Dear Neighbor

Is this a face only a mother could love?  Apparently it comes with a voice that's not so lovable...

To My Anonymous Neighbor,

Whoever you may be, you are a coward.  I can't really say it any kinder than that.  So let me just tell you what your cowardice has cost me so far.  First of all, I had a policeman come to my door unexpectedly a few days ago.  Do you know the last time a uniformed official came to my door unexpectedly?  It was in the mountains of West Virginia in the early morning hours of June 21, 2009 to bring me the news that my daughter was dead.  So, chew on that for a moment and imagine what that moment was like for me.  You ass.

Notwithstanding the deep trauma he unleashed in me, he couldn't have been nicer, this bearer of bad news that I am being cited for being a public nuisance.  Or rather, I am being cited because my dog is the nuisance.  He proceeds to tell me, just as gently and politely as he could, that there was an "anonymous" complaint the night before about my dog barking.  He came over and indeed my collie Ripley was outside and she barked at him.  Of COURSE she did.  A strange man walks into my back yard and that's sort of what I expect my dog to do.  Apparently the whole time he was there, which he states was about 15 minutes (and isn't that irony for you:  I have no doubt she would not have been barking for 15 minutes straight had he not been baiting her by lurking around my house - hope you had fun listening to that).  I confess, I never heard her or him; I was watching the Pens game in the basement.  But, I've got to tell you, having a police officer come up to my door before the sun sets was traumatic enough, had I seen him lurking in my back yard, well, that would have been far worse.

But, here's the thing, I work from home, and I am home at night (unless I'm at a game, in which case Ripley is in).  She's not out for extended periods of time and not out but very rarely after 11 PM, so the fact that, as he tells it, police have been called about her several times really flummoxes me.  He admits that they've never been able to verify the complaint before that night when, it seems to me, she was entrapped.  I also could not get times and dates for those earlier complaints.  So, I'm left wondering when she's problematic and why.  Is it just because you're a hyper sensitive anti-dog individual who flinches every time she yips at all?  Or are you a day sleeper maybe and she's keeping you awake now that I was trying to let her have some freedom after a long, harsh winter?  She sleeps with me every night, so I know it's not because she's out in the middle of the night.  I know, I know:  all dogs owners think their dogs are angels and they never are bothered by their sounds, smells and behaviors, but I truly am not far from mine much of the time at all.  So therefore, here I sit, not really knowing what about her behavior troubles you to the point you'd like to see me hauled into court (because that's what is happening) like a common criminal and have to try and fight a $675.00 fine.  And I still won't know when I do go to court because you won't be there because you won't go on record as to who you are, and that is allowable by the township where I live apparently.

I would like to resolve the issue, not for your sake at this point and under these circumstances, but because I love my dog and don't want her to be at risk in any way.  I've been told I could risk losing her if the complaints keep coming.  I can tell you, whoever you are, that won't happen.

Had you come to me, I get that it would have been uncomfortable.  Not that I would have been mad at you under those circumstances, but I would have been embarrassed that you felt like you had to.  But, then I would have known what about her behavior upsets you, and I could have taken steps to fix it right away.  I could have baked you cookies, or brought over a bottle of wine as small recompense and followed-up to make sure she was doing better.  We could have opened up a dialog so I would know if she and I relapsed.  But, as it stands I ask you to consider that all you've done here is make me ashamed, embarrassed and extremely angry.  I look at everyone with suspicion now and wonder if that's the one who is so callous as to not face me.  I am uncomfortable and unhappy in my own home.  I don't let any of the dogs out without escorting them and they're confined indoors now except for brief little breaks, even though it's finally spring and I would like them to be able to enjoy the outdoors.  That's not fair to them, but the alternative of having to fight to even keep them isn't a risk worth taking.

I have made a sincere effort to be a good neighbor.  I shovel the walks and drives for the two widows next to me and take their newspapers to their doors when the weather's bad.  Even when I had the flu.  I try to clean up after the dogs, I try not to let them do their business on the lawns where I know people don't want them (I admit, that's not always been successful), I let people ask me what's wrong with my Penguins and laugh like it's not a painful question.  But my guess is, being only a flawed human with hurt feelings, I'll think twice before exerting myself to do any of that, and that's just sad.  I can also tell you, I'm not likely to turn the other cheek when the guy across the street decides to work on his motorcycle at 2 in the morning, or the couple next door have a drunken party that extends past midnight when I've got to get up at 6 the next morning.  Ideally, I would like to be gone from this neighborhood before any of that happens again, but I looked into that, I reacted that strongly to all of this, and economically I think we're stuck together for a couple more years, sort of like the original plan was.  Of course, then it was about getting me a kitchen larger than a postage stamp.  Now it'll be about putting my neighbors in my rear view mirror.  Again, which is sad, because it's not them collectively.  And before all this, my little family and I liked it here.  No, it's you.  Whoever "you" happens to be.

