Last night, before bed, I had put newspapers down in anticipation of the mess, having spent the day before dodging doggy-do and mopping the floor with Tilex. Still, the dog managed to hit the few spots that were un-papered – remarkable aim considering the dire circumstances that must have compelled the beast to soil the house in the first place.

What’s wrong with the dog, what’s making her ill, you ask. My answer - I don’t give a shit (I realize this is a pun, one I intended). I’ve given her half a bottle of Pepto Bismal and stern talking to about the consequences should she defecate even one more time inside the house.

I know the old adage, feed a cold, starve a fever. And feel, somehow, betrayed that the old, wise folk who develop and deliver such truths forgot to generate any catchy saying pertaining to a house-pet’s GI distress. So I’m going with the starving bit and have decided not to feed the damn dog until I observe a noticeable weakening in the shit storm.

For those of you who’ve been wondering why it’s been taking me so long to publish my next post, just imagine me down on my knees, holding my breath while dabbing ineffectually at the god-awful mess my dog has left me. Imagine how it is to be so lightheaded and exhausted from all that scrubbing and lack of oxygen and the effort expended swallowing back your own vomit, that you have no choice but to return to bed immediately after cleansing the mudroom. It’s like a swoon, an enduring faintness that really fucks with a person’s motivation and eagerness to meet the day. Imagine me hanging the Gone-Back-to-Bed-Because-This-Morning-Is-Unbearable sign on the door knob and forgive me the spotty blogging.

(Just a little part of me is currently dreaming that this bout of tummy trouble just might usher in a doggy-ending. I can hear myself saying, Natural causes. Couldn’t be helped. Doesn’t the house stay clean a lot longer without our canine friend who we remember fondly but, on days like today, could probably live without?)

I’d like to hit the start over button and if I were to do so I would choose not have a vituperative fight full of insults and finger pointing concerning the personal finances and the state of the Madmarriage union over lunch. I would not go to the mailbox and receive my annual rejection from the BU Writer’s Workshop and I would not pack myself into the car and drive over to public housing to coax Gladys into paying her April rent. Actually, to be honest, Gladys was the highlight of my day. I called her to tell her I’d be there just after 1 p.m. She made coffee. She was dressed and pert and waiting for me at her kitchen table. I needed a cup of black coffee (she claims the neighbor’s stole her milk) like a jumpy, caffeinated, nausea inducing bullet to the head but I couldn’t say no to Gladys who had brought out her silver plated sugar bowl and set the table in anticipation of my visit. I brought Gladys a nice thick slice of the chocolate cake I made on Sunday. It was a desperate and shameless attempt to curry favor and, I hoped, a way to deter her from cursing at me and accusing me of stealing her china.

But the gesture was largely unnecessary as Gladys was in a much better place this visit. She had the calendar turned to the proper year and the proper month. She was coherent and full of stories about the life she once led in rural Vermont. She shared with me the fact that April makes her particularly sad as it is the time of year she thinks about the brother that she lost when he fell through the ice on a spring pond. He was her little brother. He was only seven when he died. And some of her tales were happily poignant, like the memories she shared of milking and herding the cows on her father’s farm. Gladys informed me that she likes cows. Gladys also added that she really loves dogs but can’t trust herself to keep one. According to Gladys, “dogs bark too much and mess their pants” and are otherwise a nuisance. She prefers other people’s dogs, stray dogs she encounters on her walk to the store to get cigarettes. Gladys enjoys dogs from afar. All the more reason for me to think that Gladys, in her more lucid moments, is very, very wise.

Because Gladys can’t hear at all, I just sat across from her and listened and nodded appropriately. When it came time to force Gladys to write her rent check I anticipated a battle, some struggle that included details about her imminent move to Florida and her good for nothing daughter and the biddies down the hall that steal her romance novels, but she was agreeable and pleasant and without any ado dashed off a check to cover April’s rent. I tucked the rent check into my pocket and gave Gladys a huge hug. I told her, “Gladys, you and the coffee and the important chat, have made my day just a little bit brighter.” She couldn’t hear me but it felt important just to say it aloud even though it fell on deaf ears.

