IN THE GROOVE

As my family and I approach our official relocation to Austin next week, it seems fitting to share the story of my first days as an Austin resident in August 1982.

It wasn’t my first time to the city; I’d been there many times before, most recently the month prior, for college orientation. It wasn’t even my first time to live there. My family lived there from 1966 to 1968 while my dad was in law school at UT.

But those times were different. Those times, I was either a tourist or just a kid. This time, I brought linens and an alarm clock with me. And all my cassettes. My mail would come to this address (707 Jester Center East, Austin, TX 78787). I was going to live there. The last time I had moved to another city was in 1971, when we moved from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to Duncan, Oklahoma.

So I was not only starting college, far from home. I was ending an 11-year run of residential stability reaching back to second grade.

I wasn’t so much nervous as excited. And I surely wasn’t expecting a negative experience. I had no reason to. I had kicked ass on m ACT, I had the financial support of my family, and the first UT home game was in less than a week. But it was all very, very, new.

My dad drove me down from Duncan with all my stuff, which I’m sure seemed like a lot at the time. I had no idea that, 20 years later, I would refer to that quantity of mass as “a medium-sized trip to the store” or a “quick run to the landfill.” Anyway, we got to the dorm in mid-afternoon, so that we could be assured of maximum heat and humidity.  We quickly realized it would be hours, if not days, before one of the three rolling carts the dorm generously provided the 1000-plus students moving into Jester that day would be available. So we decided to go manual. And by “we” I mean “Dad” decided that “Lee” could haul his possessions, one armful at a time, while he “stood guard.”

It gave me great comfort to know that my two bath towels and three rock band posters would not fall prey to roving bands of new wave music-loving criminals looking to dry off after a shower.

Speaking of new wave music, my first actual memory of my dorm – and my first dorm neighbor introduction – came when I stepped off the elevator and into the 7^th floor lobby for the first time. The moment the doors opened, our ears were blasted by the sound of The Go-Go’s “Vacation” album being played at a volume level I had never actually heard inside a residential structure.

To my great joy – and my dad’s great horror – the source of the broadcast was in the room next to mine. There, I made the acquaintance of a young man named David Esparza. He was from El Paso, which really put my dad in a bind because my dad is also from El Paso, which made him want to like this kid, but at the same time, this kid was actively, unapologetically, wrecking what remained of Dad’s hearing, which made him want to kill David Esparza with hammers.

Dad’s issues aside, I was captivated by David and his music and the noise and the whole atmosphere. As corny as it is to say it, the best word to describe it is “intoxicating.” The environment – my new home – was brimming with sound and energy and people, and I loved it.

The next day, I heard that one of the other dorms was hosting a free hamburger supper, so I got out my campus map to see where it was and how far away. After about 20 minutes of increasingly anxiety-filled study, I left my dorm, map in hand, in search of no-cost meat. Holding the map in front of me like the worst kind of tourist, I crossed the street from my dorm to another dorm, where I found the hamburger supper.

Too hungry and naïve to be embarrassed, I walked toward the picnic tables they’d set up. I was just about to go through the buffet line when I heard music. It was so odd. Not that there was music, but it was a song I was familiar with but yet could not remember where I’d heard it before. I looked up for the source of the music and saw it was coming from the third floor of the host dorm. One of the residents had wedged two speakers into his open window, filling the space entirely. I remember thinking it was such a “rebellious” and “college” thing to do.

But I still couldn’t place this song, even though I knew by heart. Which I know makes no sense. But what was happening was the musical equivalent of seeing someone whom you have only seen in one context, say, the clerk at your local 7-11, but instead of seeing him – as you do every day – in his vest standing behind the counter, you run into him in a club downtown, dressed to go out, hanging with friends, and drinking a beer. You know the face, but it’s in an entirely foreign context, so it takes a while to figure out who it is.

