Jeez, Louise

About six months back, during one of her occasional visits, I noticed my sister-in-law working up a sweat running errands for Jack while sporting a gray Beverly Hills Police Department T-shirt. My gray Beverly Hills Police Department T-shirt which had gone missing months before.  I held back on ripping it off her frame because even though she lives and works seven hundred miles away in Northern California, I latched onto the smallest hope that she'd bought one identical to mine at her local art fair.  When I found it after she left to catch her plane, discarded in the washing machine with her dirty sheets and towels, I reclaimed it, but had no resolution on how it all came to be.


Six weeks ago, after a going through a particularly crappy period of time when most of the electrical outlets in the house stopped working, flipping light switches produced no illumination, our remaining, pathetic laptop died, I woke up to find a cockroach or giant water bug on the bathroom floor, my dog developed severe arthritis, and I was in the middle of high stakes jury trial, I saw my mother-in-law wearing my Leadership [name of city here] T-shirt.  There is zero doubt that Jack is not a graduate of Leadership [name of city here.] It is just a cotton T-shirt, but my five classmates and I created one each year with a real designer to commerate our citywide clean up efforts from 2004-2009. Life is probably too short for bothering, but it makes me nostalgic for my former self, and into the seagulls in "Finding Nemo" ("Moine, moine, moine, moine.")


I cannot fairly judge whether I "snapped." I waited until after 10 p.m., stalked Jack's caretaker's arrival, barged into Jack's room and got the caretaker to retrieve my "Leadership" shirt.


Only two leaders or real heros emerged here.  The caretaker Ms. Cee, who has worked seven evenings a week--without a night off-- to clean and put Jack to bed for over a year.  I hear her at night making pleasant conversation with Jack, and if she had any opinions about my T-shirt hostage negotiation techniques, she didn't betray them.  She also gets credit for telling me one evening that she had learned while peeling Jack out of some particularly grimy, and blood-specked T-shirt (the one I got as a keepsake when I went to visit the PanSat laboratory) that she had fallen out of her wheelchair (on a weekend day when I was at home) during a stroll around the block and that neighbors and eventually firefighters arrived to get her upright and back on the road.  A fact she hadn't shared with me that evening, or later when husband came home, or ever actually.


Clearly, husband also deserves kudos for killing the bugs, pulling out the mildewed hallway carpet that was making me sneeze, dogging the electrician to fix the darn decrepit wiring so we had lights (my greatest fear was that I would find myself in closing arguments wearing a blue suit jacket with a black skirt) shlepping our hound to the vet, taking off from work to accompany his mother downtown by taxi to see me in trial, and plying me with whatever I needed to keep it together.


Justice seems as prevalent a notion as my jinxed laundry.  We won the trial, so thank God, justice was done.  Jack has been blacklisted from walking dogs from the shelter, what an injustice she exclaims.  It seems that Jack took a fancy to a dog named Dylan.  We surmise that she saw the courtship as a prelude to making this hovel his new home.  Jack was considered a good enough caretaker for Stinky, her late pathetic and decrepit dog, but now she is talking to the hand.  


What is actually happening is never abundantly clear.  She mumbled something about it being about her association with the shelter's former volunteer and blacksheep Mark (who I kick out of our backyard when I find him lurking there and whom I refuse to acknowledge at the front door when her deafness prevents her from hearing his persistent knocks) and somehow it was wormed out of her that the shelter was now requiring her to fill out an application to walk a dog.  


She stewed over that one, but I guess she made it eventually through the roadblocks to reach her goal of shelter volunteerism.  Then, a week ago I saw her acting wierdly in the backyard, dabbing her eyes and peering out the back gate.  In a hurry to get somewhere I called husband at work and urged him to call to see what's up.  "Nothing," he reported after phoning.  Yeah, well we learned later that was the afternoon she got Dylan's leash impossibly tangled in the wheelchair wheels in the presence of the shelter volunteer czarina.  Through more sleuthing husband also learned of a previous dog walking misdemeanor involving Dylan when she completely lost her grasp of the leash.  "For only three feet" Jack indignantly complained today.


I am going partly insane over losing control of my clothes, an intimate part of life.  We eventually figured out the clothes creep occurs when Ms. Cee, the nice lady here, reaches into our laundry basket to fill out my mother-in-law's wash load. This morning I opened the clothes dryer and found one of my cute pink furry socks slit at the ankle presumably to accommodate Jack's swollen foot. The other sock, who knows? Ugh.  What do I do, write a note in caps pleading with Ms. Cee not to wash our laundry? Explain to her the concept of cooties?


Meanwhile, Jack has lost touch with the reality of her own physical inabilities, or has reached the point where others are no longer fooled by her enthusiasm and stubborn nature. I don't blame the shelter for cutting her off for the sake of the dogs.  That kind of rebuke in my opinion, makes Jack do dumb things.  In a perfect world she would call me or my husband when she falls out of her wheelchair, but there we are.  In a jumble.