Post by Steve on Oct 10, 2008 19:07:35 GMT -5
Attention
Animal Lovers
Food and other animal necessities needed for new program. Meetings are every Monday after the first Monday of every month. For info call:
And it listed a phone number that she called. It wasn’t frequent at first, though it soon came to be a number dedicated to memory; not even the phone could be trusted to secure this sequence of numbers, it had to be stored in her brain. At first the grocery list would have an additional item, which was some type of feline or canine food, with a quiet question mark next to it in parenthesis; growing stronger it became a monster of scratched diagonal lines, also referred to as an asterisk. Even this didn’t bother me. The fact that i would be forced to drive ten miles out of my way in order to purchase pet supplies, which we had none, was nothing more than a feat i could easily mount. A tiny chore of love that i would happily divulge, a free chess piece given away in the game of love; the tiny freedoms in my life nothing more than pawns to be spared, this task meant nothing to me. Nothing more than a pink flyer sitting on the kitchen table. i’d get the animal food—wondering if a certain dog had similar tastes as me, confused about whether i should buy the turkey or chicken flavored chunks of brown; the brown and red brittle pieces that chime like broken glass when poured into a food dish or the dark brown and yellowish pieces that sing the same high-treble song— and drive home to an empty house to set aside an forty-pound bag of food...that we wouldn’t even open.
It wasn’t so bad, in the beginning, buying the food and her delivering it to the appropriate meeting place of that week. At the start it didn’t really affect our life. i wasn’t leaving work in order to pick our daughter up from school. i wasn’t cooking dinner and cleaning the house; laundry and myself after work, when we first began adopting pets we’d never see. And the damn creatures cost more than those commercials you see late at night (or early in the morning) about starving children of other countries. The kids with hair lips; stomachs bloated with bacteria; skin disease rotting their frail meatless faces with flies landing on raw, sushi-pink lesions...they cost less a month than a twenty-pound bag of kettle-cooked-beef flavored mega-bites that we bought every other week. They cost less than the twenty-pound bag of Tiams indoor/outdoor cat food; bought the weeks we didn’t purchase dog food. If you combined all pet products we bought in a month, the medical expenses of an entire village could have been paid for. One less little girl would have to pose in front of a camera bearing her synched lips; folded in places and at angles that only the wrapping of a present was folded; attempting a smile that holds more strength than any hundred and twenty pound Doberman we saved. She wouldn’t have to smile for medical bills, no; she could smile for the lustful, humane, undocumented yearnings of her own love of a boy. A boy possibly with his own V-lip, and she could taste his enamel and he her breath, but we were buying Chicken-Lickin`-Bites and Tastee-Tuna-Treats. Looking through the check-out bins to find a fake rabbit haired mouse that seemed “real” enough for a cat, that i imagined was black with tan swirls—the colour of an Irish Coffee—; not named Peanut Butter but Neptune.
There wasn’t an immediate difference in her demeanor. I mean there were issues that would arise. Things that only seem significant hours after the fact, a second thought in the realm of psychology would only expose the types of alterations that occurred at first. But before anything else, you have to know “her” and “our daughter”. Perhaps even a little about “me”.
“She” was an only child. Not really; but after the tour of foster homes, and the separation of her and her sister, she adopted the attitude and attributes of an only child. “She” had never spoken to her sister, never tried to contact her sister, so somewhere in the world there was a sister, who herself could have believed she was an only child.
“She” was named Sally at birth. The woman i married was named Danielle. The marriage certificate referred to her as Sally; she never legally changed her name. Somewhere along the line, where i never did find out, she began introducing herself as Danielle. I was introduced to her as Danielle.
