Lost and Found

I occasionally am challenged to explain why I was so angry with my mother for keeping the fact that I was adopted a secret.  The prevailing opinion of those who ask is that my parents loved me and that's all that mattered.  I understand that, but I think you had to have walked in my shoes to really understand my point of view. Most of it emanated from the fact that I had trudged into dozens of doctor's offices over the previous almost nine years and filled out hundreds of forms espousing a medical history on behalf of my side of the family that was utterly false.  When you're in a pitched battle to save your kids' lives, you don't need to find out you're firing defective weapons.  But there was also the loss I felt.  I had identified with what I always believed was my legacy.  I thought I had family out there - even if I didn't know them very well.  I thought I belonged.  And then, in an instant one stressful night, I found out I didn't.  I was lost.

Therefore, it was with some trepidation that I gathered with my mother's side of the family after her funeral, but they couldn't have been nicer.  I have written about that day before, so I'll just sum it up by saying an incredible weight was lifted off my shoulders that day.  It would seem they weren't discarding me, which they certainly could have.  So, when I was deciding where to go after life in Texas, while what I said about moving here for the sports is completely true, I was also very happy to be close to all these good people too, since the hub of the family is in Washington, PA (or Little Washington, as it is known to the natives).  That fact has been on my mind since last week was the annual family reunion, which I always attend if I'm not traveling for work.  It's always full of good and easy conversation, usually seasoned with a few salty stories about family members I never knew.  They are easy to be with; a feeling of inclusion, familiarity and warmth runs through the event.  The food is good, the beer is plentiful and the company is great.  And I couldn't be more grateful to be a part of this family, although it's not without its bittersweet realities as well.  I only wish I could have been a part long before.  And I realize that it's likely that my parents moved so far from their home not so Dad could hunt (I should have been more suspicious when The Deer Hunter came out) and fish, which was the standard storyline, but so we wouldn't be around anyone who might spill some beans they clearly didn't want spilled.  But at least I am now.

But, what I've really been thinking about this week, in the days after the reunion is the age old question of nature v. nurture.  Since the shock of discovering I wasn't who I always thought I was, I've often thought about that.  How often have I done or said something and then had the thought immediately after, "I am SO my father's daughter?"  Too many times to count.  I think I tried to pattern my behavior after the nobler aspects of my dad, but I ended up being more like my mother.  The father and mother who raised me, not the people who conceived me.  Who knows if I'm anything like them?  Who cares at this point?  They gave me my brown eyes and reddish brown hair, which I now know is Irish in origin, not Scottish.  My mom and dad gave me everything else.  Including this family I am a part of now.

And that's how I finally let my anger go.  My mother, whether it was ultimately a wrong or right decision, seemed very intent that my true origin must be kept from me.  I think she sacrificed a lot to try and keep her secrets.  I know she did it out of love.  Love, it turns out, may always be a true emotion, but people can do the wrong things in its name.  Yet I can forgive her now because in the end she gave me this great family.  I am found.

...Do as the Romans Do

Ellen Brody:  "I just want to know one thing - when do I get to become an islander?"

Mrs. Taft:  "Ellen, never.  Never!  You're not born here, you're not an islander.  That's it."

Anyway, as I was saying, I had an epiphany one night that I was trying to hold myself and my pets to the same standards I always had and that wasn't okay for the situation we now found ourselves.  I had to chastise myself pretty soundly for being both so willfully blind and so selective.  I mean, it was all right there in front of me.  The clues could not have been more prevalent:  the fact that I actually had to ask to make sure fences were even allowed in the area because hardly anyone had one.  Then there was the fact that I actually wondered for the first few months I lived here if anyone else on my street had a dog because I never saw one other than my neighbor's little ankle-nipper that never leaves her lot.  The fact that, in fact, most people had pets didn't come to view until spring when people came out of their homes.  I should have put it together, but I didn't.  And no one had complained before, so I had lived in happy ignorance of the fact that I was the odd duck.

But really what bothered me about all of that was that I have to admit that I was quick enough to adopt the aspects of living here that I liked.  For example, I was happy enough to embrace the fact that lawn statuary is a good thing and many lawn statuary is an even better thing.  I got into the fact that you not only could, but should, decorate liberally for every little holiday.  And playoffs are considered holidays.  I accept french fries on one's sandwich.  I can dig the Pittsburgh left.  I really like that I can walk my dogs in the cemetery.  I've taken advantage of the freedom to speak my mind.

