I had a pretty good idea what to expect when I hopped in the car last Friday night to catch what was being billed as “The Zombies 50th Anniversary Tour” at Montgomery College’s small performing arts center in Silver Spring. It had all the makings of a mega-Bucket List item for an aging baby boomer like me: See the once-big 1960s rock band one time before you die, but, of more immediate concern, before they die.
Though I felt drawn to the event, I frankly expected the evening to be more depressing than enjoyable. I couldn’t help contextualizing the names of the group’s hits—observing, for example, that if this is the “Time of the Season,” in the Zombies’ case it’s late winter.
“She’s Not There”? Well, maybe she is, blokes, but you can’t see her because your vision is failing. Or perhaps you’re just trying to avoid that conversation where she gently suggests it’s time for adult diapers and you defiantly “Tell Her No,” even though you have to admit the leakage is getting embarrassing.
Throw in the venue size and host—a couple-hundred seats and a community college—and the presumed “crowd” of creaky old suburbanites sporting sad ponytails and resurrected tie-dye T-shirts, and I felt only slightly closer to “pumped” than I might have if I’d been thrown onto a charter bus by the Gray Panthers and forced to see a show at the Andy Williams Theater in Branson, Missouri.
Affirmation of my saddest assumptions began when I pulled into the venue’s small and only half-filled parking lot and continued as I entered a lobby dotted by clusters of the creaky old suburbanites my mind’s eye had described. The only people under 40 were a couple of attractive young women—Montgomery College students, perhaps—who were bartending beer and wine with all the kind solicitousness of high schoolers earning public service credit at an assisted living facility.
A souvenir table offered T-shirts, CDs and posters for depressingly low, low prices. You could buy a poster signed by Zombies headliners Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone for $20, for example. It made me wonder if I could’ve skipped the show and talked the band into performing a house concert in my sunroom and still gotten change back from my hundred.
It turned out that my seat, which I’d purchased online just a few days before, nevertheless was in the second row, stage left. As show time neared, I looked across the orchestra section and up at the balcony and was heartened to see the place starting to fill up. It would be more or less a full house by the time the opening act departed and the Zombies assumed the stage.
A few words about that opening act. Billed as “The Acoustic Strawbs,” they were an unplugged iteration of a band whose name sounded familiar, but who I couldn’t quite place. According to the concert program, they’d “come out of the early days of the British folk movement” and once had counted as a member Sandy Denny—a folk singer of greater fame who later joined the better-known Fairport Convention. Anyway, the trio of white-haired Englishmen walked slowly onto the stage, instruments in hand, and sat themselves down on folding chairs to which they would remain rooted for their entire hour-long set.
While two-thirds of the Strawbs look as though they might be capable of sustained verticality, such could not be said for the ample-gutted lead singer, whose voice mostly held through a series of ballads and protest songs that often seemed perilously close to claiming his last remaining breath. The trio did a creditable job, and I’m always appreciative of any degree of musical talent and singing ability given that I have none of either. But watching the Strawbs soldier through, looking like nothing so much as old friends of the deceased sharing bittersweet memories at an Irish wake, did nothing to dispel my prevalent melancholy. It didn’t help when the lead singer self-effacingly yet pleadingly suggested we all might like to purchase a Strawbs CD, available in the lobby, for placement in our granny’s Christmas stocking.
There was a break between acts, which I will vouch is appreciated by middle-aged concert-goers with bladder-relief issues. I met that need, then milled around in the lobby for a few minutes, eavesdropping on several conversations about past Zombies shows, including one last year in Rockville that had been unknown to me. It seems that even bands whose first teenaged jam sessions occurred when John F. Kennedy was president have groupies. Which nevertheless reminded me of how, pre-show, one guy in the audience had loudly and kiddingly asked his female companion whether she planned to throw her underwear on stage, and how I’d so hoped the gag hadn’t given anyone any ideas.
I reclaimed my seat and was glancing at my program when I became aware of somebody standing nearby, ticket in hand. I looked up and saw what I first took to be a particularly unattractive older woman in a bad wig and comically oversized eyeglasses who was wearing, for some reason, a cheerleaders outfit. But then I quickly realized that she was a he. As was reinforced when the be-skirted man asked me, in a decidedly unfeminine voice, whether he was at the right row.