There’s no mild segue back to obligation and necessity in my life, it’s just one giant muddle of minor mishaps that bundle up and make me want to keen and rant and flee to dark corners. I suppose it began before we even left, when I retrieved the luggage from the attic only to find that one of the fucking cats has been using the L.L. Bean Duffle bag as a litter box. (Have I mentioned how much I hate my cats?) Both felines were sternly reprimanded. The cat box was thoroughly cleansed and fresh litter applied just in case the cat in question was objecting to the general condition of the facilities. But then I remembered that the little one, the black and tan whiskery runt, once shat on my daughter’s sleeping bag that we kept beneath our bed to accommodate childish night wanderings and the need to sleep close to parental looking people in order to fool the Boogie man. Before our flight, a new piece of luggage was purchased at Marshall’s to the tune of a $100. (We gave up on the sleeping bag idea a long time ago.)

And then there’s the dog that, while kenneled during our vacation, was diagnosed with Lyme disease and administered antibiotics that must be continued for at least a month, twice a day, at $55 a bottle. When I inquired about the efficacy of the Lyme disease vaccination I seem to remember paying $64 for back in September, I was told that no vaccination is one hundred percent effective. “Oh I see, I see,” said the dumb blond, realizing she’d been fleeced by the over-entrepreneurial veterinarian.

With the all pets accounted for and expensive, it’s on to the children who both have dental appointments next week. Dental appointments? Wasn’t it just weeks ago that I was writing posts about extractions and nitrous oxide? Upon checking the dates, I have confirmed that it has been six months since the last frightfully expensive trip to the dentist. Time to steal ourselves for the next installment in the ongoing saga to save my son’s teeth.

This appointment is ill timed to coincide with some other major expenditures: the kids’ piano tuition is due today – we pay for lessons up front, their ten week tennis clinic must be paid for on Friday (after all, tennis is a life-sport), if O wants to play Spring baseball he must register and pay by week’s end though practices don’t start until April, my niece has a birthday tomorrow, my sister-in-law turns forty next Monday and my step-mother-in-law will be the big five-0 in six days, (both adults expect significant gifts, the child will be happy with a book). Oh, and the car won’t start and apparently needs a new battery, the plow company has just sent the bill for clearing our significant seasonal snowfall and the country club that we already can’t afford has sent notice that the membership dues have been “reassessed”, which is their refined way of saying bend over while we stick this bill up your arse along with your mortgage company and your insurance company and every other organization that has raised its rates in the first quarter of this new year.

And, and, and… I could go on, but let me just share the kicker.

This weekend, while playing Madden Football on the Wii (have I mentioned just how much I loathe the Wii?), O stepped backwards on one foot while shaking his numchuck furiously and cursing at the screen (which is apparently how all Wii games are played, sort of tipsy and wild, half blind with frustration), just as the dog was slipping along behind him. Ass over tea kettle he went and came crashing down on the coffee table, snapping it in two. Legs splintered (the table’s not his), the whole mahogany, antique thing of it unsalvageable.

I didn’t adore the table but it was old and finer than anything we could have bought on our own as it was inherited from my father-in-law who upgraded to a cushy, sueded, ottoman-type of coffee table sometime back. I’ve done the research and a replacement table of the same period and provenance as the one now dismembered in my basement will cost between $500 and $1500. For now we will make due with the table we bought at a yard sale back in ‘92. It has been in storage for just such an occasion, (the complete destruction of all things finer) and anxiously awaiting a relaunch. It is tired and worn and completely too modern for our entirely antique home, in other words, it’s a design disaster. But it’s seen some action. It was the sole table in our collegiate flop pad and having served the needs of five delinquent academics, I think it can handle anything the Wii, my children and my three pets have to offer. Just don’t expect an invitation for coffee anytime soon.