Bob's Garage at Christmas
(small, smoky lounge in Fox Chapel famous for over-the-top decorations and karaoke)

The Pits-Burger from Primanti Brothers

I've even come to accept some of the things that puzzled me the most when I first came here:  the fact that you have to go to one place to buy your beer (and you have to buy it by the case at that), but someplace else to buy your wine, but neither of those places is where you buy your groceries.  Yet, I pass five neighborhood bars before I get to the first ATM machine operated by my bank.  Go figure.  I've accepted that my Garmin goes nuts downtown and isn't particularly reliable any place else.  I've learned that getting lost is just part of the rhythm of life here.  Most people do it.  All newbies do.  There's no shame in it.  Just don't panic.  Because it doesn't help and if you are prone to freaking out, then you'll learn that you spend most of your time in that state.  I've even come to accept, if not particularly like, the extremely high expectations the fans here place on the major sports teams.  I'll still turn off the sports talk radio station I listen to as soon as they let callers on because they're usually negative.  About something.  About anything.  (And, sadly, there's been enough to be sad about the last couple of years.)  But, that aside, I have even found myself falling into the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately mindset every so often.

Yes indeedy, I have often congratulated myself on how well I had assimilated to life in the City of Bridges.  And, if I'm being totally honest with myself, maybe that was part of what hurt so much about someone complaining about me - or strictly speaking, my dog - because didn't they believe I was one of them?  But, of course, I wasn't.  Not totally.

Now I am.  Sometimes - often actually - I don't think it's fair.  On a beautiful summer day, I would like Ripley to be able to go outside and enjoy the weather because I can't.  Somebody in the house should enjoy a mid-summer day in the mid-70's.  But now she has to hang out with me all day.  She's clearly bored.  She ate a flip flop a couple of days ago.  She never bothered shoes, even as a puppy.  And she's now horrible on walks - all that pent up energy just comes bounding out.  But, we're like all the other dog owners on the street.  The dogs don't go outside for more than controlled periods of time.

The question would be as I headed in for my second court appearance:  was it enough?  It was.  No other complaints had been received, so the case was closed and my bond will be returned.  The caveat is if another complaint is received there's not much I'll be able to do about it other than write a very large check.  And any hope my neighbor and I ever had of being civil toward one another is now irrevocably gone.  To her I would imagine I'm just the crazy animal lover (I feed anything and everything, which means they constantly have birds crapping all over their stuff on their way to my house).  And to me, she's the rude woman who would rather traumatize me and have her friends threaten me rather than just talk to me.  But at least I'm a little bit closer to totally being a Pittsburgher.  Right?

When in Rome...

I told myself I wasn't nervous, but my behavior gave me away.  I chewed my nails down to nothing and every other little nervous tic I had ever exhibited was showing up randomly before I would really notice what I was doing in the week leading up to Thursday.  But finally the day came:  the day when I would have to go back to court for the second time on the whole dog barking thing.  I told myself I had controlled the issue and my next door neighbor knew I was on to her as the complainer (if you really want to keep yourself anonymous, don't let your friends come over and make loud jokes about shooting my dog for a $1.50) so if she really wanted to pursue it I was going to make her face me, which she clearly wasn't willing to do.  I knew that the odds were highly in my favor going into it, but the stakes were high.  My dogs are like children:  they make me insanely mad occasionally, but I love them deeply and completely.  I would defend them with my life.  And the very idea that anyone could threaten their very existence, even if that's an extremely unlikely outcome, by making a anonymous noise complaint is enough to make me anxious.

