Large Syringe/Shorter Ghost

Nov 1, 2007

The little absurdities of life (or—another excuse not to sit down and face writing the last chapters of the latest book).

Scene: my house with Ginna in it.
Ginna (pointing at me): Max, what’s her name?
Max (like, duuuh): Gram.
Ginna: No, what’s her real name?
Max (looking thoughtful): Mom.

Scene: the barn, a sick horse. Fall, a reasonably cool day. We have a huge syringe in which I’ve been dissolving two large tablets of chalky Phenylbutazone (better known, but not by many, as “bute”) for some four hours. These are like gigantic human aspirin tablets, used to cut inflammation—which, when it gets a free hand in a horse’s foot (the inflammation, not the bute) can eventually mean a dead horse. The stuff (the bute, not the inflammation) tastes a lot like aspirin. Or so they say. You can try it if you want—let me know.

The whole problem here is that I was afraid Sophie had laminitis – which a horse can get when there’s too much sugar in her diet – meaning, lush green grass, too much grain. I know this is too much info, but you have to know this in order to get at the irony in the story.

So what do you do to make the stuff taste better to a horse who will do ANYTHING she can to spit it out right into your hair – or down your sleeves, or anywhere she can reach? You add a little molasses to the syringe, that’s what you do. So we had this bottle of molasses that Geneva left with me: “Just like a dollop,” she said. Or maybe she didn’t actually use the word “dollop.” In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard her say that. Anyway, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to pour molasses – but there used to be this really well-known expression (it came out of the south where they eat a lotta biscuits): “slow as molasses.”

What it means is, once you turn over your bottle, you can run home, take a shower, watch a PBS special, drive back, feed the horses and then go back to the upside down bottle and start worrying about whether the molasses can actually drip down into the syringe without getting all over everything. Only thing is, once molasses is committed to a flow, it’s real hard to stop. Real hard.

So, here we are, dancing around this syringe, trying to get the stuff to stop dolloping. Which it does not do until practically the whole rest of the syringe is full. And then, you can’t scrape out the extra, because by that time, the bute is all mixed into the molasses. So we shoved the stopper in and stuck a finger over the little bitty hole in the front, hoping the whole assembly wouldn’t simply blow up.

Next step: get the mixture into the horse – by the simple expedient of shoving the business end of the syringe into the horse’s mouth, which you are trying to hold way up in the air, so that it is tipped as far away as it can get from your hair. You have to get the syringe up on top of the tongue, which is very busy trying to expel anything that is not grass, hay or a bona fide treat—which means bute and all—and push hard on the plunger.

It all worked fine, that is, until the mass of molasses hit that little bitty hole in the front.

That’s all I will tell you, except to say that when we were finished, I had analgesic molasses running down my sleeves to my elbows, and Sophie, her lips now a nice burgundy-brown, was looking at us with an air of deep reproach.

Then it was left for me to hope she would not simply expire of a sugar spike during the night. I wouldn’t have worried about a dollop. A half cup is another thing altogether. But as it turns out, she survived to see another day. The next morning, the doctor couldn’t find a thing wrong with her. Okay. And now I am left to wonder: what brought about the miraculous change? Was it the bute? Or the molasses?

**********
I didn’t mean to write so much.

Char and I went to Michael’s Crafts the other day, looking for—well—craft stuff. And we happened to see this cool bow-making thing in the ribbon aisle. It was the As Seen On TV Bow Maker, and we fell for it. But before we could move happily on, we caught sight of yet another bow maker, down on the bottom shelf, a neat little package with a picture of a very happy woman on it, holding what was obviously a prize winning bow.

I need to say here that there are times when I have feel as though I am actually living with Brian Regan. If you don’t know who he is, you just haven’t lived. We went to one of his concerts – though why we call it a concert, I don’t know, since all he does is yell, mostly – and the rest of his fans are just as bad as my kids: they know every one of his routines BY HEART. In fact, if he gets one word wrong in performance, they ALL correct him. And when they are back in civilian life, and they happen to slip accidentally into a Brian Regan state of mind, they talk JUST LIKE HIM.

So, here I am in the craft store, and I pick up this nice lavender box and I look at Char, and I ask her, innocently, which one of these bow-making things looks the most effective. She does a slow grin. “Well,” she drawls, approaching Brian talk, “which would you rather use? The As Seen on TV? Or the BOWDABRA????” For that was the unfortunate name of the product. The Bowdabra. This is pronounced, at least by Charlotte, as Bow-Dabra. As in Abraca….

