Animal House

dog curtain — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Jody Mace

It’s been a couple months since my dogs started wearing diapers.

So far just a few people know, mainly the people who have visited my house since the diaper regime began. I’m guilty of the worst kind of Facebook hypocrisy. When I post pictures of my dogs (and I do it a lot), I employ angles that hide their diapers. It’s kind of like that studied angle that many women use for their selfies—the camera slightly elevated from the face so that the face is looking up. It’s more flattering, but everyone knows what they’re up to.

Before one friend came over, I texted her, “I should tell you, we’re making both dogs wear diapers now. You will know soon enough.”

I didn’t want things to be awkward for her. There’s not a polite way to ask about dogs wearing diapers and I feared that the silence would feel weighty.

My dogs aren’t wearing diapers because they have a medical problem or because they’re old. It’s because they are acting like jerks.

My first dog, Shaggy, is an elegant little creature. He’s a schnoodle, a schnauzer/poodle mix, and sometimes I think he’s not really even a dog. He’s got this meaningful way of looking into your eyes as he tries to speak English. He can say “hello” and “I love you.” My husband, who is not as skilled at listening as I am, disputes this, but trust me.

Our second dog, Harlow, is not a specific breed exactly. He’s a medium-sized, white hairy dog. Someone found him abandoned in a nature preserve and for reasons I don’t understand, we took him in. He had clearly been neglected in every way for some time. His coat was a matted mess. He wouldn’t take food from people. He didn’t know how to walk up steps. He was distrustful of everyone.

We took him to the vet, got him his shots, and had him neutered. I took him to a behavioral trainer, one that looks beyond commands like “sit” and “stay,” and, instead focuses on building his confidence and decision-making skills. I kept him by my side every waking hour, for months, at first on a leash, until he learned to follow me around, to come when I called. The change was like a miracle. He’s relaxed now, and he bonded with us. He’s got a sweet temperament. He’s almost the perfect dog.

Except he pees everywhere. Everywhere. If we put a bag on the floor, he pees on it. He pees on the furniture, on the walls. Once my husband Stan was lying on a couch downstairs and Harlow parallel parked next to the railing in the upstairs hall and launched a perfectly aimed stream of urine onto Stan’s head.

If I’m going to be totally honest—and at this point, what do I have to lose?—I’ll mention that Harlow has also, on rare occasion, pooped in the house, too. It’s a measure of how troublesome the urine is that I have no particular emotion when I find a pile of poop. It doesn’t happen often and is fairly easily picked up. One time he left a pile that was perfectly formed into the word “HI.” Since it was kind of a miracle, I took a picture of it before cleaning it up and posted it on Facebook. Then I learned that there are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who is disgusted by pictures of dog poop, no matter how literary, and the kind that suggests I create a line of greeting cards featuring messages spelled out in dog feces.

We had this idea, before we adopted Harlow, that it would be good for Shaggy to have a dog friend. That if he spent time with a dog and not just us humans, he would learn to be more dog-like. It turns out that he didn’t learn much from Harlow. Except peeing. Our graceful, intelligent, little dog-person was now lifting his leg and peeing on the side of the couch. There really is such a thing as a pissing contest.

We worked more with the trainer. I don’t want to relive it all here, but trust me when I say that we did all the things. All the things. Finally she dropped her voice and said, “You could try belly bands.”

Belly bands are just what they sound like. Cloth bands that wrap around a male dog’s middle, attaching with Velcro. When my kids were babies, I thought it was sort of weird the way some moms went nuts over cloth diapers and cloth diaper covers. I don’t mean in a utilitarian way, but for the aesthetics. When I heard them gush about the cute patterns I thought it was a little pathetic. They’re diapers! They’re just going to be soaked in urine.

Now I get it. I started out utilitarian with the belly bands, buying just a plain white one for Harlow. But it made him look like an old man in tighty whities. Or like Walter White, cooking meth in the desert. So I bought a belly band with a cute peace sign pattern. And another one with stars. And one with tiger stripes. It made it all a little bit less sad.

