The DMV: Another depressing reminder about being old.

Getting old is tough. (I am well past the time when I can pretend to be "middle aged."  Old is my current category. I can hardly wait until I define myself as "Elderly."  Sigh.)  Bones and muscles ache and get weak, sight and hearing start to fade, the memory is faulty, it takes longer to pee, one wants to have a nap at very random times of the day, the power of concentration wanes, and on and on. But even bureaucratic organizations have ways of making us feel old and confused and extraneous.  For example: in California, once you are 70 years old, you can no longer renew your drivers license online. You must go to the the DMV in person and stand in line and take a test to see if you know the rules of driving.  No matter that you have been driving for over 50 years, no matter that you haven't had a traffic citation in years and years, you still must take a written test in order to renew your license. 

So, you dutifully make an appointment, you show up 15 minutes before the appointment time and you still need to get in line with EVERYONE!  Even those without an appointment!  So, your first thought is "why did I bother to make this appointment?" which is a question that has no reasonable answer.

You wait in line and you are sent to a computer to register for the appointment you already made, you get back in line with a magic registration number.  That registration number means you can now sit in a chair and wait for your number to be called and then you are sent to another line. This third line of the morning gives you an eye test, takes your thumb print and takes your money. And you are sent to another line, a longer line, where you will get your photo taken and sent to another computer to take the written test.  But it's not actually written, it's on a computer screen.  Once you take the test and hopefully pass, you wait in another line to get your papers stamped and a pretend, temporary license, and then you can go home.

Whew. It took less than an hour, which is sort of surprising. It seemed like hours.

The DMV was populated by young people just getting started in the driving world, people who were trying to get a valid ID card and the rest of us, old people, who were there for the same reason: to renew our licenses. Lots of gray hair in that building this morning. And a lot of very timid and scared people who were completely baffled by the entire process.

When you go to the computer to take your test, you need to read the rules and instructions. It was clear that not everyone did so. One woman, probably older than me, failed her test and was very worried that they wouldn't let her drive home because of that!  There are options to skip certain questions on the test, there are instructions about what to do if you fail the test the first time, info about re-taking the test and information about other stuff.... but many don't read these instructions. I felt like I should have stuck around to help these folks, to guide them to the right line, the correct window for DMV professional (!) help, but all I could do was express my gratitude for passing the test and get the hell out of the building.

I don't blame the DMV, they try to streamline the process, but they are dealing with every sort of person, in every walk of life: youngsters, oldsters, people who don't understand English too well, people who don't really have a legitimate physical address but who still need an ID card, people with inflated egos and deflated levels of cognition. For the most part the staff was kind and patient. But it's just a big machine and we are, occasionally, cogs in that machine. All we can hope for is to settle our business quickly and get out of there.  

It was a beautiful day when I left the DMV, sunny and warm and in a couple of weeks I will get a new CA Drivers License with what I am sure will be a gorgeous photo of my old face surrounded by its gray hair and I won't need to return for many more years.  

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And a month later....

.... still not much to say. However, today was the first day of Swimming Time!  Yes, the pool temp today was around 73, which is doable, so in I went for about 25 minutes. It felt great! My exercise routine lately has consisted of a few walks in the morning, sometimes a walk in the afternoon and a lot of sitting on the couch reading and getting up to drink some water or look outside. Nothing, in other words. Being in the water is hopeful.

Work: the same. About 10-12 hours a week split over two days. At least it gets me out to the Russian River area and I get to see Jenn and Dar.  And it gets me out of the house and off the afore mentioned couch, always a good thing. 

Dogs: still walking them at 7:00 on Wednesday mornings and will do so tomorrow. Dogs are still good, more to report on that tomorrow.

Movies:  nothing much. But a good Netflix show, 8 episodes, good dialogue, good acting: The Diplomat.  Check it out, it's worth watching.  I just watched a new movie with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, titled "Air" about Nike's signing of Michael Jordan to represent their new line of basketball shoes. Decent movie, free on Amazon Prime, and the soundtrack (from about 1984) was great! 

