Stitched Together

by Bob Thompson

  Returning to the kitchen, I carefully marked the liquid levels of each bottle and kept adding tea bags to the boiling water until its color closely matched that of the bourbon. Satisfied with the coloration, I poured the whiskey down the drain, replaced it with tea, and returned the bottles to Charlie’s closet.

  I told no one of what I had done and heard nothing of the result until a few weeks later. Si, Charlie’s underpaid but loyal decades-long office manager, and I were alone in the lunch room. Si giggled as he related the story to me.

  It seems that several weeks prior, he and Charlie were working late when he heard a loud coughing and spluttering coming from Charlie’s office followed by an even louder stream of profanity and frantic calls for Si to come to his aid. Rushing into the office, he’d found Charlie’s desk covered with wet papers.

  Evidently, Charlie, as was his daily custom, had poured a large plastic sports tumbler half full of bourbon and had been in the process of downing it in one single tip of the glass, also his custom, when his finely tuned taste buds detected something foul and he spilled and spewed the suspected poison all over his desk,

  After his revelation, Si looked at me inquisitively, searching for any culpable reaction, and offered, “He thinks it was you that put tea in his bourbon.”

  Managing to keep a straight face, I expressed nothing but shock and indignation that the boss would have kept alcohol in the office despite his explicit memo forbidding it.

  Si smiled knowingly.

  I heard nothing more concerning the incident. But shortly afterward, I framed a sign that stayed on the wall behind my desk for many years. It said, “Treachery: you can’t use it without teaching it.”

  Spelling Bee

  Mom was always nice. For forty years she helped Granny run a country grocery, taught piano, was a poll worker at elections, and sang in the choir every Sunday. Never did I see her in a confrontation where she let loose on someone … except twice.

  The first was when I was in sixth grade and in the finals of the McCracken County spelling bee. Between her seat out in the audience and mine on the stage, Mom and I were exchanging worried looks at each unfamiliar word. Something was very wrong. We both knew by heart every word in the Official Study Book given to us by the head of the spelling bee committee, and these words definitely weren’t in there!

  The contest had started with ten participants representing the champions of every elementary school in the county, but a half hour later David Bradford and I were the only ones left. Finally, I was asked to spell a word that I doubted even Noah Webster had ever heard of. I made an effort to sound it out but transposed an a and e and, accompanied by a sigh from some and muted cheers from others, the contest was done.

  I was relieved the ordeal was over, but as I looked out to the audience, I saw Mom marching down the center aisle holding aloft the Official Study Book. Red faced and quivering, she waved it back and forth at the stunned judges at their table and then under the nose of the school board lady. “Who is responsible for Robert Wayne being the only contestant to receive the wrong study book?!” I had never seen Mom this animated. I think she would even have cussed, but she did not know how.

  I had discovered her deficiency in expletives only a year before when she unexpectedly caught Dad in the bathroom shaving with a Remington razor that looked exactly like her hidden-surprise birthday present for him. Before she found out it was a borrowed razor, she had let go with the scathing invective “Damn you … soul.” That was the best she could muster before my confused Dad finally got the circumstances sorted out.

  Other than that single instance times fifty years in the past, she had been the model of a nice, composed southern lady until Dad and I were confronted with the alarming and sad reality that personality changes frequently accompany the memory loss and confusion that is Alzheimer’s disease. It was evident to both of us that Mom was increasingly and regularly a little less nice about things.

  During my regular Sunday-after-church telephone calls, she would invariably fall off the edge of nice and work herself into a tirade about a lifelong friend who in his mid-eighties had started bringing a “lady friend” to church. “What does he need her for at his age? He can’t do anything with her anyway! She doesn’t care about him; all she’s after is his money.”

  This was not the Mom I grew up knowing. After enduring many versions of the same monologue tirade week after week, I finally asked her, “Why does this woman upset you so much? Don’t you want Jim to have a companion? What has this woman ever done to you?”

