Deborah Clark Vance's Blog, page 4

What’s So Scary about Those Noises in the House?

You know that feeling after you’ve watched a horror movie and your ears are attuned to every little noise in the house? We puzzled over the source of a loud intermittent buzzing that came from the attic until we settled on this: Two summers ago, just after roofers finished, we noticed some men outside staring up at our roof. Turns out they’d been beckoned by a transponder that must have been buried in our roof. One of them handed over his ICE card. He theorized that someone under house-arrest had cut off his transponder and asked a roofer friend to hide it. “It’s like what sex offenders wear,” the ICE man said, probably trying to freak us out. And added, “It costs $2000,” stressing the seriousness of this situation.

It was a hot July — if the escapee were in the attic, he’d have already melted.

We get used to noises our houses make. Some people even find them comforting. The furnace and fridge. The plumbing. Dehumidifiers, humidifiers, air purifiers, fans. Washer and dryer. Electric clocks. Lightbulbs clicking. Something falling. The settling, the creaky floorboards. We know them.

But what about those clicks coming from a chair or that rustling in the front hall? Usually not worth noticing.

Unless two birds somehow got into the house and you shooed one of them out but didn’t see what happened to the other. Was it still inside, stuck and fluttering? Birds are quiet -– it could be sneaking up from behind. It could’ve bumped its head and be dragging across the floor. Or it could be preparing to launch itself into my head.

Which is what happened last week. At the time, my ears were attuned to house noises I couldn’t identify. Yep, the damn thing came flying out of wherever! I screamed, of course, and propped open the door to the patio which it soon exited. And I knew I’d relive childhood nightmares of “Return of the Fly.”

The birds must’ve squeezed through the mail slot when I’d propped it open for fresh air. I’d opened that rather than the patio door because in July, a chipmunk got in, probably through the patio door I’d propped open to get a breeze.

I didn’t want to repeat that episode

We bought a Hav-a-Hart trap. The only one available let you choose between one- and two-sided, accompanied by unintelligible directions. We felt like Larry David struggling to open a hermetically sealed package.

An outdoor chipmunk sat watching through the glass patio door whose wood frame the indoor chipmunk chewed all night, hoping to tunnel through.

The next day we opened the open door and tried to usher the chipmunk out, but he hid. It’s an open floor plan, with just one door – to the closet— with a gap at the bottom he could scurry underneath and hide.

I hatched a tactical plan that would’ve tickled Dad, a WWII Logistical command. colonel. He’d rid his attic of squirrels by weaponizing loud dissonant music. Older squirrels fled but younger ones dug it. Riffing on the loud noise plan, we fired up Roomba while I pushed the upright vacuum cleaner and Steve ran around poking a broom underneath the sofa until we finally channeled the chipmunk out the door.  

Afterward, Steve went to play first-person shooter games to relax. I went to the pool.

Next day when I went onto the patio, the chipmunk saw my face and scurried away so fast he fell while scrambling up a stone wall.

I guess he’s afraid of the noises inside our house.

Who says acting like animals is a bad thing?

I’m fortunate to live next to an urban woods and seeing a lot of wildlife. I also have occasion to observe the behavior of people in an association of townhouses whose owners share common property. 

And I’ve decided that “behaving like wild animals” is not necessarily a bad thing.

The birds take turns within and among species as they visit our feeders. All show restraint and leave something for others. No individual consumes everything.

Meanwhile, the humans jockey for power, seeking position by badmouthing the neighbors they think won’t support their pet projects, trying to prevent their perceived enemies to be elected to the Board. And when these political animals are elected, they push through projects benefiting their own properties above community property. They even change rules to benefit themselves.

Meanwhile the birds live peaceably. They make excellent neighbors and are non-partisan. They see the bigger picture.

Where’s the Most Colorful Friendly Indoor Track?