He gave me his seat information and I confirmed that he was. With that, he picked up the canvas grocery bag he’d temporarily set down, in which I could see a hint of silver pom pom, and made his way to the far end of my aisle. As much as my mind was shouting “WTF?”, I was determined not to outwardly register anything that could be construed as disapproval, bewilderment or surprise. Part of that is because I try to be a live-and-let-live kind of guy, but I also was struck then, as I would be through the remainder of the evening, by the utter lack of attention or interest he drew from anyone in the audience.
In fact, the next day I would Web-search a variety of word combinations—“guy in cheerleader outfit Silver Spring,” “dressed in drag cheerleader Montgomery County,” etc.—to confirm my suspicion that he was some local character whose act by now was so familiar as to be passé. But I found nothing. Had he perhaps come from a rehearsal of a dinner-theater farce? Had he plans later in the evening to wow the boys during Varsity Night at a local gay bar? I guess I’ll never know.
At any rate, it seemed that he, too, was a Zombies groupie. I overheard him exchanging past-show stories with another guy on my row, and speculating on tonight’s play list. Although I was careful not to stare, I could see with additional side glances that he likely was my age or a little older, although there was no gray in his manifestly unflattering brunette rug, which gratuitously included pigtails. He was short and of medium build, and obviously hadn’t received the fashion memo about how a gal never should show five o’clock shadow after Labor Day.
Soon the lights dimmed. Out came the Zombies, who currently consist of founding members Argent and Blunstone (vocals/keyboards and lead vocals, respectively), longtime Kinks bassist Jim Rodford, Rodford’s son Steve on drums, and British session guitarist Tom Toomey.
Argent looked weathered but lean in his jeans, T-shirt and leather jacket. Blunstone was of more indeterminate shape in a dark suit, and looked facially as if he’s had some work done. Both original Zombies retain impressive amounts of hair, although Blunstone’s in particular is suspiciously dark. Rodford looked like Popeye’s dad Pappy in the old cartoons—a wisp of a man, nearly bald, with a jutting chin. His son, obscured by the drum set, had the happy look of a garage-bander enjoying a paying gig. Toomey clearly was the baby of the bunch, looking to be 40-ish.
They started out playing some of the band’s early songs—bluesy numbers with echoes of Motown, recognizable in sound if not specifics to anyone familiar with early ’60s, pre-Beatles rock ’n’ roll. The ensemble was tight from the opening notes. Argent showed great energy and enthusiasm behind the keyboards. Blunstone was considerably less mobile, slightly swaying at the microphone, but in fine voice. And when he spoke between numbers, it was with a poet’s cadence—gentle, unhurried, slightly lisping in the way one might imagine Keats or Shelley would have sounded.
Before long the band started weaving in songs from a new studio album Blunstone announced has been well-reviewed in Britain and is beginning to gain critical notice in the United States. If the new music was hardly groundbreaking, it conversely was far from vanity-lap stuff. The songs were crisp, well written, tuneful, interesting. Anything but lame.
Next came the numbers we all had come to hear—the hits, and other songs from the Zombies’ masterwork album, Odessey (sic) and Oracle. The poignant “A Rose for Emily.” The quirkily buoyant “Care of Cell 44,” about a pending reunion with a jailbird girlfriend. The moody and evocative “Beechwood Park.” “This Will Be Our Year,” which Argent proudly noted the Foo Fighters recently covered on a CD of that band’s favorite songs. Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl, Argent further noted, has cited the Zombies as a huge early influence.
By mid-set, I wasn’t thinking about how old these guys were, or I was, or the audience was. Because the Zombies were genuinely rocking, and because they so clearly and happily were engaged in what, for them, was the timeless pursuit of creating and performing music. Yes, they were honoring their past and our memories of it, but they were perhaps even more proud of their new material. And they reveled in their continuing relevance. Blunstone and Argent noted that Odessey and Oracle, a one-time commercial dud released after the band’s breakup, has gained sales and cache in the decades since, and was named the 80th most important album in rock history by Rolling Stone.
I’d arrived expecting a dog-and-pony show of sorts but had gotten a rousing, full-bodied rock concert in an amazingly intimate setting. How rousing? Rousing enough that Cheerleader Guy on numerous occasions pulled his pom poms out of the bag and shook them high and long, to the appreciative nods of the band, who several times acknowledged his enthusiasm.
One of the final songs the Zombies played was not in fact a Zombies number, although it had been written by original member Chris White and became a huge post-Zombies hit for Argent’s eponymous early ’70s band. The place erupted with the opening thumps of the arena rocker “Hold Your Head Up,” reverberated through Argent’s extended organ solo, shook through the audience-participation chorus and reached a crescendo with the final repetition of the defiant title sentiment.