It was an interesting sixty days between the two court appearances.  Interesting and often uncomfortable, at least for a while.  It didn't take long to ferret out the source of the complaint.  For one thing, one of my other neighbors had inadvertently ratted out the lady next door I refer to as Mrs. Mike as being who had called the police before on Ripley.  She had been my leading suspect all along because she had been doing a great imitation of an Ice Queen since we moved in. Some of my friends suggested I talk to the woman, and I knew they were right, but one beautiful Saturday afternoon while we were both outside working in our yards, rather pointedly ignoring one another, a male friend of theirs stopped by and was joking around with her.  And, like so many Pittsburghers, he seemingly knows one volume only, that being LOUD, which he actually turned up a notch when he turned to look straight at me with a grin and made his comment about telling me (the "little lady") he'd be glad to shoot the dog for a "buck-fifty".  She laughed at his threat like he had just told the best joke in the world, and he left her to walk around back to find her husband.  I tried not to let it bother me.  But it did.  To the point where I flung my garden trowel in her direction, gathered my dogs up into the car and angrily drove off to the dog park.  If there was ever a time when we might have buried the hatchet, it passed in that moment.  If I hadn't have left for a while that day, it might have gotten buried somewhere alright...

Then for a while I think I was under casual surveillance by the local police.  Or at least it seemed a little odd that suddenly I would see a cruiser either parked along our route as we would walk in the mornings and again in the evenings, or one would slowly roll by and park up the road aways until I went by, then pull out and move on.  This happened a few times over the next week or so.  Never before or since.  Maybe it was nothing, but I learned by watching many, many hours of Law and Order that things are rarely coincidences.  Of course, that made me nervous, a little freaked and a lot of angry.  Seriously?  Didn't the police have anything better to do that spy on a middle aged woman and her dogs?   But, in all honesty, they probably don't some days.

So, of course, the whole thing was on my mind a lot after the initial court appearance when I was granted a 60-day continuance.  And one evening as the three of us (Ripley, aka Criminal, Cheyenne and myself) were starting out on our evening walk and the Lab who lives down the street was barking at us from his little second story back patio that is blocked off by a dog gate, it suddenly hit me.  Only one other family in the whole area lets their dog out to roam in their yard freely.  It's not that people don't have pets here, but they're contained.  They get let out either in tiny enclosures like that Lab's or on leads for a little while each day and their owners walk them once or twice a day, but they don't just hang out in their owner's yards.  It's just the way it's done.  And it hit me that I'd been trying to let my dogs live like they always had.  Like all dogs do in Montana (in the summer) and Texas (not in the summer because it's too hot):  outdoors most of the time.  So they can stretch, play and laze in the sun, and when they're tired they can hang in the cool concrete walled storeroom I had fixed up almost like a little house with fluffy blankets and dog dishes.  And I was holding myself to the same standards I always had as to what was acceptable pet noise.  By the standards of just about anyplace I know actually.  But not here.

That's admittedly weird for an outsider looking in.  Because there is wild, cacophonous noise all around us.  Motorcycles that sound like you could hear them all the way to Philly - they are home-shaking loud (and I'm not overstating that).  Then there's the Friday evening parties that go on well into the night around a fire pit with some bad Top 40's station as background noise.  And what about those fireworks that you can buy in the grocery store?  For days leading up to the 4th it sounded like a blitzkrieg out there.  As a matter of fact, when I was just outside letting Ripley out for a final potty break, I heard all three of those things - a full week after the holiday.  But that's the rhythm of life here.  It's the way it's always been.  The sound that you don't hear are dogs barking.  I finally got how this mess I found myself in even came to pass. My collie's high pitched yips - no matter when or how often - is the jarring off-key note to the song of life that is this little suburb.

The question would become, with my new enlightenment, could I change my evil ways?  Or rather, could I change Ripley's?  Because we were in this together.

Estate of Mind

If you like estate sales, then Pittsburgh is the place for you.  An older than average median population coupled by a tendency for people to stay rooted to one place (and therefore not find the need to do any pre-move purges periodically) makes this almost an Estate Sale Mecca.  And, aside from football and hockey of course, there's almost nothing I like more than a good estate sale.  For anyone not familiar with them, they are not glorified garage sales (for the most part).  Garage sales are when people throw out all the crap they don't want anymore and hope someone is silly enough to buy it.  Which I have done on many occasions.  Estate sales are more often than not an entire home being cleared from everything from furniture and art to vintage clothing and jewelry.  Sometimes the bargains are fantastic.  Sometimes the people putting on the estate sale know too much about what they're doing and price things according to their worth, but in either case it's a way to get one-of-a-kind merchandise.  Merchandise that has a history.