The song was “You Might Recall,” from the “Three Sides Live” album by Genesis. To my knowledge, it has never been played on the radio. There was no MTV video for it. And none of my high school friends owned the record. I had only heard the song – and I’d heard it hundreds of times – on my record player in my bedroom. It was and still is my favorite Genesis song. And now some random college student I’d never meet was blasting it out of his dorm room window. And the sensation was magical. I felt connected to everything. The guy in his dorm. The other people around me who were hearing it too. I was completely alone in that I knew no one around me, but I felt like I was surrounded by friends.

I don’t know if these two musical run-ins were random or inevitable experiences. Meaning, I don’t know they were unexpected events which impacted me in a real and unforeseeable kind of way, or if they were bound to happen just because of who I am and how I’m wired.

Either way, I’m glad they did. They are among my happiest and most vivid college memories. And I hope any kid going off on his own for the first time should be so lucky.

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver

JACK WEAVER—DOB: 29JULY2000

The story of the birth of our fourth child, Jack, starts about nine months before he was born.

No, not that. Such dirty minds.

I’m referring to the reactions Kandyce and I got from friends and loved ones when we told them we were expecting Child No. 4 when Children Nos. 2 and 3 were not yet 22 months old. For some reason, they found it hard to understand how the same people they had seen wither – physically, mentally, spiritually, and financially – under the unending pressure and strain of 24/7 twin-based hell would voluntarily create yet another life.

Hey, we were as surprised as anyone. But, seriously, people couldn’t even pretend to be happy for us. Not the grandparents, not our closest friends, not our doctor,

After we realized people were not receiving this “joyful announcement” with the same enthusiasm they had greeted previous such announcements, we tried to manage expectations by dialing down the joyfulness in our announcement.

Rather than telling people, “WE’RE PREGNANT!!” (to which they usually replied, “ARE YOU INSANE?!?”), we simply said, “So…yeah…we’re pregnant…again…” (to which they replied “Ha! Ha! Oh wait—you’re not joking are you?).

Exactly one person managed to not take a dump on our big news and that was my grandmother Mary Jane – Jack’s great-grandmother – and even her kind words came with an asterisk since she was the only immediate family member after whom we had named an existing child. When I told her over the phone, at Christmas, that we were having another baby, she replied – after an uncomfortably long silence – thusly:

“I know it doesn’t seem like it right now. But this is a wonderful thing.”

That was it. Happy Baby Havin’, Y’all!!

Our already-desperate situation only got worse as the pregnancy wore on. Between the time of our joyful announcement and the day Jack was born, the following things happened:

* I got hired to work in Wichita Falls in March and left my pregnant wife, 2-year-old twins, and 7-year-old to finish up the school year in Austin.

*  About two weeks after I moved out, Kandyce was unlawfully fired for whistleblowing and we went the next five months trying to get her back wages paid to her, meaning our family of five – and eventually six – had to get by on my rookie reporter wages.

* My kind sister-in-law offered to keep the twins for a week or so around Easter, so that Kandyce could pack up the house by herself while simply being pregnant, not pregnant and chasing down twin 2-year-old terrorists. After just two days, my SIL called, weeping, saying the twins were just too much to deal with and could we please come get them?

*  We had to pull our oldest out of her private school in Austin because her principal there put her inside a refrigerator box to “help her behave.” We moved her up to Duncan, Oklahoma, where I was staying with my dad and stepmom and commuting to work in Wichita Falls. She enrolled in second grade there for the last month of school and has pretty much hated me for that fact ever since. She also didn’t like that Granddad forced her to make her bed every day. In fact, she probably ranks that above the school on the Things I Hate Dad For list.

* We all moved to Wichita Falls over Memorial Day weekend.

* We all moved back to Duncan over the July 4 holiday. (I refer you to the “family of five living off a reporter’s wage” passage above.)

* Kandyce’s water broke – for real this time – and, again, it's really misleading to call it "water" – on the night of July 28 up in Duncan, two weeks prior to the date we had selected for the baby to be induced.

