My (perhaps controversial) thoughts as a "newbie" to CA.

Hi ladies,

Well, it's me again.

I've been up all night.

Seems my newly renovated apartment is having some hiccups.

I noticed when I got home from the memorial service Sunday at dinnertime that there was a half-moon-shaped wet spot on my hall floor outside of my bathroom. Then I heard splashing (as in splashing) water sounds coming from behind the bathroom wall.

Hmmm...

Pantaloon sat and stared up at the sounds as if they were mice.

I called management, put down a big towel.

Maintenance came and said they thought the woman in the apartment over mine had overspilled her kitchen sink.....

Long and short: the splashing happened again last night.

I don't know many people who'd overspill their sink twice in a row. Fairly upsetting event. Gets one's attention.

I picked up my kitchen trashcan to put in a new bag and noticed water on the floor. Just an oblong of water where the trash can sits. None around it or anywhere else.

??????

I put down a paper napkin to get up the water and as soon as I dropped it it got soaked along the tile-lines where the floor tiles connect to one another.

WATER COMING UP THROUGH THE TILES??!!!!

Well, maintenance came just now and cut a big ole hole in my nice new wall...boo-hoo....there is indeed water back there but no obvious source.... I'm to monitor it and let them know if anything develops today. I had an idea: take my little camera and film it if the trickling/gurgling/splashing sounds start up again, see if anything is going on back there. The camera also records sounds so those would be captured as well.

Now I have to make myself stay awake so I can turn in at a "decent" hour and be ready for them to come by tomorrow to check on things.

The night owl in me has been banished for the time being.

When I said that I was sorry to have sent you all so many little eliminatory sagas etc a few days ago, I thought it was because I'd told you about another event in my past. But no, turns out I'd been telling a friend.

So here goes.

As I was preparing for the memorial service Sunday for my cousin, my jitters were getting the best of me and I almost decided not to read the little memory piece I'd written about her--all because I flashed on another funeral service years ago that was odd and memorable and can still make me wriggle in my seat when I think about it.

This service was for my uncle's deceased second wife, who'd been very active in their tiny Eastern Shore community church, leading the choir, being a busy organizer. We knew the service would draw many of her friends.

The February day was unusually warm; there had been lots of rain in the days prior. Things boded well for a nice event.

My uncle invited all of the immediate family--his four kids and a handful of grandkids, my cousins and their wives and husbands and kids. etc--to lunch beforehand at a great seafood restaurant just across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. We pigged out on fried oysters, crab cakes, fish, all the sides--the works.

Then we piled into our cars and headed for the little church.

I knew, of course, that immediate family would be seated in the front two rows, but didn't anticipate the claustrophobia that would kind of sweep over me as soon as I found myself wedged between my lanky brothers and several cousins.

All at once, it seemed, I was wandering like a lost soul in that weird hinterland called Impending Diarrhea And No Bathroom In Sight.

Boy, was I regretting those fried oysters on an empty stomach!

The choir was settling in. I glimpsed over my shoulder, saw the Reverend making his way up to the podium.

I had to get out! Before he began his eulogies and the fifty Bible excerpts!

In front of us and to the left was a door which I figured led to the Sunday School rooms. And Sunday School meant little kids--half of them only half potty-trained--which meant

toilets!

I didn't finesse my exit, just climbed over the knees of my brothers and cousins and made for that door.

Soon I found myself in a hall, rooms on either side.

I headed for what looked like a restroom door and squeezed myself into a tiny stall and, knees up to my chest, found the home away from home that was all the home I required.

As I stepped out of the restroom I could hear the Reverend beginning his sermonette.

There was absolutely no way I was re-entering from that same, front-of-the-room, super-public door like some lost and wandering fool.

I turned and looked up and down the hall for an exit that would get me out of the building so I could go around and enter from the front door, take a seat in a rear pew, and hear the rest of the program.

No door!

There was no exit from the building except through the church itself!

What a strange layout!

What religion WAS my aunt?

All I could do was hang by that door and listen to the service through it, which grew very tiresome.

I went down the hall and found myself in the Sunday School room for kindergartners.

