A Trip to Israel and Change of Allegiance

Over the holidays, I was kept busy.  My sister, Jenny, came down from Portland for a week, with plans to see whichever of the other Carson clan we could we could round up.

We had craft projects planned with our brother Tom's kids, and a day at the San Diego Wild Animal Park with our oldest brother, Chris, and my kids, Nick, Erin and Brett.   

Then, of course, there couldn't be a Carson gathering without the ocean involved!  So we had a day at the Long Beach Aquarium planned and a whale watching trip....

But then late in the planning game, I got a call from my dear friend, Betsy.  Her sister-in-law had a long-anticipated trip to Israel planned for the holidays.  And at the last minute, her dog-sitter had backed out!  

Would I consider house/dog-sitting for her for ten days during the holidays? She didn't live too very far from me.  She was just in Newport Beach.

Her two, adorable, shaggy, white dogs are pretty highly strung, and are no longer compatible, shall we say, with staying at the kennel.  The younger of the two has severe separation anxiety issues.  

Even when her owner leaves her in the comfort of her own home with a dog-sitter, she has terrible diarrhea  problems, among others.  So, needless to say, the kennels no longer want to board her.

Okay, this really isn't sounding so fun....  But how can I say no?  Anna's plans are all made, her tickets paid for, and her bags probably all packed!  Of course I will do it.  If she doesn’t mind Jenny being there, too.

I went a few days early so that Anna could show me the park they walk to twice a day.  

And then the many trails beyond the park where you can take long, leisurely hikes down to and along the Back Bay of Newport Bay.  

A wildlife nut’s dream!, I think.  Jenny is going to LOVE this!

On this visit, the younger of the two dogs, Jewel, would not let me near her.   She is the neurotic, diarrhea, anxiety queen.  She wanted no part of me. 

But Sarah, her mother, is a sweetheart. She loves everybody!  She came right up to me and wanted to give me all kinds of love.

I asked Anna how much food to feed them, etc.  She showed me a case of canned food, but said she didn’t know how much, as she usually fed them whatever she was eating.  “But I don’t expect you to do that…” she said with a quick glance at me. 

“That’s why I bought the canned food….  But the LOVE Double Doubles from McDonald’s!” she said, slipping me a $10 bill.

She showed me where the leashes and toys and doggie treats were all kept; then the towels, the pots and pans, etc.  

Anna seemed really worried.  I assured her that the most important thing was for her to just go and have a good time and not worry.  Just leave everything to me.  We would all be fine.  I’ve raised kids and all kinds of pets.  I could handle it.

On Christmas day, I picked Jenny up from the airport and the next day Anna left for Israel, but not without a bucket load of last minute nerves. 

I just kept telling her, whatever came up, I would handle.   The dogs would be fine.  It’s okay if they don’t know me.  

I am really, really good with little kids and animals.  Men, maybe no quite so much....

The time flew by, what with trips to the aquar- ium, whale-watch- ing, an after- noon at the Wild Animal Park, and of course lots and lots of dog walks! 

But by the end of day two, the neurotic, fearful Jewel transformed into a happy, playful, loving sidekick that followed me everywhere and followed my every command.

Jenny left and the last two days were kind of quiet with just Jewel and Sarah and me and the walks to the Back Bay (with the camera in hand, of course.)

Early on the morning of January 5 ^th, I got a text saying Anna had landed at LAX.  She was back in CA.  

So I got up and started dust mopping the hardwood floors, cleaning up the last minute white hair bunnies of playful dogs, fed the dogs and took them for their walk.

It was three hours before she could clear customs, gather her suitcase, and get a shuttle ride home.  But finally, I heard her at the door.  The dogs alerted at the sound of someone at the door and came to the door, barked once and sat their growling.

I had left the door unlocked so she could come in easily when she arrived.  She opened the door and stepped in and…

Both dogs growled viciously and barked... and barked... and growled... and barked..., backing away from her toward me protectively!

“You guys!” Anna said, holding both hands out in surprise.

They stopped barking, then growled for a second and looked back at me.

“What’s this?!”  Anna laughed.

Finally Sarah realized it was Anna and ran to her.  But Jewel still held back for a minute. 

Only when I told her, “Well, go on!” did she run up and greet her owner. 

Then she got excited and jumped on her.  But she immediately followed this by running back to me to see if it was all right.