* Kandyce’s brother drove her down to Wichita Falls in his truck, with me following. She rode with him because he is a veterinarian and I’m a smart ass.

We got to the hospital around 1:30 a.m. Since this was her third pregnancy – the second one being twins – we figured things would go quickly, and thirteen hours later, Jack was born.

I honestly do not remember a thing about the time between 1:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. I could ask Kandyce, but she just read the blog I wrote about what a tool I was during Margaret’s birth and is presently irked at me right now for my actions from 22 years ago. So…I guess I just sat in the delivery room like a good boy and didn’t eat any cheeseburgers.

There were a few anxious moments when Jack was delivered. The cord was around his neck and he emerged a little “floppy.” I watched the doctors’ and nurses’ eyes closely to gauge their level of concern, if any. I didn’t sense any alarm from them, so I decided not to be alarmed myself.

After a few minutes, Jack made his first, scratchy peeps and was more or less silent for the next several hours. He was, by far, the quietest baby we’d ever had. And, knowing he was out of the woods medically, I greeted his silence as a grand karmic gesture that we had, in fact, suffered enough and were being rewarded with a quiet baby.

By the end of the day, Jack’s bruised vocal chords had sufficiently healed and I was disabused of my obvious fantasies from earlier in the day. Jack would go on to be the loudest, shriekiest, most demanding-est baby our family – or any family – has ever known.

There was only one sure way to appease that child and that was to hold him at all times, preferably, with his bald little noggin pressed firmly between the bosoms of a woman. Which I totally understand, at a personal level, but it is a pain in the ass when it’s not your head and you don’t have bosoms.

The next morning, I awoke and realized that we had no diapers, no onesies, and no formula. While I was at Walmart rounding these things up – and wondering just how late we could pay rent – I recalled that with previous pregnancies, we had not needed to get diapers and such right away. And then I remembered it was because with previous pregnancies, our friends and family had hosted baby showers. But not so much with this one. (I refer you to the “Oh wait—you’re not joking are you?” passage above.)

No doubt, the year 2000 was a tough year, probably the hardest year of our married lives – at least up to that point. But my grandmother was right. That baby did, in fact, end up being a wonderful thing.

Happy Birthday, Jack!

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver

MARGARET WEAVER—DOB: 29JULY1992

The story of the birth of our first child, Margaret, starts about a month before the day she was born, also known as “The Day We Learned That Pretty Much Everything “Feels” Like Labor When You’ve Never Been In Labor Before And It’s Your Original Due Date And You Actually Just Peed On Yourself But Wouldn’t It Be Fun To Go The Hospital At 5am Like For Practice?”

Kandyce had taken up residence on the sofa some weeks before mostly because our bed didn’t have a helpful right angle built into the mattress allowing her to wedge herself in such a way as to accommodate her various…parts. There is also a slight chance that I was a high-strung sleeper who was disturbed by every toss, turn, and whining complaint and she slept on the couch out of unconditional love.

Anyway. It was a long time ago.

Continuing, she came into the room, in high dudgeon.

“Lee!! My water broke!! We need to go the hospital!!”

I had trained my entire life for this moment. It was my time to shine.

“Are you sure?”

She was sure. Which doesn’t mean she was right. It just means she was sure. So, we went to the hospital, where the nurses greeted us with all the warmth and charm of that troll from The Holy Grail.

Who…is your insurance carrier?

What...is your method of payment?

Why…are you here when all you’ve done is pee yourself from coughing/sneezing/breathing?

So, we went home. A week or so later, she woke me up in the middle of the night again. This time, it wasn’t her water breaking – or even her “water breaking” – but rather actual, hardcore labor. She was in terrible pain.

Several hours later, her labor pains were diagnosed as “Symptoms of Excessive Fried Chicken Consumption.” So, we were sent home empty-handed again.