I amused myself by sitting in a little chair and reading a little book.

This also grew tiresome.

I wanted to rejoin my tribe!

My kith and kin were out there and here I was staring at a five-year-old's version of Jesus in Crayola Orange/Red.

How had I ended up in this pickle?

I got up and went over to a window.

Outside the day was crystal clear and sunny and beautiful.

I tried the window. It opened.

Not a soul was in sight. I looked down at the bright green grass (winters are mild on the Shore) and it seemed to urge me to be bold.

I lifted my leg, lopped it over the windowsill.

Then I sat astride the sill and thought about it.

Then I brought the other leg over.

My legs were dangling out the window, the rest of me hanging back.

Mainly because I'd seen them.

A couple.

Walking down the road running behind the church.

I eased myself down out of the window.

My feet hit solid ground, but not until gliding through a foot of ice-cold water.

I stood there, my good shoes, hose, lower legs soaked, paralyzed again by the fact that the couple had stopped walking and were staring at me.

I'm sure they'd seen a woman climb out of a window before but they seemed not to have. They looked at me and I looked at them and then we all looked as far away from each other as we could humanly do.

I sloshed my way out of the deep, rain-filled trench that ran the length of the building.

"Dammnit!" I hissed to myself. "Don't these people have any GUTTERS around here?" I'd forgotten that gutters aren't usually placed on the ground--but that would have been asking too much of a brain not at its sharpest.

I made my way around to the front door of the church, snuck my half-wet self in, and slid down into a back pew, able to catch the last words of the Benediction before everyone was rising and turning.

And seeing me.

Did I look THAT much like an apparition?

Uncle Tod was first to come down the aisle, flanked by two daughters.

"What happened to YOU?" he asked, frowning.

I shouldn't be angry with myself for being able to quick-think myself into a saving lie, should I?

Still, I felt a pang as I looked at him and said in a voice as limp as my shoes,

"Oh, Uncle Tod, I was so sad about June I had to leave! It was too much!"

Everyone--and the whole gang was now backed up behind Uncle Tod, looking over his shoulder at me, rapt, awaiting my answer--now nodded and smiled in unison and looked at me with tender expressions.

"How sensitive Trilly is!" I heard someone say. "She's just like her mother! Feels things so deeply!"

But was it a lie? I DID feel sad about June. I liked her. She'd been Uncle Tod's secretary when they both worked at State Farm. Her teeth were interestingly crooked, she had a wonderful stomach-shaking laugh, and she was more fun than his chain-smoking first wife whose collars smelled like Camels when she leaned to give you a peck on the cheek and whose illness made her eyes protrude like Bette Davis'. (I'm being mean now. Aunt Dottie was nice, too. Crocheted in with the Camels' smell was Narcisse Noir that made my head spin.)

And it WAS too much for me. Those six fried oysters were too much for my empty stomach and my intestinal track, which was so empty it had its own empty stomach.

So, well, I felt wasn't lying. I was just shifting a few nouns and verbs around.

Thanks, grammakathy, DisneyGirl16, and Molly 50! Sorry about the typos at the end--I was fading. (What's an "intestinal track"?)

Hi ladies---

Have a practical question for you.

I've decided that stuffing Kleenex into my old bra is not working. So I called Nordstrom and made an appointment for next week to get a bra and prosthesis. Have to pay up front and then will get reimbursed. Didn't realize the prosthesis is $235. (bra itself only $28.) I have Medicare and wondered if this all will be covered.

T

Thanks so much, dear ruthbru! Knew I'd prolly hear from you, O Keeper of the Details!

After writing here, I decided to check out the Johns Hopkins Image Recovery Center. Duh, silly me didn't think to do this first, which should have been a logical step as that's where I had surgery and whose info sheet I was given my last appt when I got the prescriptions from Dr Jacobs for the prosthesis and bra. IRC does all the submitting and I don't have to pay anything up front! That would have amounted to upwards of $275. and a wait of 60 days for reimbursement. So I cancelled the Nordstrom appt and made one with IRC. I'd love to have a cami--especially in cold weather.