I come from a long line city-folk who didn’t grow their own food but went grocery shopping. Daughter of a mayor, my grandmother’s city-slicker skills included being a professional singer and weaseling out of traffic tickets. Once when pulled over she asked the cop his name. “My, that’s a nice Italian name!” she said. “Italians are such lovely singers. I bet you have a wonderful voice.” He waved her on.

She knew the rules. Wherever she went, she wore dresses and heels, put up her hair and put on a hat, a necklace and fitted gloves, even for her daily trip to the grocery store. At age 65 she thought she was too young to be called “grandma” and wanted us to call her by her first name, Jo.

Mom was the opposite, in her Hepburn-style slacks and tenor voice unlike Jo’s soprano. When we kids were home Saturdays supposedly doing chores, Mom would disappear all morning and return with sturdy brown paper bags full of groceries. We’d find her unloading sodas, cookies and ice cream. She’d find us messing around and would complain we didn’t help out enough. In fact, she complained so much that I felt sorry for her. Being an obtuse kid, I associated her Saturday morning blues with her trips to the grocery store.

But years later I learned that although Mom couldn’t sing and schmooze like Jo, she’d inherited Jo’s love for grocery shopping. She finally revealed she’d always relished fleeing from our chaos and entering a sanctuary of neat and orderly aisles, bright and cheery shelves and friendly and smiling faces.

I’ve inherited this city-folk way. Even during winter when pondering places to rack up miles on a walk, I consider food markets. There are plenty to choose from if you have a car, each with its own characteristics. An indoor farmers market since 1852, Findlay Market is full of surprises. A local chain that was sold to its employees decades ago hires some of the slowest, sweetest, oldest people I’ve ever seen in retail. It’s big, never crowded and easy to get in a few miles. A smaller Midwest chain that resembles an indoor farmer’s market and a local market that began as a community co-op are both big enough for a mile or so if you keep circulating. Fresh Market and Whole Foods are good for meandering but at a slower place. The two organic food stores aren’t even big enough for a little walk.

I warmed up to the biggest grocery store of all after I heard my friend from India say that soon after arriving here she was on the phone trying to describe where she was. She turned, saw the big sign with its big blue K and relayed that she was at “K – Roger”. Kroger has since built a 100K square foot store where it’s easy to add up miles just looking for olive oil and trying to find the exit.

When it’s raining and cold, my neighbors go across the street to an oily, dank parking garage which seems to me like undoing any health benefits gained by walking.

It’s true, once upon a time I grew enough produce to process tomatoes and apples and cucumber pickles and dried beans. Must’ve been my rebellious phase.

How Do You Like That Plastic With Your Dinner?

When St. Louis Bread Factory opened nearby, my dad became so delighted to bring home fresh loaves of bread that he bought my mom a bread slicer for her birthday. This was the kind of thing that sent her to bed with a migraine. Sadly admitting he wasn’t good at picking out presents, he stowed the tool in its box on the highest pantry shelf. But when I came to visit, he seized the opportunity to buy a loaf of bread so he could demonstrate the slicer.

I grew dubious when reading the claim on the packaging that said, “made with food grade plastic,” conjuring images of swallowing bits of shaved plastic clinging to the bread. I’ve since learned food-grade plastic means your food can touch plastic and it won’t kill you. I’ve also learned that isn’t necessarily true. BPA and phthalates interfere with hormones — BPAs are banned in infant formulas and phthalates are banned in children’s toys. But let those kids get a little older and they can eat anything, according to the FDA.

Hasn’t the rapid spread of Covid 19 taught us something about our overall national health?

What’s wrong with our health? you wonder. When so many places in the world have undrinkable water, at least we have the Clean Water Act, right? Well… Thailand has imposed such strict water pollution regulations that a Thai company is coming to the US to build their micro-plastic plant that will dump micro-plastic particles into the Ohio River, water source for 30 million people. Ohio even granted them money, thinking they’d hire unemployed coal miners, literally a dying breed from inhaling coal dust.