And she spent the next few moments running back and forth between us, not sure where to show her allegiance.

The lesson of this story has nothing to do with vacations in Israel, or house-sitting, or even dogs.  It’s about allegiance.  About knowing who you are and what you believe in and sticking to your guns.

In this case, it was just a humorous moment when two dogs simply had such a good time adapting to their new handler that for a moment or two they forgot that they had another, real mom out there who was going to come back to pick up where she left off.

But often you’ll see that with us human types.  We change our allegiance at the drop of a hat because we don’t know who we are at our own core.   We don’t have a solid base of our own, so we sway this way or that, influenced by those who have stronger personalities and/or opinions.  

It is so important for a healthy self worth to know who you are and where you stand.  With that solid base, you will have no need to waver.

The Secret of the Two Red Coffins

The timing was bad.  What a time to have to leave town!  We’d just had water flood damage days earlier and had to move all the furniture from the dining room and my bedroom into the living room and sewing room. 

I pulled up soggy carpet and padding and found black mold – on the flooring beneath the carpet and on walls behind book shelves and desks.  We sprayed a bleach solution on all the wet and moldy surfaces and ran fans ‘round the clock for days on end.

And in the midst of all this, I was called off to Idaho to help my older sister, Jenny, pack up her entire household to be ready to move out by Sunday, the 31^st.  (She’s going back to school in another state and renting out her house for the next two years.)

But bad timing on unexpected trips to Idaho at the call of my sister was nothing new.  

In the midst of the Los Angeles riots in 1992, I got a call from her when her husband of two years was hit and killed by a train.  She called and I came running then, too. That's just what family does.

This time, when I arrived in Coeur d’Alene to report for packing duty, very little had been done.  She was somewhat overwhelmed.  And we were often interrupted by meals with friends who wanted to see her before she moved away.  We had just three and a half days to do it all.

I set out to be as helpful as I could be, packing boxes full of bedding and dishes; taking photos off the walls and bubble wrapping them to store them away safely for moving.

Together, we packed up boxes of books to donate to the library, and a couple of boxes of fabric to donate to a quilter’s guild.  She was doing really well at parting with old, unused stuff.

With time at a premium, we were knocking things out at record speed.  But each time the subject of her bedroom or the garage came up, I noticed she’d put me off.

The stuff in her bedroom was mostly papers and stuff that she had to sort through herself – some of which was still in boxes from the last move - home stuff mixed with office stuff.

And the garage – well, it was the garage.  Hers was huge!  And she had parked her one car in there, with the rest filled with the stuff of life: 
canoe, kayak, power tools, table saws, snow blowers and lots of just old, dusty stuff. As garages go, though, it wasn't terribly over- packed at all.

We had to have everything boxed up before her volunteer friends from work came to help load the U-haul in the morning to haul everything off to the two storage spaces she’d rented.

And by Friday evening, we were down to the bedroom and the garage, I was pretty much stumped.  She kept putting me off.  

I could understand the paper-sorting being a one man job, but I could easily tackle the garage.

But I know that packing up your entire life and moving out of state to go back to school is a traumatic life experience.  So I was trying really hard to tread lightly and not to press her, even as the deadline bore down on us.

I could clean out the back room where she was going to store what tools and such she planned to leave behind, and then move that stuff in.

 

Then I could tackle either packing up or marking for “give-away” the rest of the garage stuff while she worked on the mountain of paper sorting in her room.

But she started getting all weird on me.  

Don’t touch that....  We can’t do anything until the back room is spotless....  

(It is a furnace room/potting shed/pass-through to the back yard, for goodness sake!!)   

She actually wanted me to vacuum the concrete floor!

Are you kidding me?!!!  I was running out of energy this late in the game, and patience too.  My back was killing me and I was going on less than 5 hours of sleep for a week now.

She had to be crazy!  With all we had left to do, everything had to come to a standstill so I could vacuum the corners of a storage shed?!

The more I tried to talk reason, the more agitated she got and dug in her heals.  So, with my asthma being what it is, and her vacuum kicking out a musty odor, I suggested she might do the vacuuming while I got things ready to move into the room.

But, no.  The tools (rakes and shovels and hoes) couldn’t go in the back room until I took the trash can that would hold them out into the back yard and scrubbed it down inside and out with soap and water…

Jenny, it’s just a trash can, and it’s not that dirty!  

