Furiously Happy (13 page)

“They lived in a coffee can,” said my father. “They
needed
a vacation.”

That was hard to argue with. Mostly because it was insane.

It did, however, make me hesitate a moment before leaving Hailey. But I figured that my sister and I (and the ringtails) had survived, so the odds were in her favor. Plus, Hailey loved the strange and unexpected madness of my parents' home. The year before she'd spent a week with her cousins learning noodling at my parents' house. For those of you who don't know what noodling is, you've probably lived a very sheltered life and you probably also don't keep baby ringtails in a coffee can. Noodling (aka hillbilly handfishing) is when you catch a catfish, but instead of using a fishing pole you just shove your hands into underwater holes that you're hoping might have fish in them rather than crocodiles, snakes, or bitey turtles. It's how people fish when they've run completely out of bait, dynamite,
and any common sense whatsoever
. There are stories of people being dragged to their death by giant catfish, which is a really shitty way to die. It's like being dragged to your death by mermaids, except instead of mermaids it's a fish that tastes like mud. My dad was smart enough to realize that teaching his grandkids to shove their hands in murky lake holes would be something my sister and I would find questionable, so he just brought home a bucket of live catfish, dumped them inside the backyard canoe, and filled the boat up with water instead. It's sort of the exact opposite of how boats are supposed to work, but it was a safe way for the grandkids to practice catching Winston McFishface over and over. (Technically there were several fish there, but all catfish sort of look the same so they just named them all Winston McFishface.)

It's weird, but that's what my parents have instead of a trampoline—you work with what you're given. Plus, the kids were happy and my dad assured me that all the Winston McFishfaces were eventually returned to the wild (which I suspect is code for “we ate them”) and I suppose that's all that matters.

And that's what I tried to remind myself of when we were in Japan, but I still spent most of my time worrying about Hailey. The only time I finally stopped worrying was on day three when we took the bullet train to Kyoto. After severe jet lag, plus a lack of sleep, we finally fell into our hotel bed. I was so exhausted I didn't even get undressed but Victor managed to at least take off his shirt and jeans before falling fast asleep. A few hours later Victor heard a noise and shook me, whispering: “I think someone's breaking into our room.”

I muttered, “Fine. Just tell them to keep the lights off,” and turned over to go back to sleep as Victor groggily dragged himself out of bed to see that our door was slightly open and a pair of bolt cutters were being slid in to cut the top of the metal latch, which was the only thing keeping the intruders out. Victor is not someone to mess with even when he's in a cheerful mood, but waking grumpy, middle-of-the-night Victor up with a noisy robbery is like disturbing a bunch of hibernating bears so you can shoot Roman candles at their cubs while wearing Lady Gaga's meat dress.

Victor watched as the bolt cutters slid back through the door and he said, “Oh, hell no,” and grabbed the bolt cutters and pulled hard. The person holding the bolt cutters was caught off guard and slammed into the other side of the door with a dull thud. Then Victor threw open the door and yelled, “WHAT IN THE SHIT IS GOING ON OUT HERE?” while angrily waving the bolt cutters at four skittish Asian people who gasped in horror and ran away down the hall as if they were being chased by Godzilla. It was possible they were just really bad burglars, or maybe they were just surprised to see a large, disheveled American man wearing only socks and a pair of novelty boxer shorts with a big fish across the rear that read “NICE BASS!” who was waving bolt cutters at them semi-menacingly. (I would pay
real
money for that surveillance tape as it's probably very popular on whatever the Japanese version of
America's Funniest Home Videos
is.) The possible-burglars disappeared down the stairwell so Victor walked back inside, shoved a chair under the doorknob, and fell right back asleep. He claims he told me a small gang was breaking in and apparently I said he was hallucinating ninjas. And I guess that doesn't make a lot of sense because ninjas probably would have been much more subtle, but it's not like
all
ninjas are automatically great at their job.
Someone
has to be the worst ninja in the class. That's just basic math.

The next morning I rolled over and said, “God, you were so out of it last night you thought people were breaking into our room,” and then I laughed until Victor pointed to the bolt cutters on the floor, the half-cut lock, and a letter that had been slid under our door. The letter explained that the hotel manager wanted to talk to us as soon as possible about “the incident that occurred last night.” We assumed that we were going to be arrested, but apparently the terrible ninjas who'd broken into our room were hotel staff who'd been convinced to pull out the bolt cutters after an angry guest insisted that he'd been locked out of his room. Turns out he had the wrong floor and he and his wife were two of the frightened people that Victor chased down the hall in his underwear while swinging bolt cutters at them. The manager was very apologetic about the whole misunderstanding and moved us to a larger room without a cut lock and with a toilet that was so complicated I couldn't even use it and I considered asking room service to just bring up a bucket.

Honestly, the toilets in Japan are intimidating as hell and I suspect we'll all be replaced by Japanese toilets in the future, because they can do pretty much anything you can do, but better. Like, one of the features of a fancy Japanese toilet is that the seat is warmed for you, which seems like it would be nice but it's just unsettling. It's as if someone else has just come off the toilet, but no one is there but you. It's like a ghost is haunting your toilet. No one wants that. It's like the opposite of those little strips that say, “Sanitized for your protection,” that you have to break before you can use the motel toilet. Plus there are all sorts of other buttons and levers and pulleys and I'm pretty sure one of them launches nuclear bombs or calls the Pentagon. Here's a picture of just a few of the buttons on a Japanese toilet:

I'm not entirely sure what these are all for but I think the top one that looks like a stick figure is to notify people that you've found the Blair Witch, and I think the next one means “Poop won't go down. Use your foot.” I assume the orange button on the far left is for starting a war, and then there are two for washing your boobs for some reason, and then one about levitating on a fountain, and I think the last one is for ordering bacon? Frankly, I was too afraid to try out all of the buttons because just sitting on it triggered something that made it break out into song. It was unsettling. Like, a pooping lullaby. Frankly, I think we've gone too far if you need someone to sing you to the toilet. In fact, I think the toilets were scarier than the whole rest of the trip, including our room being broken into by non-ninjas.

I was feeling bewildered about the whole thing so I called my mom to let her listen to the toilet sing and also to find out how Hailey was doing. When I talked to Hailey on the phone she assured me she was having an absolutely
brilliant
time and had spent the afternoon “wrapping rubber bands around Papaw's birds and then
throwing them into the air
.” Then she hung up because she has a short attention span and thought she saw a cloud that looked like someone she knew.

I called back later to ask my mom if Hailey was strapping poultry together in bird clumps and just chucking them in the air like inefficient boomerangs, but Mom dismissed the idea and thought it was more likely that Hailey and my dad were clipping messages to the carrier pigeons my dad was training* and then letting them go. Or possibly she was
really
fucking up the family chickens. Hard to tell with seven-year-olds. Also, hard to tell with my family. Regardless, I suspected that Hailey was having a better time than I was.

That's when I decided that from now on I'd stick to vacations that didn't have intimidating toilets and bad ninjas in them. Staycations, where I can actually relax and recuperate in my warm bed full of books and cats, and which don't require me to take vacation time to recover from my vacation time. My mom said I should probably also include “and no ringtails in coffee cans” in my new standards. She had a point. A weird one, but one that obviously needed to be made.

*   *   *

*
Interesting side note:
My father is constantly trading, nursing, and releasing animals into the wild, so the limpy bobcat he had last week is usually a rescued peacock the next week and will be replaced with a three-legged iguana the next time you visit. However, it's been years and he still has dozens of carrier pigeons, who wiggle out of their enclosure and sit on their roof, staring pointedly at you and waiting to be fed. I was a little impressed with my dad's dedication but then I realized that you probably
can't
get rid of homing pigeons. They just keep coming back. It's like a horror movie with birds, which actually exists now that I think about it. It was probably written by someone who got tired of having homing pigeons. If you could sell them it'd actually be a pretty great pyramid scheme, but with pigeons instead of money. Except no one wants pigeons. Basically it's like having a child who never leaves home and shits everywhere, and then you're all, “Go. Be free!” And they're like, “Nah. We're fine here, thanks. Where's the food? Need me to pass a note?” My dad loves them though and keeps tying notes to their legs.

“Have you never heard of e-mail?”
I asked him. “It's very fast and there's so much less bird flu and feces involved. Usually.” But he just smiled and went back to mending the doggy door he'd made for the birds.

God knows who he's sending bird-delivered letters to. Who uses birds to pass notes? Is it Harry Potter? Because that's all I can think of. I hardly even respond to my e-mails and I don't have to wrestle a bird and tie a note around his foot in order to do it.

Victor pointed out that Daddy might be sending bird notes to me and that's just great because now I'm going to be staring down every bird to see if they have a letter for me, and that makes me look even crazier than normal. Plus, the letters will likely be chain letters telling me I have to send off six of my own pigeons with a message about Jesus or else I'll be cursed with … I don't know … something worse than having to strap letters to six birds, probably.
Thanks a lot, Daddy.
Expect to get a lot of homing pigeons back that just have “UNSUBSCRIBE” written on them with a Sharpie.

 

It's Hard to Tell Which of Us Is Mentally Ill

I've always been a fan of therapy. You spend an entire hour talking about yourself and someone has to fake being fascinated by the strange assemblage of minutiae that is you. I shop around for great therapists the way drug addicts shop around for doctors with loose prescription pads. I'm not looking for drugs. I'm looking for good actors. Or people so boring that my life actually seems interesting to them. Either way. I'm not picky.

I enjoy therapy so much that I am constantly trying to get Victor to go, but he won't. Finally I said that we were going to a marriage counselor so that way he'd
have
to go and I could watch. I was like a shrink voyeur. Victor was against it until I explained that a therapist is like a referee who could decide which of us was the most wrong in the recurring arguments we'd been having over and over for the last twenty years. Usually when we were in a fight I'd end up saying something like “If we were on
Jerry Springer
everyone would be booing you right now,” but Victor doesn't watch
Jerry Springer
so instead I moved to, “If we were at a therapist's she'd be shaking her head at you in disappointment and throwing dollar bills at me in appreciation for my seemingly inhuman patience.” She was like an imaginary friend who was always on my side and who also had more education than either of us. Eventually Victor called my bluff and set us up with a therapist himself, which was what I'd wanted until it actually became reality.