Meanwhile, the water heater silently and secretly begins to drip, drip, drip onto the garage floor, eating away a corner of my wallet which allows vast amounts of money to drip, drip, drip into the waiting hands of a water heater repairman … for a house that’s already so under water, we need to don scuba gear before we pay the monthly mortgage.

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to suddenly drop you into the middle of a story, but it’s this morning’s story here at the ole Bloggybirdery.   To explain, we have a darling little house we bought when we moved to Phoenix from Seattle.  About one nano-second AFTER we signed the contract, the housing values in Arizona fell like Chicken Little’s sky and we (along with many, many others) are now the proud owners of an upside-down house.  We intended to live in that house only until we could figure out the lay of the land and discover which area of this very huge city we liked best.  With house prices at that time growing larger than the Grinch’s heart on Christmas Eve, we thought it a grand idea to buy rather than rent.  Hah!

Eventually we found the area and house that suited our needs, but of course, couldn’t sell the first house which had dropped in value by over half.  Solution?  Rent the first house.

Long story, short … we became double upside-down landlords, not receiving enough rent to even cover the mortgage payment on this very wet and under water house.  Drip, drip, drip!  Still, it was all good.  We rented to a wonderful woman who loves the house and takes care of it like it’s a precious jewel.  For her it is!  Her good care of the house gave us peace, even if we were still a great deal out of pocket.  The house was happily occupied and we were happily happy.

Then, last month our renter lost her job — another common malady these days in Arizona.  Over ten percent of working-age Arizonans are unemployed.  We’ve done everything we can to help her because she’s awesome!  We’ve helped her write a killer resume, let her slide through November with rent, given her copious hugs and good thoughts.  Short of taking up a street corner collection, we’ve done everything we can.

So, when our very sweet and immaculate renter called early this morning, we knew the news wasn’t good.  Water heater at the rental house, kaput.  Renter’s job, kaput.  November rent payment, unpaid.  December rent payment, forget it.  January and beyond, oh dear!

Life is hard for so many right now.  We’re all swimming through these deep waters.  Some of us have water wings and are floating by without a care.  Some are swimming like crazy, hoping for a spot of dry land to crawl onto for a much-needed rest for even a short while.  Some are sinking and some are so drowned, they’ll never come back.  We’re all doing our best and holding good thoughts that we’ll make it.

For us at the Bloggybirdery, we’re doing our best, collecting cans for those folks who could use a little help right now and visiting the little ladies and gentlemen once a week at the care home.  Dan says he’s helping the economy by supporting the local golf course.  We can’t do much, but we try to pitch in as we can.

So now we’re heading out to see if we can find a good sale on water heaters.   Wish us luck, and while you’re at it, think really, really good things for a very scared renter who is now literally, as well as, figuratively … UNDER WATER.

From Auburn, Dan, Wilson and Scarlet to our friends at DancingBirds — may you be ever blessed with thankfulness and filled with thoughts that always lift you higher.

Today … and always.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone

Auburn

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.  ~Colette

Writers.  We blurt and bloop and blather on about this and that.  Sometimes even, after years of practice and millions of writing belly flops into very very cold water, we find our voice.  Our brilliance.  Our excellence.

Sometimes.

Ah, but those years of practice before coming into our time of gravitas  can, for some of us, be nearly deadly.

Case in point:  Blogging.

May I direct you to my previous post for a perfect example of how innocently a writer can, within the span of a few small paragraphs,  go horribly awry … and how the Internet will forever remember the one bad post you wrote, while ignoring all those wonderful, pithy, poignant moments that came before and will surely come after.

One’s personal blog is seductive.  There are millions of folks now who write personal blogs.  Each day, approximately 175,000 new bloggers jump into the mix.  Some blogs are amazingly clever, some are narrowly focused to a single topic, some serve as pragmatic teaching tools — and some are (like DancingBirds) a grand experimental and sometimes nonsensical wave of hello to anyone who might happen by.  There is no particular theme to DancingBirds, other than its recognition that we are each like small birds shuffling through our days and hoping to goodness that we pick up a lovely dance step now and then.