All the grim excitement was obscured by the hemlock trees, the dense hedge between our yard and the Harrison’s. So thorough and opaque a barrier that I have, in two years, exchanged ten words, maybe twenty with the people next door.

I dash to the second floor to get a better look. A woman, maybe Mrs. Harrison, but I’ve only met her once so couldn’t say for sure, slightly gray, wearing a wool pea coat and holding her purse across her chest, walks carefully up the icy walk and disappears into the house. The ambulance moves off slowly, no sirens, lights extinguished. And it looks convincingly like the final moments of someone else’s tragedy.

Later a light goes on in the room above the garage. A single lamp, perhaps to read a book by while she eats her dinner in her lap and tries to forget the heart attack that has taken her husband just four days before their daughter is due home from Middlebury for Winter Break; just eight days before Christmas, on an afternoon that is sunny but bitingly cold. After dinner, she will try for rest in the bed that was theirs. And in her fitful sleep her feet will seek the warmth where he had lain and find it cold.

She will invite the golden retriever to join her in the bed. The dog will be confused, having been relegated to the oval carpet by the foot of the stairs for nine whole years. She will stroke the dog’s fur and find it soothing.

She had named the dog her ‘pet-peeve’. She had laughed and told friends about his shedding and his propensity to lift his leg on the living room couch. She had never considered herself much of a dog person, a pet person, really. She once would have been entirely content to be canine-free. But she can see the future, a dog in her bed, a dog for whom she must remember to wake and administer pills for arthritis and eczema. The orange-yellow pill bottles lined up in the medicine cabinet, each one labeled Peeve Harrison, two tablets daily, to be given with food.

There was wiggle room only as otherwise normal looking individuals sorted through a variety of ensembles including a toilet seat complete with realistic looking dribble of crap and a plush body suit made to look like a naked Dom Deloise. Not that I envy these folks their selection. I mean really – toilet seats, Dom Deloise? But all this adult excitement concerning a holiday I thought exclusively the domain of children got me thinking, I have never, ever been to a costume party where other adults show up in masks and wigs and face paint.

Where are all these people going on Wednesday night that requires their purchasing a $200 costume and why, oh why haven’t I ever been asked to such an event so that I can politely decline, citing mortifying flashbacks from my Kindergarten year when I was ruthlessly laughed out of the second grade quad by children whose mother’s had created home-made costumes in the likeness of the Fry Guys and a bag of M&M’s and Wonder Woman and a Ladybug while there I was, wearing my regular everyday clothes and a mouse-with-a-mushroom-hat-mask. I’m not sure what the hell my mother was thinking besides, “Oh this looks easy and doesn’t require sewing and, great, it’s on sale, a fungi wearing rodent it is.” To this day, I loathe the act of masquerading. But still, it would be nice to have invitations to decline.

Instead, I will have to project my anxiety onto my own children who will gleefully don their costumes and face the wrathful judgment of their peers. It’s tough stuff – this Halloween thing. And I try to make up for my lack of creativity in the costume department by creating holiday memories of another variety. Like my sister-in-law who is so good at leading holiday themed craft projects and always, always baking the perfect festive dessert for her family on the special day, I decided I, too, would create a memorable Halloween confection that we could all enjoy and take photographs with as proof that I am not a total parental failure. And, after three hours of sweaty effort, my Halloween cake actually looked like the one in the magazine, all orangey frosting and dripping chocolate ganache. When I excused myself to go wash the chocolate off my jeans, the dog promptly dragged the whole thing off the counter.

Always at the ready, on call, coiled and tense
Available for car rides and quick romps
Down deserted lanes early Sunday morning.
Charging ahead with the determination
You frighten the geese, snap bees from the air
And stop to defecate right in the middle of the steepest slog
To challenge my grit and endurance.

May your third birthday be filled with warm naps in spots of sunshine,
Dribbles of popcorn, M&M’s and Goldfish from a child’s hand,
Squirrels and chipmunks and a few wandering cats
To chase across a wide green lawn dotted with tennis balls and marrow bones.
Happy, happy day to she who loves me best.