A little while later, that scene and feeling still were playing in my head as I climbed into my car. Driving home, I thought about how, although aging is a bitch, there’s no law saying any of us has to give in and give up. Yes, life is terminal. We fear the reaper. But take a look around. There’s music to nourish you. A cheer somewhere to lead. Minimal expectations to be proven wrong.
Life will slump your posture. The Zombies’ advice? Try to look past it all. Hold your head up. Hold your head high.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
Blast in the Past
The Web site of the Maryland Renaissance Festival describes the 25-acre site near Annapolis as “a recreation of a 16th-century English village.” The trappings certainly reflect that, what with the Tudor facades, Globe Theater replica, jousting arena and whatnot. Technically there’s indoor plumbing, but the Port-o-Lets lined up behind the wood screens more closely approximate ye old privy than what we think of when we say “bathroom.”
I read recently that personal computer sales are down, as newer, faster, more portable modes of communication and media access become ever more popular and dominant. As I sit here typing at my PC’s keyboard, this news strikes me as just the latest of countless blows in what I not so jokingly describe to friends as the 21st century’s gleeful obsession with obliterating every vestige of life as I’ve known it.
Therein lies the key, I think, to why every year I make at least one trip to the Renaissance Festival, which runs from late August to late October. In terms of shtick, the event is all about Henry VIII, Elizabethan speech, elaborate costumes, period entertainments and throwback libations and grub. But when I pay my American dollars at the ticket counter (oddly, bartering is forbidden) and am welcomed into the village of Revel Grove by a jaunty lord or gracious lady, I feel as if I'm entering not so much an imagined 16th century as a gone and lamented 20th.
It starts in the parking area, which is a huge open field. I exit my car and immediately feel as if I’ve merged into the line to get into a midnight movie sometime in the 1970s. A lot of the people who are emerging from their vehicles and trudging slowly toward the entrance are dressed in costume—the guys tucking in their puffy shirts, the women assuring that their tightly corseted dresses display ample teat, and the kids adjusting tricorn hats that their parents have deemed, historically speaking, to be Close Enough. (I would have been appalled were my mom ever to have shown any teat. But then again, my parents never would have paid the 1960s equivalent of $18 to get in.)
At the ticket booths there’s no such thing as paying by smartphone pointed at an electronic reader. There only are old-school cash boxes and credit card swipers.
Enter the “village” and there’s live entertainment on multiple stages. There are microphones, sure, but no video screens, overhead Tweets or other falderol. You’ll see a juggler over there, a magician and his bungling assistant over here. Troupes ham their way through lampoon versions of Shakespeare. Knife-throwers and their targets wink at audiences and exchange banter that’s Sherwood Forest by way of 1930s vaudeville—corny, harmlessly risqué, as sunny and light in spirit as 2011 so typically feels dark and ominous.
Just as you wouldn’t have watched a Zeppelin concert back in the day without a flask or a joint, you aren’t about to traverse this alternate universe without being in a slightly altered state. To that end, there’s plenty of mead for sale. And ale, of course, otherwise known as beer. Put a tip in the jar on the counter and the bartender will ring a bell, as if to tell all the king’s subjects you’ve just single-handedly defeated a band of knaves and deserve to be celebrated.
Food booths are huge money makers, of course, and the choices are as blithely, delightfully inauthentic as was anything offered at history-tinged tourist sites in 1955, 1975 or 1995. Behind cheesy names like Ben Jonson’s Banana Split are dishes as unlikely to have been found at any Renaissance table as genuine colonial fare was to have been served at the Fort Ticonderoga cafeteria during a family vacation in 1962.
Then there are the shopping options. The prices aren’t 20th century, but the offerings are. Don’t come to the Renaissance Festival looking for the latest electronic gadgets and apps. You’ll find hippie clothes, albeit billed as the stuff Chris Marlowe or the court’s ladies might have worn. You’ll see jewelry, pottery, crafts. You need no IT expertise to make, model or use this stuff.
Or, you can spend your money on old-style soothsaying and other happy wastes of shilling. Palm reading, tarot cards, phrenology. Want to know where you’re going? Leave your GPS and Google Maps behind. Rather, ask some chick hovering over a crystal ball. She’ll tell you for $40.
A couple of my favorite activities at the Renaissance Festival are the dunking booth and the music. The former is the perfect antidote to insular, endlessly strategizing video games—it’s just me, three bean bags, and a saucy wench who questions my ability to drench her, and who’s been right all but one time to date. As for the latter, just as rocking to the Who, or to Elvis Costello in his punk days, was an incredible trip for the teen and 20-something me, so, too, is kicking it now to amplified Celtic music performed by men in kilts while I’m in the throes of a moderate mead buzz.