Speaking of coal dust, the petroleum industry is now showing how green they are by planning to get out of the fossil fuel business. But that doesn’t mean they’re unconcerned with how they get their petroleum into our bodies. — they’ll be using it to power up their plastic businesses. And they’ve already shown what they can do — more than 74K micro-plastic particles are inhaled and swallowed annually. They can even find their way into the fetus of a pregnant animal..

Many of us wonder how we can ever be truly healthy if the air, water and soil are not. In the year of Covid gone amok, the public has shown new interest in boosting immune systems to fight off viruses. A healthy mind in a healthy body needs healthy water, air and soil where healthy food can grow, right?

Of course, and all over the world, researchers who care about the environment are looking into biodegradable packaging, using plant materials instead of petroleum to make plastic-like pellets. And even if there’s plastic in KFC’s fried chicken, the company now offers a coffee cup made out of a cookie.

Let’s hope the egg in the cookie dough doesn’t contain plastic.

How Do You Know When It’s Time to Write Your Book?

When I was a kid, my parents deluged me with stories and encouraged me to tell my own. I did, and before long I was writing them down, especially the ones I didn’t want my parents to know. I found that there were things I wanted to say with meanings only I could explain. I squirreled away snippets, poems, sketches, ideas, short stories novel outlines and chapters, in pencil or pen on envelopes or typewritten on recycled paper.

Four years ago – feeling the hour had come to compose the novel that only I could write –  I joined a writers’ group. Each week I brought scribblings I’d worked over and got thoughtful feedback from the group. Gradually a main character emerged who could speak for the many voices in my drawer. I named her Sylvia, a name deriving from the Latin word for forest. An earthy name. As a story arc emerged, I needed to pinpoint attributes that could help my protagonist overcome her challenges and flaws that could prevent her from doing so.

Going through this undertaking reminded me of composing eulogies for my parents’ funerals. I’d begun that mission by wondering how I’d wound up with parents who seemed so different from me. But mulling over lessons I’d learned from them, I realized that not only had they they’d taught me to look under the surface, get the facts and tell the truth, but they also displayed honesty to a fault – and I’ve got some great stories about the fault part.. Honesty and doggedness shaped their lives, in ways that worked for and against them. I couldn’t grow up with them and not absorb the lessons.

Characters in my novel – Sylvie, Mom and Dad – share similar values but inhabit different thought worlds, making their stories unique to themselves. In writing about story-telling, C. S. Lewis says, “In life and art both…we are always trying to catch in our net of successive movements something that is not successive.”  What remains in the net reveals what Sylvie’s school teacher calls “getting the big picture,” as this net sifts out the story’s particulars and leaves the themes.

So it goes in life. As we let our own stories of 2020 fall through the net, we may find we’ve reached similar conclusions. Our stories may differ, but we often share the same themes. Whether brilliant or dark, our stories can bring us together, and if want to survive together on this planet, we need to gather around the positive themes.. Even stories of sickness, pain and death can present themes of awareness, realization, compassion and hope.

As my parents modeled for me the art of living, so they did that of story-telling. My dad was an unrivaled raconteur, my mom an outstanding writer. Their character renderings were evocative, their punchlines often subtle, their timing pitch-perfect, their messages intriguing. Despite knowing I may not have reached their standards, I’ve dedicated Sylvie Denied to them.

What Do Dogs Think About All Day?

I grew up in the age of free-range children and dogs, each of which species met up and roamed together. That’s how our dog got pregnant — twice. Whether my folks didn’t consider spaying or weren’t aware she was in heat, I can’t say. Anyway, all the puppies were quickly adopted by upstanding families and grew up to be upstanding dogs — except the funny-looking one in the second litter. To my parents’ dismay and our pleasure, we got to keep him.