Most who stop by are writers (Hi Writers!) who aren’t here to learn anything about the craft because I don’t pretend to be a teacher.  I’ve got nothin’ — unless you consider the lesson is how to be a foolish writer and live to laugh about it.   Writing a post like it’s your dog writing it is a perfect example of what NOT to do unless you’re Rita Mae Brown writing one of her clever and cozy mysteries with her cat, Sneaky Pie Brown, as co-author.

But for every foolish post I write, there’s an equally foolish grin on my face.  I love my writing errors.  Those  gaffes and missteps in punctuation and content, those ridiculous trial-and-error balloons I float above my head, every misplaced thought and every obvious error in judgment — I love it all.

It means I’m gloriously alive and there’s still a small glob of thinking brain matter capable of bringing me back to the joy of placing one word after another … even when I slip and fall all over those banana peel, slapstick words.  Every day I search for that wondrous writing precipice where I can fall gently and elegantly into a truth or even a simple moment of joyful expectation that brings me one tiny bird step closer to something good and worthy.

I search … and find … and then fall down and skin my knees and sometimes bite my lip in whatever not-so-gracefully hard landing I manage.  It’s not so much the fall that hurts, but rather, the generous hope that heals.  That’s what’s important — always the hope that the next thing we write  just might be good and perfect … something that flies straight up from the soul.

I think the best part of failing at one style of writing is the endearment of another ah-ha moment, the generosity of that less-than-glib feeling of narrowing down on our own snowflake writing voice that is unique and real and wholly our own.

And so I live on as that little bird — still writing, still laughing.  Always dancing.

Okay, here’s the truth.  I’m a dog.  Yes.  Yes.  How could anyone think anything less of me?  I’m an animal.  Okay?

But party animal?

Please.  I’m sure it’s all a mistake.

It can’t have anything to do with that ridiculous picture captured of me with the curly paper party hat.  Ha!  I laugh in the face of curly paper. I EAT curly paper.  Surely it doesn’t relate to my inability to stand without wobbling or falling down (see above picture), or that kegger I begged for.  (Again, see above picture clearly showing my inability to stand.)

I claim the Bart Simpson defense:  “I didn’t do it.  No one saw me do it.  You can’t prove a thing.”

It was that woman.  The one I refer to as, “She-Who-Holds-The-Cookies”.  It was her.  Or She.  Or her magnificent pocket that smells like liver and chicken and cookie things that makes me go weak in the knees and all drooly in the mouth.  She’s a She-Devil, I tell you.  A She-Devil.  Making herself all smelly and squeaky voiced like an irresistible liver cookie.

We’ll talk more about this discretely.  We need to make plans.  Secret plans.  Okay, okay … I’ll let you be my spokesperson.  As long as you understand that I’m in control.  After all, She-Who-Holds-The-Cookies lets me on the couch now.  We don’t want to disrupt that arrangement now — do we?

We’ll talk again soon because She-Who-Holds-The-Cookies seems to be recently otherwise journalisticly occupied.  That’s a good thing, no?  Or yes?  Or Down?  Did you say, Down?

Yours hairily,

Wilson

A Tiny Garden

See what I’ve done with

my fingers, my hands, with the

sun.  I selected you.  Stood your

legs deep inside dark and loamy smells, unfurled

your petals into the breeze.

You answered with your bodies,

swelling into green, budding, giving things,

fixing my mouth,  my eyes into

watering anticipation.

~  Auburn McCanta

If you should happen by my garden in the next several days, please don’t mention to Mr. Tomato that his days are numbered.  And for goodness sake, don’t let Miss Rose know that her ruffled skirt is beginning to wilt.  They are both such proud animals.  I’d hate to have them squander their full potential as a future dinner pairing — Mr. Tomato as a southern fried green dish and Miss Rose as a daringly orange table decoration.

Thanks in advance for your discretion in this delicate matter.

Yours hungrily,

Auburn McCanta

It happened over the course of two days.  Sunday and Monday.  I suppose it could have been any other two days of the week.  Tuesday and Wednesday.  Friday and Saturday.  It really doesn’t matter which days.  It only matters that for two days, I was in the right place at the right time.