So, Okay, those of you who can, let’s all say it together, just like Brian Regan: BO-DA-bra. And for the next twenty two minutes, that’s all I could get out of her. “Don’t you just want to get home and get your hands on that BO-DA-bra?” “We did it ourselves with the BO-DA-bra.”

In the end, that pretty much made the decision for me—I have way too much reverence for Christmas to bring something like the Bo-DA-bra into it.

I’m just wondering how Regan’s family lives with him??

This was supposed to be a summation of July – but now I can’t remember anything that happened back then.

So I’ll talk about Halloween.

We used to have, like, 300 kids come to the door, back in the day. We were the only real neighborhood around for blocks, and people would come from all the rural corners of the planet to walk our street and harvest our candy. But urban sprawl has eaten almost all the land outside of my pasture, so kids don’t have to walk twelve miles in the snow to find candy anymore. Besides, they all grew up.

More or less.

Last year, it rained. We only got the eleven kids from across the street and about three others. Which was great. Cut down on all that DVR pausing. This year, the weather was great, and I decided I was going to count kids, just to see how many we had left in this good old and getting older neighborhood.

I don’t give out candy anymore. I give Oriental Trading goodies – spiders and bugs and glow-in-the-dark bracelets (which are good for the really little kids who can’t get past the candy thing), so what’s left over, I just toss in the Halloween boxes for next year. Which means that I had plenty of bugs in the bowl by the door – at least, I hoped I had plenty. The fact that Halloween was on a school night was going to cut down on the after eight o’clock crowd, anyway. And Scott Holyoak, who used to show up after nine, figuring everybody would dump their surplus on him (which we did) is now married and lives somewhere else, also factors into my planning.

We used to do a talking ghost. This is because some people who lived across the street and down the block from us did one when I was a kid in LA. Maybe they only did it one year, but it made a tremendous impression on me, so we did it for twenty seven years, and let that be a lesson to you. We used to use two sheets, with Guy’s big work boots just peeking our from under the bottom hem. And we’d run wires out to the studio so we could use the big processors on the voice (Darth Vader had nothing on us). We’d peek out the windows and call the kids by name, and they never could be sure if the thing was really alive or not. And for years, the kids loved it, and for a while, they brought their own kids back to the house just to see the ghost.

We did not, however, put the thing up this year. We’re too old now, and the charm of waiting by the window has worn off in direct proportion to the amount of time it now takes between banks of kids (15 to 20 minutes). And as our kids are all off now, wearing dreams and looking for chicks and guys, and driving to the university and the city, and not taking their turn at the window – well, the thrill is just gone.
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We got less than a eighty kids this year, and quite a few of those were the very tiny children of people who USED to be very tiny children, and I hate the thought of giving them nightmares. Nobody seemed to miss it. Our fame has run its course.

And I only allowed two of our pumpkins – medium sized ones, all this year – to be carved. I guess I am in cultural rebellion: I love whole pumpkins and I think they are highly appropriate on the Thanksgiving porch as well. I do not wear purple with a red hat; I’m not even sure when that became the symbol of being old enough to throw out the expectations of the ages and exercise the freedoms of age. But I am finding that I can, finger by finger, give up some of my grip on traditions that used to characterize this house full of children.

So, now I am going to show you pictures of my yard, and my two last children – or maybe Cammon, too. And the dogs. Piper was really genuinely sad that we made him come inside; he wanted to lie out on the deck and watch the kids. Turns out, our fierce, kid-hating puppy grew up to be an old softy. If he didn’t make Ginna sneeze, he’d spend hours following Max around like a – puppy.

That’s all I have to say. I wore my new orange Gap sweater (which is as close to a costume as I ever get, since my dreams are full of lovely, angelic images that I will never achieve in costume) and Guy and I stayed home to answer the door (some old people don’t even do that). Half of our petitioners came from two houses across the street—children we love, trooping by our house first, before it was even dark.

Here is a picture of my neighborhood: I no longer have treat-or-treating kids, no opportunity to pilfer—so I walked out onto my front porch and yelled: I WANT A BUTTERFINGER!!! ANYBODY WHO GETS ONE TONIGHT, GET ONE FOR ME, TOO. And by the end of the evening, I had ten of them.

And that’s pretty much the end. I ate two tiny Butterfingers and stored the others up unto the season thereof. And we blew out the two little lanterns. And now we get to put the decorations away. Everything goes too fast, you know?