To be fair, we were now two-plus weeks past her original “due date,” a fictional and arbitrary “X” on a calendar we were now convinced had been randomly selected by our “obstetrician.” I thought it fair to forgive her any imagined or phantom labor symptoms. Personally, I would have pushed out a kidney just to put an end to the whole tiresome affair.

Which brings us to the morning of July 29, 1992, when she came into the room at 5 am and woke me up.

“Lee? My water broke?? We need to go the hospital??”

“Uh-huh.”

I honestly think she considered going back to the sofa, but her “mama grizzly” instincts kicked in and she insisted that this was the real deal. So, down the hospital we went and, a mere 17 hours later, Margaret was born.

Between our “check in” and Margaret’s “arrival” many things happened.

Kandyce and I walked around the hospital and the hospital parking lot and the neighborhood around the hospital and to the freaking moon and back, all in hopes of “speeding this thing along,” because “this thing” was, once again, not “actual labor” but rather “obvious symptoms” of “mental illness.” Or whatever.

Anyway, our doctor finally grew weary of the whole charade and broke Kandyce’s water manually, which was quite possibly the most primitive and grotesque and OH MY GOD YOU COULD AT LEAST WARN A GUY BEFORE YOU SHOVE A CROCHET NEEDLE UP IN MY WIFE’S BUSINESS thing I have ever witnessed.

And one last word on this “breaking water” thing. Fellas, if you’ve never seen it and are under the impression that because “doctors” call it “water” that it in any way resembles actual water, let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. Because it is so very much not water.

Ick.

Okay, so now Kandyce’s water was broken and the clock was ticking! Things were really going to start popping now! So much so, that the male nurse, the anesthesiologist, and I almost had to miss parts of the 1992 U.S. Olympic Basketball Team – better known as the Original Dream Team – as they steamrolled Germany by 50 points. Thank God there was a TV right there in the delivery room so we could all attend to Kandyce’s needs while still enjoying the history being made in Barcelona.

After the game, I was famished. It was late afternoon and I’d been stuck in that hospital all day. Kandyce had pretty much stalled out, so I made a quick run to get a burger, which I was kind enough to bring with me back into the delivery room so that she could at least enjoy the smell of it, at which time I finally saw just how hormones can affect an otherwise pleasant woman’s personality in the worst kind of way.

Then, only six more hours later, Margaret was born! She came out, literally, two minutes before the docs were going to have to perform an emergency C-section. She also came out, literally, at the stroke of midnight, and we were given the choice of choosing July 29 or July 30 for her birthday. We more or less flipped a coin and chose July 29.

We were officially new parents! And since this was our first pregnancy/childbirth experience we did not yet know that nurses are exactly like IT guys, car mechanics, Home Depot employees, and anyone else you are forced to deal with under stressful circumstances and know absolutely nothing about the ONE thing they know EVERYTHING about. Or at least claim to.

There is something about that kind of knowledge inequality that produces the worst kind of communication breakdowns. And by “communication breakdowns” I mean “cruel and intentional lies.”

What I’m talking about is this. I am a bright guy. My wife is a bright gal. We are a bright couple. We have read books and climbed mountains (not really) and can drive cars (well, I can) and have basically done lots of stuff. And yet, despite our competency in every other aspect of our lives – and despite the fact that we had personally witnessed no fewer than 3,000,000 far stupider people successfully have babies – our nurses had us convinced there was no way we weren’t going to bring terrible harm to our child.

The list of things they told us that we might do – or might not do – or allow, evil, demonic forces to commit – was so long and frightening and contradictory that we fully expected our baby to burst into flames within the 17 minutes of being released into our care.

We spent the first month in the hospital’s ER driveway, just to be safe.

Not really. In truth, we spent the first month in this weird no man’s land between “Mind-Numbing Exhaustion” and “Anxiety-Based Insomnia Because Of That Whole 17 Minutes Thing.”

Personally, I was more angry than exhausted. I remember feeling actual fury that I kept having to wake up. I mean, for God’s sake, I had just gone to sleep! Who lives like this??

