Email to a friend.

I just woke up from a long, disorienting nap. It was filled with R.E.M. dream images that began to fade the moment my damn cell phone rang (it was a robo-call for business loan money) but left me very disturbed -- or maybe it was the automated phone call that upset me. Anyway, I was just sitting here completely shattered -- unable to remember anything I wanted to do or needed to do today, feeling like I’d somehow survived a terrible cataclysm. And then I got your nice comment on my scorpion story, and the world started to fall back into place again. I pretty much have to take a siesta every day or I get physically sick -- but sometimes I dread it because of the weird dreams that come creeping up on my vulnerable mind. They mug my sanity, leaving me uncertain and perplexed about everything. So, thank you for your restorative comment.

One other person has contacted me about the scorpion story. I don’t know him at all, but he used to work for Ringling in some capacity and got the story link off my Facebook page. He pm’ed me that he wanted to talk to me about why God allows suffering in the world when He is all-powerful, etc. I referred him to the Book of Job in the Bible, which seemed to help him somewhat. He didn’t even recognize that I had quoted Job in my story. People need to be more Bible-literate. Whether you believe in it or not, it’s a cornerstone of Western civilization.

Oh, before I forget, I don’t remember where the scorpion story took place, except that it was the first place I was assigned in Thailand, some Bangkok suburb, and Bart Seliger was my companion. I sure miss not being in touch with him. I think of him as an older brother. He was very good to me, his ‘greenie’ companion.

Your roof story reminds me of my bathroom story. Amy and I bought a house on Como Avenue in Minneapolis, just down the street from my parent’s house, and across the street from Van Cleve Park, where I spent my childhood winters skating and summers swimming. I thought it was a beautiful setup. This was just before the break up, around 1991. We didn’t have to make any down payment, because most of the neighborhood houses were being used as student rentals for the U of M and the city wanted to reverse that trend and bring in families -- so we got a special dispensation through the city and the bank to buy the house w/no down payment cuz we were a big family.  

It only had 2 bedrooms, but a big glassed in front porch -- which we divided to make a third bedroom. The basement was full of mice, because the house sat across the alley from a hive of grain silos and a tangled skein of railroad tracks. Immense clouds of pigeons circled the silos endlessly, cooing eerily. There was an ancient cottonwood tree in the backyard that dumped several tons of fluff on our house in the early summer. The kids loved to play in it as if it were a sandbox or the torn out stuffing of a mattress, and dragged so much fluff into the house that we had to buy a new vacuum when the old one asphyxiated on the cottonwood ‘snow.’

The house had been built in 1897 and had only one bathroom, upstairs. The tub began leaking, staining the dining room ceiling, so I tore up the bathroom floor to find the leak -- only to discover that the old lead pipes were completely rotten. We called in a plumber for an estimate, and like your roof, the price of repair was way beyond our ability to pay. We couldn’t qualify for any kind of home improvement loan, so we used the tub to store linen. Luckily, there was a crude shower in the basement, and that’s where everyone had to go to clean up. The kids were terrified of going down there without either Amy or I going down with them, because of all the mice. I caught dozens of mice with glue traps, but they just kept coming back.

That first winter in the house was a brutal one -- a blizzard on Halloween dumped over 3 feet of snow on Minneapolis overnight and we couldn’t dig our car out of the garage for three days. Then Amy had a bad attack of rheumatism that nearly crippled her for life. The doctor said we should think about moving to a warmer climate, so we decided to pull up stakes and move out here to Provo, where most of Amy’s brothers and sisters were located. A year later we were divorced . . . just when I had finally gotten a good paying government job. Tax collector. Which I hated, but if I stuck with it for a year I could get a promotion into management and then just goof off like the rest of the supervisors I knew there.

But after the divorce I bought a VW van to live in and went down to Florida to work for the Clyde Beatty Cole Brothers Circus as an advance man -- setting up ticket outlets and scheduling media interviews for the show’s stars and clowns. And I’ve never had my own home again. Just rented, like I’m doing now.

I like your idea of selling up and going to Thailand, but won’t encourage you since Jennie is against it. A peaceful marriage is better than the beaches of Thailand.