All we’re going to do is put dirty garden tools into it and put it into a back room where it will get dusty and bug-inhabited anyway, I thought.

She blew up at me.  And I decided it was easiest just to do what I considered the ridiculous, and get on with it rather than waste time trying to talk reason. 

All I could hear was the tick…tick…tick… of the U-haul-loading countdown.  

Well, that and the increasingly noisy sucking sound of the last of my limited energy being flushed down the drain.

But understanding the enormous amount of stress she was under, I grabbed the trash can, some Dawn dish washing soap and an old broom, and begrudgingly set about my insane assignment. 

And with it all cleaned out, I helped her to sort through the forest of gardening tools, paring down to the essentials.  

She really didn’t need four shovels, five rakes and three sledge hammers.  We slated 2/3 of them for give away and stored the rest – rakes, hoes, shovels and sledge hammers.

With that done, she went back to work sorting papers and I came back into the garage and tackled the shelves.

Eventually, as I got down to the last bits and pieces and odds and ends, I had to call Jenny back down from her bedroom.  Now what?

She was still  irritable and unable to focus, flitting from one thing to the next and accomplishing nothing.  

For me, it wouldn’t be surprising behavior, but it was really strange for her.  She is usually very opinionated.

“Okay, now what about these?” I asked her, indicating the long, narrow, red crates that had been buried behind the gardening tools and under piles of other odds and ends.

And that’s when the light came on - the real reason we were vacuuming gardening shed floors and scrubbing perfectly acceptable trash cans to store dirty garden tools.

This wasn't about papers or tools.

“I don’t know what’s in those,” she said, suddenly fidgeting anxiously.  “Those were from the logging site and were in the back of John’s truck when he died….”

And we stood there, staring at these two, red coffin-like boxes.  Five or six feet long by a foot and a half by a foot and a half.

“So you’ve been dragging them around all this time without looking inside?” I asked incredulously.

My big sister stood there, the look of a small girl being scolded on her face. 

I had no idea she had been hanging onto these things all these years.  Jenny’s just not the sentimental, emotional type.  And John died nearly twenty years ago, for goodness sake!

As the realization came over me, I felt badly.  

“Well, that’s easy to remedy,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.  I stepped over the long pile of moulding on the floor and reached for the opened lock on the top box.

“I don’t know what’s in there,” she repeated, anxiously.  “I’ve just never gotten around to looking in them.”

I opened the lid on the top coffin-like crate, carefully watching for black widow spiders, and there it was….

Not the body of Jimmy Hoffa.  Not B.D. Cooper’s fortune.

Just more garden tools!  

Just another box full of rusty, old, scarred and broken hoes and shovels and rakes and sledge hammers!  We both had a good laugh, breaking the tension.

She breathed a sigh of relief, and in the end, it was all very anticlimactic.  We just closed the lid and decided not to do anything with them at all.

We would just leave them where they were, and if the new tenant (a friend of hers) didn’t like it or needed the space, he was welcome to throw them out.

A good deal of the foot-dragging and anxiety and stupid demands (like vacuuming  storage sheds and scrubbing trash cans to fill with dirty gardening tools) stemmed from her fear of facing what was in those two coffin-like chests.

She could have been shed of them two decades ago, had she just been bold enough to face them head on and take that peek inside.  

But instead, she had dragged them through her life for nearly twenty years and at least two house moves.

And so it is, so often in life, for most of us.  We drag along our own caskets filled with fear.  

And over the years, if we don’t deal with the fear, it grows and multiplies until we find it takes over half the garage of our lives in toxic red coffins.

We were up until after midnight packing boxes, and got up at 5:00 a.m. to finish it off before we had to pick up the truck at 9:00.

Her friends were lifesavers (because by that time, my back was in ruins and I could lift only the lightest of boxes.) 

There was a glitch in the plan when Bob and I got to the third floor of the storage facility with four dollies filled with boxes only to find the storage space they’d assigned us to, was already taken.  

(The other mover friends sat in the back of the truck relaxing while I took Jenny to the office to straighten it out.)

 
We got everything out of the truck and then up to the 3rd floor of the storage warehouse. 

And in the levity of completion, we got a little silly, racing the dollies back down the hall to the elevator!  When it was all done, we returned all the dollies back to their proper places on the first floor. 

Then we went back to Jenny’s so the help could all join in a cold beer.