  There was a pause. “Good,” I thought. “She’s thinking, exercising her brain.”

  Finally she said, “Son, don’t you remember Edna Leigh? That witch gave you the wrong spelling book!”

  There are some things that even a disease as debilitating as Alzheimer’s can’t erase. A mother’s Righteous Wrath will always show Nice out the door!

  Cats

  The back porch of my family’s grocery store was a pretty good place for a dozen or so country cats to find employment in the rodent-control and expired-dairy-disposal business. Cats aren’t dumb.

  I am an August-Leo baby born in the Chinese Year of the Tiger, a cat twice over. I understand felines; I know their favorite rubbing places on their neck, behind their ears. I can make their purring vibrate walls. I can talk to cats. Don’t be fooled—it is in their DNA always to pay attention despite their outward “I-don’t-care, you-are-nothing-to-me” persona. They are always listening, evaluating, plotting.

  I love cats, except for the very few that Mom occasionally selected from a litter as royalty, because after a while these “house” cats became spoiled beyond belief, gaining that capricious cruelty that always accompanies a sense of entitlement.

  It seemed to me that every phone conversation with my parents was interrupted by a yelp from my mom as the latest of these monsters, Molly, raked a claw across her Coumadin-thinned skin or out of boredom shredded a piece of furniture. Molly would not face me in person; she would hide in another room, under the bed, or in a closet when I visited.

  Finally, postponing the inevitable with a few years of daily inhome services, it became painfully evident to all that after sixty-three years in their rural home, it was time for my parents to choose an assisted living facility. One of the primary determining factors was which one would allow them to keep Molly. We finally settled on a facility in Paducah that would accept the jaded demon fat-cat providing that her vaccinations were up to date, which they weren’t.

  At their home, I explained it all to Mom as Dad gently coaxed, then shoved Molly, not without loss of blood, into the carrier for me to take her to the vet.

  “She’ll be scared to death,” said Mom worriedly, “She’s never spent a night outside this house since she was a kitten!”

  “She’ll be fine,” I said.

  On the way to the vet, Molly lay in the cage on the seat beside me, her back turned to me, pretending to not listen as I talked to her. I explained that life was about to change for her and my parents, that now I was in charge and her years of tyranny were over; I had power of attorney, owned the house, paid the rent—and she’d better straighten up and quit messing with the big cat’s mom!

  To gauge the impact of my lecture, I made an attempt at consolation by slipping a couple of fingers through the wire cage and touching her neck. Instantly and effortlessly, she pivoted 180 degrees in the small enclosure and brought blood to both fingers.

  “Okay,” I said. “Have it your way.”

  In the vet’s office I explained to the receptionist, one of Mom’s former piano students, that Molly needed to be vaccinated and—I looked at Molly, who gave me that “Whatever” look—“she also needs her claws removed.”

  “All of them?”

  “No, let’s start with the front.”

  ‘’You understand we’ll have to keep her a couple of nights,” she said.

  “I figured that,” I said. “It will be a vacation for her, I’m su
re.”

  A couple of very full days later, my parents were nervously settled into their new home and I went to retrieve Molly. On the drive home she was sullen. I quietly explained the new realities of her life. She would visit the vet as often as I chose, and she was lucky that she was not a tomcat.

  Just out of the cage and disoriented in the strange location, she darted for safety under the bed. “It will take some time for all of you to get adjusted,” I offered.

  Following that, I smiled in daily conversations with my parents, in which they always commented about the marvelous change in Molly’s attitude. Dad contended there had been a mix-up at the vet and I’d brought home a different cat, all cuddly and sweet.

  Cats aren’t dumb.

  Boundaries

  Both my ninety-year-old dad and our hound dog puppy Jasper have recently had trouble with boundaries.

  After a year of living successfully living within the confines of the invisible fence system, in which his collar would warn him if he was flirting with the shock awaiting at the limits of his boundary, Jasper’s world suddenly changed when the fence power supply came unplugged. I happened to be looking out the front window when he took off running down the street, drunk with freedom.

