Monsoon enough

As one who grew up with most of the works of Kipling, I was pretty sure I knew what a monsoon was. In the first place that HAS to be a Hindu word, and the phenomenon has therefore to be one unique to the tropics: muggy mornings, giving way to torrential rains in the afternoon, which leave clear but even hotter and visibly steamy evenings and sweaty, mosquito-plagued nights. Oh, yes, and spices and heady flower fragrances float in the heavy air as well. Isn't that what you thought, too?

Well, think again. Here in the high desert, what the locals call the monsoons arrive usually in time for the opening of the opera season (plus or minus July 1), in order to provide for the early arrivals a meteorological pre-game show through the opening in the back of the stage. Thunderheads and rumbles build throughout the afternoon, and by evening there is as likely as not a gully washer (lavadora del arroyo?), at least in Santa Fe, also usually in Albuquerque. Not so much in between the two cities here in Cochiti Lake -- one day out of 6 or 7 we'll get rain, but we get every single mutter and clap of thunder. The heat -- the DRY heat, they say proudly -- continues, and the sweat dries instantly on the skin. If there WERE frangrances in the air, you couldn't smell them because the inside of your nose is cracked and bleeding from the lack of humidity. (The humidity rests stubbornly at around 12% today.)

The monsoons came early by a month or so this year, and it's not a big deal to anybody but Grreta, our beautiful but slightly neurotic shepherd/husky. The fact that it's a big deal to Grreta makes it an enormous deal for the rest of us in the household, as well as for those neighbors who are kind enough, and love Grreta enough, to want to help us deal with her. At the very first sign of thunder (we don't even know it's coming except for the behavior of our little harbinger) Grreta whines, she quakes, she runs around the edges of the room, she crawls under tables, unplugging appliances and electronic equipment as she goes, she paws at doors, she scrubs the carpet, she climbs in and out of the bathtub and pulls down the curtain rod as she does so. If we have been foolish enough to leave her loose alone in the house for one of these episodes, she will likely as not pee on one of our beds. If anybody approaches her to try to put a leash on her, she growls and snarls. We used to cram Grreta into a crate (viz. "Marly and Me"), but by now (age 10) she's just damned well had it with that, and so she snarls and snaps alarmingly, twisting and turning and bracing her legs so that it's pretty scary and a huge effort to get that job done. We gave it up.

There is not enough Rescue Remedy or canine tranquilizer in the world to reassure this dog. She just will not be persuaded that every day, every single day for months, there is not a mortar assault on our bunker, from which we will all die, Grreta first. That we haven't died in ten years of thunderstorms in Atlanta and then the so-called monsoons of New Mexico means nothing; today could be the day the mortar round finds its target and we will die. Grreta first.

The only solution, and it's an imperfect one, is to restrain her; we risk dismemberment by attaching her leash, and then we affix the leash to a (large) object, like the leg of our ridiculously heavy coffee table, or the frame of a bed. Snubbed up in this way, Grreta seems at least to be if not mollified, then contained. She seems to feel slightly better if she's in company (it's always good to have an audience if you're chewing scenery), and the fact of the restraint seems vaguely comforting. "Stop me before I pee again...." If she should need to pee in earnest, she won't do it, likewise will not eat nor drink. She wants to be left alone (but closely watched, if you can imagine) to shudder and quake exophthalmically.

I have some experience with prima donnas, and after a lifetime of trying to modify the behavior by ignoring it, isolating it, or desperately changing the subject, I have surrendered to it. Damned if I'll applaud, but it's taken its toll on me so I'll just let it go. If I can hear the audio of the broadcast of the Wimbledon finals, then I'll just nevermind nevermind nevermind.

Update: I finally had the mammogram last week, so everybody can stand down now. An interesting side note: When a welfare queen such as myself shows up for her Medicaid-covered mammogram appointment, one of the Blue-Toothed (not literally, although those things look a lot like Patrick Stewart's Borg appliance) reception bimbos, now trying to spell the perfectly phonetic Hoochaneetsa Plaza North, makes you an offer. You know how when you're playing blackjack in Vegas or Reno (or the Sandia Casino for that matter), and the dealer's first card is an ace, she offers you insurance against the possibility that her next card will be a face card or a ten, otherwise known as the idiot bet? This is like that. For an additional but paltry sum of $40.00 plus tax, the radiologist will scan my film through a CAD program. I pursue the matter:

I: Doesn't he read it first, with his eyes?

Bimbo: Well, yes.

I: Medicaid doesn't cover it?

Bimbo: No; it's just an added reassurance.

