Best Friends, Occasional Enemies: The Lighter Side of Life as a Mother and Daughter (Reading Group Gold) (22 page)

Because then we would be the same age.

Also she was only ten years old yesterday, and the day before that, she was a toddler, and a split second before that, a baby.

I mean, she should still be nursing.

I let down just thinking about that, but don’t tell her.

I don’t know how all this happened, with the time flying and the children growing, and the elliptical being so damn slow.

That Einstein, he really was a genius.

But I bet he had a trainer.

Remembering Joy

By Francesca

My beloved horse, Joy, recently passed away. A beautiful gray Thoroughbred mare, she was the first horse I owned and the first one I lost. I was in the city when it happened, I felt far away from anyone who could really understand. It was hard for even me to understand. It felt so different from losing a dog or a cat, not better or worse, but different.

Every pet has a unique personality, my cat is different from my dog, my dog Pip is different from my mom’s dog Tony. But my relationship to each of them is the same: just love. I ask nothing of Pip except to be vaguely cooperative and accept my near-constant affection.

I asked my horse to carry me on her back. We were partners. Joy and I worked together, trained together, and learned from each other. You have to respect a horse—after all, they are large, powerful animals and they can be dangerous, intentionally or inadvertently. And yet, they mostly take care of us.

Joy certainly did.

Which is not to say she was a saint. Joy could be a difficult horse, but she was never a mean one. She was a challenge and a babysitter at the same time. Everything about riding her was outside of my comfort zone but not outside of my ability. It’s in that space between where growth happens, and grow I did.

Joy raised me.

When we met, we were almost the same age, she was eleven and I was twelve. I remember when the horse dealer, a weathered ex-jockey, Rumpelstiltskin in cowboy boots, delivered her. He unceremoniously yanked on her snowy white tail to pull her out of the trailer, and out she came, her swan neck held sky high, her big brown eyes rimmed in white.

We both looked wide-eyed at each other, spooked. I was afraid because I had lived too little, Joy was afraid because she had lived too much. The mare had been bought and sold several times, loved and unloved by then; she came to us neglected and underweight. She was a nervous horse and I was a timid rider, not usually an ideal combination.

But we were.

Joy was the antidote to all my preteen insecurities, because she mirrored them. If I was afraid, she was afraid. If I second-guessed myself, she second-guessed me. If I became frustrated, she became ornery.

Crossing water was one of our major challenges. The smallest creek on a trail ride was terrifying to Joy. As soon as the water touched her hoof, she’d fly back and upwards. If she sensed we were heading near the creek, or if she sensed my own anxious anticipation, she’d crow-hop, threatening to rear.

When I felt Joy’s back tense, my instinct was to tighten up, curl into a ball, anything to steady her and my pounding heart. But that never got me over the stream. A few times, it almost landed me on the ground.

Joy needed me to lead by example. I learned that I had to relax, or at least pretend to relax, and push forward. A horse can’t throw you if you keep moving forward.

And it has worked for every obstacle in my life since. Through breakups, disappointments, down days, and down months, I think of the riding command:
leg on.

Nothing can throw you if you keep moving forward.

But even as I move forward through this loss, I will never forget the wonderful friend and teacher I had in Joy. I didn’t get to be with her when she passed, but more than getting to say goodbye, I wish I had had the chance to thank her for all her many lessons:

That a strong hand can still be a gentle one. That you must be patient, with others and with yourself. Self-doubt is natural but not insurmountable. You may step into water not knowing how deep it is. You may face a jump higher than before. And sometimes, as hard as it is, you need to point yourself at that obstacle and go forward. Courage is a choice.

Angels come in many forms.

If you live outside of your comfort zone, you might have the ride of your life.

Leg on.

911

By Lisa

Everybody reacts differently in emergencies. Some people panic and run around like crazy. Other people remain cool and spring immediately into action.

And then there’s me.

I do neither. I go into emergency denial.

Here’s what happened, most recently.

Daughter Francesca was home, and we were both in the family room, I was working on my laptop, and she was watching
Castle
on TV. All the dogs were with us, dozing on the couch, except for Little Tony.

Odd.

Because he spends every night standing at the window and barking at the dark.

Little Tony does not go gently into that good night.

I know how he thinks. He thinks there are dragons and sea monsters and constellations come to life in the nighttime, and he barks to keep them at bay. Never mind that he weighs ten pounds, so at his most menacing, he looks like a really angry black bean.

Francesca, sitting opposite me, asks, “How can you stand that barking?”

I’m on the laptop not five feet from Little Tony, but I’ve learned to tune him out. “What barking?” I ask her.

In time the barking stops, but I don’t notice that either, until Francesca remarks, “Where’s Little Tony?”

And I start to wonder. Little Tony is nowhere in sight. I set the laptop aside and go in search, and I find him in the kitchen, where he looks up at me and swallows hard.

Gulp,
he goes.

Hmm. And next to him on the floor is one of my knee socks. You don’t have to be Castle to figure out what happened. I pick up the leftover sock and can’t tell by looking how much he ate, so I try it on. The entire foot is gone.

“Call the emergency vet,” Francesca says, but I’m not so sure.

