Trans/plant/portation

If one weekend night’s costume party was about mysteries, food, and fun, the next was its near-direct opposite. We took to creating our costumes a couple of hours before the faculty party, Susanne donning a personification of her office building’s reconstruction, and me going as the carpet a couple of offices down from hers. When this construction—a 30-foot addition to the end of the building—began at the start of last summer, several emails went out with a slew of mixed messages. This construction will be completed quickly. We didn’t expect anyone would need their offices in the summer. The noise should be minimal. We’ve discovered we need to remove asbestos. And so on.

When the jack hammering got too loud, Susanne went to work in the library, or came home. At some point the psychology lab upstairs was getting its facelift, and lo and behold, a waste pipe burst, spilling pigeon crap all over the carpet in one of Susanne’s colleagues offices. This was not the “minimal intrusion” he’d been promised. One day, while I was in the Bi-Mart, looking at canning equipment, I came across some carpet remnants. I typed into my phone:

TELL BRUCE CARPET’S ON SALE AT BIMART.

I’m sure he was pleased with my helpful suggestion, though I haven’t stopped by to see if he took me up on the idea.

I needed to figure out how to replicate bird poop without using any actual excrement. So I turned to the most logical place—our kitchen. It is with my own trial and error process that I now reveal my bird poop recipe.

Recipe for pigeon-like poop

4 packages of regular flavor instant oatmeal

1/4 cup of corn starch

6–8 drops of yellow food coloring

1/2 cup of raisins

1 T flour, unbleached if possible

1/2 to 3/4 a cup of water

Grind up the oatmeal and the raisins in a food processor. Turn out into a metal bowl and add the corn starch and flour, mixing with a fork or whisk. Add in 1/2 cup of water and stir, adding more water as desired. Add drops of food coloring, enough to give a sick-looking hue. Drop by the spoonful from about 4–6 feet away for desired splatter effect, and let dry.

Yes folks, my bird shit was completely edible, although it didn’t taste particularly good. But it could have been helpful for a Renfield imitation, I suppose. What else is Halloween for?

I dropped the whole mess on a piece of carpet we had in the basement and let it sit for a good while, and was happy when it stayed put once I hoisted the carpet up on string so it was wearable.

I looked mostly like I was planning to jump over Niagara Falls in a dirty carpet-turned-barrel, but whatever. It was in this way that Susanne declared that we were protest art. I was my own art installation! Nifty.

We drove over to the festivities with a couple of other professors in tow, a cowgirl and a witch. Susanne had looked up the directions before we left, and then we were off into the night. The spooky night. We jumped on the highway, made a right, went over some railroad tracks, and then.

Then we drove up to the big house. Hmm. That couldn’t be right. That looked like a maximum security prison where the state of Washington executes prisoners, not a Halloween party for the local liberal arts college.

Susanne tapped her foot impatiently. I was not listening to her, clearly. I turned the car around.

And then we made it, our lives still intact from our brush with death row. Crossroads Steakhouse and Lounge overlooked a high school football game and the rest of the city. We walked in, looked around at the coworkers who were, in their costumes, one scraggly, intentionally creepy bunch, and . . .

were immediately and rudely asked to step aside for a waiter who was trying to fetch drinks from the bar. “Seriously?,” we wondered. The rest of the waitstaff were just as rude.

“Please, people, make a path here,” a woman in a white shirt and black skirt said, walking through the space and waving her arms. I thought of waving my own and saying, “Danger, Danger, Dr. Smith,” but I actually wasn’t that mobile wearing 30 pounds of carpet. In fact, I would have had a hard time making a path for the President, much less for these inconsiderate people.

Now then, I’m used to rude service, given that I lived in DC for 11 years. I’ve encountered several rude people in that town over the years. But at least they had something to back it up—terrific sushi (yes, that’s a swipe at you, Cafe Asia), comfortable seating in the cinema (Hoffman 22), or posh hotel accommodations. This place was as far from quality as a local ExxonMobile TigerMart is for quality dining fare. Yes, there was a dance floor, and yes, it was not the smallest dance floor I’ve ever seen, but it was one of the most barren. The DJ was so bad (“how bad WAS he?”), the DJ was so bad he’d start a new song, see nobody was coming to the dance floor and would then put on a new song, screech-skidilidatting the old one off the first turntable. My dead grandmother turns better tunes.