Books: nothing memorable.

And on and on. I will try and get my game on and write more. No promises. Thanks for listening.

Boursin Cheese, once a gourmet delight!

 Growing up, our family didn't have fancy cheese. (This was the 1950-60's, by the way.)  We had sliced American cheese for the grilling of sandwiches and a block of cheap cheddar for things like enchiladas and tacos. Our parmesan cheese came in that green container, ubiquitous to all Baby Boomer kids.

The first time I tasted Boursin cheese was early in the 1970's. I was married, we were at some friends  house drinking cheap wine and this cheese was there, a little round thing, dotted with herbs, and we spread it on a cracker and ate it. (Cheese-and-crackers was a relatively new experience to me as well. I knew nothing about the appetizer scene.) But this new cheese was amazing! It was soft!  Tasty! Nothing like American cheese or cheap cheddar! I loved it.

Fast forward 50 years. I am currently house/dog sitting for Gabe and Annie and in their fridge is a half circle of Boursin cheese!  "How delightful is this?"  I think.  I spread some on a gourmet cracker (no Ritz crackers here) and it is still pretty good. It's still soft and tasty and herby but there is a tiny taste of ..... fakeness.  Something artificial is living in this cheesy treat. This is surprising. Looking at the ingredients, there are none that would give it a 'fake' taste. So I chalk it up to the difference between my palate 50 years ago and my palate now. Maybe my taste buds have gotten snotty in their old age and Boursin just tastes like the 1970's to those taste buds.  Who knows?

Still, it was nice to revisit an old acquaintance. It was nostalgic, remembering lots of meals with old friends, thinking back on semi-drunken, what foods we thought were the epitome of sophistication then, the wines we drank (or guzzled) and the late-night conversations fueled by that wine. Good memories. 

Bad Dog Day Afternoon, No Biscuit for Me: Part 8

Sorry, I couldn't resist that title.  "Dog Day Afternoon" is a good movie and the title fit, sort of.    (I have been watching old Al Pacino movies lately, pre "Godfather," which is one of my all-time favorite movies.  "Serpico" is on Netflix and holds up well, by the way). 

And my dog time is not the afternoon, as you well know, it's 7:00 a.m. so the afternoon reference is also bogus.

But the non-bogus part of this is that it was a bad morning for me and the dogs.  Every other  Wednesday that I have been at the SPCA walking the dogs has been either good or very good. Sometimes I walk 4 dogs but usually it's 6 or 7, depending on the dogs, the time and the other volunteers.  Today I walked 2 dogs. That's it.  Just 2 dogs and both of them were dogs I have walked previously.

Clover is a smallish female mix, maybe 40 pounds and she has been in prison at SPCA Sonoma for a couple of months and I can't believe she hasn't been adopted. She's calm when walking, knows how to fetch a ball, is personable and loving.  I walked her today and gave her lots of pets and treats. She loves hot dog bites.  

And this is Harry.   

Harry is huge!  Like 100 pounds huge. But beautiful and calm and I am sort of in love with him. Almost all the dogs at the SPCA wear a harness to walk which means we put those harnesses on the dogs when we take them from their cells.  Some are so difficult to harness (see below) and some are easy.  (Some fall in between terrible and easy.)  Harry, even with his size, is easy.  He knows that going out means peeing and pooping (which he won't do in his cell) and a romp around and Harry loves to smell stuff. He also likes treats, dog treats, hot dog bites, anything.  I love this dog. Even as big as he is, he is gentle most of the time and once our jaunt is over and I return him to his cell, he is happy to get more treats. But then, when I close the door and look at him, he has the sincerely sad face that only a lovely dog can have. He breaks my heart every time.

So, Clover and Harry. My pals. So far, great.