  Bolting outside, in a loud voice I demanded his return, and his response was the same as when he catches sight of our cat Hunter in the yard. My exhortations, threats, and whistles had not the slightest effect on his eager embrace of Don Quixote adventures. It was at such moments that I regretted not buying the optional training button, tuned to the frequency of his collar, that would have stopped him in his tracks long enough for me to catch him.

  My dad was suffering from much the same confusion. In the last few years his world had changed more than I could imagine. He’d grown up without electricity or indoor plumbing, lived fatherless through the Great Depression, survived World War II, and prior to him moving to the assisted living facility, almost all the women in his life had been relatives; now that had also changed, as the majority of residents, 99 percent of the staff, and all the bosses were female.

  His first shock in this new world came when he quickly learned that it was entirely out of bounds to express too much delight at his weekly assisted bath. I got a call from the administrator assuring me that Dad was much beloved by the entire staff, but to ensure that he continued to receive the services he was entitled to, I should have a talk with him about boundaries. He was chagrined, vowing to apologize and promising it would not happen again, adding that the very idea of the encounter had been so overwhelmingly foreign and amusing that he could not resist the not-well-received quip.

  A few days later, in one our twice-daily phone conversations, he told me the apology had been accepted and everything was forgiven. He went on to tell me about an interaction with another staff member, an attractive thirty-something meds nurse who often lingered to chat with him. “I like her. She’s nice and she always stays to talk with me,” he said. “She told me she had three kids. I asked her if they all had the same daddy!”

  “Dad, you didn’t!”

  “Yes, I did!”

  I paused to collect my thoughts before explaining that, although sexual attitudes had most certainly changed drastically from his youth, there were still some things that were not appropriate for casual conversation with women and many things, although common knowledge, were better left unsaid, especially if he didn’t want to die of an “accidental” drug overdose. I hoped he understood.

  A month later, because I had not received any more cautionary phone calls from the staff, I thought Dad was beginning to acclimate to the realities of his new world. On one of my biweekly visits to Paducah, I was in his apartment when an old family friend, twenty years his junior, stopped by for a visit. Dad was ecstatic to see her. Her family had been an integral part of the rural community I grew up in and we had a long conversation about the good old days in Ragland. Quiet for a while, Dad entered the conversation to tell her that of all her brothers and sisters, he’d always liked her the most, even when she was a kid, and that as an adult she had always been nice to him. He told her how much he appreciated her and that he thought she was a good person … even though everybody knew she had hot pants and had slept with every boy in Ragland. But he’d always figured that was none of his business.

  She smiled, taking it all in stride, as I sat there wishing they made training buttons for old men.

  Hunter

  I consider scars accidental tattoos, each with a story. One of my recent body-art additions resulted from the interaction of a circular saw and Hunter S. Thompson, my cat.

  As might be expected, Hunter has risen to paranoia and unpredictability levels commensurate with his namesake. He is an excitable, jumpy, and maybe bipolar feline, with a great fondness for catnip and exaggerated drama. A fundamental disagreement between him and our hound dog Jasper about what constitutes play had banished Hunter to an area around and under the garden shed, beyond the boundaries of Jasper’s underground fence. Ridden with guilt over my complicity in letting my wife bring this biblical plague into Hunter’s life and his resultant banishment to the periphery of my life, I set about renovating the shed into a kitty condominium with a straw-tick bed and a battery-operated, critter-proof automatic feeder. Ultimately, I had plans for a small kitty door to limit his uninvited guests to creatures more his size, but first I wanted him to get comfortable with his new apartment by providing easy and unlimited access, so I just chocked one-half of the man-sized double doors open a foot or so.