I’m convinced that they have no idea why they’re wearing diapers. They don’t like them but they’ve come to accept them. When they come inside they wait in a little line for me to put the diapers back on them. If I could have just five minutes during which time they’d really understand English, I would tell them one thing: “Don’t pee inside.” That’s it. I believe that if they really understood that I wanted them to never pee inside again, that they’d make their best effort to avoid doing so. They want to please me. And yet they do the very thing that pleases me the least.

Since we started the diaper regime, our life has gotten better. The dogs don’t have to stay glued to my side. We’re not cleaning the carpets all the time. Speaking of cleaning carpets, now I’d like to share with you the secret of getting dog urine out of carpets. This is a bonus, a takeaway from this essay, if you will. It’s a process that’s very inexpensive but time-consuming.

First you need to find the spots where the dogs have peed. If your carpet is tan like ours is, it may be hard to see the spots after they have dried. That’s why you need a black light. Wait until nighttime, turn off all the lights, and walk around, shining a black light on the carpet. The urine spots will glow. Some other fluids will also make the carpet glow, but that’s your own business and who am I to judge? Once you’ve found the spots, mark them by surrounding them with masking tape. Turn on your lights. Then spray a mixture that is 50/50 white vinegar and water. Soak those spots. Wait for them to dry. If you’ve saturated them sufficiently, this will take a day.

Next spray them with hydrogen peroxide that has just a little bit of dish liquid mixed in. Really lay this stuff to the stains.

When that’s dry (and it will take overnight at least), sprinkle baking soda on and then vacuum it up. This gets out the odor and the black light test will verify that it did the trick.

So compared to that process, diapering a couple of dogs several times a days is not a big deal. Their diapers are almost always dry. The belly bands discourage them from peeing inside because there’s no fun in it. So it could be worse.

But still, I can’t help but consider the complexity we’ve added to our lives. Our kids, at sixteen and nineteen, are old enough to be pretty self-sufficient. I can forget to cook dinner and nobody is going to call child protective services. They can make their own damn macaroni and cheese. Things have gotten simpler for us from the days of busy, demanding toddlers who were hell-bent on electrocuting themselves and breaking all the eggs from the refrigerator. From those days, life has, year by year, gotten simpler. And yet, instead of taking advantage of the simplicity and lack of demands on our time, we did this thing that has made our lives infinitely more complicated.

We brought animals into our house. Sometimes when I think of it, the whole concept of pets seems bizarre. We do all these things to insulate ourselves from the unpredictability of nature and the outside world. We build houses, we seal the doors and windows. We avoid building a house on a flood plain. We install locks on the doors and a security system. We buy homeowners insurance in case there’s an act of nature.

Then once we have this safe, controlled environment, we bring in animals. I believed all along that Shaggy was kind of a person. But people don’t pee on the ottoman. They just don’t. When the whole peeing thing started I’d sometimes look at these dogs and think “My god. They are animals.” They seemed like just one step away from raccoons. Once I hired an expensive pest control expert to lure a raccoon family out of our attic. But we invite the dogs into our house. To live. We say, “Yes, you are a being who likes to chew on a beef bone that’s been buried and left to rot in the ground for a week. But by all means please live in my house, which up until now, has been kept in a fairly sanitary condition. Here, sit up on the couch with me and I’ll scratch behind your ears and possibly kiss the side of your face.”

And they’re unpredictable. When we adopted Harlow, we didn’t consider the possibility that he would be an unrepentant urinator and that he would get Shaggy started too. But it would have been reasonable to assume that he’d do some things that would bring complexity into our lives. Dogs do all kinds of things. They run away. They bite. They bark at the nice couple pushing a stroller down the street as if their baby was the antichrist. They tear up cushions, leaving the cushion carcass surrounded by mountains of fluff.

I think about entropy a lot. I mean, I think about it on a superficial level, the way non-scientists do, because as soon as I start reading words like logarithm and microstate and quantum thermodynamics, I find that I need to quickly click on Youtube and watch a video of a chimpanzee riding a Segway. But the idea of entropy is that systems naturally move from order to disorder. If you put an ice cube into a cup of hot water, the water doesn’t freeze; the ice cube melts. The molecules of the ice cube, which were frozen into a rigid order, are freed to move around as a liquid.