Okay, that bring us to pretty much the end of the pregnancy/child birth/new baby story of Margaret and I can’t help but notice I come off looking so far. So, in the spirt of being ‘fair and balanced,’ I will end with a little vignette from when Margaret was about six months old.

My employer at the time had given me a pager. I have no idea why. But anyway, Kandyce and I had – at least theoretically – worked out a code so that I could differentiate between a regular “call me” beep and a more urgent “emergency” beep. That said, our code was a really stupid one, but we were young and in love and we thought we could take on the world. Anyway, rather than making “911” our emergency code – a code that had not, in 1992, reached common-knowledge-level awareness – we used “911” for regular “call me” and “911***” for “emergency.”

I see now the flaw in our system. And I am sufficiently embarrassed. Can we move on?

So, anyway, I was downtown one night, at play practice, when my beeper went off.

911***

I tore out of the studio like a madman, jumped in my truck, and ran every stop sign between the theatre and our house. I did a four-wheel drift around the last corner and drove the truck over the curb, across the lawn, and right up to the front porch.

There, I saw Kandyce. She was doing a kind of nervous-happy-dancing thing like little kids do when they have to pee really bad.

I jumped out of the truck and saw that her expression was not so much one of panic as nervous guilt.

Before I could say anything, she said, “Was 911 star star star for emergencies or not emergencies?? Because um…we need diapers?”

Maybe those nurses weren’t so wrong after all.

Happy Birthday, Margaret!!

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

It was February 1986 and I was walking across the UT campus with my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend. We had just eaten lunch in the cafeteria in her dorm (Kinsolving) and were walking in the direction of my dorm (Jester). The route’s distance was about as far as you could walk within the boundaries of the UT main campus. It was midday, between classes, and the sidewalks were jammed with students.

We had been dating several months, going back to the fall semester. Her name was Jan. Not really, but there’s no way I’m going to say her real name. No sense giving her even more cause to track me down and murder me. And, to be clear, my death at her hands would not have been unjustified. On accounta I surely needed killin.

Anyway, we were just a block or two into our “commute” and talking about nothing or whatever, when she slowed a bit and turned toward me.

“Lee, what’s going on?”

Now, I was only 21 at this time and fairly inexperienced in the ways of the world, and this was the first time I’d been asked this question (that I can remember, at least). If I knew then what I knew then, I would have had some inkling as to how bad things were about to get.

What I did know was that I had stopped dating her emotionally about a month before. Not that I was evolved enough at the time to know such nuance existed, much less to know when to apply it to myself. I simply knew that we were continuing with our “dating” routine despite my intense desire to do anything but that.

We continued to eat meals together, watch movies together, and go to church together (although, I had ducked out of that particular boyfriend duty the previous two weeks). We continued even to make out on a regular basis, clear evidence of my commitment to our routine.

All the while, I absolutely, truly believed that if I could just keep going through these motions long enough, our relationship would eventually, magically, painlessly end, and I would be spared the discomfort of having to break up with her.

Because, you see, I had never broken up with a girl. They had, heretofore, always broken up with me, a process I found tremendously uncomfortable in its own right. And because Jan was a sweet, thoughtful, girl who had never done anything mean or rotten to me or anyone else, the last thing I wanted to do was make her feel as bad as I had when those other girls had dumped me.

So you see? By stringing her along, I was trying to be thoughtful! And sensitive! I was the good guy in this scenario! Totally!

Anyway, my answer to her question went something like this.

“Um.”

We walked a few steps in silence. But not nearly as many as I would have liked.

“Well?? What’s happening?”

“I…um…I…I…”

I considered it an act of abject cruelty that Jan refused to finish that sentence for me. I would have accepted any number of alternative endings, including but not limited to:
* want to break up
* have to leave the country because I killed a man in Reno just to watch him die.
* am totally gay
* will be dead in a week from (fill in the blank).
* am actually a hologram and--*boop* (disappears into the 8^th dimension)

But no, she was going to make me do it.