Susanne went and found the drinks, meaning, she stood at the bar, waited for a bartender, then walked to the register in our part of the building, where she was admonished for standing in the “path” the waiters needed. Several minutes later she came up to me with a martini and a beer, sighing.

There were several other twosome, coordinated costumes at the party—the usual pirate and piratess, a bloody bride and her bloody bridesmaids, a fork and a spoon, and so forth. I wondered if there wasn’t some kind of violence influencing chemical in the water around these parts, as there were a lot of murdered and murdering characters there. A “cereal” killer, with a bleeding box of Honey Nut Cheerios strapped to his back. A man killed by a shark. Maybe there’s a fake blood factory around here I don’t know about, or the K-Mart had a sale.

At any rate, it was inevitable that Susanne and I would be asked to show our costumes to the college president. Two minutes of explaining and he didn’t look like he really understood what we were trying to represent, Susanne wearing a trash bag with “Warning: Asbestos” signs taped to her, and me in a moldy, pukey-looking carpet. We were saved by the bell, also known as Beyonce’s Single Ladies song, and it was off to the dance floor to try to replicate the choreography from Glee.

Back to our spot at one of the tables, the waitstaff had cleared away Susanne’s martini, though she’d only drunk half of it. And about this time I noticed that some people who weren’t a part of the party had come into the room, taken a long table, and were watching us. A couple even got up and danced. Apparently it was also the bar’s karaoke night. No wonder they were clearing drinks, the asses. Hadn’t the college paid for this space? Were they planning on kicking us out at a certain hour?

My carpet was cutting into my shoulders, so I made a move to take it off. I set down my beer glass on the table. In two nanoseconds (or so; I wasn’t counting) a waitress was there, next to me.

“I need you to pick that up,” she said to me.

“Excuse me?”

“I need to clear this table.”

“I’m using this table.” I sound like I’m arguing in the retelling, but I really wasn’t understanding her.

“I need to clear this table.”

“I just need to put this down FOR A SECOND.” With all the music, maybe she didn’t understand what I was trying to accomplish, but I also didn’t understand why it mattered to her. Was the ghost of Princess Di going to need this crepe-covered surface?

I picked up my drink. She walked away. I put down my drink and took off the carpet. A colleague of Susanne’s had overheard the exchange.

“Better watch it, Everett, or you’re gonna get kicked out of here.”

“God, no kidding!” Hey, that’s fine, I figured, I’m ready to take on the white water of Niagara in this thing.

On the ever-growing list of Things that Make DC and Walla Walla Different, let’s add Halloween.

Halloween in DC is hit or miss. You may get three very young trick-or-treaters in half homemade costumes with helicopter parents standing behind them, looking nervous to be out after dark with their precious ones. One gets the impression that they badgered their otherwise overprotective caretakers to let them out of the house for the promise of bite-sized waxy chocolate, and that only the most vocal, pushy kids and the most pushover adults are the ones making the trek. Or one may get no knocks at the door, even if the light is on outside, and there’s a fake ghost on the foot-wide lawn, looking especially scary next to two broken 40 ounces and one used condom—because of course context is everything. The last possibility in DC is that one will get gaggles of middle school and high school kids, all dressed in white t-shirts and torn jeans in a far reach for “zombie.” And then one has to drop the candy into their pillowcases or they’ll grab three and four bars each, causing one to run out of candy all too quickly and leaving one to cower in the corner of the kitchen, far from the front door, pretending not to be home. And that gets old fast.

In Walla Walla, trick or treating is limited to the arranged rendezvous with candy. Kids are orchestrated by well meaning adults in some central location, like a dorm on the Whitman campus, which is then decorated to communicate that for this night only, ghosts are on the prowl in the dorm that would surely, on any other day, fire up the college students’ parents to demand at least partial refunds of their room and board payments. There are also trick and treat events in some of the nursing homes in town, on a two-block strip of Main Street, etc. But house-to-house soliciting, as far as I can tell, is limited to Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they’re not seeking confections so much as offering eternal life.

To sum it up, Susanne and I got stuck with a boatload of candy last year, and she brought it to her office in hopes of limiting the damage to our pancreases and transferring the potential dental issues to the students and staff.

We bought no candy this year, expecting that once again, only two kids will show up at our house. At that rate, I can rummage through the kitchen and come up with some Orbit gum and an old Peppermint Patty from that Thai restaurant on 9th Avenue, no worries.