So is there also a sort of entropy at play in our personal relationships? When things become too simple, do we have a tendency to add elements that complicate them? In a sense, any time we take on the responsibility of caring for another being, we’re opening ourselves up to complications that we can’t predict. How do we know that the child we bring into the world won’t have a disability that will require us to reshuffle our lives? Or that the man we marry won’t have a stroke a year later? We don’t.

The issue of nurturing is all mixed up in this idea of personal entropy for me. I took in these dogs and that means I made a promise to take care of them, even if they brought chaos into my life.

I think we have pets because at a very fundamental level we have a need to nurture. And with that nurturing comes all kinds of risks. In the scheme of things, the diapers aren’t a big deal. But every time I put a diaper onto a dog, I’m struck by the ridiculousness of the situation. Dogs, healthy dogs, wearing diapers. But I’m also sometimes reminded of the bond we share with these animals, and the promise we make when we teach them to love us. When Harlow learned to trust us, to sit by us and awkwardly lean against our bodies, looking at us as if to say “Is this how it’s done? This love thing?” we lost the choice of letting him go. He was ours.

•••

JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. Her website is jodymace.com. She publishes the website Charlotte on the Cheap in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People.

A Year of Dreams

dream2 — By Jody Mace See more at I Draw My Dreams on Facebook

By Jody Mace

Once I was involved in a political revolt. The situation leading up to the revolt was horrifying. I’ll just mention the worst of the atrocities. The dictator was sawing people in half at the waist. Led by a wise, bald man, we succeeded in overthrowing the autocracy. My personal heroism was as follows: I rescued a baby from a river, and after we restored a peaceful democracy I contacted a dentist, because many children had lost their retainers during the struggle for freedom.

This was a dream.

The only reason I can describe this dream, three years after it occurred, is because for one year I drew every one of my dreams in cartoon format. I’ve been asked why I did this, and I’m not sure why I started, but I continued because when I shared the first picture on Facebook, it got lots of likes and my friends said it was funny, and I will do almost anything for a laugh. So I created a Facebook page.

It turns out that I had very few dreams in which I was a hero. In fact, the dreams exposed the worst of myself. I did things that I wouldn’t do in real life but might think about. I cheated in sports and I called small children “bitches” (and then lied about it: “Tell their parents I called them ‘witches.’”) I went ape-shit on a college professor who said I wasn’t listening, throwing desks around the room in an uncontrollable rage.

In my dreams I examined what I would do if presented with situations I was unlikely to face in real life. I learned that if I were a soldier, I would avoid injury by finding hiding spots whenever the shooting started. Also, after a rampaging hippo at the zoo was shot and killed, I looted its cage and stole its toiletries. (“This shampoo looks good!”)

Everyone knows this about dreams: they’re fascinating for the dreamer to talk about but boring as hell for the people who have to listen. Try telling someone your dream from last night and watch for the exact point when the listener’s eyes glaze over. It won’t take long.

But that’s not because dreams are boring. It’s because our storytelling is boring. We don’t know where to start the story and we sure don’t know where to end it. The interesting parts are buried in mundane detail. If I were to describe the political revolt dream but started at the beginning of the dream, where a tour group was packing into a bus and the driver said something a little weird and I looked out the window and saw someone selling hats, nobody would be listening by the time I got to where the dictator was sawing people in half, and that’s when it started getting interesting.

If you were telling someone a story about a close call on the freeway in the afternoon you wouldn’t start out by describing brushing your teeth in the morning. You probably wouldn’t include what kind of shoes you were wearing. Just because something happened doesn’t make it a part of the story.

Because I was drawing the dreams, I was forced to boil each dream down to its essential elements, maybe five or six frames. It also helped that I can’t draw. So everything that happened had to be depicted in the simplest manner possible, which made it impossible to include extraneous details. The cartoon me had maybe three distinct facial expressions during the course of the year, but I learned to draw those three facial expressions convincingly. My “angry” expression was particularly iconic.

My poor drawing skills did occasionally call for some explanation, so there are a few notes here and there, like “Third arm is an accident,” “Not really this tall,” “This is not a penis,” etc.

The exercise of identifying the interesting elements of a story, and figuring out where a story begins and ends helped me in my other writing as well. I became more ruthless, slashing words, sentences, paragraphs. I think that drawing badly made me a better writer.