And at the heart of it, that's what I like.  It's why I insisted on an older house - a fact I've cursed many times since the husband headed back down to Texas.  I like looking at something and realizing it stood witness to other people's lives.  I don't know why - the erstwhile writer in me I guess.  I like to look at something and wonder what the people who used to own it were like.  What they did with it.  What they talked about in its presence.  If it's a piece of vintage clothing, I wonder where the woman wore it and what she coupled it with.  Did she wear gloves and what hat would go nicely with it.  Weird?  Maybe.  Who can truly confess that their own fascinations are weird.  They just are what they are.  I guess at the end of the day, I like stories.  So I like things that have stories to tell.  If I could only unlock them.

Plus, I've always been fascinated by things that are older than me.  When I was 7 and completely obsessed over the fact that the refrigerator in my parent's cabin was older than me, that's just amusing.  When you're my age it's becoming a real challenge.  I went to a "vintage" show and sale at the Heinz History Center this past spring and was so depressed at seeing so much kitchenware that I grew up with being passed off as vintage.  Didn't they realize I had just donated boxes and boxes of that crap to goodwill when my mother died?  It's not "vintage" - it's just old and tacky!  But, if I stopped and thought about it, it's no different than my being fascinated by things from the 30's and 40's.  To the average shopper at that show - mid-20's hipsters - it's fascinating to look at the things that your parents grew up with as children.  They may not realize it, but it's a way to connect back to your parent's past, which impacts you because it framed who they are and how they raised you.  You've heard all their stories, now you've got some context for the setting.  I know that's true for me.  Nonetheless, it's depressing to look at a set of Corningware just like the one your mom had and think it's now old enough to be retro.  Because, of course, people don't become retro, just that other thing:  old.

But anyway, back to the estate sales.  There have been a couple on my very street in the last few weeks, and rumor is there is another to come soon.  Despite having a very full house already with all the things I inherited from my parents and a fair amount of stuff from the husband's side of the equation, I hauled home still more stuff.  I was - and am - extremely pleased with myself.  I got some great pieces, including a stained glass panel that I've been looking for at far less than I've seen elsewhere, but there was a price to be paid that wasn't in dollars and cents.  Maybe because I saw the people who belonged to these things going out to get their mail or the paper when I was out walking the dogs.  In one case, the house and the couple even made it into my other blog.  So there was a vague connection with these people whose things I was now rummaging through like a scavenger.  These were my neighbors and now they're gone.  It seemed oddly inappropriate to profit from that fact.  But, I figured if I didn't, then someone else would.

Then there was the common theme that many of the best estate sales have:  they tell the tale of people who are "collectors", a polite way of saying they border on hoarding.  The one larger house was crammed full of antiques - they were in excellent shape and very valuable, but there was so much of it that it was nearly overwhelming.  I can't imagine how it all fit into that house, even as large as it is.  Two weeks later, walking into the foyer of the smaller, humbler home I realized that this couple's things didn't actually fit - they must have had to weave their way in and around all this mass of stuff.  There were still tags on coats and hats - and not inexpensive coats and hats.  For all the modesty of the home, the lady of the house liked expensive clothing.  I now own one of her faux fur coats.  I needed it like I need a hole in my head.  But I love it.  So...  But, it got me to thinking how it wasn't just my mother hoarding because she grew up in the Depression - these couples were probably too little during the Depression to really understand what was happening, but you wondered if they came through the peaks and valleys of the Western PA economy and they bought and collected as psychological backlash to the down times.  But maybe it's just a reaction to growing old.  I've seen it in the terminally ill - almost as though if they keep buying things, they won't die.  So, as I hauled home all my awesome stuff, I had to ask myself:  why truly are you buying all of this?

Finally, there is the realization, as I surround myself in some other peoples' things that, when they bought these things and proudly set them up in their home, or hung them in their closet, they weren't thinking that someday they would be dead and a total stranger would own them.  Really, intellectually, we all know we will die.  But emotionally it takes much more to make it sink in.  So as I rummaged through a whole rack of old coats trying to decide which was the one I couldn't live without, I decided that life really does fly past and you've got to live it well while you can or the next thing you know your own kids will be selling all your stuff and it'll still have the tags on it.

Who knew that simple estate sale shopping was such a philosophical quagmire?!

And that, folks, is the bottom line!
www.pittsburghestatesales.com