I would like to work past the anger, not for your sake, but because it's just a rot that does nothing but eat away at me.  So, I'll work on not hating you for my own sake.  I'll keep Ripley under lock and key for hers.  But, the fact remains, you are a coward, and I felt you should know what the price of that is.

Sincerely,

Your Neighbor

Because It's the Cup

I'm tired of talking about weighty subjects.  Primarily, I'm just tired.  It's taking most of my energy just to breathe, for one thing.  Whatever is wrong with me being still wrong with me, now with the addition of a rather alarming rash that has so far spared my face, but that's about it, which I assume is a side effect of one of the medications I'm taking.  But, what can one do?  Persevere, that's what.  But I'd love a break from the kinds of issues that I've been pondering lately and just relax, but there's something looming in the way.  Something that is causing me to lose sleep and become anxious.  Something that makes me want to crawl in a hole and hide for the next eight weeks.  It's the NHL playoffs.

Most hockey fans live for this time of the year.  But not me.  Truth be told, I hate the playoffs.  There's just way too much pressure in this town and on this team.  I have my own reasons why I desperately want the Pens to win - over and above just wanting them to do well and vicariously inflate my ego when they do because I can say I'm so wonderfully smart to have chosen such a winning team.  Those haven't changed since I wrote about them last year.  But, it's more than that.  It's this obscene level of expectation that we have around here and how nasty it can become when the team doesn't live up to the level the fans expect.

I get it to a degree.  We've got the greatest player on ice right now, backed up by the rest of the team that's loaded with talent.  We should dominate.  Or that's the prevailing thought anyway.  But, my point of view is that if it was so easy to win a professional sports championship, then everyone would have multiples of them.  It's not.  It's a lot of things combined:  talent, coaching, the opposing team, how healthy the team is, how tired they are (notably in an Olympic year), and a little bit of luck.  Hockey is a streaky sport.  We all know that.  You get hot in the playoffs and sometimes it's you raising the cup when no one else expected it.  Ask the Kings.  Sometimes your luck runs out and you fizzle when you're expected to go deep.  Ask the President's Trophy Capitals from the 2009/2010 season.  But I know the potential is there for the Penguins every year, and I've been as guilty as anybody in expecting too much.  I turned to my husband at one point during the season two years ago and actually said out loud, "You might as well hand us the Cup right now."  He just looked at me.  I assume his thought at the time was along the lines of, "Oh, if I had a nickel for every time I've thought that about the Cowboys and the playoffs since 1995."  Then the Flyers happened and we were out in six ugly games in the first round.

Then Boston happened last year.  It was heartbreaking, true, but you'd have thought the team lost to a bunch of 80-year old widows, not a highly elite hockey club, who actually are the odds on favorite to win the Cup this year.  I was painfully disappointed, I'm not going to deny it.  Many, however, were just plain mad.  They wanted heads to roll.  They didn't.  So, this year the verbal and written vitriol started early.  The Pens have been up and down since the Olympic break and every rough outing - heck, every rough period - brought out the boo birds.  Fire Blysma.  Trade Fleury.  This is the worst Penguins team ever (and even I know that's so far from the truth as to be patently absurd).  And so on.  I think the only player I didn't see attached to a negative Tweet is Sidney Crosby, and that's probably just because anyone inclined to write one knows the rest of us would hunt them down and force them to take it back.

It's the maternal instinct in me, I'm sure, but I hate all of that negativity with a passion.  It's hurtful on an oddly personal level.  I like my team.  They've given me so much joy that I feel protective of them.  More to the point:  I don't want them to be so psyched out on the pressure of the expectations that their heads do a number on them that the opposing team cannot.  I want them focused.  I want them relaxed.  I want them ready.  And I want us to support them.  But as it is I'm as nervous as a cat in a dog pound.  My nails are all chewed down to nothing.  My muscles are tense.  I am no in way looking forward to this.  And that's not the way it's supposed to be.  It's supposed a time of celebration and excitement.