Drawing my dreams also made me work harder at the visual aspect of storytelling. Sometimes the dream could be told with hardly any words, just pictures. In one dream I had read a book on caring for chickens and it said that it was good for chicks’ social skills to spend some time every day with a rooster. So the picture consisted of several frames of little chickens climbing all over a rooster, and finally a close-up of the rooster with a pissed off look on his face and the words, “The rooster is not amused.”

And maybe being creative in a medium for which you have no skill or talent helps your creativity as a whole, because you can’t rely on any skill you might have developed. I don’t know the “rules” of drawing the way I know the “rules” of writing. If there’s a grammar to illustration I don’t know what it is. So I had no filter, and it felt good to create with no filter.

Sometimes I drew other people’s dreams as well. They’d tell me the long, boring version of the dream, and I’d boil it down to the essentials. Several times I drew my husband’s dreams. They were interesting to me because of what they said about our relationship. Like this one: We were climbing around on a cliff. We got to a dangerous part and Stan said, “We should stop,” but I said, “No! Let’s go!” Then I fell off the cliff into a body of water. Stan had to jump into the water to rescue me, risking his own life, but I was dead. Only I wasn’t dead! I jumped up and said, “That was fun!” What this dream says about our relationship is that I’m the fun one.

I also drew my friend Christie’s dream in which she and Stan were driving a truck through the mountains, hauling several refrigerators wrapped in towels. The interesting part of the dream is that Christie and Stan were flirting with each other. Later Christie claimed that I misinterpreted her dream and that they were not flirting, but when you ask someone to draw your dream, the artist gets to make the call.

My favorite dream I drew was one of Stan’s. It’s also probably the most offensive. In this dream we were browsing a catalogue of organic meat and we had this conversation.

Me: “I think I’ll get a midget.”

Stan: “What? Do you have any idea how big a midget is?”

Me: “I’ll cut it up and put it in the freezer.”

Stan: “I’m not eating some tough old midget!”

What I like about this dream is that on the surface it appears that he’s the virtuous one, rejecting the notion of cannibalism. But really his objections focus on the space the midget will take up and the quality of the meat. (Also, I know we don’t use the word “midget” anymore, but this wasn’t my dream.)

During the year I drew my dreams, I found that I remembered more of them, probably because the first thing I did each morning was recall them so that I could draw them. I also kept a notebook by my bed so if I woke up in the middle of the night I could write down a word or phrase to help me remember the dream I had before I woke. Sometimes the scribbled notes made me a little sad, like when I read “monster on house” but couldn’t remember the dream.

Reading notes about these lost dreams made me appreciate even more the staggering creativity that goes into dreaming. During the day, sometimes I stare at a blank Word document wondering if I’ll ever get another idea, and I hit “save” after writing just a couple sentences, afraid of losing even one word. But at nighttime ideas flow so freely. I tell stories, make jokes, invent things, and paint pictures with absolutely no effort at all, and then they’re simply released, like they’re nothing. If I don’t catch them as soon as I wake, they’re gone forever.

I rarely draw my dreams anymore, but I still look forward to sleeping every night and not just because I’m tired. Every night I anticipate the places my brain will take me, the surprising connections it will make, the unlikely storylines and the unselfconscious confessions. Every night I hope that when I wake, before I fully surrender to the morning, that I can grab a thread from a dream, give it a gentle tug, and bring that lovely diaphanous memory with me into the world of solid things.

•••

Haunted Wedding

By Jody Mace

Two years ago, in early October, I found my husband, Stan, in the garage, fondling a pair of chicken wire breasts.

“Do you think these are even?” he asked.

For a moment I thought maybe we’d gone too far.

But the feeling passed. I examined them with a critical eye. “I think they’re perfect.”

The chicken wire breasts were part of a chicken wire bridesmaid, who was part of a wedding party constructed of PVC pipe and wire. The wedding party ended up dressed in thrift store formal wear as part of a “Haunted Wedding.” The bride, her groom, and two bridesmaids created an eerie scene in our front yard. In the darkness of Halloween night, their frames were almost invisible, so the dresses and suit appeared to float in the air. Earrings dangled from an absent head. A gloved hand held a champagne flute high in the air. The scene captured the bride throwing a bouquet in the air, while bridesmaids waited with outstretched arms, invisible except for the long white gloves.

