Whatever is a Girl to Do?

I almost lost a dachshund. If I hadn’t been wearing my red Baywatch swimsuit the other day when Shirley fell into the pond, she would have drowned.

I was sitting on my back porch enjoying a rare day of sunshine when I heard a strange-sounding “thunk.”

I looked up to see that Shirley was in over her head. And given the fact that her legs are two inches long, she was not going to be able to pull herself out.

Thank God I was there. And thank God I didn’t have to do CPR, because there’s no telling what she’d eaten that day. But God knows I would have done anything to save that little dog because I love her and because I need the great anecdotes she consistently supplies, especially since I’m apparently allowed to only write about my pets.

My kids have already extracted a promise that I will not write about them without first securing permission concerning the subject matter. In fact, my oldest daughter didn’t speak to me for several weeks after the Mt. Rushmorgan entry.

My ex threatened to sue me for writing about him. Since he realized that I’m not liable for pointing out that he makes Alec Baldwin look like Mother Theresa, he’s taken to having the kids beg me not to write about him. So I’ll lay off him for a while but with this warning, one of my favorite quotes (and one he abhors): “If you don’t want it told, don’t do it.” That, by the way, is courtesy of the great modern-day philosopher Jimmy Buffett. We’ll cross our fingers, kids.

I can’t write about my church, either. Come to think of it, I’ve never actually written about my church. Probably because this is not a blog about church. But I won't write about my church because I'm tired of silly people thinking my blog is an appropriate place to vent their frustrations about a place I love.

And according to the blog trolls, I can’t write about my divorce, my faults, addiction, my taste for beer, or Tiger Woods. Or sex. Especially not sex.

Thankfully, one anonymous blog troll was kind enough to tell me what I’m allowed to write about. The person wrote, “Can you shut the heck up and focus on talking about your dogs, a bengal cat or whatever?"

Whatever? I wish someone would tell me the topics included in that category.

So Shirley almost died. I pulled her out, dried her off, and fried her an egg to comfort her. She licked the plate clean, then looked up at me and said, “I need to warn you that if you write about this incident in your little blog, I’m calling my lawyer.”

“Your lawyer? Since when do you have a lawyer?” I asked.

“Since I read your blog the other day on animal rights’ attorneys. I called the real estate attorney who lives down the street. He’s got some time on his hands these days, what with the real estate slowdown, and he said it was only a matter of time before we could slap you with a libel suit.”

She looked around the kitchen. “Before long, I’ll own this house, and you’ll be the maid. And I’ll require two eggs over easy and two slices of toast cut into one-inch cubes every morning.”

“Dammit! What am I going to write about now?” I asked my dog.

She burped and said, “I’d write about 'whatever.' But I wouldn’t piss off that cat. She’s already trying to kill you for calling her a tainted pussy.”

Whatever.

Gag Reflex

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Christian circuit produced a teacher who, by some accounts, was the second coming of Christ.

A short, soft-spoken man in his forties, this self-appointed shepherd of God’s flock attracted literally millions of believers to weeklong seminars in which he spoke using only an overhead projector for a prop.

The seminar delved into the basic causes of conflict in life, and he spent an awful lot of time talking about teenagers.

He used words like “temporal values,” and “moral impurity.” For example, he spent several sessions on how rock music alters the brain waves of teenagers, thus inciting them to moral impurity. Along with that moral impurity, a “temporal value system,” that is, placing value on things that don’t last -- like Gucci, money, cars, and Prada -- leads to massive conflict in one’s life.

A favorite metaphor of Mr. “Shepherd” was God’s “Umbrella of Protection.” According to the teaching, when a couple marries, the husband becomes the “umbrella.” The wife and the children are under his “umbrella of protection,” and when the devil throws his fiery darts at them, those darts are deflected by Dad’s umbrella.

So prevalent was this teaching that, almost thirty years later, when my friend had to replace the roof on her house, her mother (also a preacher’s wife) actually said to her, “You DO know why your roof is leaking? It’s because you’re sleeping with your boyfriend.” Never mind the fact that a catastrophic hailstorm had pitted the shingles on every house in her neighborhood. No, that roof was leaking because at age forty-five she had ripped some serious holes in her metaphorical umbrella by sleeping with a man outside of marriage.

I told her the only solution is to find a new boyfriend. If having sex causes leaky roofs, she needs to be sleeping with a roofing contractor.

Incidentally, seminar attendance took a nosedive in the mid-eighties, around the time God Himself revealed a new insight to the teacher. The “quiver full” principle stated that God commanded Christians to give up all methods of birth control in order to rapidly multiply and produce more conservative voters. My dad, to his credit, realized the guy was off his rocker and terminated our attendance at these seminars.

My friend and her boyfriend broke up a few months after the roof was replaced, further cementing in her mother’s mind the connection between the two. Sadly, it also meant that her mother was forced to find another affliction to use in her attempts to control her adult daughter’s behavior.

But isn’t that what we all do? We must attach meaning to maladies. Someone is diagnosed with lung cancer, and we immediately say, “He’s a smoker.” Cirrhosis of the liver – “drank too much.” Because if we can point to a character flaw in another that is causing the problem, then we can insure ourselves against ever having that problem.

Yesterday, it happened. My friend spent a great part of the day enduring tests to figure out why she coughs like a lifelong smoker every time she eats. The doctor thinks it’s acid reflux.

I can hear it now. Her mother will say it’s "the consumption,” the antiquated name for tuberculosis, which, during the early part of the twentieth century, was thought to have been caused by masturbation. Maybe she should find a new boyfriend and take her chances with a leaky roof again.

Personally, I think she’s probably just gagging up all the rules other people keep trying to cram down her throat.