Miss Marple (Agatha Christie) and her cultural faux pas

 A few months ago my sister gave me an old collection of six novels by Agatha Christie. There is something so lovely about reading Agatha's mystery stories. It's as if you simply do not care one whit about the present day struggles and troubles with society and politics and world events. You are tossed backwards in time, to the 1930-1970's and you are happily taken up with the customs and moral concerns of those eras. Miss Marple spans about 30 years,  so one must be ready for a few modern changes in culture as one reads about her amazing murder-solving abilities.

One readily acknowledges that one's time could be better spent improving one's mind with modern day non-fiction about socioeconomic disparities and the political breakdown of our country but one does not care, at least for about three or four hours. Agatha Christie is a tonic for all of the above.

Currently I am reading a Miss Marple novel. (Yes, I am one of the "ones" mentioned above.) The where, when, how of the novel are not important because they all have a common theme: polite conversation, a mysterious murder, more investigative conversation and Voila! We know who the murder is and how it was done and why, all thanks to the elderly and sometimes doddering Miss Marple.

However, in today's light, these books give us such a rich look into society of that time, especially because Agatha Christie began writing her mysteries in the 1930's but her last book was published 40 years later. That's a huge span of time, of course, running from the Great Depression through WW2, into the Cold War and almost to Watergate!  While Christie doesn't mention a lot about current events in her Miss Marple stories, she does flavor her tales with quick references to daily events. She will mention how novel telephones are in the early novels and then moves on to the same thoughts about television.  But since most of her murder solving work takes place in small villages in Britain, it's easy to ignore the fact that time has marched on. While reading her stories, it's easy to pretend everything is stuck in 1933.

Agatha Christie was certainly not a "politically correct" writer.  She has no problem using pejorative and dismissive words and phrases, not to mention racially loaded terms. I won't repeat them all here, but words like "chink" and "darkie" and  other pejorative terms for different nationalities are widely used by characters in her mysteries. They aren't necessarily used in a malicious manner, just as a term of identification in some way.  But reading them today, it is sometimes a bit of a shock that those phrases exist so easily on the page.

If you haven't read one of the classic Agatha mysteries in a while, please do.  "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" or "The A.B.C. Murders" are good places to start for a Hercule Poirot mystery.  "The Body in the Library" or "The Caribbean Mystery" are good Miss Marple books.  Reading one is like taking a little vacation from reality and that is often just the tonic for what wears us down in everyday life.  Check them out.

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Burning the Bounty

It's not that I don't make mistakes or screw up all the time, but seriously....burning a cake?  A cake that I have made at least a dozen times?  A cake made from the bounty of apples from my daughter's front yard? A cake that was to be served at a dinner for ten people? And I burned it?  Holy cow.  Now what?  It's not like life gave me lemons and I made lemonade (a trite saying that I hate, by the way.)  No, life gave me apples and I burned them.

Back to the cake. I did what any baker would do who didn't have time to bake another cake: I took a knife to the aforementioned burned cake.  Once it cooled enough to handle, I gently flipped it upside down and roughly sawed off a quarter inch from the bottom part of the cake. Then I slowly shaved about an eighth of an inch off of the really dark parts of the side of the cake. There was nothing to be done about the too-brown apple pieces on the top, so those remained. Once the surgery was complete, the cake looked OK.  Unless you had witnessed its sad coming-out-of-the-oven over doneness, you might not have known its major flaw, which was, of course, that it was burned.  I felt a tiny bit bad about the overcooked situation but not bad enough to leave the cake behind. It came to the party with me. 

No one suspected a thing! Once sliced, the cake looked perfect!  And it tasted great, no hint of black edges, no burnt taste and people really liked it. Whew, crisis averted.  Well, not really a crisis, of course. Who would really care if the cake had accidentally fallen into a muddy, wet ditch or had been trampled by a runaway horse or been stolen by a cake thief?  One of those scenarios might have given the baker a great story to tell and that story might have been better than the actual apple cake desert.

Next time I will save the cake for myself and serve the guests an outlandish tale that they will eat up like pudding and be just as satisfied. 

Actually getting to walk a dog! Part 2

 There I was, poised to harness an 80 pound dog when my dog-walking "mentor" gently asked the relevant question: "Do you have treats in your pocket and poop bags as well?"  

Well, gosh, no. I carried neither treats nor poop bags.  What a loser.  No wonder I have not yet been certified to walk a dog. What dog would want to be seen with me?  How alarming to be out, strolling the grounds, and pooping, and having your so-called certified dog-walker not be able to pick up that poop!  