Really, it’s all good. It’s great, in fact. Four or five hours at the Renaissance Festival—where I’m headed tomorrow, on what promises to be a brilliant, fall-like Saturday—and I always feel as if I’ve been to high school reunion that brought back only the good memories, and to which none of the bullies, pricks and other jerks showed up.
Yes, soon enough I’ll be back on the Beltway, where I’ll have to honk phone-distracted people out of my lane and will hear radio reports of the latest economic meltdowns, environmental disasters and political stalemates. For the moment, though, as I exit Revel Grove, all I’m thinking of is the joy of a visiting a lost century—the most recent one.
I read recently that personal computer sales are down, as newer, faster, more portable modes of communication and media access become ever more popular and dominant. As I sit here typing at my PC’s keyboard, this news strikes me as just the latest of countless blows in what I not so jokingly describe to friends as the 21st century’s gleeful obsession with obliterating every vestige of life as I’ve known it.
Therein lies the key, I think, to why every year I make at least one trip to the Renaissance Festival, which runs from late August to late October. In terms of shtick, the event is all about Henry VIII, Elizabethan speech, elaborate costumes, period entertainments and throwback libations and grub. But when I pay my American dollars at the ticket counter (oddly, bartering is forbidden) and am welcomed into the village of Revel Grove by a jaunty lord or gracious lady, I feel as if I'm entering not so much an imagined 16th century as a gone and lamented 20th.
It starts in the parking area, which is a huge open field. I exit my car and immediately feel as if I’ve merged into the line to get into a midnight movie sometime in the 1970s. A lot of the people who are emerging from their vehicles and trudging slowly toward the entrance are dressed in costume—the guys tucking in their puffy shirts, the women assuring that their tightly corseted dresses display ample teat, and the kids adjusting tricorn hats that their parents have deemed, historically speaking, to be Close Enough. (I would have been appalled were my mom ever to have shown any teat. But then again, my parents never would have paid the 1960s equivalent of $18 to get in.)
At the ticket booths there’s no such thing as paying by smartphone pointed at an electronic reader. There only are old-school cash boxes and credit card swipers.
Enter the “village” and there’s live entertainment on multiple stages. There are microphones, sure, but no video screens, overhead Tweets or other falderol. You’ll see a juggler over there, a magician and his bungling assistant over here. Troupes ham their way through lampoon versions of Shakespeare. Knife-throwers and their targets wink at audiences and exchange banter that’s Sherwood Forest by way of 1930s vaudeville—corny, harmlessly risqué, as sunny and light in spirit as 2011 so typically feels dark and ominous.
Just as you wouldn’t have watched a Zeppelin concert back in the day without a flask or a joint, you aren’t about to traverse this alternate universe without being in a slightly altered state. To that end, there’s plenty of mead for sale. And ale, of course, otherwise known as beer. Put a tip in the jar on the counter and the bartender will ring a bell, as if to tell all the king’s subjects you’ve just single-handedly defeated a band of knaves and deserve to be celebrated.
Food booths are huge money makers, of course, and the choices are as blithely, delightfully inauthentic as was anything offered at history-tinged tourist sites in 1955, 1975 or 1995. Behind cheesy names like Ben Jonson’s Banana Split are dishes as unlikely to have been found at any Renaissance table as genuine colonial fare was to have been served at the Fort Ticonderoga cafeteria during a family vacation in 1962.
Then there are the shopping options. The prices aren’t 20th century, but the offerings are. Don’t come to the Renaissance Festival looking for the latest electronic gadgets and apps. You’ll find hippie clothes, albeit billed as the stuff Chris Marlowe or the court’s ladies might have worn. You’ll see jewelry, pottery, crafts. You need no IT expertise to make, model or use this stuff.
Or, you can spend your money on old-style soothsaying and other happy wastes of shilling. Palm reading, tarot cards, phrenology. Want to know where you’re going? Leave your GPS and Google Maps behind. Rather, ask some chick hovering over a crystal ball. She’ll tell you for $40.
A couple of my favorite activities at the Renaissance Festival are the dunking booth and the music. The former is the perfect antidote to insular, endlessly strategizing video games—it’s just me, three bean bags, and a saucy wench who questions my ability to drench her, and who’s been right all but one time to date. As for the latter, just as rocking to the Who, or to Elvis Costello in his punk days, was an incredible trip for the teen and 20-something me, so, too, is kicking it now to amplified Celtic music performed by men in kilts while I’m in the throes of a moderate mead buzz.