P.S. If any of you are following my water woes, finally got some action. The bathroom wall had a soft spot like the top of a newborn's head and the manager and her cohort managed to push a hole right through it yesterday after I called them! Wadded paper towel was wedged down in there--if that doesn't indicate that a workman knew there was a leaking water issue before the speckling, painting,sanding, etc, I don't know what would... totally sad. They came this a.m. at ten of seven and began cutting away bathroom wall and let the hall hole stay and dry out over the weekend. Monday they'll patch that.

The poor 90-year-old lady who lives above me--and whose sink outflow piping was the source of the leak--had a huge three by four foot hole cut in her wall to find the source of the leak. I'm taking her up some goodies tonight to see how she's faring over all this.

Ruth, dear, thanks again for the additional information. I do love you. t

Hi ChiSandy--

Oh how i've been entertained reading these last posts of yours! And the woman who excused herself from jury duty so creatively! When I hit 70 one thing that made it a happy event was that I was now exempt from being called.

Actually, that time I was called and had to sit as an alternate I found that jotting down notes and questions on the legal pad they gave us jurors helped with my "I'm trapped in here!" anxieties, got me involved and my mind off my digestive tract. We know now that the mind and the body have this close relationship, (an incestuous one!) and are in constant contact. When I'd moan to my parents about my self-consciousness my father would invariably pipe up, "Girly, if you'd just forget about yourself you'd calm down..." Feeling equally chastened and frustrated, the conflicting emotions hard to bring into any kind of harmony, led me to drop the subject and stop my moaning.

But he was right. Focused on that little steno pad (remember steno pads?) I was instantly more relaxed.

Speaking of periods, I now know that the bad cramps and clotting that I'd face every month were caused by endometriosis, which revealed its heart and soul when I had a hysterectomy in 1990 and as I worked in Medical Records could read all about in my path report. But when I was 14 and upwards it was just "cramps." It was hot water bottle time or mom's go-to solution for many ills: a pound of salt heated in her big black cast iron skillet and dumped in a teacloth, rubber-banded and curled up around in bed. The salt stayed nicely warm for hours and could be re-heated.

I recall one rough episode when I was in 9th grade. I had horrid cramps and bleeding so heavy it amounted to hemorrhaging. I went to the office and asked to have mom called to come pick me up. As I was standing there a clot emerged from me that was so large it never actually got all the way out. It just sat there, half on the pad and half inside me. That morning I'd girded my loins, and everything else I could gird, with three pads pinned to the crotch of my underpants. With the "armor," cramps, and now this monstrous clot I could do no more than shuffle down the hall to wait at the main front doors for mom to come. As she also had endometriosis, she understood what I was going through. There was no pain relief except aspirin, which only made the bleeding worse. I didn't get relief until a doctor way down the line prescribed birth control pills. Then away went the heavy periods and cramps, away went the acne problems.... how wonderful!

"Roughage." That's what we called it too. Not fiber.

Yeah, the fear of being late. I leave for appointments way, way early. I do everything way, way, way...

After flunking out of U of MD for failing every course except Health and Creative Writing--the one because it entailed no mental effort, the other because it entailed so much--and then finding life pretty awful with only half a degree, I reapplied two years later, having done stints as a rebel runaway, hippie, and part-time-jobber. They let me back in under probation. Reeling from shame, and having jeopardized what little remained of my parents' trust in me, I vowed to never, for the duration of my college years, get less than an A in any course I took. (I came close.) No more putting off reading or doing papers, no more all-night cram sessions before exams. No more distracting dorm life and dating. I lived at home and drove myself to College Park every day in our VW Microbus. When I worked in the summers, I paid rent. I went after scholarship money.

Midway through my character's--what little I still had--recuperation I recall one day coming home from classes aglow at the fact that I'd won a scholarship for the up-coming semester. My father was scrubbing the hearth in the living room. He barely looked up at my news.

It would take more than that one happy event to get him to look up. It would take many.

But then one day he did.

I don't think many things in my life have meant as much to me as losing and then regaining my parents' trust and respect.

They never yelled.

They never even raised their voices.

It was their silence, their downcast eyes.

Their sighs.

Their sighs were like a roaring wind, howling in a barren wilderness....