“Well?”

“I think I don’t think I want to go out anymore.”

^^exact words^^

We walked a very long time in silence. WAY longer than I would have liked. The sun set and rose again. Seasons changed. Babies were born, lived, and died. And still we walked.

Finally, she broke the silence. And by “broke” I mean to say “shattered, destroyed, blew up, obliterated, and nuked from orbit.”

“WERE YOU EVER GOING TO TELL ME?? WERE YOU?? WERE YOU EVER GOING TO TELL ME??”

At some point, Jan threw her books to the ground and climbed atop a bus bench. She wasn’t a tall girl, so this act put her head about a foot above mine, giving her the aura of command and authority otherwise lacking in her terrifying outburst.

It was as public a beating as any person has ever received.

And, for perhaps the first time in my life, my boy-girl instincts actually guided me in the right direction, as a tiny voice inside told me to just stand there, in silence, and take it.

I stood there for a while. As did many others. It was quite a spectacle.

Jan did, eventually, calm down and we (sort of) moved on and (sort of) became just friends. And I wish I could say I learned a life-long lesson that day and never again took the coward’s way out of a relationship, but that would be a lie.

Two years later, I “broke up” with a girl by moving to another state without telling her.

To be fair, we’d only been dating a few weeks – and I did not ditch her consciously.

Hear me out.

I lived in Santa Fe and she lived in Albuquerque. We saw each other only on the weekends. So, after one such weekend, during which we went on a Saturday picnic up in the mountains and drank wine and snuggled like two people who are about to never see each other again, but just don’t know it yet, might do. I went back to Santa Fe the next day, which was Sunday.

The next day – Monday – I received a phone call inviting me to interview for a job in Austin. I flew out Wednesday, interviewed Thursday, and flew back Thursday night. On Friday, they called me and offered me the job. I gave my notice at work that day and started packing the next day. In a week, I was gone.

I simply forgot.

About a month or so after moving to Austin, I remembered. I nearly fainted. It was the worst thing I’d ever done, a milestone which was surpassed two seconds later when I did an even worse thing: I decided to simply leave things be.

It had been a month already, anyway. What good would come from calling her now?

On the bright side, I went many years before doing anything worse than that. And it had nothing to do with ditching a girl without telling her. In fact, the very next time I faced that decision – to just come out and tell the girl it was over – I ripped that bandaid off like big boy and did the right thing.

And twenty-five years later, we’re still together.

So…progress?

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver

IT’S DOG-EAT-CAT WORLD

Growing up, we had a handful of family pets – most notably three beagles: Samson, Delilah, and the product of their union, Sally.

My dad brought Samson and Delilah home, as freshly weaned puppies, on the same day in the summer of 1975. They were both AKC registered, purchased from different bloodlines, so that they could be bred.

My dad, a corporate lawyer with no prior record of moonlighting, never bothered to explain his sudden decision to go into the beagle retailing business. But, I would learn later on my own that when you’re the dad you just get to do stuff like that. No questions asked.

And because my dad also ALWAYS did things the right way – and, more importantly, the most difficult way – the pups’ first very first night with us was not spent with us, but rather outside in their doghouse, which my dad built himself.

True to his nature, Dad offered false hope to neither the puppies nor his kids, ruling out any chance we might bond during long nights of them licking our faces and laying across our feet and generally being adorable.

Instead, they were more like our dad’s tools and our mom’s cigarettes – mysterious and powerful objects which we knew existed, but were forever beyond our grasp.

Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but the plan did call for Samson and Delilah to be “outside dogs.” And outside dogs they would be, from Day One.

On the bright side, this arrangement did spare us the grief and headache of attending to whining puppies during those first nights. In fact, to my knowledge, Dad was the only person to care for them during those midnight hours. This was a deviation of such magnitude from his normal my-home-is-my-castle task-delegating policy that I can more easily imagine he simply stared them both in the eye, on that first night, and whispered, through gritted teeth, “If I hear one peep out of you, you will regret it for the remainder of your days.”