So we begin again. We get poop bags. We get treats. We get a leash. We get a walkie-talkie. Then we try and get a dog.

There are a couple of dozen dogs at this local SPCA  so one would think getting a dog on a leash and taking it for a walk would be easy. Not so much.  As I previously reported, there are a lot of steps between "wanting to walk the dog" and actually "walking the dog."  And seriously, we don't really walk the dog so much as let the dog out of its very sad, tiny concrete room to go out and pee and perhaps poop and maybe get to run around in one of the yards. There isn't a lot of walking involved. There is, however, a lot of struggling and jumping and wrangling involved.

These dogs, most of them, have come from families. And now they are in small rooms, alone. They often have to pee and poop in those rooms, where they have a small bed and a food and water bowl. The dogs hate to be in the small 10 x 10 room so when they see a person sneaking into the room they go crazy. They jump, they wiggle, they jump more. Trying to put a harness (which is what they need to wear to exit the room) on a leaping, over-excited dog is like trying to harness a small tornado. It's very difficult.

After what seems like ten minutes, once the harness is on and you get to leave their prison cell, they are all energy. They just want to get outside, to be let go, to chase a stick or fetch a ball or simply zoom from one side of that yard to the other.  And then they want to be petted. Lots of pets. Lots of love. Then, maybe, they will let you walk them for five minutes before you must take them back to their cell. And leave them.

My training is complete. Next week I will get my shift assignment and will have two hours to walk whatever dogs need walking at that time. As happy as I will be for that allotment, the  dogs will be happier.  After all, I am not in a 100 square foot concrete cell. They are.  All I hope is that I make them feel better, 20 minutes at a time.

Being certified as a dog walker, Part 1

 Heeding the call from the Sonoma SPCA for volunteers, I am currently taking classes on being a volunteer dog walker. Now, one would not guess that there's a lot to learn about walking dogs, especially if one has been walking dogs for more than 50 years. But that would be a faulty assumption! It seems there are hundreds of things to learn about leashing up a canine and strolling it across the property.

In short, it is harder to be a certified SPCA dog walker than it is to be a parent! No one really gets a lot of lessons in parenting, you just sink or swim. Someone might help you with diapering skills or explain how to sterilize baby bottles but other than reading a couple of books about sleep patterns and the right stroller to buy, most parenting is on-the-job training. And usually the kids turn out okay!

But the dog walking curriculum covers everything from different dog collars and harnesses, leashes, dog safety (from dog and human points of view), how to give a dog a treat, how to pet them, how to rate their poop on a seven point scale, when to maintain eye contact, how to manage a huge dog as it pulls you across the muddy lawn, and on and on. All of the information is good but so far I have gone to three classes, had one Zoom meeting and I have yet to actually walk a dog!

But I will persevere! Tomorrow I get to "shadow" a dog walker to see how it is actually done. I am sure I will learn more valuable tips on dog management but I just want to meet the dogs and walk them and make them happy for a few minutes. Turns out that if you are a stellar dog walker and last at the job long enough you can eventually be trusted to take the dog off the SPCA property!  Perhaps take a dog to the beach!  Or to a park, or go on a hike! Needless to say, I am looking forward to this sort of adventure.

I will keep you posted on how the training progresses and if I actually get to walk a dog. 

Noise or not?

Working in an industry where there are people in your face all the time, when you must deal with people on their terms, when the daily chatter of hotel life is non-stop, it makes you crave quiet. When you come home after an eight hour shift there is nothing you want except silence. No music, no talk, nothing. Just quiet. That was me, for years.  I would play music on my days off, sometimes not even then. With the loud, constant ringing I have in my ears most of the time, quiet was fine.

At some point you realize that noise is different for each of us.  Depending on where you work, you might be surrounded by noise all the time but it might not be intrusive. Or you might be the person who doesn't mind the background confetti of sounds, always ongoing. Maybe that background chatter doesn't feel personal so it is easy to ignore it, like constant white noise.  

The other evening, I sat at a nice bar in a nice restaurant having a glass of wine while waiting for some take-out food. The place was noisy, as restaurants usually are, but surprisingly I found that the noise was mildly entertaining.  Noise was coming from the patrons at the tables, noise was in back of me from the hostess stand, chatter from other people sitting at the bar, clattering from the open kitchen, a slight murmur from the bartenders as they worked. Many layers of noise but none of it disturbing or annoying. (Of course the glass of wine and the promise of good food probably were factors in the lack of annoyance.) And I realized that it wasn't sounds that bugged me. It was when the noise intruded on my personal space: people chatting at me when I didn't want to chat, the telephone ringing when I didn't want to answer it. That kind of noise over an eight hour shift made me crave the silence.