The family that came to be her own wasn’t affluent. They weren’t wealthy. They met their bills and the necessities that the cost of living required, and anything else they had went to Sally; the young girl they had adopted. It wasn’t quite a family. A man and a wife don’t exactly meet the criteria to be considered a family. But this couple accepted Sally. Gave her standards that i don’t think anyone had ever met. The couple were relatively old. Not to say that they were elderly, but they were not of an age where natural child birth was an option, and their gray hairs fell strand by strand with the passing of her birthdays; creating a pillow of the softest contentment to rest her uneasy head against, falling asleep and dreaming of utopias un-comprehensible to the best wordsmiths.
Her father was a gentle man. His face was the black and white of dried salt on a highway after a snowstorm, covered completely in this contrasting coloured hair. His voice was soft, often times she told me i was the closest to comfort she had felt since his narratives of Grimm Fairytales, and he spoke with a thick “th” that she described as a warm comforter when there wasn’t hot chocolate. His teeth were white and straight, and his body as large as a mountain, though years of sitting proof-reading stories for a magazine left the path to his summit loose and palpable. Whenever she spoke about her youth, Danielle compared climbing onto his chest as “trying to walk a crossed a water-bed, balancing a stack of books upon your head”. She also said that climbing trees were just an excuse to see how birds saw. To see the world with an elevation she only saw at the moment she closed her eyes, utterly exhausted, and saw the world fall away. She was never certain whether it was the world falling away, or, if it was her falling off the edge of the world.
Her mother was a quiet kitchen woman. Her father never touched her mother, never even raised his voice above his soft, nearly inaudible, whisper, and for this her mother willing obliged in the tasks of maintaining a house. At times her mother was weak. Physically. There were days when arthritis prevented her from groping the long arm of a mop, and Danielle would assist her, to the extent of which an only child could. Her mother’s hair was more silver than it was gray, and at night, while the moon shone through their front windows; while both her parents read, Danielle would watch how the moon blended in haphazard chunks like a Van Gogh portrait. She told me one day, before our daughter was born, that the only reason she bought an apron was because her mother taught her to snap string beans while wearing one. There were tiny particles of her mother she accepted. Her mother’s taste for Brandy she never did inherit.
It was a Saturday, while the sky wasn’t sure if it was plum or orange, that our daughter was born. It was at Valley Hospital, on top of a hill that was covered in fog, in room 322, on blue bed linens that slowly turned purple beneath Danielle. On the television set the news was announcing a bill in Congress, addressing American usage of High-fructose-corn syrup and Hydrogenated oils in our foods, which was vetoed. Danielle was making noises like a nail being pried from a dry piece of wood and large-grained sandpaper dragged a crossed concrete. i didn’t know what to do and an immense, dense, wad of a woman nurse asked to move out of the way. Danielle never held my hand. She never asked to hold my hand. The bed-rail seemed to give enough resistance, or at least more resistance than either of us felt my calcium-deficient fist could render. We loved each other though, at that moment; that very second where our daughter felt it the right time to slip into this world. Our eyes met, welded together; a general consensus that neither one of us wanted to go back. And the child i would have to lie to, tell that her mother was out with her friends; bring her tiny castle of sand and youth down, transform her kingdom of innocence into the dirt of reality that she would walk upon: this child we both named Chloe. And she would be left as the only child, something she inherited from her mother.
With time the weekly drop-offs became longer, lasting deep into the night, sometimes pushing the boundary between late-night and early-morning; bringing her through the screen door and into the house as silently as fog—as still as the gentle fragrance of a garden. The metal spring would creak as it extended and echoed through the tranquil air of the house. There were times when the sound was so intoxicated that it stumbled into every room of the house before resting quietly again. The phone would jump to life like a startled rooster who had over-slept sunrise. This was the call to let her know there were clients on the other side of the country that needed to be phoned to keep them interested in the animal. I still remember the first time she referred to it as “closing”. We were sitting at the table eating breakfast, one of the days of the weekend, and Danielle and I were chatting idly as Chloe mixed the contents of her plate together. “So honey, I’m sorry if I woke you this morning. I had a scheduled closing that I had to make.” It all rolled off her tongue as natural as asking for the pepper. After calling and jabbing to people for an hour or two she’d fall into bed and drag me from my dreams.
