chicken 2 is squatting in the tank under a shroud of moving black beetle carapaces. Looking at it is mesmerizing, like watching the tide but less comfortable than that. You can really feel them creeping around on your own person, a gift that keeps giving for hours of psychological twitches. So that was Chicken 2.

Probably the last chicken in my day, Chicken 3, arrived just before dinner. I sort of hope this is the last chicken of the day, because otherwise we are moving into weird territory. Chicken 3 is printed on a chair in the Anthropologie catalog. I instantly wanted it. If I can’t HAVE chickens, I should be able to SIT AMONG chickens, right? This makes perfect sense to me and perhaps you can understand why the WideEyedSpouse’s life is made complicated sometimes. Chicken 3 is going to haunt me and there’s a good chance that when I have the new yard sale settee recovered, it’s getting chickens.

Settee

Yeah, chickens.

what is now and what will be..

Published by wideeyedfunk

My dream self is a deadly street fighter. My dream self can speak 4 languages fluently. My dream self has several published books, can fence (with a sword, not stolen merchandise), and has a Nobel Prize.

She has a tattoo of a stately oak (Quercus coccinea Muenchhausen) scribed on her back and joie de vivre on her arm. My dream self can drive race cars and ski the triple black diamond trails. My dream self is smart, she is confident, she never eats too many potato chips in one sitting.

She is perpetually 35 years old, young, fit, lovely, and doesn’t need reading glasses. My dream self is kind, mature, and gracious. She never has too much or too little to say and never, ever makes a fool of herself. She has never disappointed people, or been disappointed by them. She doesn’t fail or falter.

I have, I do. I’m old. Accomplishments are things past. Regrets, disappointments live long in my heart.

But Dream-Self reminds Me-Self: dreams are not what was. Dreams are what is now and what will be.

…

You’ll have to excuse me now. I have some things to do.