A Little Pick-Me-Up

I was feeling more than a bit melancholy this morning when I walked the dog, despite the sunshine and the greening trees. The second anniversary of Lisa’s death is fast approaching, and I just couldn’t manage to ignore it any more. It was exactly the sort of morning on which she would have been up at 6 and off with the dog to walk along with river; exactly the sort of day she’d spend emailing me about plans for the garden; exactly the time of year she’d be downloading past performances and calculating imaginary Derby bets, and not having her here to do any of that is still shockingly painful at times. I had Justin Hayward’s Forever Autumn running through my head - “you always loved this time of year” - and there was a single crow, one for sorrow, staring at me from the fence by the ballfield.

And then, wonderfully, one of the neighbors pulled up alongside us, and rolled down the car window to say hi and to share a silly, stupid joke. I giggled, we chatted, and I felt - lightened. Grieving still, yes, but it wasn’t the burden it had been. It’s still a Lisa sort of day, and spring days like this always will be, but I can see a time when that will be more joy than sorrow. And that is a gift worth celebrating.

Memory Trouble

The other day, I was sorting through things to go to the recycling, and came across one of the many equine supply catalogs that I get because Lisa used to get them. This one had a photo on the cover of a horse in a fly mask, and all of a sudden I remembered visiting a very nice, very good racehorse who had worn a great fly mask that had green lenses on it, just like sunglasses. But I couldn’t remember his name.

One of the things about being in a long-term relationship is that you (or at least I) ended up off-loading a certain amount of memory. The names of actors, for one: Lisa had genius for remembering them. Where to find certain recipes. Song titles. Plays and playwrights. Horses and horse stories.

I stared at the catalog. We’d seen the horse at Saratoga, Sean Clancy took us to meet him on the backstretch, the same trip that we met Beautiful Pleasure.... Nothing. I got up, went to the bookshelves, and, after about an hour of skimming through various books, I think I have the answer: John’s Call. Who, if I remember correctly, began as a flat racer, didn’t have much success, and was switched to steeplechasing. At which point, he fell on his head, and became a very good flat racer indeed - perhaps so he would never have to jump a hedge again.

But I’m still not sure.

These days, when I run across something that falls into the “Lisa handled that” category, it makes me melancholy rather than miserable, which I guess proves that I’m healing. But I wish I could remember that name!

Milk

It’s rare that I don’t finish a book. I read quickly, and I read constantly, and if I don’t finish a book, then I have to find something else to read that much sooner. The obvious corollary to this is that I read a lot of reviews, and keep a list of books to watch out for when I go to the library or the bookstore. I’ve been in Victorian mood lately, at least as far as fiction goes, so when I saw reivews of The Sonambulist, it immediately went on the list: right period, it was about a stage magician (though very few novels about magicians match JB Priestley’s Lost Empires), got good reviews — what’s not to like?

In a word, milk.

The title character drinks milk the way private eyes in the pulps drink cheap whiskey, guzzling it by the gallon, chugging it before every action, carrying it with him when he can’t finish his tipple in the bar or at home. And I really hate milk. If I’m not very careful with it, it makes me sick; more than that, though, I don’t like the way it tastes. It’s always sour-ish, no matter how cold you get it; it’s a thin, nasty flavor except when it’s so rich it gags you. It leaves a gross film on the dishes, dries to disgusting flakes — in short, I find milk completely revolting. Every time the Sonambulist chugged down another pint of milk, I got a little more queasy, until finally, about two-third of the way through, I had to stop.

I had just settled down to supper (yes, I read at meals, and I feel a little frisson of satisfaction every time I do it, having been forbidden to read at the table most of my childhood) and opened the book — to yet another description of milk-drinking. This time, the Sonambulist had spilled some down his shirtfront, and it had dried, and I just couldn’t go on. I put that book down, picked up another, and had my supper in peace.

After supper, I stared at The Sonambulist for a while. It was an interesting story, and I did want to know what happened; however, I’d been skimming the milk-drinking episodes for quite a while, and I was still reading more of them than I wanted. It was time to give up. On the next morning’s walk, I dropped it into the library’s return box.

Next in my stack was a biography of John Dillinger: badly written (“providential” used in place of “provincial” — that kind of error), poorly attributed (too many “facts” come from mysterious papers collected by an ex-cop, and then lost in an attic for years), but still infinitely preferable to another glass of milk.