So, here's what I want all of us to do:  I want us to realize this is our city, this is our team.  Come what may.  If the Penguins lose, on the morning after, we will still get up like we always do.  The sun will rise like it always does.  Our day will go on.  Our families will love us; we will love them. Or not.  As the case may be for some of us.  We will have joys, we will have sorrows.  Our lives will proceed.  As scheduled.  This will not end us.  So, let's relax, all of us, and let's go out there and support our team.

 Because it's the Cup, dammit!

Day Trippin'

http://cfbarchitects.com/

Finally.  I could log out for the weekend.  Wow, what a long week.  I remember the days twenty years ago when Friday night meant being in the office until midnight at the earliest, but now, at 7:30 PM, I felt sort of worn down like a stubby pencil ready for the trash.  I don't know if it's the age or the mileage, or if it's just because I don't want to do the 80-plus hour weeks anymore so my mind won't let me go there anymore, even if my body could.  Those long hours cost me too much all those years ago and I'm done paying.  But this week's been a little more arduous than most, so that final logout seemed like an especially long time coming.  For one thing, I'm battling sinusitis and something with a complicated name that I was too busy coughing to catch that is essentially like asthma, but not asthma.  Whatever it's called, it scared me enough to cause me to go to the doctor for the first time in 14 years, and that took a lot.  And that's all on top of the whirlwind trip my daughter and I took to Harrisburg that stirred up old memories all for a cause that I'm not sure we did much to help win.  But, we did it and we were the only two from the whole entire western part of the state who did, so bully for us.  But, now, come Friday night, there wasn't much left in my tank, so I could do one of two things:  sit here and tell you about it or fold the laundry I washed a week ago.  Guess what I opted for?

But first I have to set the stage for the Legislative Action Day by taking you all the way back to the previous Tuesday.  There was so much stuff floating in the air during the day that I actually had a moment when I thought it was snowing.  It wasn't, it was actually a rather pleasant spring day, hovering in the 50's.  So it was cool and a little crisp when Marissa and I went to our first baseball game of the season and sat out in the coolish air breathing in whatever that was floating around for the next five hours.  By Wednesday, I was struggling a bit to breathe.  By Thursday, I wondered if I was getting sick.  By Friday, I had stopped wondering.  By Saturday, I wondered just how sick I was, and by Sunday, when we had tickets again, I was really hurting.   Come Monday, every ounce of me hurt, I was cold, tired, achy, and exhausted constantly because I couldn't really get my breath.  Ever.  Walking up my stairs had become an arduous experience.

The game plan was I would get up Tuesday morning at 5:00 AM, get ready for the trip to Harrisburg, pick Marissa up at 6:30 when she got off work and we'd take off from there.  I slept straight through the alarm until the regular 6:00 AM alarm.  Yikes!!  I had a half hour to shower, do my hair, make-up, take care of the dogs, cats and pull all my stuff together.  All while running a fever and not able to breathe.  Believe it or not, I did it in 35 minutes.  All of that.  But it's a good thing I didn't see a photo of myself until the next day or I would  have had a meltdown of some kind.  I did NOT look good.  So, there I was, advocating for the most important thing I can think to advocate for and looking like I could barely dress myself.  It's no wonder we weren't swaying our audiences like I thought we might.  But, anyway, we had a tight window to get to our first meeting, which was with my local representative, Hal English, so running late at all was not a good thing, and we're women so there's no way we were going to make a 3 and a half hour drive without a rest stop.  We had to have two.  Therefore, by the time we pulled up to the massive capitol complex, it was pretty much time for our first meeting.  I threw the car in a space on the street, fed the meter, and we hustled up the very long, long walk to the very long stairs to the front of the building, all the while my lungs refusing to cooperate and let in air.  I can't even imagine what poor Marissa must have felt like, after finishing up an eight hour overnight shift all on her feet and now hustling along with me on no sleep at all.  What a pair we must have looked as we burst into that mad, bustling building, which is really a gilded city within a city.  But we were there.  Which is more than I can say for Representative English, who was late to the meeting.  And the other team members who were supposed to be with us who never showed up at all. In fairness, he was caught at another event, where he had a photo op, I'm sure, and he gave us a fair amount of time to make our case, even though we could tell we weren't convincing him about the importance of the legislation we were there to pitch.  And what was that, you ask?