Hey, it worked on his children.

Anyway, Samson and Delilah may have spent their first night outside, but that is not to say they were alone, because our housecat Eloise stood watch the entire night, perched safely atop a hedge beside their dog house.

Eloise was the strangest creature to ever live on the earth. I am not exaggerating. If Eloise were a person, she would have been, well…nobody I ever met or heard of. Although, just sitting here, scrolling through my mental Rolodex of odd characters, I must admit that the image of “Tim the Enchanter” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail comes to mind. Or, perhaps, Courtney Love’s angrier, crazier, twin sister.

(Actually, if I’m being completely honest about it, the creature Eloise most closely resembled was … my mom. Which would make Eloise the second strangest creature to ever live on the earth.

No shit. Welcome to my world.

Suffice it to say that “finicky,” “anti-social,” and “eager to claw great hunks of flesh from bone” were not traits limited only to our feline pet. Just ask Dad.)

Anyway, prior to the beagles’ arrival, Eloise had never so much as glanced at the bush in question, much less hunkered down in it for the night. Come to think of it, I’m not sure she’d ever climbed anything – other than an innocent human’s bare leg – before that day.

But there she was, like she knew what she was doing. And while she could not have known what, exactly, those wiggling blobs of fur meant to her, she must have sensed something was amiss – and that it required her undivided attention. So, she stayed out there all night. Up in that bush. Staring at those dogs.

I have a theory about that night.

As an adult cat, Eloise was much bigger than the puppies, but I have to figure she knew, at some limbic-brained level, that her physical advantage would not last. And while there were no witnesses – and Eloise was silent on the subject – I’ve come to believe that at some time during the night, Eloise did in fact come down from that bush and put the whoop on those hounds, because they never once, even when they were older, gave that cat any trouble.

Okay, that’s not true.

There was one instance when those dogs set aside whatever treaty had been negotiated between themselves and Eloise and tried to truly, sincerely, kill that cat.

Samson and Delilah were both full grown at this point, as was Sally, their “daughter.” And for reasons known only to the God Of Idiot Teenage Boys, some unnamed numbskull thought it would be funny to secure a tanned rabbit pelt to Eloise’s back – picture a furry Superman cape – and toss Eloise out into the backyard among the hounds.

The numbskull was right. It was funny. And we can laugh about now for one reason only. We can laugh today because Eloise was one-zillionth of a step faster than the dogs, in particular Samson, who abandoned all notions of interspecies détente and went directly for the kill shot on Eloise. After some commotion, we rounded up the baying hounds and Eloise, eventually, returned to earth.

Recently, I came across a blues song by Texas singer/songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard that could have been inspired by the Eloise/rabbit pelt/Samson backyard showdown.

Well I saw this old dog, he was chasin’ this rabbit.

I saw a dog, he was chasin’ this rabbit.

I saw a dog, he was chasin’ this rabbit.

It was on a Sunday, about noon.

I said to the rabbit, “You gonna make it?”

I said to the rabbit, “Are you gonna make it?”

I said to the rabbit, “You gonna make it?”

And the rabbit said, “Well, I’ve got to.”

Anyway, we had all of those dogs and the cat for about 10 more years. Delilah died first. I don’t remember why. A few days later, Samson crawled under a bush and died. He just gave up. Sally and Eloise were euthanized when my parents separated. That was pretty messed up, now that I think about it.

But not terribly surprising.

I tell this hodgepodge of stories because I think stories of how people and animals relate say a lot – not so much about the animals as the people. And you’re all free to draw whatever conclusion you want about the people in this story.

The conclusion I draw is that it’s a dog-eat-dog (or cat) world – for both pets and people. And sometimes we do the things we do simply because we’ve got to.

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver

VACATION FROM SUMMER VACATION

This may sound un-American, but I am against summer vacation.