Hi JuniperCat---

Thanks for your very nice words!

You know, writing about my father last night and thinking about subjects that many females know all too much about--rough periods, angst-ing over finding a bathroom in time--got me remembering an incident from years ago when I was a newcomer to teenage-hood.

The seven of us lived on ten partly-wooded acres outside of Annapolis. Each weekday morning my two brothers and I climbed our long hill up to the road where we met the bus.

One morning was different.

My father normally left for work before the three of us made that ascent, but on this morning the Dodge was parked at the top of the hill.

?????

Our acres were fenced in--including the woods--to contain our sheep. Wild dogs sometimes chased our sheep, but more often the rag-tag rascals got into the steel trash cans that my father or brothers hauled up to the road for the trash truck, sending them clattering down and off into the woods, leaving a trail of mess.

On this morning there was no sign of my father at the car. But thanks to the fact that it was winter and the trees were bare, when I looked over to the right I could see a tumbled garbage can that had rolled down into the woods, emptying its contents along the way. Against the gray/brown ground was an array of spilled tin cans, discarded newspapers, cereal boxes, bread wrappers, banana peels. Standing out even more than these were bright-white things splotched with red.

Then I spied my father, bent over, gathering trash that had rolled behind a tree. As I watched, he made his way, picking up, bending, picking up. W/hen he came to the white/red things he took a brown paper bag--the container I assumed they'd fallen from--and stuffed them into it.

He didn't seem to notice that my brothers and I, paused on our way up the hill, were watching. He was still focused on his task when the bus came and the three of us climbed aboard.

It wasn't until we were halfway to school that it came to me what were the white/red objects he was picking up.

I could feel my cheeks heating up. I hadn't started menstruating but knew something about it thanks to a little booklet that had found its way into my hands called You're A Young Lady Now. My acute embarrassment ambushed the better side of me and I sunk lower in my seat, certain my fellow bus-riders knew exactly what I was thinking about.

We women judge and evaluate men using all manner of yardsticks--how successful a wage-earner, how adept a lover, how gifted a father, how good a joke-teller, how loyal a friend he'd be. It sounds almost funny to tell about it now, and I certainly didn't tell it to the boys/guys/men over the years that I liked, loved, lost, kept, held, bid adieu, but the acid test for me was what would this latest guy do with that spill of red/white things down that hill? Would he have just driven by, let the wild dogs that had pushed over the can come back to clean it up, leave the mystery of them for the wandering sheep to muse over as they grazed? Or would he have been like that picker-upper?

Most guys, of course, failed pretty miserably! A few had it.

Mom and Dadda honeymooned at a family cottage on Lake Seneca in central New York. On the way there after their February wedding in 1937, mom got an early introduction to the intimacies of wedded life when they stopped their Model T to get gas. Mom told me she used the restroom and mistakenly left a saturated sanitary napkin (or whatever they used back then) on the back of the toilet. It wasn't until she'd returned to the car and my father was using the very same restroom that she remembered.

"It was too late then," she said. "He must have known I'd probably remember. How it would have embarrassed me. But he never said a word about it."

It's so easy to em-pedestal a dead parent--just as it's easy to knock their un-opposing selves from one. My father once told me that goodness is something you do when no one's watching. But as far as I was concerned in such simple acts as these he earned the pedestal he'd eventually come to stand on. When no one was watching, of course.

Hi JBeans and MelissaDallas-- My mom is gone, which of course makes it easier to reflect on the rougher times in our relationship very calmly now. 20/20 hindsight is not only perfect, it can "perfect" people we used to know who are long gone from us. The nice thing is that the sharp edges tend to soften and the happy memories rise in more pronounced relief to the surface and sometimes, happily, crowd out the rest.

MelissaDallas, to have both parents be high school teachers! Wow! That must have been tough at times. They probably knew all about the tricks and foolery teenagers can get up to from so much exposure to the "creatures in their native habitat" and all day being surrounded by influential peers. Did you get away with ANYTHING? I had a friend who was a PK--a preacher's kid, and she was often on the verge of doing something rebellious but then at the very end being too skittish to follow through. I think she did it in her heart....