Really, it’s all good. It’s great, in fact. Four or five hours at the Renaissance Festival—where I’m headed tomorrow, on what promises to be a brilliant, fall-like Saturday—and I always feel as if I’ve been to high school reunion that brought back only the good memories, and to which none of the bullies, pricks and other jerks showed up.
Yes, soon enough I’ll be back on the Beltway, where I’ll have to honk phone-distracted people out of my lane and will hear radio reports of the latest economic meltdowns, environmental disasters and political stalemates. For the moment, though, as I exit Revel Grove, all I’m thinking of is the joy of a visiting a lost century—the most recent one.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Bright Sunshine-y Day
So. Following up on my previous post, from two weeks ago today, we actually never—surprisingly, amazingly—lost power when Hurricane Irene, or what was left of her, blew through the D.C. area. I’m guessing that’s because Pepco was stung by my certainty of an outage, unnerved by the vastness of my readership and determined to prevent trees from falling on local power lines even if it meant making their line crews sign kamikaze suicide pacts to prevent it.
Ha! No, what I’m really thinking is, maybe it was like how carrying an umbrella around sometimes seems to have the effect of preventing promised rain. Perhaps my bemoaning the inevitability of power failure was exactly the thing that prevented it.
Anyway, we’d spent days monitoring the forecasts and assuming that when Saturday night’s deluge ended and the sun reemerged the following day, what was being billed as a pending blessing would feel like a curse, as temperatures rose in our sunlit but un-air conditioned home. To our happy shock, however, Lynn and I found ourselves sitting in cool comfort as the post-storm sun blazed outside on that sultry late-August afternoon.
But then this past week came the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee. Although nothing about that weather event had sounded particularly threatening—“tropical storm” suggesting nothing an afternoon indoors with a fruity cocktail couldn’t mitigate, and “Lee” sounding rather like Marie Osmond’s idea of a bad boy—that storm in fact kicked far more heinie around here than had the considerably more heralded hurricane.
From Monday through Thursday, rain fell more or less continuously, often in sheets. Creeks became rivers, roadsides became creeks, lawns became pools. Fortunately, the precipitation seldom was wind-driven, however, and the saturation somehow failed to uproot a single tree hovering over our power lines.
Still, I experienced Lee in a way that I had not experienced Irene. And the Bean was the reason.
I haven’t written much, if anything, about our three-legged hound mix since I introduced him, in a blog post early December, as “essentially a big, spazzy, unsocialized puppy with major separation anxiety issues.” A little more than eight months later, he’s still big and spazzy. He’s better socialized and suffers less separation anxiety now, although he hasn’t made as much progress on either front as we’d like. He’s as handsome and lovable as he was the day we brought him home, but as he has become more comfortable he’s also become more destructive. Time was when he’d feel too freaked out when left alone to indulge in such time–honored canine behaviors as shoe-chewing and paper-shredding, but that’s no longer the case.
In short, Bean has turned out to be exactly as advertised in that old post. He’s very much a Dog’s Dog, in the same way that our late greyhound Ellie, Bean’s predecessor, was a Cat’s Dog. Ellie was aloof and meek. Bean is engaged and rambunctious. Which is great in many ways. But not so much, I have to say,when Noah’s flood is raging, and I’m the one being swept away in it, tethered to the dog by a leash.
See, as I’ve noted before, Lynn is the dog advocate in our house. I loved Ellie and I love Bean, but I have no innate need for canine companionship and would be fine with our never having another one. I much prefer cats, who are less work, less needy, less gross, equally beautiful/handsome and, in my experience and contrary to stereotype, as affectionate, if not more so, than dogs. (I know canines have that “unconditional love” reputation, but the closest to that Lynn and I ever have experienced with either of our pooches is, “You are my best friend as long as you have in your possession, and may give to me, food that I want.”)
So, we rescued Ellie, and then Bean, with the understanding that Lynn would be their real-life, hands-on mom, and I their sitcom dad—amiable and well-meaning, but minimally involved in their raising, and more cheerleader than mentor. In practical terms, this means that, while I’m always there to rub Bean’s belly as I pass him in the house, and to shower him with affectionate nicknames (“Beanie Buddy,” “Beaner Budder,” “Crazy Pupper,” “Handsome Head,” etc.), when I’m getting ready for work in the morning and wearing my PJs at night, it’s Lynn who’s trudging out the door to walk him.