First, I was at my usual place — on the couch — whining, also as usual, about the state of this, that and the other thing.  The remote rested in my hand with its normal familiarity, my thumb flicking the channel button … until it stopped on a most unusual movie title — little man.  A winner of 12 documentary awards, the film by Nicole Conn with an unusual title all in lower case letters  seemed intriguing.  I decided to drop in for a few minutes before moving on with more mindless remote thumb flicking.  Instead, I sat mesmerized. little man is the story of a family brought to its knees when they must choose between the destruction of their profoundly lovely family and the life of their infant son.  It chronicles every heartbeat of Nicholas, born 100 days early and weighing only one pound.

Nicholas, his tiny froglike legs and arms swimming in his NICU isolette, seemed from the start of his improbable life to be nothing more than sixteen ounces of joy.  With a heart barely the size of a cashew, the journey of Nicholas caused my own shriveled Grinchy heart to swell three times its size.  Even when the looming question of when — not if — to give up on efforts of maintaining the life of this improbable boy in a little bird’s body was examined, I rooted for Nicholas.  I cheered for the tiny spark of life rather than for the darkness of release.

When the film ended, I realized the remote had fallen from my hands and I really didn’t care to pick it up again.

That was the start of it.

That evening, Dan insisted I go with him to the bookstore.  I hadn’t been out of the house in several days and my dear, long-suffering husband needed to look at something other than my listless form on the couch.  Grudgingly, I took a look in the mirror and made a large note to self to shroud all the mirrors in the house in black cloths the moment I returned home.  Scrunching a baseball hat on my still-somewhat sour head, we headed to the bookstore for a couple hours of escape into Book and Magazine Land.  I grabbed one of those intriguing one-word titles off a front table, ordered my usual non-fat, no foam latte and found a chair tucked into a far corner of the store.

The book I had selected was enigmatically titled,  Sway.  It asks the preposterous question, “Why do perfectly rational people make irrational decisions?’  For the next hour and a half I read through eye-opening accounts of ridiculously normal people (like me) who became “swayed” by encounters of loss and then behaved in ridiculously thoughtless behavior in order to avoid further loss.  (Like hiding out on the couch for days on end?  Ridiculous.  Never.  Not ME!)

I finished my latte, bought the book and, clutching it to me like it was my new best friend, spent the rest of Sunday evening turning pages.  Literally AND figuratively.

Turning pages.

On Monday morning, I cruised quickly through emails, the HuffingtonPost, some of my other usual newsy stops in Google World, and ended on Facebook where one of my nearly lifelong friends had posted a 46-second YouTube video that — added to the previous day’s documentary and book — made me break out into an infectious smile that is still even now here.

I vow that from here forward, whenever that Sylvia Plath, full moon, HELP-I’m-drowning-in-my-own-inner-tide feeling threatens to make me once more a form on the couch, I now have a little man, a sway and an elk in a puddle.

Enjoy:

(P.S. If you can’t view the video, paste this into your browser:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWfvv2Blk48)

This ain’t a song for the brokenhearted
No silent prayer for the faith departed
And I ain’t gonna be just a face in the crowd
You’re gonna hear my voice when I shout it out loud

It’s my life
It’s now or never
I ain’t gonna live forever
I just wanna live while I’m alive

Bon Jovi

I just wanna live while I’m alive.

There’s a lone tomato growing into its later moments — in my backyard — and I swear it’s singing Bon Jovi’s It’s My Life, swaying to a soulful desert breeze, a little Bic lighter marking time to the moment.

And where am I?  Where have I been all these days and weeks?

Pretty much not living while I’m alive.  Jon Bon Jovi would be ashamed of me.

I’ve been lying on Greta Garbo’s fainting couch with a sour mood heavier than all the days of one’s life.  Living out the lines of her Camille with the back of my hand placed over my forehead, regret and anguish spilling into my heart, whispering that famous retort, “You who are so young–where can you have learned all you know about women like me?”

I’ve certainly not been rocking it out like that brave late-into-the-fall tomato in my yard.

