Broken Doorbell

My doorbell is broken; a wonderful way to avoid solicitors. I tried to fix it after moving in. It requires an App, of course. I couldn’t get the doorbell to sync, and gave up, but I still have the app on my phone and now I get neighborhood alerts. I avoided adding neighborhood watch apps because I don’t want to read about petty grievances with messy front yards or someones trash cans, so I ignore the notifications from the doorbell app.

My cat comes-and-goes as she pleases. I won’t see her for two weeks, but then she’ll saunter in at 2am, meow loudly, making the dog run laps in excitement that is wild older sister is visiting. She jumps on my dresser and stares at me with such intent, I don’t know if she wants me to pet her or she’s plotting an attack.

In June, she must have taken to another family because she was gone. I thought she died, and was worried sick that Geoffrey would have a broken heart. I decided I’d just pretend she was alive, and I’d never tell the kids because they’re gone half the week, and will never notice. When Geoffrey leaves for college I'd retire the food dish. But my boyfriend and I were enjoying the Saharan heat one afternoon on the back porch and we heard her meow. I grabbed a flashlight and was convinced she was stuck under the deck, bending the chicken wire, telling him, “I see her!” I swear I saw her green eyes glowing in the light, but we heard another meow, I turned around, and she was walking towards us through the overgrown backyard like a tiny panther. 

I think she is mad I freaked out when she brought in a dying baby bird. She dropped the bird at my feet and instead of praising her, I swept it out the backdoor and dumped it over the fence. Or maybe she’s pissed I raise my pets Christian Scientists to make them strong. I keep her food dish above the kitchen sink, and I refill it every couple days, so I know she’s eating at night.

I received a notification from my doorbell app for a found cat, and I thought it could be her, so I decided to check it out. It was a different cat. Then I scrolled, and I saw more postings about found or missing cats that weren’t Midnight, ending on a video post of a mountain lion walking through someones backyard at 1am. I shut the app, and said, “This is why I don’t look at this shit,” trying to wipe the video from my brain.

In June, I told my sister about the cat’s disappearance, and she remembered how she lost my mom’s dog. My mom moped around crying and depressed, the entire time subtly blaming my sister for the dognapping. Then a month later, the dog showed back up, tied to the front door. My mom was overjoyed, but one morning while drinking coffee, my sister came in from working her overnight nursing shift, and my mom said, “You see how the dog is hiding his genitals, I think he’s been sexually abused.”

I wonder if my mom manifested her dog’s return. It reminds me of when Kiki was four years old, and we went to Vancouver. She left her baby blanket in the restaurant, and the next day she was devastated. We called the restaurant, and it was closed. When the taxi driver picked us up to take us to the airport we told him the story, and he said, “That’s where my son works! He’s probably there now.” And he called his kid, who said they had the blanket, and we picked it up a few hours before flying out of the country. I always think, "Of all the cabs!"

The blanket mysteriously disappeared after my ex-husband starting saying things like, “She’s too old to be carrying around that filthy blanket.” 

She became very secretive about her blanket, and would cram it under a pillow if anyone not related to her was around. Remembering the blanket, I got pissed off, and sent him a text that said, “Did you throw away Kiki’s baby blanket or just hide it?” 

He wrote back, “What blanket?” 

I replied, “The pink one. Her prized possession that you thought was making her weak and pathetic."

I’m blaming it on the heat, but I got caught up in negative thinking, so I decided to start listening to self-help audio books. It helped. The audiobooks are reminders for me not to boil over in rage when thinking about something that happened five years ago. Keeping those thoughts at bay are critical for opportunities that come knocking, otherwise I'm distracted and they’ll ring a broken doorbell. So I’ll refill my cat’s dish each morning, and not worry about a baby blanket thats been gone for five years. I’ve got more important things to do, like not think about mountain lions.

Secrets to Success

My mom called me very excited, and she reported, “You won’t believe what I just heard!”

“What?!” I said on the edge of my seat.

“They’ve found a common factor behind the super successful like Bill Gates, Steven King and Elon Musk. They drink Diet Coke all day long. Or Diet Pepsi. Either one will work.” She said proudly, obviously, having just discovered the secret to success.

I’m reading my annual parenting book. Parenting books are not my cup-of-tea because it’s hard to stay focused. I’m forced to re-read pages because my mind wanders into a daydream. It takes forever to get through one of them. I can’t remember what made me start this parenting book, it was so long ago when I cracked it open. Maybe the kids going back at school, or the intense closeness of summer. It's called The Conscious Parent, and really embraces the spirituality sold on Oprah, complete with the Tolle and Dalai Lama endorsement smacked on the cover. I’m digging the hippie-let-your-kids-be-themselves vibes.

As a parent, I just try to be present, and listen. This usually means leaving my phone in the other room. I impart my wisdom best I can, and unfortunately this can involve scare tactics. Like Nancy Reagan, I stand at the frying pan and demonstrate “this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs” for my kids. Standing in shorts that are too small for me, and holding a spatula I just sang Rain On Me into, I remind my kids, “You have to take life seriously!”

I’m so worried about my kids being introduced to drugs I’ve implemented a “Just Say No” campaign in my house because I’m from a hippie town in Northern California called South Lake Tahoe. Yes, the international tourist destination. If you live there though, it’s sort of a bleak landscape, after you erase the beautiful landscape, because you see the peace-love-and-happiness intentions to self-destruction. 

I have no idea if this label is PC, but it's for a character whose done so many hallucinogenics their brain doesn’t work properly, and Tahoe is ripe with them. They are called The Burnout. They’ve taken a plunge into psychedelics they weren’t able to fully come back from, and spend the rest of their adult life working jobs with a crew of high school kids, never noticing the growing age gap, and regaling the new-to-adulthood audience with stories from their wild partying days.

I met a bunch of burnouts in my youth. At the time, I thought they were cool, free-spirits, lighting the world on fire with their lack of inhibitions. But as I got older, they were unchanged. I remember going over to a coworker’s house, and she was dehydrating banana peels next to the heater vent because she planned to scrape out the inside of the peel and smoke it for a new trip. I thought what ingenuity, but a few years later when she died of a drug overdose, I could make some associations between drugs and living up to ones potential.

It’s cool when people report of a singular psychedelic experience that changed their life because they felt an energetic connection to all life, the power of the mind, and a sense of reality being malleable. However, from my experience, this is few and far between, and I have to take a hard line because the nuance of drug use can't be conveyed to children. So I tell my kids that drugs are for losers! Yes, I said losers. You can put a red hat on my head, and a fish filet sandwich in my hand, but I care about my kids. So much so that I’m willing to read the most boring books, and let them drink Diet Coke at breakfast. Or Diet Pepsi. Either one will work.