  Gradually, over a couple of weeks, the aroma of his twice-a-day portions of Wild-Feline Seafood Mix and his catnip-infused bedding overcame his many trepidations and he took up semi-residence. On one of my frequent visits with a supplemental can of wet food, I observed the disarranged aftermath of what looked like a knock-down, drag-out battle with nocturnal marauders. I decided it was time for phase 2 of the renovation.

  In retrospect, I will admit that I did not give the now vigilant and always-on-edge tenant much notice prior to beginning the renovations. In my garage, I gathered the previously purchased cat door and returned to the shed with the necessary tools for the job.

  Hunter had finished his treat and was comfortable in his bed when I opened the door wide and tried to coax him out but, as cats most often do, he paid me no attention.

  “Okay, have it your way,” I said as I closed and latched the door.

  Using the cat door as a template, I outlined where the cuts were to be made with my carpenter’s pencil, then carefully pulled back the blade guard, positioned the battery-operated circular saw for a plunge cut, and pulled the trigger. The thin-bladed saw slashed through the plywood at an off-square angle, vibrating the walls of the shed with a frequency not normally occurring in nature and evidently discordant with Hunter’s finely balanced internal tuning fork. Above the noise of the saw, I heard a loud, plaintive caterwauling sound. “It’s his own fault,” I thought smugly. Now I had his attention.

  I stopped the saw to listen. The noise coming from inside reminded me of a motorcycle orbiting inside the Globe of Death steel circus cage. It sounded like Hunter was circling around the walls and ceiling, defying gravity, knocking garden tools off their pegs and toppling boxes. Talking to him through the door, I tried to calm him down, but he persisted. In his catnip-addled mind, he must have thought Freddy Krueger, Jason, and a pack of banshees were outside clawing and slashing their way in.

  Finally, when he did not settle down I decided it was time to open the door and assess the damage. I crouched down in front of the door hoping to intercept Hunter and reassure him. As I cracked open the door, I was blinded by a white flash of pent-up energy. In that moment of frightening clarity, I saw the wildly neurotic bug eyes behind aviator sunglasses, a cigarette holder clenched tightly in his mouth, and razor claws reaching toward my face. I jerked backward as the furry cannon shot blasted past my shoulder, knocking me to the ground. Thankfully, he did not have access to a gun. Lying on my back
looking up at the blue sky through the trees, I felt blood trickle down my neck from a slashed ear and I realized how unwise I had been in the choice of names.

  My next cat will be named Gandhi or maybe Buddha.

  Tree Climber

  My son was six years old when, at a backyard cookout, I watched him climb a pine tree for the first time. I knew it was a seminal moment for him, a rite of passage.

  Most people start out imagining their kids will be just like them, at least the parts of themselves that they’re most proud of, the things they love. And maybe that will be true for some things, eventually, but when they’re little we start to see indications of their individual paths, pace, and timing and realize that what they become will hold surprises for everyone.

  To my knowledge, my own father had not been a great tree climber, but the oldest and dearest vision I have of myself is as a climber of trees. I don’t remember my first steps, but I do remember that first tree, my first alternative perspective, my high sanctuary. Watching my son, my mind’s eye drifted back to the 1950s and the big box elder tree next door in my grandmother’s front yard.

  When I was little, everything looked bigger. I grimaced at the thought of that Alice in Wonderland world where faucet handles, cookie jars, bicycle seats, and the lowest tree limbs were all beyond reach, and where chairs, ponies, toilet seats, and spiders are all far bigger than they needed to be. I remembered being exasperated with having to look up at nearly everything. The only things at my eye level were grownup butts. Trees were my escape from that lowly station of childhood and I expect the same was true for my son.

  Growing up in my family’s grocery store in the 1950s and ’60s, I had been confronted with more than my share of posteriors. There was a constant parade of tushes that would make a Kardashian envious; customer, salesmen, and vendor rumps, fannies that took me two or three steps to get past. The delivery men, the Bunny Bread man, the Midwest Dairy man, the Tom’s potato chip guy, the Coke, Pepsi, and Royal Crown guys all had distinctive hindquarters.