And why all this broken sadness?  All this regret and madness?

I’ll get to that later.

Right now I want to talk about what any of us would do if we had only five — FIVE — days in which to do our life’s work.  What’s our five-day bucket list?  Here are the rules:  We’re healthy and strong enough, like teenager-strong, to do anything we physically want.  We’re amazingly smart enough to accomplish anything we can think of.  We’re football stars and movie stars and rock stars and geek stars.  We’re able to do whatever good or evil we wish … but we only have five days in which to do it.  Our list can be extensive or it can be exclusively singular.   We can do ANYTHING we want.

So GO!  What would you do?

Here’s my list:

1. Haul my heavy backside off the couch and go do something to make myself sweat at the gym.  Not just a little sweat, but pouring down my temples and into my eyes sweat until my legs no longer work and my arms are noodles and I break apart and fall into a million little depressionless shards of get-up-and-go.
2. Find a woman (maybe in the grocery line) who’s hair looks like mine — you know, hair that looks like those little fuzzy baby chicken feathers that stick up from the head because there aren’t enough of them left to curl or style or hide all that sticky scalp — and strike up a conversation with that beautiful woman simply because I love her bravery so much I can’t stand it.
3. Walk into the church I no longer attend because of its narrow minded bigotry and fall on my knees because of sadness for its frailty and its desperate need for little women like me to pray for its sad heart.
4. Take back number 3 and pray for tolerance because I need it first.
5. Dye what’s left of my hair a wild and sensuous blond because that’s how I’d like to go out — a wild and woolly blond!
6. Go sky diving —  Hah!  Just kidding.
7. Spend my entire week’s food budget on a family that could use healthiness and something better than donated Velveeta and Wonder Bread.  If Mr. Backyard Tomato Rock Star is ready, he’ll have a new purpose in life too.
8. Take Wilson to visit our beautiful little ladies and gentlemen at the skilled nursing facility — and spend so much time with them that the staff will think we’re patients too.
9. Sit quietly with another hurting woman, hold her hand, cry with her, heal with her.
10. Go sky diving — Nope!  Still not a chance on God’s green earth that will I jump from a perfectly good airplane.

I could go on, but ten things is a good enough start with only five days in which to accomplish my premise.

So, what’s on your list?  Please don’t tell me you’re going sky diving.  ANYTHING but sky diving.  May I suggest spelunking?  That would be lovely.  I like caves.  Nice, cool, I-need-a-sweater caves.

So, back up to the middle of this bloggy thing … and the question of why I’ve been so saddened lately.  Let’s just say, if I do even half of the things on my list, I’ll be happy, happy, happy.  And the couch will no longer have my impression stamped into its leather every day, and Notre Dame will win every game from this day forward.

I’m going to miss all my little ladies.

For each lady hair that falls from my head, she leaves a frightening space where no hair dares take her place.  There, there and there.  She’s gone, never to return.

I see so many women now with thinning hair.  Like me.  It’s inexplicable.  Are we all gifted with so many brains that our hair falls out from the sheer heat of our genius?  I doubt it.

Maybe we all drank milk from the same cow.  The same infected cow?  Improbable.

Maybe we each ate something.  Or it was in the water.  Or the air.

The air!

Now, that is possible.  The air.  The Air!  When I was a child, I remember tests of nuclear thingys were conducted.  In Nevada, I think.   All I remember is that when the bell rang, I was always told to get under my desk and be scared of communists.  I do recall reading that the winds distributed stuff everywhere.  Maybe the cows ate the grass that was watered by the fallout that was seeded by the clouds that took up the gas that was baked by the hen that scolded the ant that outlived the grasshopper – and now all the little ladies are dying off our heads.

All I know is that I see so many women in Arizona with their scalps on promenade.  We’re losing our hair.  By the droves, we’re losing it.  Maybe I only notice it here because Phoenix is too hot to wear a concealing wig.  (Personally, I’m into baseball hats.)  Whatever the cause, we’re losing it.

We’re blasted losing it.