Animal Lovers
Food and other animal necessities needed for new program. Meetings are every Monday after the first Monday of every month. For info call:
And it listed a phone number that she called. It wasn’t frequent at first, though it soon came to be a number dedicated to memory; not even the phone could be trusted to secure this sequence of numbers, it had to be stored in her brain. At first the grocery list would have an additional item, which was some type of feline or canine food, with a quiet question mark next to it in parenthesis; growing stronger it became a monster of scratched diagonal lines, also referred to as an asterisk. Even this didn’t bother me. The fact that i would be forced to drive ten miles out of my way in order to purchase pet supplies, which we had none, was nothing more than a feat i could easily mount. A tiny chore of love that i would happily divulge, a free chess piece given away in the game of love; the tiny freedoms in my life nothing more than pawns to be spared, this task meant nothing to me. Nothing more than a pink flyer sitting on the kitchen table. i’d get the animal food—wondering if a certain dog had similar tastes as me, confused about whether i should buy the turkey or chicken flavored chunks of brown; the brown and red brittle pieces that chime like broken glass when poured into a food dish or the dark brown and yellowish pieces that sing the same high-treble song— and drive home to an empty house to set aside an forty-pound bag of food...that we wouldn’t even open.
It wasn’t so bad, in the beginning, buying the food and her delivering it to the appropriate meeting place of that week. At the start it didn’t really affect our life. i wasn’t leaving work in order to pick our daughter up from school. i wasn’t cooking dinner and cleaning the house; laundry and myself after work, when we first began adopting pets we’d never see. And the damn creatures cost more than those commercials you see late at night (or early in the morning) about starving children of other countries. The kids with hair lips; stomachs bloated with bacteria; skin disease rotting their frail meatless faces with flies landing on raw, sushi-pink lesions...they cost less a month than a twenty-pound bag of kettle-cooked-beef flavored mega-bites that we bought every other week. They cost less than the twenty-pound bag of Tiams indoor/outdoor cat food; bought the weeks we didn’t purchase dog food. If you combined all pet products we bought in a month, the medical expenses of an entire village could have been paid for. One less little girl would have to pose in front of a camera bearing her synched lips; folded in places and at angles that only the wrapping of a present was folded; attempting a smile that holds more strength than any hundred and twenty pound Doberman we saved. She wouldn’t have to smile for medical bills, no; she could smile for the lustful, humane, undocumented yearnings of her own love of a boy. A boy possibly with his own V-lip, and she could taste his enamel and he her breath, but we were buying Chicken-Lickin`-Bites and Tastee-Tuna-Treats. Looking through the check-out bins to find a fake rabbit haired mouse that seemed “real” enough for a cat, that i imagined was black with tan swirls—the colour of an Irish Coffee—; not named Peanut Butter but Neptune.
There wasn’t an immediate difference in her demeanor. I mean there were issues that would arise. Things that only seem significant hours after the fact, a second thought in the realm of psychology would only expose the types of alterations that occurred at first. But before anything else, you have to know “her” and “our daughter”. Perhaps even a little about “me”.
“She” was an only child. Not really; but after the tour of foster homes, and the separation of her and her sister, she adopted the attitude and attributes of an only child. “She” had never spoken to her sister, never tried to contact her sister, so somewhere in the world there was a sister, who herself could have believed she was an only child.
“She” was named Sally at birth. The woman i married was named Danielle. The marriage certificate referred to her as Sally; she never legally changed her name. Somewhere along the line, where i never did find out, she began introducing herself as Danielle. I was introduced to her as Danielle.
The family that came to be her own wasn’t affluent. They weren’t wealthy. They met their bills and the necessities that the cost of living required, and anything else they had went to Sally; the young girl they had adopted. It wasn’t quite a family. A man and a wife don’t exactly meet the criteria to be considered a family. But this couple accepted Sally. Gave her standards that i don’t think anyone had ever met. The couple were relatively old. Not to say that they were elderly, but they were not of an age where natural child birth was an option, and their gray hairs fell strand by strand with the passing of her birthdays; creating a pillow of the softest contentment to rest her uneasy head against, falling asleep and dreaming of utopias un-comprehensible to the best wordsmiths.