We had put ourselves through all of that for HB1959 and SB 1248, concurrent bills pertaining to the dissemination of materials to Pennsylvania parents annually from the school districts about eating disorders.  The bills also allow for guidelines to be developed for screenings and staff education.  That's a harder row to hoe in a state like this one, but they are optional, so they should not be large roadblocks to passage of something both so simple and inexpensive, yet so important.  Yet, as we went through the day, meeting with various staffers of various legislators from various parts of the state, it was easy to see that not everyone sees it with quite the same clarity as we seem to.  We touched some people, that was clear.  Others were barely polite, merely taking the meeting because we are voters and it's part of the gig.  In the meantime, the massive building was literally alive with all manner of other groups, lobbyists, school kids, staff and politicians.  It's a crazy quilt of humanity all vying for attention under the silent watchful eyes of beautiful art and statutes.  I can imagine it's hard to filter all that out to focus on the things that are truly important to your voters, when sometimes they don't even know what that it themselves.

And I also get why it's hard to make your voice heard above the din:  it's hard to get there.  The only way to drive it is on the tollway.  Forty-five dollars in tolls, thank you very much.  I looked at the train, but the times weren't right.  If I go there again, that's the way to do it, I've decided though.  But flying is out.  I looked at a little hopper and the cheapest flight I found was literally $875.00, and would have taken three times longer than driving.  Free access to our government is not free it would seem.

If I can do all of that as sick as I was and Marissa could do all of that as tired as she was, it should tell you it's important, so take a moment to write your local representative and tell them to please add their support.  Contact me if you need to know why.  Or just consider what we lost that made us willing to take such a hard road to try and see it through.

Living with Our Ghosts (or how Pittsburgh Saved Me)

I declared myself "cured" (for lack of a better word) not long ago and decided to make a break from the long established blog I had been writing about the journey of grief recovery and began this one to try and finally take myself in a new direction.  But, it didn't take long before some of the same old issues tugged on my heart strings, so after considering for a day or two, I figured I might as well get them out there and discuss them because trying to focus on the beginning of baseball season or hockey playoffs just seemed sort of hollow in comparison.  And that's all fine.  No one's life is sunshine and butterflies all the time (particularly right now - there has been slim to none in the way of sunshine in the area for days).  For me, a couple of events collided to create my current state of mind, which really is not helped by the dreary and rainy spring weather.  First, I tripped across an old blog post I wrote on the day I buried my mother, on April Fool's Day exactly four years ago.  And, second, I'm trying to do some homework on eating disorders so we can travel over to Harrisburg early next week in support of legislation pertaining to educational material for the disease.  It's brought back all the early years for us when I was fighting with my kids' school as first one, then the other of them became ill.

I remember so well when I wrote the blog post a few hours after burying my mom.  I was sitting in the lobby of our hotel, curled up in a overstuffed chair next to the large picture window with a cup of coffee from the quaint little coffee shop adjacent to the lobby while my daughter slept upstairs.  My relatives had invited us to have dinner with them, but Marissa begged off.  We were just both so tired, I think.  This was the first quiet moment we'd had in ten years.  Finally, no elderly mother with Alzheimer's and a myriad of other issues to care for.  No older sister struggling with an eating disorder and raging at the world because it wouldn't set her free because she had died just a few months before.  She had finally finding a way to get the disease to let her go.  Marissa had fought her own demons, and would have a few more battles to face before she was done, but she was recovering from her own eating disorder and cross addictions.  We were battle weary.  There really was no other way to describe it.

Fast forward four years and our lives are very different.  My daughter is a college graduate, sober and recovered from her eating disorder.  We volunteer for OFA, we go to hockey games and have a baseball ticket package.  We go to Steelers games when we can, but watch the rest from our sports cave in my little post war cottage less than 10 miles from the stadium.  There is the zoo, and the symphony, the ballet, theater and museums.  There are arts fairs and quaint little shops along the Strip.  There is so much to do and see here, that it was just too hard to continue to stay curled up in a chair next to a window and watching the world go by.  We've learned, in short, to live again.   Our problem these days is that there is more to do than there is time (and sometimes money).  Many of my friends were dubious when we chose to move, warning me that we couldn't run from our problems.  That is true.  I can tell you that all the ghosts that live within our memories just move along with you, but Pittsburgh (despite our radon mitigation device downstairs) was like a breath of fresh air.  I am just so grateful to be here that, for once, good words fail me.

The thing I've been thinking about over the last few days, as a result of all this soul searching, is that we never forget the ones we lost, but it serves no one and nothing to stop living as a result.  Kelsey never got to see Pittsburgh, but I've often thought she would have loved it here.  Rather than feeling a crushing guilt over that, I can only try and carry her in my heart wherever I go and whatever I do.  And we can try to honor her memory by risking the stirring up of old memories  in support of a first small step in eating disorder awareness in the state.  My first small step toward trying to pay back what we've been given.  More to come.