In a real sense, I’m like a member of the cushiest Army Reserves unit, who needn’t ever muster on weekends, let alone ship off to Afghanistan. I merely need occasionally to serve a single soldier his grub, or to lead that same soldier through a short hike on those infrequent occasions when his commanding officer is unavailable.
That soldier, of course, is Bean. Except without an iota of the discipline that should make the job easy.
Perhaps because Irene had proven to be such a non-event as inconveniences go, or maybe because Lynn’s body in recent years consistently has conspired against her, last Sunday Lynn tore a muscle in her left calf while running across a street with Bean. Being the doting husband and enormously compassionate human being I am, I commiserated and fretted over my wife’s not inconsiderable pain for as many as 10 minutes before turning my full attention to how this misfortune promised to adversely affect me. With crystal clarity, sometime during that 11th post-injury minute, I realized the upshot was that I would be Bean’s primary walker for at least the next several weeks.
I also knew that a lot of rain was forecast, starting the following day. Unfortunate timing, but I knew what I had to do: prepare myself mentally and practically. Be a Man and suck it up. Be selfless. Be dutiful. Be the husband and Doggie Dad I must be at a time of familial adversity.
Which is to say, the bitching and whining began pretty much immediately. Followed by the grudging, petulant and absolutely minimal fulfillment of my obligation. And all of this while wearing inappropriate and inadequate apparel that promptly got soaked, because donning proper raingear would’ve taken even more precious minutes away from “All Things Considered” in the mornings and baseball on TV at night.
At 9:30 those first couple of evenings I chirped, “Time to take the doggie out,” hoping to ape Lynn’s usual neutral-to-cheery tone in voicing those words, but knowing I sounded more like Dick Cheney in his heyday, being dragged into an obligatory meeting with America-hating members of the “Democrat Party.”
I had on shorts, a T-shirt, sneakers and a baseball hat—that last being my only concession to the rain. Bean, being the un-Ellie, and thus as oblivious to getting wet as she had loathed it, immediately busied himself doing all the things he does on walks under all weather conditions—stopping to eat grass, employing his hound nose to sniff up every morsel of delicious squirrel and rabbit waste to be found on each lawn and stretch of road, lunging at wildlife, often pausing to stare into space at who knows what.
Meanwhile, victimhood saturated my thoughts, much as the rain was saturating my clothing. “Why me?” “Damn dog.” “[I love you honey, but,] Stupid crippled wife.” Etc. Flashlight in my mouth to illuminate the proceedings, I clamped the plastic implement I call the Jaws of Poop around Bean’s glistening turds, as a waterfall cascaded off the bill of my cap.
After toweling Bean off on the front porch, I sloshed my way inside, careful to say little to the missus beyond the necessarily informative “He pooped,” lest words escape my mouth that I’d best not utter. I then trudged downstairs, shed my wet clothes, toweled myself off, changed for bed, brushed my teeth, took a few deep breaths and tried to leave as much of my bad attitude as possible in the basement.
As the week went on, though, I found that things got better. I like to think I Manned Up, gained maturity, all that positive-spin stuff. I do believe that was part of it—that I started heeding that “angel of my better nature,” per Abe Lincoln. But also, most things get easier with repetition (commuting in D.C. traffic and, in my case, rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates each baseball season, notwithstanding).
A huge game-changer for me was when I stopped bone-headedly repeating my sartorial mistakes and began taking the time to dress for the biblically ridiculous conditions outside. Clad now in a sweat-inducing-but-waterproof raincoat (with its peripheral vision-restricting but protective hood tugged over my ball cap), with jeans having replacing my shorts (although rain pants would have been better yet), and with water-resistant boots covering my feet and lower legs, I came to feel nearly as indifferent to the rain (if not as enthusiastic to be outside the house at 6:15 am and 9:45 pm) as was Bean.
In fact, I daresay it even felt ever-so-slightly fun at times to be largely impervious to the elements that everyone else was hiding from—as if the city was exploding, or radioactive, but those citizens wearing superhero suits like me needn’t be concerned. In fact, even on Friday afternoon—with the monsoons finally ended and the sun back in the sky, but the landscape still as squishy as a Nerf ball—I delighted in wearing my rain boots along with my shorts and T-shirt, the better to follow my crazily zigzagging dog wherever he might lead me without having to worry about soggy shoes.