We named him Hubert and began training him, In a few short days he’d learned to come, sit and stay. Then we taught him fetch which he did OK a few times.  But something went wrong the following week when we taught “lie down.” I think he blew a fuse. He’d look at us, tail wagging and tongue hanging out, and didn’t respond to anything we’d taught him. Later when we saw him pick up a ball in his mouth and then hover helplessly above his food and water dishes, we knew he’d completely lost it.

One day my mom left Hubert sitting in the driver’s seat looking nobly out the front window. When she returned from the store, the woman getting out of the next car over said, “What a handsome dog! Mind if I pet him?” My mom opened the door and Hubert jumped out, revealing his disproportionately big head. The woman gasped, quickly patted him and scurried away.

I’m afraid we weren’t sympathetic enough about Hubert’s plight: He still lived with his mother. He slept in the closet where he was born. And if he encroached on the window seat from where his mother oversaw the front yard, she cruelly nipped at him until he skulked back to his closet.

But Hubert had his day in the sun. In 1967, Chicago Daily News, satirical columnist Mike Royko held a “new kind of dog show” that featured mutts. My siblings, friends and I took Hubert to the 1st (and only) Mongrel Show at Soldier’s Field in Chicago. Hubert met the qualification of looking like three different breeds. The many contests included prize for “Dog that Barked the Longest.” that indeed went to a dog that hadn’t shut up the entire day. Imagine our excitement when the loudspeaker announced Hubert had won a first prize! It was for Dog Looking Most Like [then French president] Charles deGaulle.

Years later I was at my folks’ house dog-sitting while they were away. As usual, I let Hubert out in the evening.. He didn’t come back. I walked up and down the street calling him and checked with the police to see if they’d found him. My mom was going to kill me.

In the morning when I phoned the police again, they said, “We found a very old dog.” It seems Hubert had traveled a half mile to an apartment building where lived a miniature poodle in heat. The police said he jus stood in the parking garage staring at the wall and wouldn’t budge until they lured him into their car with chocolate chip cookies.

After that last hurrah, Hubert would just stand for hours, staring at the wall, as though recalling the moment when he’d been so close to scoring with a French poodle. Now I wonder if his prize had gone to his head.

How Many Heroic Cows Do You Know Of?

How many times has a cow been offered the key to the city by the mayor? Or offered a mascot gig at a bank and a part in a “holy cow” TV ad for prime rate equity loans? Or been the subject of a 11-day man- —  er — cow-hunt?

Once, in early 2002. An athletic white Charolais cow escaped from the Ken Meyer Meats stockyard by standing on another cow’s back to leap a fence, then crossed an interstate overpass and ended up three miles away in a 57-acre park too thickly wooded to shoot her with a tranquillizer dart. The hunt was on, as it then was for Osama bin Laden. A local radio DJ dubbed this cow Moosama. 

The sheriff flew a helicopter with thermal imaging cameras. TV stations set up an aerial “cow cam” to track her. SPCA workers, park rangers, police, and the Dept. of Natural Resources strategized. They set out food and water, installed a sharpshooter with tranquilizer darts, enlisted cowboys on horseback and unleashed the hounds. But Moosama fled whenever the law got within 100 yards.

The people were on her side. Residents in a high-rise overlooking the woods watched from balconies as she peacefully drank from a fish pond and foraged through the undergrowth. When they saw the law closing in, they chanted, “run, run, run!”

On day 11, cow decoys (including a bull) were installed in a makeshift corral with grain, hay and molasses. When hungry Moosama took the bait, two men lassoed her but she bolted, dragging them by the rope down a hill and through a neighbor’s yard until a tranquilizer dart finally got her. In her drugged state, she was loaded into a trailer.

Bowing to public opinion, officials declared she’d earned the right to live. Still, everyone wanted a piece of her. She was all set to be in the Cincinnati Reds’ opening day parade but went nuts when stuck inside yet another trailer. Opportunities abounded — Reds owner Marge Schott invited her to live on her estate; a “Survivor” TV show contestant wanted her on his farm.