I can hear the men laughing.  Join the club.  The Hair Club.  Um, guys, we don’t want to join your club.  We want our crowning glories to remain.  Women don’t want to look manly and handsome.  Maybe you don’t understand.  Our hair is falling out … plink, plink, plink.  Women are not supposed to be bald.

I’m going to the wig store in the mall tomorrow.  I’m going to sit in the barber shop chair and tears are going to fall from my eyes as I reach up to remove my baseball cap.

It seems I’m now one of the  little old bald women who’s lost all the beautiful ladies from the top of her head and no one has an answer for this malady except a very hot and itchy wig made from someone else’s hair.

But — Bless you, Someone Else, who grew some hair to weave in a wig to sit on the head of a bald woman you’ll never know that was destroyed by the air that was watered by the clouds that grew the wheat that was harvested by the hen and baked into bread that was  … that was …  Well, just, Bless you.

I think I’ll be a blonde again.

My ears wake me.  Or maybe it’s the stars.  At 1:34 a.m. — always 1:34 a.m. — like some kind of Twilight Zone moment.  I guess my ears collude with stars that twist across the sky, wanting me to notice all that whispers and whooshes, gurgles, bumps and whirs during that mysterious time of night.

Dan’s soft breathing into his CPAP air machine is always first to gain my attention.  The CPAP gives off a continuous, soft whoosh, but underneath is Dan’s even softer breath.  I always listen for the breath.  In.  Out.  Breathe, Dan, Breathe.  Good.

Overhead, the ceiling fan makes another kind of rhythmic whisper against the air it creates.  All night, I pull on my covers or throw them off — pull them on, throw them off — in a kind of blanket dance that only my failing internal temperature gauge understands.

Just outside our room, a refrigerator whirs and clicks its way through the night.  Each on-cycle lasts about a half-hour’s worth of whirring and clicking before it quiets itself for … oh, about a nanosecond.

The dogs dream their doggie dreams with legs running sideways on the carpet, whimpers and whines puffing from their cheeks.  They quiet when they’ve caught their dream-quarry or escaped the chasing beast.

Dan turns in bed, now always accompanied by a whoosh and a breath.

A toilet burps.

I hear another hair fall from my head and follow the sound of it skittering across my pillow.

Somewhere near 3:35 a.m. a dog turns and sighs.  Always 3:35 a.m.  Two hours and one minute of listening to the sounds of night.  Of sleeping others and the blips and dings that occur during that stretch of time.  At 3:36 a.m.,  I roll over, causing a sluice of sheets to cascade around my ears.

At last, the house holds me safe and I fall back asleep — amidst the sound of a constant night, a starry, starry swirling night.

Among a certain group, cage fighting is all the rage.  The gorier, the better.  The cagier, the better.  Not so much here at the Bloggybirdery.  We enjoy our no-drama days, our gentle nights of mostly PG-fare television.  It helps us sleep better, dream kinder, wake sweeter.

Okay, so we’re boring.

But what happens when two drama avoiding adults and two set-in-their ways dogs decide to toss a cat in the midst of all this colloquial nicety?

Fur.  That’s what you get.  A whole lot of whizzing fur chasing up and down the stairs.  Flying in and out and all around.  A small-footed wad of fur sliding under the bed just in time to escape the teeth of some big-footed fur thing.  Large fur barking at small fur.  Small fur hissing at giant fur.  Furless people yelling NO, NO at furred things.  Furred things blind, deaf and dumb to those furless things hollering at them.

What you get is ultimate cage fighting, DancingBirds style.

You get Whip It! with an audacious cat named Laverne who’s faster than a tattooed toughie on roller skates.

You get Drama with a capital D.

But alas, the high excitement of a good roller derby match turned out to be more than we could handle.  Laverne, for all her bravery in the face of giant barking dogs, packed her game duffel and went back to her former home.

Her other “mommy” missed her and wanted her back.

It would seem that Laverne has that effect.  Crazy-making when she’s around … but when she’s gone, she’s missed like mad.  We miss her now, but the good news is that we’ll still get to see her whenever we wish … and all that roller derby gear can be put away for another day.