But then I ventured into unknown territory. Usually there is a regular employee there who also walks dogs early in the morning and stands with me at the white board and gives me guidance on who I should leash up. This man knows my hesitancy with really large, jumpy dogs.  However, he was not there today so I relied on the notes all dog walkers are required to leave on the computer.  Keep in mind that these are dogs that were not there last week.  The notes said things like "easy to leash" and "jumpy but easy" and "once harnessed he was an angel" and so forth.  I picked three of these unknown dogs and got into their cells and I could not harness one of them.  The smallest was an 8 month old puppy, maybe 30 pounds, but his cell was full of poop and pee (which I usually tolerate just fine) and he jumped and nipped at me and spun around and around and barked for about 3 minutes, at which time I called it quits.  The same thing happened with two other dogs but they were larger, 50-60 pounds, not housetrained so lots of pee and poop on their paws (which, again, is fine if they are willing to be coerced into the harness) and way too jumpy and pushy for me.

In defeat, I signed out and left the shelter. I felt like I had failed the dogs. Not just the dogs, but that I had failed myself. Of course, as we humans do, I conveniently extrapolated that experience into this: What a failure I am. What a joke my life is. I can't even harness a dog. What is the point of anything?

Humans are so good at that, aren't we? Taking one thing that happens and making it the entire point of our existence?  

It took me a while to get past that mind-set. It brings up the entire point of being retired, of course. What's the point? I don't want to play any sort of card here, but the cards are on the table for a reason.  But that's a blog for another day.

Thanks for reading. I wish I could say something like "strange things are afoot at the Circle K" but I am sure those cards are not in the mix.

To be clear, I did not walk the bunny or the cat, nor did I attempt to walk either of them.  Perhaps that would have turned my day around. Perhaps not. Just saying....

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Reading John Irving

 John Irving fans know this: to read him is to commit. His books are long and involved, many subplots, many characters who change over the course of 400-500-600 pages. The reader must be in for the long haul and like it. There's no reading Irving if you don't like his work or are just "meh" about it. Needless to say, I am a fan and I have liked every one of his novels, some of them I have read more than once.

But his latest, "The Last Chairlift" clocks in at close to 900 pages!!!  That's not a commitment, that's a kind of craziness.  Seriously, I took it out of the library, kept it past it's due date, returned it and put it back on my request list to read the second half.  Irving's books aren't quick reads, either. They do not accommodate skimming. Every time you try to skip past a paragraph or two you realize, at paragraph three, that you missed something crucial and need to backtrack.  So you don't skip ahead too much.

But the writing and the plot and the characters! It's been a while since I've read his other novels (he hasn't written one in seven years)  but the characters in this one are so shimmering and almost ethereal and yet completely real and alive.  And beguiling and frustrating and maddening and joyful.  

The story begins in the 1940's, in Colorado, at a real hotel, the Hotel Jerome, now a luxury auberge hotel.  Things happen there, ghosts are present, lives change. The story moves to the East Coast, to New Hampshire (of course, Irving is always going back to his roots) and New York and other locations but the Hotel Jerome appears in the book many times.

A lot of John Irving's novels revolve around political themes (war, injustice, civil rights) and there is always a sexual component to them as well. He champions, in  his novels, the queer and trans world and the struggles of groups outside the "norm," whatever that might be. This novel is no different. The main characters are straight, bisexual, gay, lesbian, trans and questioning.  Just like the real world. A lot of the story takes place in the 1980's, when Reagan was President and ignored the AIDS epidemic, and it continues until present day.  In 900 pages there's time to span 80 years!

"The Last Chairlift" is quite a tale and I enjoyed it immensely.  It makes me want to re-read some of his older novels but not quite yet. There are too many new novels out there in the literary world and too little time.  I'll go back and revisit older ones when I am too old to go to the library and pick up new books. But if you like Irving, you will like this book. 