But artist Peter Max offered the winning deal, won in part by giving the city some artwork and rewarding the SPCA for their compassionate work. He redubbed her Cincinnati Freedom and took her to his New York Farm Sanctuary where resident cows greeted her with face licks. She became besties with other slaughterhouse escapees — Queenie, Annie Dodge and Maxine. They whiled away days together grazing, lying in the sun and chewing their cud.

Finally in 2008, weak from terminal spinal cancer, unable to walk, she was comforted by the herd that gathered around her, one licking her face, another licking her back, keeping her calm as she was euthanized until she took her final breath. Then every member of the herd came to say goodbye.

There’s much to marvel at in this story, not least the ingenuity of a cow scaling a fence and running through city streets until finding a woods and ending up with cohorts who’d escaped similar fates. People cheered this fugitive for her heroic will to live, undefeated by the system that had pre-determined her fate, and with the courage and fortitude to outwit beings with way more resources than she had.

I think we’d all like to know people like that.

photo by Marcus Spiske from Pexels

Can We Stop Corporate Media from Insulting Audiences?

Here’s what I said in a letter published on the Baltimore Sun editorial page years ago:

“If a restaurant ad said, ‘Bring your gluttonous self to ravage our food,’ would you think they respected you as a customer? What if a theater advertised, ‘come with your silly friends to see our flick”? … The Maryland Science Center’s dinosaur exhibit is advertising with a campaign that says, ‘Bring your little monster to see ours.’ My 5-year-old has seen this ad during cartoon programs and thinks it means to take his toy dinosaurs with him to the Science Center. Poor kid doesn’t know he’s being insulted…”

Sheesh, what a crank I was! … Or was I?

At that time, I was on a content design team for a children’s educational TV series that also included members from the National Science Teachers Association, the National Science Foundation, professors of child development and a former school principal in inner-city Baltimore: One of these seasoned pros insisted it was disrespectful to refer to children as “kids” and policed our usage. I took that message to heart.

Plus I’d just earned a master’s degree in media which had been steeped me in broadcast laws and regulation. I knew this once was a country where citizens were aware that airwaves were public property and thought it unethical to target ads at children (as other nations still do).  But the fight for non-commercial US media began losing — when networks began in the 1920s, when TV began in the 1950s, when PBS began in 1969 — and the white flag was raised after cable took off which, by the way, was supposed to be ad-free since we paid for subscriptions (LOL).

Generations of lawmakers have deemed commercial broadcasting “natural” and think “serving the public interest” isn’t serving the interests of the public but rather giving us whatever national corporations for are willing to pay for.

Which has led us to the media mess we’re in, with its weaponized internet messages funded by who-knows-who.

When I typed my letter and mailed it via USPS, our TV only received a few broadcast channels and fuzzy or no reception for PBS. Now with unfettered messages bombarding young people, I feel for parents who want their children to be treated respectfully.

Can our media become more degraded than it is now? Stay tuned.

Do I Really Get What You’re Wanting to Say?

Since many of us are sad about not traveling this pandemic year to join loved ones at Thanksgiving, I thought I’d share a little intergenerational story just to remind ourselves of how complex family relationships are — and to suggest, sometimes it’s nice to just stand back and ponder.

Every Sunday my dad would telephone his mother who lived 900 miles away “high in the hills”, as he put it. His side of the conversation was mostly “yep… yep… nope… of course…doing well…”, sighing heavily when he hung up. He made it clear she was a difficult person, and told negative stories about her. He also told me how I, in particular, had annoyed her during our one visit when I was little. And he’d wrap up his rant saying that, when he was little, she threw a tuna can at his head.

Unable to picture that elderly woman being so cruel to her little boy, I continued sending her cards on mothers’ day and her birthday and thank-you notes for the beautiful dresses she sent me for Christmas. Her responses were warm and grandmotherly, so I grew up with dueling versions of her –- what I saw and what my dad said. I went with his version, thinking he wouldn’t make up something like that.