Robins

Yesterday it snowed, and rained, and rained with snow, and snowed with rain, and then it rained and snowed some more. And during the worst of it, the dog kept running downstairs (I was working upstairs in my office) and barking out the windows. I didn’t think too much of this because — well, to be honest, the dog will bark at anything from blowing leaves to falling icicles, not to mention squirrels, seagulls, crows, passing dogs (known and unknown), and the strange little man who walks down the street talking loudly to himself. (He has been known to bark back, and they both seem pleased by the interaction.) But after a while, she started to sound kind of frantic, and I went downstairs to see what was going on.

She was in the living room, bouncing from one front window to the next, so I pulled back a shutter to see what was going on, and found robins. Not just a robin, or even a pair of robins, but dozens of them, a mob of robins busily stripping the pea-sized crabapples from the two dwarf trees that dominate the narrow flowerbed that is my “yard.”

Lisa planted those trees in her last really good spell, and she’d picked them in part because the nursery people had said they would attract birds, but I’d never seen anything like this. The robins were perched on every possible branch of the crabapples, and there were more waiting their turn on the wires that run along the street. A few were scavenging along the ground, picking up anything the bigger birds dropped. They completely ignored me, standing in the window with the shutter wide open. All right, one of them cocked his head to make sure I was really confined, fixing me with one beady black eye, but then he went on eating. As I stood there, they stripped the tree bare — there truly wasn’t a single apple left behind — and then swirled away into the snowy rain, bright red breasts against the gray sky.

I’m still smiling, thinking about it.

Periphery is available!

Periphery, the Lynne Jamneck-edited collection of erotic lesbian SF, in which I have a story, "The Rocky Side of the Sky," is now available on Amazon. After the delay caused by the sale of Haworth Press, and the company's subsequent decision not to continue publishing fiction, it's nice to see the collection in print!

A not-so-shaggy dog story

I watched the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show the last two nights — another family tradition, particularly since someone in Lisa’s dog club had a dog go Best of Oppposite a few years back. The dog slept through most of it, while the cats and I watched with some attention….

The best part, though, was during the Toy Group, when one of the diminutive champtions — I think it was the toy fox terrier — was introduced as "Louisville Slugger." (His father was "Grand Slam.") Not only is this funny to start with, it reminded me of one of our trips to Chicago, and the first time I ever saw a Chinese Crested.

We were staying at a hotel near the lake, in a neighborhood that clearly was full of dogs and dog-lovers, and that particular morning we'd decided to find coffee and croissants somewhere in the area before we headed off to the conference. Our search for an open coffeehouse led us past a small park, and as we passed it, we could see a guy behind the fence who looked like — well, like Tony Soprano's Chicago uncle. A goombah. A great big dark-haired dark-chinned man in polyester slacks and a polo shirt with a sports jacket over it, and a diamond ring you could see from across the street.

And as we tried not to giggle, he reached into his pocket, pulled out a plastic bag, and stooped to clean up after a dog that was too small to see behind the parked cars. A bulldog? A small pit bull? Some vicious little dog of uncertain lineage and obvious menace?

He carefully deposited the bagged waste in the trash can, then pulled out his handkerchief and picked up the dog: a Chinese Crested — a hairless Chinese Crested. He wiped its feet and the puffs of ankle fur, then settled in in the crook of his arm. It bounced up and licked his chin, bracing its now clean paws on his jacket, and he gave it a hug and walked on.

Naturally, we spent the next couple of days inventing stories about the man. Lisa found a name for him, but she never did get the chance to use him in a story. But now…. If you read anything of mine that includes a semi-retired mobster named Sonny Trentacosta and his little dog Louie (short, of course, for that well-known Chicago gangster's weapon, the Louisville Slugger), well, you'll know where they came from.

Story Sold!

Well, it's official! My short story, "One Horse Town," has sold to Catherine Lundoff's anthology of lesbian ghost stories, Haunted Hearths. I'm extremely pleased, not least because I enjoy Catherine's work, and it's been a pleasure working with her on this project.

I understand there's going to be a reading/release party for Haunted Hearths and for Lynne Jamneck's Periphery (in which I also have a story) at this year's Wiscon. Woohoo!