The year before that, our Halloween decorations were uninspired. Severed arms protruding from the bushes. A tombstone that shrieked when trick-or-treaters approached the front door. The usual stuff.

But two years ago we upped our game. I don’t remember why we decided to become That Family in our neighborhood. Maybe it was because our kids, at thirteen and sixteen, were (arguably) aging out of trick-or-treating. Maybe we just craved some kind of creative expression. I know that it started when I said, “What if…”

I’m an idea person. I don’t know how to actually do anything, but I have a whole lot of good ideas. Stan knows how to do things and what he doesn’t know, he can find on Youtube. He’s also obsessive and focused. While I was off looking for bargains on candy, he was laboring over what weight of chicken wire to use and how to secure the groom to the ground. (A tent stake through a hole drilled in the heel of a dress shoe, in case you were wondering.)

Between my ideas and Stan’s resourcefulness, the wedding scene was just the beginning.

First I came up with the back story about the doomed wedding. A quick synopsis: A jealous ex-lover of the groom plotted to kill her rival and the bridesmaids with poisoned tarts, which she carried around on a tray, having disguised herself as a waitress. However, the groom ate a tart as well. When she realized that she had unwittingly murdered the object of her affections, the jilted lover offed herself by eating the last tart.

Running with that theme, we made a video of one of my son’s friends, dressed as a bride, walking back and forth, forlornly, in a darkened room. Stan edited that video and punctuated it with a found video of a scary woman screaming. On Halloween night, he projected it onto wax paper, which was taped to the window of a room on the second floor of our house. From the street it looked like a ghost bride was pacing in an attic.

Next, I wrote the story in verse and recorded Stan reading the story. He then applied some kind of video editing magic to make his face look spooky. But that wasn’t all. He built a booth out of wood and set up what’s known in the “haunting world” as the Pepper’s Ghost Illusion. It involves special lighting (a lightbulb), careful angling of the video monitor and a sheet of plexi-glass. The result is the appearance of a floating head in the booth, telling the story. It was spectacular. The “special lighting” did cause the booth to catch fire early in the evening, but that was really the only glitch.

Maybe the best thing about our Halloween preparation was how it allowed Stan and our son to experience some real father-son bonding. Forget fishing or throwing the ball around in the backyard. Nothing can compare to the first time a father and son build a coffin together.

When our neighbors walked up our driveway, they generally just wanted to go to the front door to get candy, but I’d have none of that. They had to stand and watch the floating head tell the story of the haunted wedding before they could proceed. Besides, at the end of the video, another of our son’s friends jumped out of the coffin.

Some parents didn’t seem too happy because our display was too scary for their young kids. I have to admit that I didn’t really care. Every other house on the block was fine for little kids, but ours was the only one that had a line of teenagers. The little kids could skip our house. I’d even walk to the bottom of the driveway and give them candy.

The end of Halloween was sort of melancholy for us. It was over. There’s always something sad about dismembering your chicken-wire ghost bride and putting her into the attic.

Then, of course, we had to conduct a post-mortem analysis. What worked and what didn’t? It turned out that my rhymed narrative about the poisoning was a little bit long, despite the impressive special effects. People don’t appreciate literary efforts on Halloween. They really just want to be scared, and scared fast. The kid jumping out of the coffin was more effective.

“We need more of a shock effect,” I said. “Next year we should have props that move.”

I had no idea how to make props that move, and I was already walking away, but Stan was on it. “We’d need an air compressor, pneumatics…”

•••

He discovered that there was an online community of “haunters,” as they called themselves. For years I’d been the one with the online life. When our kids were little, I discussed pressing matters like toilet-training with faceless names on the computer screen.

Now Stan had discovered the social aspect of the internet. Only, instead of discussing how to get kids to eat vegetables, he and his new friends talked about things like “corpsing,” which is making something look like a decaying cadaver, and recipes for fake blood. Instead of discussing the best places to buy diapers, the haunting boards explode when the cheap skeletons arrive at Wal-mart. The haunters fell into one of two camps, those who preferred electric motors (“smoother action,” they claimed) and those who preferred air cylinders (“more force!”) As you might imagine, the arguments could be fierce. If you’ve ever seen the anatomy of a breast vs. bottle flame war, you know what I’m talking about.