Since my life doesn't have eight hour shifts much anymore, I am going to start paying attention more to sounds that I like and that I enjoy.  Except for the cawing of crows, I really like the sounds birds make and I live in a bird-rich area, so I'll start with appreciating that. I might have to sit at restaurant bars more often and bask in the happy noises emanating from that venue. Maybe I will even begin to listen to music when I am alone and enjoy the companionship of that kind of "noise." Maybe my solitary world will become less silent and maybe even more joyful. 

Who knows? Change is good. 

Parents - Siblings - Self

Talking to my older brother Steve the other day, we remarked on how detached we sometimes felt from our other siblings, other people, the world. Not in a bad way, but just slightly removed and thus slightly unemotional.  Maybe it's a generational thing; so many of us baby boomer kids were raised by parents who really had no idea what they were doing and thus were not the most forthcoming with affections, connections, communications.

Or maybe it was just our parents. They didn't have many friends other than in-laws, there were never dinner parties at our house where adults mingled and they never discussed relationships outside of aunts, uncles and cousins.  Our parents really had very little outside life. And it was clear that they didn't really know how to be concerned parents. Perhaps they didn't even like being parents, who knows? But there was never any dialogue about how they felt about us kids, never any positive affirmation about our joys or any support about our sorrows.  That's a huge generalization, of course, because I do remember them being very excited when one of my younger brothers won some science fair award and went on to the state contest. But other than bland comments about grades on report cards or a mediocre, short-lived response about a hand-made Mothers or Fathers Day card, there wasn't a lot of personal interaction.

Now, I could be wrong. I could have entirely forgot that my Mom read to us every night or encouraged us to tell her about our day at school or guided us through making cookies for the first time. That might have happened. But I don't remember it.

The relationship with my siblings is fine. We are all very different people but we all get along. (Mostly.) I know people who haven't spoken to their siblings in years and have no interest in doing so. At least the six of us talk on the phone now and then and we hold no rancor against each other. But I wouldn't say that we are all really connected. Some of us are in touch frequently but some of us, not so much. Do we love each other? Not for me to say. Do I love my siblings?  Yes. And that's a stronger "yes" for some than others.  I like them all as well, some of them more than others but that's probably just because some are more familiar than others, I see them and interact with them more frequently.  And because we are all very different, it's easy to like each one as a separate entity, not just as a sibling.  Would I answer a call from any of them in the middle of the night and drive to their house if they asked?  100% yes.

But there is a coolness in our relationships. A slight distance that one doesn't usually find with really good friends. Maybe it's difficult to be friends with your siblings, maybe there's too much shared genetic language, too much knowledge of our past that precludes close friendship.  I don't know.  

Anyway, just mulling over the past.  And the present. 

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Talking to my dead dog

 It's true. I talk to my dead dog. Watching TV. Cooking dinner. Driving in the car, walking through the park, sitting on the deck under my umbrella while having a cocktail.  I talk to Cooper.

No, he does not respond. I have not gone that far off the rails. Yet. 

This past week I watched Hannah, Gabe and Annie's dog, and several times I called Hannah "Cooper" as in "wasn't that a great sunset, Cooper" while Hannah looked at me askance. 

I realize that having Cooper die after living with me for 15 years means a little cognitive dissonance is appropriate on my part.  I get that. It's not that I am delusional about his death. It's simply that I lived with that dog for a long time and now that he's gone, he's still my trusty Pony-Pal-Pokey. (If you don't get that reference, well, too bad.) So I still talk out loud to him, I address comments to him and in some odd way, it is comforting.

When creatures you love die, whether they are human or animal, there seems to be a resistance to letting them go. Not so much for old parents, but for peers who die too young or really good friends who die and of course, for pets. We know our old parents need to die, so we welcome (in a way) their demise.  But friends and pets, not so much. How surprising is it then, once they are gone, that we continue to converse with them? Not surprising at all, at least to me.  

With my pets, I simply talk to them, make comments that they would understand and, in the end, I simply wish they were still in the room with me. How cool would it be if my great dog Webber, the large, goofy Golden Retriever, had been friends with the small, stellar dog Cooper?  What fun they would have had.

I will continue to talk to my dead dog Cooper and my previously dead dog Webber and all the dead people I loved and have known.  If they listen, great. If not, also great. In the end, it's all good.