It’s Saturday afternoon now—the second day of dry, and my sixth full day of primary dog stewardship. Soon I’ll take Bean out for the third of his four daily walks. He’ll be his usual endearing and infuriating self—thrilled to be outside, sniffing everything in sight and nearly everything that isn’t, eating all manner of gross stuff, forcing me into conversation with people I don’t know, or with fellow dog-owners who assume (incorrectly) that I love talking about dogs, and getting mouth slobber all over my hand when I slip him treats he’s done nothing to deserve.
But you know, I honestly won’t mind it that much. OK, as much. I’m in this thing for the long haul.
Maybe, in a sense, I can see clearly now. The rain has gone.
Ha! No, what I’m really thinking is, maybe it was like how carrying an umbrella around sometimes seems to have the effect of preventing promised rain. Perhaps my bemoaning the inevitability of power failure was exactly the thing that prevented it.
Anyway, we’d spent days monitoring the forecasts and assuming that when Saturday night’s deluge ended and the sun reemerged the following day, what was being billed as a pending blessing would feel like a curse, as temperatures rose in our sunlit but un-air conditioned home. To our happy shock, however, Lynn and I found ourselves sitting in cool comfort as the post-storm sun blazed outside on that sultry late-August afternoon.
But then this past week came the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee. Although nothing about that weather event had sounded particularly threatening—“tropical storm” suggesting nothing an afternoon indoors with a fruity cocktail couldn’t mitigate, and “Lee” sounding rather like Marie Osmond’s idea of a bad boy—that storm in fact kicked far more heinie around here than had the considerably more heralded hurricane.
From Monday through Thursday, rain fell more or less continuously, often in sheets. Creeks became rivers, roadsides became creeks, lawns became pools. Fortunately, the precipitation seldom was wind-driven, however, and the saturation somehow failed to uproot a single tree hovering over our power lines.
Still, I experienced Lee in a way that I had not experienced Irene. And the Bean was the reason.
I haven’t written much, if anything, about our three-legged hound mix since I introduced him, in a blog post early December, as “essentially a big, spazzy, unsocialized puppy with major separation anxiety issues.” A little more than eight months later, he’s still big and spazzy. He’s better socialized and suffers less separation anxiety now, although he hasn’t made as much progress on either front as we’d like. He’s as handsome and lovable as he was the day we brought him home, but as he has become more comfortable he’s also become more destructive. Time was when he’d feel too freaked out when left alone to indulge in such time–honored canine behaviors as shoe-chewing and paper-shredding, but that’s no longer the case.
In short, Bean has turned out to be exactly as advertised in that old post. He’s very much a Dog’s Dog, in the same way that our late greyhound Ellie, Bean’s predecessor, was a Cat’s Dog. Ellie was aloof and meek. Bean is engaged and rambunctious. Which is great in many ways. But not so much, I have to say,when Noah’s flood is raging, and I’m the one being swept away in it, tethered to the dog by a leash.
See, as I’ve noted before, Lynn is the dog advocate in our house. I loved Ellie and I love Bean, but I have no innate need for canine companionship and would be fine with our never having another one. I much prefer cats, who are less work, less needy, less gross, equally beautiful/handsome and, in my experience and contrary to stereotype, as affectionate, if not more so, than dogs. (I know canines have that “unconditional love” reputation, but the closest to that Lynn and I ever have experienced with either of our pooches is, “You are my best friend as long as you have in your possession, and may give to me, food that I want.”)
So, we rescued Ellie, and then Bean, with the understanding that Lynn would be their real-life, hands-on mom, and I their sitcom dad—amiable and well-meaning, but minimally involved in their raising, and more cheerleader than mentor. In practical terms, this means that, while I’m always there to rub Bean’s belly as I pass him in the house, and to shower him with affectionate nicknames (“Beanie Buddy,” “Beaner Budder,” “Crazy Pupper,” “Handsome Head,” etc.), when I’m getting ready for work in the morning and wearing my PJs at night, it’s Lynn who’s trudging out the door to walk him.
In a real sense, I’m like a member of the cushiest Army Reserves unit, who needn’t ever muster on weekends, let alone ship off to Afghanistan. I merely need occasionally to serve a single soldier his grub, or to lead that same soldier through a short hike on those infrequent occasions when his commanding officer is unavailable.
That soldier, of course, is Bean. Except without an iota of the discipline that should make the job easy.