Stan talked to me about his new friends by name, or handle. When he spoke of “Mary the Scary” (name changed) it was with reverence. She knew how to weather Styrofoam stones, how to animate props through a computerized controller. She created tutorials and attended haunting conventions.

“She has a lot of authority,” Stan said.

With the support of Mary and the other haunters, last year our Halloween display was more interactive. Gone were the static displays in the front yard. Instead, Stan turned the garage into a haunted house.

I came up with the theme of The Plague. I recruited actors to play the part of plague victims and doctors, as well as some witches, for good measure. I got out the sewing machine that I hadn’t used since my ill-fated stint at a sewing class as the local community college. (I had left in disgrace after an extended bout of uncontrollable laughter when the elderly instructor kept calling asterisks astronauts.) This time I got a friend to show me how to use the thing and I created tunics for the actors. I never sewed anything other than tunics but I sewed a lot of them.

I also was responsible for the pustules. Here’s how I made them. I’d take a little piece of a cotton ball and put it on a plate. Then I’d cover it with Elmer’s Glue. When it dried I dabbed red and green paint on it with a Q-tip to suggest oozing blood and pus. When it was all dry, I peeled it off and adhered it to the plague victims’ faces with either more glue or something called spirit gum. But don’t go by what I say. You can probably find a Youtube tutorial on this if you want to try it yourself. My memory is fuzzy. I’m not good at crafts. We had a big problem with pustules falling off people’s faces.

Stan did the rest. The props he created were mechanical wonders. There was the corpse that jumped out the coffin, the “hanging man” who writhed around and screamed, the guy who pulled apart the bars of his prison cell and stuck his head out when trick-or-treaters approached.

•••

This is the third year of our haunt. It’s more elaborate than ever. I can’t say much more because I’ve been sworn to secrecy. I’ll say that some of the props that Stan’s been working on in the driveway have drawn concerned looks from our neighbors. There’s a certain look they give us. People walking their dogs just stop and stare for a long time. They say nothing. Then they walk away. Nobody ever says anything.

Bicycles, electric fans and ice cream makers lie, torn up, in our garage, cannibalized for their motors and wheels. A structure that looks suspiciously like gallows stands next to a tree in our front yard.

We are not ideal neighbors.

There’s a certain point in our planning when we question ourselves. Why are we doing this? In a way it all seems so…stupid. To spend all this time on an event that’s over in one night? It’s as if once the intense years of child-raising were over, we had to find a new project. A new way to express our creativity. And for reasons we can’t understand, we chose mechanical corpses jumping out at screaming children.

Maybe this will be the last year. Maybe next year we’ll sit on the stoop like normal people, compliment kids on their superhero costumes, and hand out Tootsie Rolls.

But on the other hand, I’m prone to good ideas.

•••

JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. She publishes the website Charlotte on the Cheap in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The links in this essay will take you to actual footage from Jody and Stan’s extravaganzas. I seriously recommend clicking. —Ed.

The Insomniac’s To Do List

A guide to getting things done at 3 a.m.

googly eyes — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Jody Mace

1. Keep close track of exactly how much sleep you’ll get if you fell asleep right now. Repeat every half hour.

2. Ponder why you said the dumb-ass thing you said today. If you didn’t say a dumb-ass thing today, revisit one you said sixteen years ago, at a job you used to have, to people you don’t know anymore. Consider how badly those people must think of you.

3. Resolve to use this time wisely. Think about cleaning the bathroom but then remember that you hate cleaning the bathroom and, plus, the cleaner is in the other room and you wouldn’t want to wake anyone up. Instead, decide to do some serious writing, unlike the stupid writing you do for a living.

4. Berate yourself for doing stupid writing for a living. Imagine the disgust that the seventeen-year-old you would feel for you if she knew the kind of writing you’d end up doing.

5. Imagine the disappointment your high school English teacher would feel if she knew.

6. Wonder if your high school English teacher would remember you anyway, despite the brilliance you demonstrated in class when you wrote that farce about archetypes. Consider the notion that perhaps you were not as brilliant as you always thought you were and that maybe you were really just a smart-ass.

