We're Feeling Better, but Glum....
I guess it was obvious by mid-day yesterday that she was feeling a whole lot better. Rolling around on the rug in the family room and giggling about her veiled references to bodily functions. That's always a huge laugh, and sometimes I can overlook it, other times it gets tedious, really hard to take. And here you thought it was only pre-teen boys who engaged in riotous scatological asides, slide-splitting references, hidden agendas of gleeful comparisons. It's only when they're feeling pretty good about themselves that they seem to indulge like this, and it was clear she was feeling a whole lot better. Observations about ear-splitting toots and noxious odours abound, and they're a sure-fire recipe for staccato-type giggles.
Odd, that. Earlier in the day when she'd parked herself in the powder room, door locked until a hearty flush, and I'd asked her if she felt better, she was embarrassed. Give me a break. What goes in must inevitably go out, in however altered form, I explain to her. "Shuush"! She hisses bringing her face right up to mine; she's blushing, I'm oblivious, and take the time to explain that the status of her evacuations are directly related to the state of her health. Oops, nothing to laugh about there, this is serious and as such, completely uninteresting and downright inappropriate: "Bubbie"!
Her mother informed me later that night as we conversed briefly over the telephone that she knew her daughter was feeling fine; she had reverted to her normal obnoxious behaviour. She'd devoured the two pizza pockets assigned to her, and was whipping about the house, chasing the dogs, the cat, the rabbits, and putting them all in their place. Well, not quite, Karen said. She'd put the pizza pockets out on the counter to cool, had gone downstairs for the briefest of moments and when she'd returned she immediately noticed a large empty space on the baking sheet. No, it wasn't that horse of a rescue dog from Iqaluit, it was Tibby, the Humane Society reject-cat who weighed in at a whopping 30 pounds when Karen brought him home and whom she'd managed to whittle down to 26 pounds. Always on the prowl, an avid cheese lover, he'd availed himself of the situation....
Karen was annoyed, she'd earmarked one of the pockets for her lunch next day. Amazing what a cat can eat, just incredible. He's a devil, she said, just can't leave anything out unattended. It used to be the largest of her seven dogs who would snuffle food off the counters, but he's been nicely trained now, to avoid such misadventures; harder to do with a cat.
Speaking of cats, today when we entered the stained glass shop with our Button and Riley, the latter caught whiff of the resident cat immediately we went through the door and he whined piteously the entire time we were there, to be allowed to "play" with the cat. But we know that cat, and he's obviously forgotten, that it likes nothing better than to give him a good cuff on the side of the head, claws out. We went back there because Irving has finally decided on his next set of stained glass windows and realized he wanted clear glass this time around. And he's really pleased to be rid of the painting in the house, back now to doing what he really loves doing. I was worried we wouldn't be back in time to pick Angie up at the bus stop.
When she came into the house there was a palpable air of gloom, a shadow of misery on her normally impudently-carefree face. Nothing, she said, nothing was wrong, and anyway, she didn't want to talk about. That tooth was ready to come out, it was really making her miserable, her grandfather told me in an aside, and to her, he offered to pull it out. Nothing to it, she wouldn't even feel it, it would be that quick and painless. Nothing doing, she said, she'd suffer until it fell out. Quite unlike her attitude toward wayward teeth in previous years when she willingly submitted to instant removal. She'd have chocolate milk, she said, and strawberries, if I wouldn't mind cutting them into itty-bitty pieces.
Then out it came, the gloom-causation. She'd realized when she arrived at school that morning that she had forgotten it was an outing day. She'd opted to go with the skaters to the Rideau Canal with the understanding that she would walk, glide, slide, run alongside her skating friends, because she HATES to ice skate. Trouble was, the canal ice was shut down due to miserable ice conditions and they went instead to the local arena where she had to sit in the bleachers, alone, while her friends skated down below. WHAT A WASTE OF TIME! And then? Later we went to the Aeronautical Museum and it was miserable too, I HATED IT! Didn't find it interesting to look at the airplanes? No! And we had to keep sitting down just because this lady kept telling us all about the planes, like WHO CARES ANYWAY!
Want me to tell you what it's like to fly in an airplane? Especially for the first time? I can tell you what it's like. Oh, thanks anyway, Bubbie, I'm not interested. But I forge on, and she listens to me telling her about how it felt for me the first time I'd flown, good grief, a whole lot of years ago. I talked, she listened, she questioned, she remarked. Then I remembered I'd brought back two little glass trifles for her; an opalescent-red glass heart, and an iridescent-blue tiny glass splayed foot, with oversized toes. Oh, Boob!
Hey, we're feeling better. I've prepared a large jar ful of pasta sauce I had cooking on the stove, and a smaller jar of onions and shredded chicken, cooked, but not in with the sauce, so she could sprinkle the chicken over the sauce and pasta for dinner tonight. Also some freshly-shredded Parmesan cheese in a little baggie. Now she's no longer queasy like the previous few days, she's alert to all the possibilities that each meal brings to her taste-bud experiences and anticipates each indulgence. That's my girl.
Then her grandfather tells me what he had suspected for the last few days. He seems to be coming down with something. Damn.
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, February 01, 2006
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