I was at visiting my folks some time after I’d raised my own children to adulthood and knew tough parenting was and heard my dad launch into the tuna-can story for my nieces. When he’d finished and his audience was gasping with horror, I asked something I’d never thought to ask before: “Wait – was it an empty can?” I’d always assumed so, which was bad but not horrendous.

“No, it was full.”. Well, this gave the story new gravity — he could’ve suffered brain damage. Or worse!

But my mother instinct smelled something fishy. I said, “Ok, Dad, Mothers don’t just lob full cans of tuna at their kids for no reason. What the heck were you doing at the time?”

He said, “I was sticking a fork into the electrical outlet.”

Well! How often have I not asked such a simple follow-up question that would have clarified a relationship? How often had I failed to really know someone because of it? How many wrong assumptions had I made by believing my own eyes and ears? I grew up in a culture that says it’s bad manners to discuss religion and politics. But isn’t that what’s brought us to this country divided by misunderstandings and mistaken assumptions? The divide is so great, in fact, that these topics can’t be tackled head-on anymore because eyes and ears are closed to that approach. But we can share stories that show how we feel and we can reflect back whatever gifts we get from those stories.

My response to my dad doesn’t model that approach, — he was trying to say he’d felt he was the victim of child abuse, but I stood up for a fellow mother and .said, “Dad, she saved your life!”

May your Thanksgiving be drama free.

What Random Truth Does the Pandemic Year Challenge?

DEXTER THE SWAN

The drama among the Spring Grove swans, gliding tranquilly on their spring-fed lakes, has reached Shakespearean levels. Where this drama plays out is in the shadow of the gothic Dexter Mausoleum.

Before moving to Cincinnati, I was interested to see the unique tree specimens at the famed Spring Grove Arboretum. Imagine my surprise to find it’s also a cemetery established in 1845 by the Cincinnati Horticultural Society. Besides being full of beautiful graves (which sounds like an oxymoron) it’s a place where fashion photographers do their shoots, students make films, couples hold weddings and walkers follow designated 1-, 2- and 3.5-mile trails. It contains much fodder for contemplation.

I’m not sure when they first came to Spring Grove, but Dexter (named for the mausoleum nearby) claimed Geyser Lake, the easternmost lake, for him and his mate Charlene while Dale and Glenda (named for Glendale) chose Mahketewah Lake in the middle. Willow Water is to the west. The lakes are really large ponds that connect beneath paved roads that wind through the 733 acres.

Dexter and Charlene hatched a brood of cygnets some years ago that swam behind their mother until a snapping turtle ate them one by one. As if that weren’t enough grief, Charlene was then killed, probably by a fox. Spring Grove staff tried to hook Dexter up with new mates, but he rejected each and has lived by himself for years. Swans can live 20-30 years.

In the four years I’ve lived here, I’ve seen Dexter in his lake, Dale and Glenda in theirs. But early this summer Dexter wandered over to be with Dale and Glenda. At first the couple distanced themselves from him and moved over to Willow Water. But Dexter stalked them wherever they went, usually sitting on the banks watching the couple swim. When I asked a groundskeeper what was going on with the swans, he just said, “I dunno! They’re acting so weird!”

But yesterday I saw the swan couple in Geyser Lake, the single male in Willow Lake and also saw a woman with a folding chair sitting and watching the couple. She’d been coming every day at lunchtime and had the full story.

After Dexter bided his time all summer, he bloodied Dale a couple different times which seems to have impressed Glenda. When she cozied up to Dexter, Dale went up and lay on the lawn, cried the missing mate call which drew Glenda who went to him and they did a courtship dance. Still, she moved with Dexter to his Geyser Lake abode.

We’ve all learned that swans are monogamous for life. But 2020 -– true to form—makes us face the reality that swans don’t always mate for life.

DEXTER MAUSOLEUM