Dogs on My Mind: Part 7

 Walking lots of dogs early in the morning is a little like speed dating:  you interact with each dog for a very short time for a very specific purpose.  That's where the analogy ends: in speed dating one is not intent on getting the subject to pee and poop as quickly as possible.  With dogs, at least with the dogs we know are house-trained, they have been inside for 12-15 hours and they REALLY NEED TO PEE!  Some get five feet outside the door and pee becomes a certainty.  (Poop takes a little longer.)

It's always a gamble when I arrive at 7:00 on Wednesday mornings to see who is still there and who has found their home. Stan, the frisky one-year-old I mentioned previously, has found that home, thankfully.  There are my old favorites, of course, like Shiloh, who I hope gets a home soon because he is such a love. Nora and Clover have been at the shelter for a few weeks and are doing well. And there's a new dog, Penny, a mix between a Pitbull and Catahoula, neither of which are on the small side of dogdom. 

Penny is beautiful and so gentle. She will take a cookie out of my hand like she is whispering to it, just a little tiny movement of her mouth. She walks on a leash perfectly and is spirited but responsive and respectful. If I had the space, I would take this dog home with me in a second.

Nora is another newish dog, a cross between some sort of husky and maybe a German Shepherd.  She's not too big and she is a great walker, plus she knows how to play fetch and is happy tossing the ball into the air and playing with it like a cat.

The SPCA has acquired a few other dogs and some are so endearing that I know they'll be gone in a week or two. I try not to fall in love each week, but like with speed dating, it's difficult to ignore the great qualities I see in some of these dogs. Not a Wednesday goes by that I don't drive away thinking "... maybe.  Maybe."

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All the good dogs: Part 6

 It's a guessing game as I get to the SPCA at 7:00 in the morning: which dogs will be there and which dogs will have magically vanished?  I want my best dogs to be there but at the same time I want them to be gone, to have been adopted in the seven days since I walked them.  So it's always a bittersweet morning.

There is a lovely young (one year old, a bouncy puppy) black lab and pit bull mix, named Stan. (Come on, you gotta love a dog named Stan.) On the early shift we try to walk the dogs who are house trained first, because they have been waiting for at least 12 hours (more like 15) to pee and poop.  Stan is jumpy when I squeeze my body through the door, holding a piece of a hot dog in my hand to distract him from trying to bolt out the door. Stan wants to get escape, definitely, but at this hour he just wants to pee.  We get out, he walks about ten feet and he pees. And pees.  And pees. Seriously, he pees for about 45 seconds, which is a lot of pee!  Stan calms down a bit. We go to one of the large yards where he can be off leash and he zooms around like a crazy animal (!) and then, whew!  He poops.  (I know, TMI)  And now he is totally just a dog. Not a dog with huge needs, just a dog. Stan doesn't fetch, he cares nothing about a ball being tossed. He just zooms.  And then he jumps on the structures and waits for me to come over and I pet him and his entire body just relaxes into the petting. That's really what he needs: love.

And don't we all? 

Then Stan and I go back to his cell.  He gets some sliced hot dogs that I bring from home, he still wants to escape from  his cell but he fetches the sliced hot dogs that I toss across his little habitat and I scoot out the door.

Next is Shiloh, an older pit bull mix, the one that looks like a piggy bank, white with big black spots. Shiloh has been there for a while, like five months. It's difficult to figure out why he hasn't been "chosen" because he's so cool, so calm, such a lovely older dog. He also goes out, walks  20 feet and then pees a lot. Shiloh is so happy just walking around, so happy to be out of his cell. An easy walk, a romp in the play yard, back into his cell.

And so it goes. Some new dogs, a couple of huskies that are actually lovely, not as hyper as huskies can be. A small, older chihuahua mix that needs to get out to pee but you can feel the distain radiating off of her, like she knows she must do her business but she would rather 1) do it without someone watching her, 2) do it without being on a leash and 3) she would rather be anywhere but here. All she wants is to be on someone's couch, in a warm home and be loved all day. She cares nothing about me, and no offense is taken.

So many other dogs: I walked eight dogs on Wednesday in two hours..... and covered almost three miles doing so. It was a good morning.