Dog Towels

The Canada geese glide down and ski to a stop on the brown water below us as we walk over the wooden bridge towards the dog park. It is a misty grey morning and it has been raining, so the bridge is slick. The geese have joined ducks and the invitation propels the puppy to the side, pushing her black snout through the slats, all her birding instincts commanding her to crouch, bark and attempt to simultaneously remove my arm at the shoulder and knock me off my feet by yanking forward on the leash. 

I am pulled along, the puppy zigzagging from one side of the path to the other, sniffing grass, peeing on a fence, greeting another dog until I can unhook her and toss the kong. This early the dog park is nearly deserted and the rain has left small lakes clustered all through the throwing area. I am not a dog park person, as our old Aussie mix preferred sitting on the bench with the people and we can do that at home. After a few tosses, I give the kong a throw with a bit more muscle and the puppy plows through a puddle sending up a huge spray. This puppy is drawn to the water like a toddler and this could go on for hours I soon realize.  The game winds down when the puppy starts to drop the kong further and further from me so I clip on her leash and am dragged back over the bridge to the parking lot.

On cue the puppy sails up into the back of the Jeep, sleek and black as a seal pup, her tail threatening to pull her spine out of alignment she wags so furiously.  I remind her, again, to sit and push her back, distracting her by tossing the slimy pink kong in the corner as I close the tailgate. By the time I open the driver’s door she’s in the passenger seat, beyond excited to see me again.  I get out and put her in the back, this time looping her leash over the roll bar. This is my son’s puppy, in essence my beta grandchild, so it’s the best kind of puppy.

I had lined the back of the Jeep with junky blue towels – the dog towels - and used an extra one to rub her muddy haunches as she wiggled all over me.  This towel wrestle is a familiar one. Her muscular enthusiasm echoes that of her owner’s when I used the same towels to dry his 30-pound puppy body.

These faded cobalt blue towels were once the perfect match for the blue tile that lined the shower and bathtub in my kids bathroom, though they were rarely displayed on the towel rack.  They have toweled off three slippery baby bodies. Pulled hot from the dryer they have burritoed toddlers who did not want to get out of the bath that they did not want to take 20 minutes earlier.  I’ve used them to cover a pee soaked bed I was too exhausted to change at three in the morning. They have dried dripping curls of many lengths, and been left where they drop, on the floor of the teen post apocalyptic bedroom, after lacrosse practice showers.

There was the time, not too long ago, I found a blue towel staple gunned to the polished blonde maple dining table leaf, because my eldest said he was ‘making something’.  One was discovered in my middle son’s bass drum along with some couch pillows when the drum kit was being unloaded from my car after a gig.

I washed, dried and folded the vibrant cobalt hue and fluffy texture right out of these towels. After twenty years of service, they are no longer presentable, now frayed, with holes and inexplicable stains, they reside folded in the laundry room pantry next to the leash, dog and cat food and box of poop bags.

Once we are back home I let the puppy out of the back as she was eager to get reacquainted with our cats and I gather all the wet muddy towels out of the Jeep and bring them in the laundry room.

The puppy flops down at my feet while I start the towel load, and gnaws her kong with a squeaking of puppy teeth on wet rubber. The emergency towels, the junker towels, the dog towels. They are faithful and ever ready.

I don’t know who’s more exhausted.

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Jungle Plant

there's one in every litter

Remember looking at National Geographic magazine's pictures of jungle tribes?  Lying on the living room floor, your head bracing hand falling asleep, the scratchy carpet irritating the skin of your belly where your Hang Ten hand-me-down shirt had lifted up,  turning the slick pages with your functioning hand.  The smooth skinned naked natives with their blackened nub smiles both fascinated and repulsed.  The body manipulations: ritual tattooing, scaring, piercing and stretching of the dark jungle moist skin was so other, alien.  I thought about this as I seated myself at the dinner table on Christmas Eve, forcibly softening my squint of disapproval and holding my tongue in order to enjoy a rare visit from my eldest son.

to find some books on xeriparenting

Modestly pierced ears were pretty much unanimous at the table.  My scientist brother-in-law has tiny hoops in each ear, but my eldest son has surgical steel in various gages looping in and out in three different directions, plus rosewood bottle cap sized plugs in stretched lobes, but most festive is the thick shiny silver bull ring ending in double ball bearings dangling from his upturned nose, jewelry that would be more suited on a 350 pound Samoan, not my delicate featured, freckled, blue eyed Scot-Irish Neo Primitive. Plus I think we can all agree that white boy dreadlocks are unfortunate. Two ambitious rope heads are seated at our dinner table. Brothers, one dark, one red. Seeing them seated next to each other, eating only the quinoa salad, I recall rinsing playground sand and sweat from their toddler scalps as they battled with multiple Batman action figures – and me -  in the tub.  I would pour water from a Toy Story popcorn bucket as they covered their eyes with a washcloth, the stream pulling their ringlets down their backs as the suds were rinsed away. Now those curls are matted and hidden in rough ropes that smell worse than they look and include remnants of camp outs on Mount Tam, beads and feathers.  The elder, the redhead, ‘the Gingerdread Man’, has crafted his signature look into a dread mullet, cutting the front short, growing a pompadour, bleaching it, then shaving it down to a burr cut again, and with the red ropes pulled back, he passes as employable. 

The Gingerdread Man, as he sits here before me, is six months into what we are collectively agreeing to agree is a gap year. He left college after his freshman year and he is the only person at the table who is happy about this. His freshman year of college was a busy one.  While he did well academically, he also hopped freight trains, took up with a nefarious crew in Portland, can use the term ‘squat house’ with confidence, has earned an arrest record and he has three four DIY tattoos. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say he hasn’t been wearing his retainer.

I’m enjoying Christmas Eve dinner with my family and baffled by my poseur Hobo. When he left school he and his tribe went on food stamps because they didn’t want to be tied down to summer jobs. He wanted to roam and since we, the evil fun oppressors wouldn’t be sponsoring his plan, well he showed us. He and I had a chat about integrity and I might have used the words ‘lacking a moral compass’ when I forgot to use my inside voice.

Willing to sleep in a squat house in Oakland or the joint custody tribal van rather than his bed in our home.  Opportunities rejected, intentionally festooned to appear unemployable, throwing himself headlong with gusto into risk laden situations, all the while knowing he has options.  His reality is his choice.

HoboCam Pic

My choice is to detach, and enjoy my dinner, sip my wine and breathe. I look at my kids and realize it was never my intention to raise house plants, children who fear the world and I cannot control his 20 year old choices. I am fascinated and repulsed. I say nothing. 

Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop.

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G is for Grace

In my motherhood journey, like all parenting journeys, there is a moment I am pained to speak about. I was merging onto the freeway, taking my daughter to karate, when chunks of the sky started falling.  That’s when the robocall call came through the car’s Bluetooth from the King County Jail, then paused for my son’s recorded voice speaking his name, then continued to inform me of the 800 number I had to call to bank time with a private phone service so I could speak to my incarcerated son the next time they allowed him to call.

That moment is a splinter I can’t grasp,  It is like a canker sore that hurts more when I press it with my tongue and yet I continue to press, to see if it still hurts.  It does.  Then it fades, and I press again. Still there.

The panic I felt, the complete lack of control, the ensuing lessons I learned about the Seattle court system, my son and myself led to, of all things, Grace.  All parenting concerns become meaningless after your son has been arrested, in another state.  Really the only thing left to be concerned about are the parenting biggies: sickness and death.  When you let everything else go, you get Grace. 

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