Now, I do not mean my summer vacation; I don’t get one of those, so there’s nothing for me to be against. I’m referring to the interminable break my children take from school during the summer months. (I assume other children have this same layoff, but I don’t care about them. Unless they spend one second of this idle time in my house, in which case I do care and they can just turn around and go back home.)

I don’t know anyone who is fully on board with this cultural relic called summer vacation. It’s too long, it’s too expensive, and it takes place during the least hospitable time of year, when the last thing anyone wants is to be close to someone for any reason other than to murder them for their ice cream sandwich.

And yet, we cling to this burdensome custom nonetheless. Like driving on the right side of the road, overpaying for health care, and mindlessly, inexplicably, shopping the day after Christmas, it is an unshakeable tradition, in America, to take summers off from school.

It’s what we do. I get that.

Now, would some explain to me why do we do it?

Oh sure, I’ve no problem gleaning on my own why we started doing it. Simply applying general common sense and my own caffeine-based powers of imagination, it would seem logical to say that the origins of the summer vacation have their roots in our early agricultural economy, some cultural leftovers from our European ancestry, and the technological inability in those dark, pre-air-conditioned days to turn hot into cool.

Sound good to you?

Sure it does.

And…um…which of these reasons still hold true today?

Right.

The worst thing about summer vacation is the kids’ constant needling and whining for me to take them somewhere. It’s almost like they want me to be an asshole to them.

Some random child with my last name: Dad? Can we go to (a place that is not our house) (during a time when the sun is up)?

Me: Hell, no. Are you crazy? We’ll all die. Go watch TV.

I might feel differently about summer vacation if I didn’t live in Texas. Vacationing in the summer, in Texas, is like holding an AA convention on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras; there’s simply no chance of achieving the desired outcome.

Granted, my experience is limited to summertime in Texas. I’ve no idea what July in New Hampshire is like; it may be delightful. But, we have an expression here in the Lone Star State that, I think, is on point. It goes something like this:

So what? I don’t live in New Hampshire. What has New Hampshire ever done for me? Fuck off, New Hampshire. Would somebody, please, bring me a beer before I commit a crime?

To be sure, kids need a break from school. And I’m in no way endorsing year-round school; I get enough bad news from those people during the nine months I have to deal with them already.

But, honestly, how many of us are really taking summer family vacations? By which, I mean loading up the Country Squire station wagon and spending a month or so on the road, eating baloney sandwiches, buying beef jerky at roadside stands, and taking Polaroids in front of the Grand Canyon.

Before you answer that you do, in fact, take such vacations, take a moment to imagine how much more enjoyable your Eisenhower-era fantasy road trip would be if you could actually roll down the Country Squire’s windows and breathe in nature’s bounty without scorching the lining of your lungs?

I’m just saying, nearly every one of our country’s National Parks are open in March. And October. Same goes for hotels, interstates, and airports. Ours is a year-round economy.

We could do this, America. There’s no reason not to. Nobody can afford a month-long vacation, much less three months on the road. Heck, most of us can’t afford the gas it takes to drive to Dallas and back.

Speaking of things we can’t afford, schools are air-conditioned now, so why am I paying to keep my children comfortable when there’s a perfectly good, taxpayer-funded, ice house right down the street?? Where’s this “Nanny State” I hear so much about?

And, lastly, minor children aren’t bringing in the summer harvest in 2014, are they? So why are structuring our entire society around a practice which no longer exists? (Not to harp on it, but could some please confirm for me that minor children aren’t bringing in the summer harvest in 2014? With the Koch Brothers running things, this isn’t something I can just take for granted.)

It’s settled, then. Let’s demand that the meager dozen or so weeks we’re given to bond as families take place at a time of year not known for heat-induced mental illness and an annual up-tick in violent crime.

Let’s do summer in the spring. Or we could go 50/50: six weeks in spring, six weeks in fall.

I heard that’s what they’re doing in New Hampshire.

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver