Just like our pets I was prone to taking afternoon naps. Naps after lunch were best, more so after pie. I felt like Bilbo Baggins cozying into my cottage right before the dwarves came. Outside there was scant, filtered light, the leaves their brightest gold, copper and turmeric. Part of me knew I should be out in it and another part didn’t care. I’d been up on the ladder pulling leaves out of the gutter, transplanting shrubs, handling rain-softened poop. I deserved some rest.

All night the rain. You can try to be zen and see the beauty in it, what they call a feminine rain in Asian cultures, but there’s also an angry, evil rain and that’s what we were getting now. I tried walking in it and calling a friend but couldn’t unlock the home screen, my fingers were so wet.

I got bullied into getting my ears pierced by my teenaged daughter Charlotte, who used high school pressure tactics, calling me a “puss” when I balked over the imagined pain. (Babies get their ears pierced, dad.) She said it’s not even cartilage; it’s the easiest part of your body and there was a place that didn’t use guns or needles, just fine-tipped piercing studs (she was right, they did infants after 2 months). I’d gotten mine done first by a fraternity brother who used ice to numb it and then pushed one through with his thumb; it hurt more when I later paid to have it done with a gun. (I always wondered if that was the same gun they used to unlock those polycarbonate anti-theft security cases new cassettes came in in the 80s. It made the same jolting sound, like a nail gun.)

All this ornamentation was stupid. I knew it but still had to do it just to be sure. I abstained from tatts but secretly fantasized about shirt sleeve tattoos with primitive symbols adorning the beautiful curves of my arms. Then slowly removing my shirt at the beach with my hair flowing like that Hawaiian actor who played Aquaman. All of it an obvious ruse.

But it’s a funny tribute to our vanity that we would go to such lengths to distinguish ourselves in a way that’s not even remotely unique.

Inside with nothing to do (we had three varieties of leftovers, so cooking wasn’t needed), I took to vacuuming the clumps of animal fur floating around like tumbleweeds. The vacuum with its articulated neck and handy little light illuminated all that was gross and gritty and made the act of cleaning both confronting and therapeutic. But it was like peeling an onion the closer you looked, and at times it was easier to just ignore it. That was no winning strategy, though. The knotted handfuls of fur in the vacuum canister were testament to how much went unseen in the weave of our carpet or the corners of our kitchen. It had a den-like quality just a few clicks above cave dweller, barely qualifying as civilized living. The monthly vacuuming left the house feeling clean for a half day at most—like freshly washed sheets the satisfaction was brief.

With the holiday now over I wondered how our overly-enthusiastic-about-Halloween neighbors were doing on this sullen All Saints Day. Their cast of ghouls and zombies were strewn about the yard with the dead leaf debris, giving a post-battle scene vibe, a pair of cadaverous hands perched in the dirt. And why was it I felt some low-level contempt for them, that was not neighborly or Christian or even nice. If they sold to a developer there’d be four new houses with young tech executives and Teslas. Give me white trash over that any day. That was more our ilk, with the busted patio umbrella I’d jerry-rigged at the bottom of our dog run to cover the generator, the mud-caked kayaks, the rusted-looking grill. Everything leaned sideways like a boat.

I lay in bed with my robe and ambient CD playing and the sound of the rain, slow tribal drumming. The CD in the right channel playing off the rain in the left. The dog between it too, nap #97. The days a smear of naps interrupted by peeing (or sometimes doing both at the same time). Burning sweet incense to simulate some primitive, ceremonial rite. Story ideas and memories like compost, me turning it with a fork.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, humor, journal writing, prose