I: If I have cancer, won't they include that test, among others, like an MRI, in my "program"?

Bimbo: Well, yes.

I: So if I decline this once-in-a-lifetime offer (you'll excuse the expression), I can have the CAD-read anyway if I need it?

Bimbo: Well, yes.

I: I therefore decline it.

Bimbo: OooooKAY. [Subtext: it's your funeral.] Please sign this form SAYING you decline it. [Subtext: it's not MY fault if you die of an overlooked TUMOR, and it's not Doctor Gary's fault either. So don't even THINK of suing. Before you die.]

Can't wait to see "Sicko" -- it's gotta reaffirm everything we already know about the absurd and rapacious health care system in the United States.

Through the eyes of Katharine Hepburn

People only remember the aged Katharine Hepburn for her shakes (she SWORE it wasn't Parkinsons, and it turns out it wasn't), or for her old tree metaphor, but nobody mentions her weepy eye. One (I think the left) was always red and drippy, and that's how my spring allergies have decided to manifest themselves the last couple of years: red, itchy, constantly weeping (right) eye. My glasses are always crusted, and stay askew on my nose from my constant reaching up under the lens to blot the drip. Handle the cat, swipe a little dust off of a table top, even read the Sunday paper, and I have to treat my hands as if they were radioactive -- wash them IMMEDIATELY and in the meantime NOT touch the offending eye. (Was it Solomon who said if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out? Well, I'm almost there.)

Anyway, Kate's eye got some kind of a permanent infection from when she threw herself, several times, into a Venetian canal at the insistence of the famously hard-nosed David Lean, the director of "Summertime". Terribly romantic movie (Rossano Brazzi was breath-taking), and a terribly romantic way to get a chronic eye infection. It's not all we have in common, Kate and I: she was only a few months younger than my mother, and they bore a startling physical resemblance to each other. Mother could do a devastating Hepburn imitation (better even than Anthony Hopkins', "Yowah killing yowaself with yowah drinking, yew know..."), something about calla lillies being in bloom my deah, reahhlly they ahh. And Mother was invited to play the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine in a staged "Lion in Winter" off Broadway, and damned near did it, but her health declined very quickly about then and it didn't happen.

Mother had played Eleanor very convincingly all of my life, up against my father's Henry II -- the dinner table battles were epic, those two bitter and noble and frightened monarchs battling it out with everything they had. (That table is where I got the nervous stomach that used to make it easy for me to lose weight in a crisis.) They had a passionate relationship, my parents, and God help those of us who had a stake in the outcome of any particular skirmish. We kids almost fit the pattern of the princes, too (except for being female): the eldest not very imaginative but fierce, the middle one always scheming but with no physical courage whatsoever, and the baby (moi) everybody's favorite but not at all inclined to rule. (The fact that that baby was not too bright I don't want to dwell on.)

So here I am with allergies, peering at the world through salt water, asitwere. This condition will fall off rapidly as soon as stuff out on the mesa stops its vigorous blooming; in the meantime I pop Benedryl like Pezzes, and continue to mop the eye.

For a brief time in the last week we thought Beaux Eaux would be coming back to us. After a massive and demonic communications foul-up, after I had paid for a motel room in Colorado Springs (non-refundable), and rented a car big enough to haul an 85-pound dog and his enormous crate, after getting so damned mad I could spit, it turned out that nothing, NOTHING, about Beaux's situation was as reported, and the place where he lives now is just fine. The people who have him apparently got a slanderous report on us and our feelings toward them and their dog-handling, so they're pissed too. They told us to butt out, not to contact them (good God, you'd think we were talking about a grey-market child adoption here), and further off-putting instructions. When I'm not getting mad all over again, I can take comfort in the fact that they renamed him Bodhi (which is perfect for that great soul), and in that we don't have to turn our lives upside down all over again. I'm glad and sad, but that chapter is closed now. Repairing relations will take a little longer.

Update on the great breast (leave that one) uproar: I got in to see a GYN, and got a (very) brief breast exam. He was not particularly excited about the lump, which had all but disappeared in the time between making the appointment and actually seeing somebody. We did make another date for an overall screening (hereinafter to be referred to as "screaming"): mammo, pap, etc etc etc, for six weeks later, so this clearly was not an emergency. Everybody can stand down now; I am grateful for your concern, truly I am.

We are busying ourselves with finishing the home improvements begun pre-Beaux Eaux, with firming up arrangements for our vacation at the end of August, with planning a choral tour to San Francisco in October and another one to Australia in May/June 2008.

Y'all tell me your favorite summer reads, okay? I think I'll actually be finding some time to do that!