“It’s not an emergency. Let’s see if he passes it tomorrow.”

“I don’t think so, Mom. We should call.”

“Nah.” I wave her off. “They’ll just say to bring him in. It can wait. He’ll be fine.”

“Let’s play it safe, and call. Please?”

So I call and they say bring him in, and we do, waiting in the reception area an hour until they come out with him and tell us that they saved his life.

I feel terrible. “Really?”

“Yes,” the vet nods. “The sock was thin and stretchy, so he wouldn’t have passed it. Good thing you called.”

My face goes red.

Francesca looks over.

Little Tony burps.

Then the very next day, I’m on my laptop, and it’s windy outside. I hear a weird noise outside, so I look out the window and notice that a huge evergreen in my yard has fallen over onto the roof of my garage.

I blink and blink. It takes me moments to process.

This could definitely be an emergency.

The tree trunk is horizontal, which is distinctly out of order.

Still, it doesn’t look as if the garage roof is damaged, and amazingly, there are no people, dogs, cats, or cars in harm’s way. Everything’s normal except that the big tree is parallel to the driveway. But Francesca isn’t there to tell me I should call somebody, and I’m not sure whom to call. Now that I’ve learned from last night that I go into emergency denial, I won’t make that mistake again.

Still, is it an emergency or not?

So I get on the phone and call my insurance company, which tells me that my deductible is $2500.

I eye the tree and figure it will cost a grand to clear it away.

And then I learned how to define an emergency.

Anything over your deductible.

If a Tree Falls in a Driveway …

By Lisa

So a tree landed on my garage, but didn’t damage anything. That would be the good, and the bad, news.

It got me looking at the trees around my house, and there are plenty of them. More good and bad news.

I don’t know what type of trees they are, because it never mattered to me. I operate on the principle that there’s only so much information my tiny little brain can hold, and it’s already stuffed with things I need to know for work, plus essentials like the words to most Rolling Stones songs and the Empire Flooring jingle.

So I never learned the names of the trees I own. I’d be happy to name them Mick and Keith, and let it go at that.

But I do love the way they look, especially in fall, when they turn bright yellow and gorgeous orange, or in summer, when their rich green shades the lawn. Bottom line, we can all agree, trees are good.

Usually.

But then I started eyeing the trees, close up, and with the leaves fallen, I could see a lot of old branches, thick, dark, and ending in a point. I’m no expert, but some looked dead. I started to wonder when they might fall, like daggers from heaven.

Call this an exaggeration, but recall that I was raised by Mother Mary, who taught me that even the most mundane items can kill you. For example, knives loaded into the dishwasher will stab you. Blowdryers will electrocute you. Toasters have murder on their minds.

So I started to see the trees not as examples of natural beauty, but as lethal weapons.

And they could fall at any second, on me, the dogs, or the cats. And some of my trees hang over my street, and I’d hate to think they could fall on a passing car or person. I couldn’t live with myself if that happened.

I have enough guilt already.

And made me worry about something worse.

Namely, lawyers.

So I called a tree service guy, who came over and started pointing. He knew the names of all the trees. Hemlock. Sugar maple. Red oak. Mulberry. Tulip poplar.

What lovely words.

Then he started in with the numbers—

$450, $340, $540. Not so lovely.

And then sent me a two-page estimate.

What was it that Joyce Kilmer wrote? I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree … service estimate?

It turns out that I have lots of trees that need servicing. Dead branches have to be trimmed, stumps ground down and hauled away. We’re talking days of work.

For trees?

I expect to pay for home improvement, but I never factored in tree improvement. It reminded me of the time I had to call an excavator to build a swale in my backyard, and if you don’t know what a swale is, it’s like a berm, only more expensive.

It made a sound.

No, I don’t know what a berm is either. That’s why it costs extra. Things add up when you start with dirt improvement.

And some of the tree improvement sounded downright exotic. For example, the tree guy told me that it was a spruce tree that fell on the garage, and it would cost $380 to reduce the top leaders.

I didn’t know what a top leader was, but it sounded redundant. Nobody follows a bottom leader.

Can you imagine, a bottom leader running for president? No, we can’t! Give up and go home!

Hmm.

And it would cost $90 for a fir tree that needed cable. I didn’t know trees had cable. Do they have DVRs, too?

And some of it was scary. The estimate read that my sugar maple had to be pruned “to prevent main trunk failure.”

That can’t be good, can it?

Plus I think it already happened.

To my waist.

As Seen On TV

By Lisa

I have some good news that may interest our regular readers.

And by the way, God bless you, every one.

As you may know, these stories have been collected into two previous books, entitled
Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog
and
My Nest Isn’t Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space.

The big news is that the books have been optioned to produce a half-hour comedy series, for TV.

Yes, that’s right. Mother Mary could be coming to a TV near you.

Run screaming.

Let me explain what this means, if you’re unfamiliar with legal terms like “option” and “run screaming.”

An option means that somebody has the right to make a TV show from the books. It doesn’t mean that they necessarily will. So we can still expect that nothing will happen, which is the way it usually goes, at least for me. Not to brag, but my books have been optioned before.