In the list of differences, I went to one and only one costume party in DC, but out here in Walla Walla, they seem to be a dime a dozen. However little the children dress up to gather candy from strangers, the adults go nuts pretending to be someone else. I can’t blame them—I’d like to be someone else out here, too, other than an unemployed, has-few-prospects, wanna be novelist who is tongue in cheek running for City Council, but that’s beside the point. The point is, they like a good costume party in this town.

We went to one last Saturday and have another to attend next Saturday. Last year I wore my Eeyore costume that I had purchased in 2002 for the one and only costume party I attended in DC. It is head to toe blue fleece, complete with floppy ears, depressed looking mane, and tail held on by a few strands of string. It also includes a little press pad in the top left paw (paw!) that says alternately, “Hello, I’m Eeyore,” and “Thanks for noticing me.” The thing gets so hot that I can’t wear anything underneath it other than some boxer shorts and a tank top. We’re talking stifling—the kind of heat surrounding one’s body that gives one the urge to run outside into a blizzard or make snow angels for 3o minutes, whilst banging the paws against the ground, to the beat of “Hello, I’m Eeyore,” and “Thanks for noticing me.”

I’d agreed to lend out this costume for the party this next Saturday, not realizing that I myself was obligated to attend. I’m a little bemused that anyone else would want to dress up as Eeyore, even knowing that the costume has been worn some number of times by a sweaty man in just his boxers, but whatever. What is life without risks, anyway?

This led Susanne and me to go to the K-Mart—which we affectionately call the “Sad Mart,” because it’s so dilapidated, with few customers actually shopping (as opposed to standing in front of a sales fixture, staring mindlessly, as if the nursing home dropped them off for a few hours so they could go “outside”). We looked through the costumes that they had for sale, knowing we couldn’t repeat the Magnum, P.I. and Perry Mason outfits of last weekend. It would be like wearing the same dress to two inauguration balls!

The costume perusing quickly devolved into shock as we saw what they had stocked on the shelves. An inflatable ballerina costume, because everyone loves obese ballerinas. An inflatable ninja costume, because why not mix in a little Orientalism while we’re being fat-phobic? And then, I gasped, and Susanne rushed over to look at what I was seeing.

The Woman/Man costume. Split right down the middle. Someone had watched too much Victor/Victoria. But seriously? Who would wear that, and why?

Please notice that the Woman/Man wig is sold separately. Since it can be worn for so many other occasions. If you don’t buy the wig, what else do you wear with this albatross?

“That says a lot about something,” I said.

We moved on, giggling at the human-sized whoopi cushion costume. Alas, it did not actually make a farting noise, probably because there is no left paw for a small speaker. I suppose the idea of whoopi cushions with paws is too frightening to deal with anyway.

So, I don’t have a costume for Saturday. Maybe I’ll go as a zombie councilman. Or affix several tumbleweeds to my clothing and give people small scrapes all evening. Or I could just wear a tank top and boxers and tell people I’m wearing an invisible Eeyore costume. I’m sure any of those ideas will work.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

In DC, amusement was going to the National Portrait Gallery just to see Steven Colbert’s picture hanging over a water fountain next to the men’s room. In Walla Walla, anything goes. Such it is that driving by the Elks Lodge in September bestowed upon our eyeballs the following notice:

WED CHIC AND DUMP

Instructions for a short-lived marriage a la Britney Spears? What to do immediately after exchanging vows so as not to die of embarrassment after drinking too much the night before?

No. The sign is shorthand for Wednesday, Chicken and Dumplings. Such is the flavor of titillating humor in these parts.

To be sure, there are other notes of hilarity. The man who works at the muffler shop on 9th Avenue is also a folk artist, crafting human-sized and -like statues from the leftover car parts. As Drew Bledsoe of former NFL quarterbacking fame is from Walla Walla, there’s a muffler man to his honor, as well as a guy reading whilst perched on a toilet. The toilet itself is the standard porcelain contraption, and not comprised of rusty metal. And the proximity of the two is not a statement on the artist’s opinion of Bledsoe. The New York Store, which used to be downtown on Main Street and is now in “Eastgate” near the edge of town, sells western ware, an intentional misdirection known to make at least one native New Yorker burst into tears upon reading the sign. But for Walla Wallans, it’s a hoot, if not popular enough to sustain sales that can make the rent payments in the more expensive part of town.