7. Remember the mean thing that one person in high school did to you that one time. Look that person up on Facebook and feel vindicated that he is recently divorced, not because, obviously, being divorced is evidence of a character flaw, but because clearly in this case his wife left him because he was an asshole who did mean things to people. Haha.

8. Wonder what the fuck that noise was.

9. Entertain an extremely disturbing thought: how many insects are in this house right at this very moment?

10. Become convinced that there is a microscopic bug crawling on your leg. Challenge yourself to not scratch. Dammit.

11. Remember about bedbugs. Google how to check for bedbugs. Feel sick. Seriously disgusted.

12. Read a book.

13. Realize that you’ve lost your attention span for reading. Or maybe it’s your rapidly worsening short vision that’s the problem. In either case, consider that it may be caused by a brain tumor.

14. Google brain tumors and learn that you definitely have one.

15. Think about making a video for your children with all the advice you’d like to leave them, like how to choose a mate, how to set goals and stick with them, how to do the right thing when their friends are doing the wrong thing, and just how to be a kind person. Then remember that they don’t listen to you anyway so fuck it.

16. Instead, plan the music you’d like at your funeral. Start a “Funeral Playlist” on Spotify. Include some Morrissey because every funeral should have some Morrissey songs.

17. Give some serious consideration to how much further you’d be in your career if you hadn’t majored in the wrong thing in college.

18. Compile a list of all the people you know who are younger than you who are more accomplished in a similar career.

19. Fantasize about doing something inappropriate with someone you shouldn’t think about.

20. Resolve to be more patient with your elderly father, even when he tells you about his dispute with the phone company for the hundredth time, or when he answers the door wearing just a carelessly tied bathrobe despite expressly promising on the phone that he would put on pants.

21. Reflect on what a shitty person you are because you know damn well you will not be more patient with your father.

22. Make a list of all the things you’ve been neglecting to do. Make sure to include the oil change that your car is 1,560 miles overdue for and your mammogram.

23. Panic.

24. Find a bottle of expired Ativan and wonder if expired Ativan will just not work or if it will harm you.

25. Do something productive. Plan menus and a shopping list for the week. Start with eggs.

26. Notice that you’re really hungry.

27. Deny yourself food because it’s 3:30 a.m. and people who eat at 3:30 a.m. are either teenagers or have a big problem.

28. Think about your own teenagers and compile a list of all the things that worry you about them. Start with your older one, who’s in college. Is she eating enough? Does your younger one spend too much time texting, playing video games and watching Dr. Who reruns?

29. Move onto things that they don’t do but might do someday, like binge drink, drive recklessly, and smoke crack. If people still smoke crack. Research what the popular drugs are with the kids these days. Feel nostalgic about smoking pot in college.

30. Check your spam folder in case a really good writing assignment ended up there. Read about how you can get a sexy body that sizzles, rock-hard abs, and lose fifteen pounds in four weeks with just one brand new product. Also read a nice message from a hot Ukrainian girl with beautiful eyes who is ready to “correspond to erotic themes.”

31. Consider what the chances are that, in your forties, you’ll actually lose weight and decide that all your exercising has been a waste of time. Think of other people in their forties who are skinny and hate them. I mean, seriously, seriously hate them because they eat whatever they want and don’t exercise and look at them. Assholes.

32. Read an article about how lack of sleep can make you gain weight and can also adversely affect your mental health. Freak out about how you will never sleep again and you’ll end up the size of a house and also deranged and when you die they’ll have to take the door off its hinges to carry you out, and they’ll put you in a double-sized coffin and that’s all anybody will think about at the funeral, not the playlist you put together for their enjoyment.

33. Have a sudden, searing realization that one day your dogs will die. Cry. Because dogs are the best thing ever, especially your dogs. The way they look at you with those big eyes and wag their tails so hard their butts slide back and forth on the floor. The way they sigh and lean their bodies against you when you take a nap. My god, why do they have to die?

34. Calculate the very latest you can wake up and still get your son to school on time. Set your alarm.

35. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think.