Perhaps because Irene had proven to be such a non-event as inconveniences go, or maybe because Lynn’s body in recent years consistently has conspired against her, last Sunday Lynn tore a muscle in her left calf while running across a street with Bean. Being the doting husband and enormously compassionate human being I am, I commiserated and fretted over my wife’s not inconsiderable pain for as many as 10 minutes before turning my full attention to how this misfortune promised to adversely affect me. With crystal clarity, sometime during that 11th post-injury minute, I realized the upshot was that I would be Bean’s primary walker for at least the next several weeks.
I also knew that a lot of rain was forecast, starting the following day. Unfortunate timing, but I knew what I had to do: prepare myself mentally and practically. Be a Man and suck it up. Be selfless. Be dutiful. Be the husband and Doggie Dad I must be at a time of familial adversity.
Which is to say, the bitching and whining began pretty much immediately. Followed by the grudging, petulant and absolutely minimal fulfillment of my obligation. And all of this while wearing inappropriate and inadequate apparel that promptly got soaked, because donning proper raingear would’ve taken even more precious minutes away from “All Things Considered” in the mornings and baseball on TV at night.
At 9:30 those first couple of evenings I chirped, “Time to take the doggie out,” hoping to ape Lynn’s usual neutral-to-cheery tone in voicing those words, but knowing I sounded more like Dick Cheney in his heyday, being dragged into an obligatory meeting with America-hating members of the “Democrat Party.”
I had on shorts, a T-shirt, sneakers and a baseball hat—that last being my only concession to the rain. Bean, being the un-Ellie, and thus as oblivious to getting wet as she had loathed it, immediately busied himself doing all the things he does on walks under all weather conditions—stopping to eat grass, employing his hound nose to sniff up every morsel of delicious squirrel and rabbit waste to be found on each lawn and stretch of road, lunging at wildlife, often pausing to stare into space at who knows what.
Meanwhile, victimhood saturated my thoughts, much as the rain was saturating my clothing. “Why me?” “Damn dog.” “[I love you honey, but,] Stupid crippled wife.” Etc. Flashlight in my mouth to illuminate the proceedings, I clamped the plastic implement I call the Jaws of Poop around Bean’s glistening turds, as a waterfall cascaded off the bill of my cap.
After toweling Bean off on the front porch, I sloshed my way inside, careful to say little to the missus beyond the necessarily informative “He pooped,” lest words escape my mouth that I’d best not utter. I then trudged downstairs, shed my wet clothes, toweled myself off, changed for bed, brushed my teeth, took a few deep breaths and tried to leave as much of my bad attitude as possible in the basement.
As the week went on, though, I found that things got better. I like to think I Manned Up, gained maturity, all that positive-spin stuff. I do believe that was part of it—that I started heeding that “angel of my better nature,” per Abe Lincoln. But also, most things get easier with repetition (commuting in D.C. traffic and, in my case, rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates each baseball season, notwithstanding).
A huge game-changer for me was when I stopped bone-headedly repeating my sartorial mistakes and began taking the time to dress for the biblically ridiculous conditions outside. Clad now in a sweat-inducing-but-waterproof raincoat (with its peripheral vision-restricting but protective hood tugged over my ball cap), with jeans having replacing my shorts (although rain pants would have been better yet), and with water-resistant boots covering my feet and lower legs, I came to feel nearly as indifferent to the rain (if not as enthusiastic to be outside the house at 6:15 am and 9:45 pm) as was Bean.
In fact, I daresay it even felt ever-so-slightly fun at times to be largely impervious to the elements that everyone else was hiding from—as if the city was exploding, or radioactive, but those citizens wearing superhero suits like me needn’t be concerned. In fact, even on Friday afternoon—with the monsoons finally ended and the sun back in the sky, but the landscape still as squishy as a Nerf ball—I delighted in wearing my rain boots along with my shorts and T-shirt, the better to follow my crazily zigzagging dog wherever he might lead me without having to worry about soggy shoes.
It’s Saturday afternoon now—the second day of dry, and my sixth full day of primary dog stewardship. Soon I’ll take Bean out for the third of his four daily walks. He’ll be his usual endearing and infuriating self—thrilled to be outside, sniffing everything in sight and nearly everything that isn’t, eating all manner of gross stuff, forcing me into conversation with people I don’t know, or with fellow dog-owners who assume (incorrectly) that I love talking about dogs, and getting mouth slobber all over my hand when I slip him treats he’s done nothing to deserve.
But you know, I honestly won’t mind it that much. OK, as much. I’m in this thing for the long haul.
Maybe, in a sense, I can see clearly now. The rain has gone.
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