A chiropractor in town also changes up his black-lettered sign every so often as well. These are more existential in nature, the humor only coming into play if one is already equipped with the sort of wit that would allow for a good snort after reading whatever he’s put up there.

WE’LL SCRATCH YOUR BACK SINCE YOU CAN’T SCRATCH OURS is something I would write, if I’d lost my mind and was a mad scientist chiro guy.

A colleague of Susanne’s nodded in my direction at a cocktail hour last Friday, “cocktail hour” meant in all seriousness and not as a joke, for the purposes of this blog. I greeted her with a smile.

“You’ll have to check out the Elks Lodge before Saturday,” she told me, in the same kind of tone as “Mick has some really good shit on the street right now and you better get there before it sells out.” I asked if it was camera-worthy and was assured that yes, it was.

What could surpass WED CHIC AND DUMP?

“The furries are coming to town,” said the colleague, with fake astonishment.

“It’s like that CSI episode,” I said.

The Furr Ball, as it turns out, was a fundraiser for the local Humane Society. Paintings and other art were auctioned off at the event. One of the pieces was done by the as-yet-still-small child of a friend, and sold for $300. It must have been like something by that child prodigy that nobody believed could really paint, although now that I look at it, her work sold for $24,000. That’s probably one dollar for every homeless dog and cat in the city confines.

However, this child is better, for many reasons, I’m sure, but one of those reasons is this—she made a lawn sign for my write-in campaign for city council. She also managed, in 5 or 6 places, to include the greeting “HI” to whomever paused to read the sign, and for this, I decree that I’m glad my supporters have taken a stand against mud-slinging. Such a scourge on our democracy, those negative campaigners. Let it never be said that Everett Maroon slung any mud toward his opponents, even if he did refer to them as “jackasses” a couple of blog posts ago. That was only meant for incumbents who left the 30 inches of snow in Walla Walla unplowed last winter.

So, I suppose we try to take everything with a dash or pinch of dry humor. As opposed to wet humor. Since you know, it’s a desert.

Walla Walla has a City Council. This I knew before we moved here. The Mayor position is filled on a rotating basis with someone from the Council, voted on by members of the Council themselves. So the good citizens of Walla Walla don’t directly vote for a mayor. Representative government at its best?

Possibly not. I received my ballot in the mail on Friday, which I still find unsettling as a process, this whole vote by mail thing, and looked at what was on it. The Referendum 71, to keep or ditch domestic partner benefits for Washington State, and the Initiative 1033, to gut funding for programming from libraries to nursing homes, I already knew about. There are signs all over for the state representative job, so I knew I’d see that on the ballot. I’d heard a peep about the two men running for the commissioner of the Port of Walla Walla, but not much, and I’d heard absolutely nothing about the three people running unopposed for the open slots on the Council. Unopposed. All three of them.

What was this about? Were they all shoo-ins? Or did no one care who sat on the Council?

I ran to the Internet—okay, I didn’t run, seeing as my laptop was a few feet away—and looked up information on the races. Well, when I say “looked up,” I typed in a few keywords (namely, walla walla election city council 2009), and then voila, I got bupkus. Maybe on page 2. Nope. One article on the contested Port Commissioner job, and nothing else. Apparently “Walla Walla” is a link at the bottom of many pages on Washington State politics, skewing my results. Three pages into my search I gave up.

On the Walla Walla city Web site it lists the current members, and with five minutes more of digging, I found the name of the mayor, Dominic Elia. Sheesh, no need to put your names out there, folks, you’re only running the city.

So where were these people who were campaigning for positions 1, 2, and 3? What were their ideas about making the city a great place to live and work? Where did they think we need improvement? How are they prepared to handle the tax revenue issues in these difficult times? And my biggest question of all:

Why didn’t you jackasses move the snow off the streets last year?

Feeling frustrated and fanciful after inking in oval after oval on my ballot, I wrote in my own name on Position 3. Too bad for you, Daniel Johnson, who I’m sure will be elected anyway. I sealed up the envelope, avoiding the paper cut of last year, and put my poll tax—I mean, stamp—on the front.

Later that day, a friend who’d just lost her grandmother came over for some apple crisp and tea. As we were chatting, I mentioned I’d audaciously written myself in to the council, figuring I’d be right down there with Mickey Mouse and Yoda. Her reaction surprised me.

“I’m voting for you!”

“Oh, really, you don’t need to do that,” I said, waving my hands in front of me like they’d save me against her 18-wheeler of a response.