Her father was a gentle man. His face was the black and white of dried salt on a highway after a snowstorm, covered completely in this contrasting coloured hair. His voice was soft, often times she told me i was the closest to comfort she had felt since his narratives of Grimm Fairytales, and he spoke with a thick “th” that she described as a warm comforter when there wasn’t hot chocolate. His teeth were white and straight, and his body as large as a mountain, though years of sitting proof-reading stories for a magazine left the path to his summit loose and palpable. Whenever she spoke about her youth, Danielle compared climbing onto his chest as “trying to walk a crossed a water-bed, balancing a stack of books upon your head”. She also said that climbing trees were just an excuse to see how birds saw. To see the world with an elevation she only saw at the moment she closed her eyes, utterly exhausted, and saw the world fall away. She was never certain whether it was the world falling away, or, if it was her falling off the edge of the world.
Her mother was a quiet kitchen woman. Her father never touched her mother, never even raised his voice above his soft, nearly inaudible, whisper, and for this her mother willing obliged in the tasks of maintaining a house. At times her mother was weak. Physically. There were days when arthritis prevented her from groping the long arm of a mop, and Danielle would assist her, to the extent of which an only child could. Her mother’s hair was more silver than it was gray, and at night, while the moon shone through their front windows; while both her parents read, Danielle would watch how the moon blended in haphazard chunks like a Van Gogh portrait. She told me one day, before our daughter was born, that the only reason she bought an apron was because her mother taught her to snap string beans while wearing one. There were tiny particles of her mother she accepted. Her mother’s taste for Brandy she never did inherit.
It was a Saturday, while the sky wasn’t sure if it was plum or orange, that our daughter was born. It was at Valley Hospital, on top of a hill that was covered in fog, in room 322, on blue bed linens that slowly turned purple beneath Danielle. On the television set the news was announcing a bill in Congress, addressing American usage of High-fructose-corn syrup and Hydrogenated oils in our foods, which was vetoed. Danielle was making noises like a nail being pried from a dry piece of wood and large-grained sandpaper dragged a crossed concrete. i didn’t know what to do and an immense, dense, wad of a woman nurse asked to move out of the way. Danielle never held my hand. She never asked to hold my hand. The bed-rail seemed to give enough resistance, or at least more resistance than either of us felt my calcium-deficient fist could render. We loved each other though, at that moment; that very second where our daughter felt it the right time to slip into this world. Our eyes met, welded together; a general consensus that neither one of us wanted to go back. And the child i would have to lie to, tell that her mother was out with her friends; bring her tiny castle of sand and youth down, transform her kingdom of innocence into the dirt of reality that she would walk upon: this child we both named Chloe. And she would be left as the only child, something she inherited from her mother.
With time the weekly drop-offs became longer, lasting deep into the night, sometimes pushing the boundary between late-night and early-morning; bringing her through the screen door and into the house as silently as fog—as still as the gentle fragrance of a garden. The metal spring would creak as it extended and echoed through the tranquil air of the house. There were times when the sound was so intoxicated that it stumbled into every room of the house before resting quietly again. The phone would jump to life like a startled rooster who had over-slept sunrise. This was the call to let her know there were clients on the other side of the country that needed to be phoned to keep them interested in the animal. I still remember the first time she referred to it as “closing”. We were sitting at the table eating breakfast, one of the days of the weekend, and Danielle and I were chatting idly as Chloe mixed the contents of her plate together. “So honey, I’m sorry if I woke you this morning. I had a scheduled closing that I had to make.” It all rolled off her tongue as natural as asking for the pepper. After calling and jabbing to people for an hour or two she’d fall into bed and drag me from my dreams.