•••

JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. She publishes the website Charlotte on the Cheap in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The Hole in the Story

ghosttree — By Beth Hannon Fuller www.etsy.com/shop/ebethfuller

by Jody Mace

When my father was a teenager in Atlanta, wild dogs had become a problem in Adams Park. He and his friends were enlisted by the park rangers to ride through the park on horses, shooting the dogs. He never said much more about the incident, but why would he need to? The bare bones of the story were plenty.

I didn’t entirely believe it, but it was still my favorite dad story. I liked it better than the many variations of how he impressed the staff at restaurants (Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian) with his linguistic prowess. (He punctuated these stories by spitting out guttural sounds that he claimed were phrases in those languages.) I liked it better than the one about how he played golf just one time, with coworkers, and they were amazed at his natural skill. Or how, while in the Air Force, he was invited to become an astronaut, and, after successfully completing training, he decided he didn’t want to be an astronaut after all.

Those stories were lacking a couple things, but most notably, teenage boys galloping on horseback shooting guns in a park.

There were some holes in the story. It didn’t seem likely that any governmental authority would enlist teenagers to shoot at dogs, even back in 1949. But not just that. At the time, my father lived above his father’s grocery store in an urban area, sharing a bedroom with his Yiddish speaking grandmother. He rode streetcars and bought candy. He didn’t have a Wild West kind of upbringing.

He’s eighty now and his memory is shot. It’s not just short-term memory, although the repeated phone calls asking me what time I’m picking him up for lunch can send me around the bend. He’s losing details about things I thought he’d never forget: which college my brother went to, what musical instrument I played as a child. The other day a new acquaintance asked him how his wife died seventeen years ago and he didn’t seem to remember that she died of metastasized breast cancer. He didn’t remember the chemotherapy, the radiation, the surgery, her devastating decline. He answered, “It wasn’t her heart,” then went quiet. Maybe he just didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe it was too traumatic to revisit. But maybe the memory really was gone.

So when he tells his unlikely stories there’s no way to really know which details spring from memory and which are just from the habit of telling the story. When you repeat a story a lot, details gain authority—even if you’re not eighty.

•••

When my son was six, he accidentally knocked a trinket off a table at a flea market. The vendor exploded at my son and towered over him, waving his arms and yelling, until my boy started to cry. The item, which was worthless crap anyway, wasn’t even broken. My husband confronted the vendor. He didn’t actually say much—just, “If you have a problem with him, talk to me!” But we hadn’t even reached the car before the embellishments began. My husband was all in this guy’s face. He shoved him. The vendor cowered before him. He apologized. In some particularly enthusiastic tellings of the story, the vendor wet his pants. When I try to picture this event, I see it just as we tell it. My husband, nose-to-nose with the bully, standing up for our little son. I’m sure that our son, now fifteen, has no doubt about his dad’s heroics at that flea market.

That’s the power of story-telling. The way you tell a story can become more real than what really happened.

So who knows what happened in Adams Park in Atlanta sixty-four years ago? There’s no way to verify.

But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t going to try. During today’s visit after the usual business (the 500-foot roll of professional grade plastic wrap that he bought me off the internet, why his remote control didn’t work, the new brand of pickle relish he’s trying, which of the Harry Potter books is his favorite), I asked him about the story. For the first time, I asked him if it really happened the way he always told it.

And this time he told it a little bit differently. He said, “So they let us ride the horses for free or very cheap, and we rode around and scared the dogs away from the picnic tables.”

“So the part about the guns, that was just made up?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t shoot at dogs.”

“Had you ever ridden a horse before then?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so.”

And suddenly the picture in my head changed. No longer did I see horses galloping through a park, ridden by wild, gun-wielding boys. Now I imagined city boys timidly perched on gentle horses, walking on a path.

The story was terrible.

“Dad, I think you should tell it the old way.”

But he had already moved on.

“No, I had never shot at anything at that age. Except this one time with Joe Arnold, who you didn’t know. He had a gun, a little .22 pistol, and we decided we were gonna go and shoot things. And I had a knack for it.”

He paused and leaned back.

“I shot a hole right through the middle of a dime.”

•••

JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child Magazine, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. She likes to hear people tell their stories, especially when she’s not sure if they’re true.