“No, I’m writing you in, and I’m telling all my friends to do it, too!”

Oh my God. How . . . how, fantastic. I mean, there’s no way I could win, what with 30,000 registered voters in the county and me knowing exactly 138 people here. So they would be throwing away a vote for one seat in an unopposed race. Low stakes. So why not tell her to shout from the Blue Mountain range if she wanted to?

I’m up to 12 votes at this point, and kind of tickled pink. Maybe I should have a motto, but everything I come up with seems to have a serious drawback:

Vote for Everett Maroon, Because Maroon Means Mayor in Arabic

Because Someone on the Council Should Be Able to Rock a Bejeweled Blitz Game

Putting Walla Walla’s Nondriscrimination Clause to Work!

He’s Even Named After a City in Washington

Because Who Cares, Really?

I may even take a picture of myself mailing in my ballot.

This week the new swine flu shot is available for health care workers. For people on the front lines of what is likely to be an intense fall and winter of virus-laden illness, some people are happy for the quick availability of the vaccine, but others are chafing at the compulsory nature of the shots. I’ve seen no fewer than five articles just today on—

Excuse us, Mr. Maroon.

Yes? Who are you? I’m trying to blog here.

Hi, we’re the USDA.

Uh, hi. I need to get back to—

Yeah, um, about that blog thing you’re doing. We have a request.

Okay. What’s up?

We’d really like it if you and everyone else could please stop calling it the “swine flu.” It’s the H1N1 virus.

Well, I understand that’s the flu strain we’re talking about, but I think more people understand it as swine flu.

Sure, sure, maybe they do right now, but it’s really harming the pork industry right now.

The what?

The pork industry. People are afraid to eat pork. In these tough times, it’s making it tough for pig farmers.

I’m sorry, just so I get this straight: you, the USDA, want me and other bloggers to call it only the H1N1 virus?

That’s right.

But that actually communicates a lot less about the thing than “swine flu” does. Can you show me one pig farmer who’s gone out of business because of the phrase swine flu?

Well, no, but, that’s not the point.

But you said it was.

Well, see, it’s only part from a swine flu strain. There are also avian flu and human flu strains in the H1N1 virus.

I see.

It’s a lot more like the 1918 influenza than any swine flu.

Oh, so should we call it pandemic flu, then?

Well, no. That sounds—

Fear-instilling?

Yes.

Well, I’m glad we’re in agreement on that. But I have a question.

Yes?

Didn’t this flu originate on a pig farm?

That’s not the point.

Oh. Not the point. I see. Okay, I’m lying, I don’t see why that’s not the point.

Because it’s not just swine flu.

Can I call it Swine Flu Plus? Or Swine Flu +?

Please don’t.

Okay, okay. I’ll call it H1N1, even though I have a right to free speech. Can I get back to blogging now?

Sure, sure. Thanks for your help.

Okay, bye.

Sheesh. Okay, so anyway, while some health care workers are complaining that they’re being required to receive this vaccine, even though there’s a long history of required vaccines out there, there is a point to be made about how the H1N1 flu vaccine was rushed to market. Of course it was rushed, having only come into existence last spring. Here in Washington State, our limits on the amount of mercury makers can put into a vaccine were suspended so that producers could get them out to the public in time for flu season. H1N1 was excepted from the limit even though the vaccine is recommended for pregnant and breastfeeding mothers. This must mean that the mercury in these shots knows not to wreak any of the havoc it normally would on fetuses and newborn children. I suppose, more seriously, that they think the risks of the disease are greater than the potential effects of mercury poison, but it calls into question for me what the calculus is for what must be a high-stakes cost/benefit analysis.

For our part as general citizenry, here in Walla Walla I now see antibacterial gel everywhere: next to cash registers, in the weight room at my gym, next to the shopping carts at the grocery store, even at the concessions counter of the cinema. We are a germ-killing, germ-fearing populace, all the while as we isolate and grow the strongest germs by using these products.

Walla Wallans consider themselves an enduring lot, and happily isolated from population centers. Perhaps this gives us a sense that swine flu won’t hit us here, but we forget the global nature of everything around us. Eighteen wheelers  roll into the city everyday, visitors from Seattle and Portland come out here on the weekends to taste our wine, and people fly out of here all the time to see that civilization that exists elsewhere, picking up who knows what along the way. Can’t there be a balance between vigilance of our health and hygiene, and ignorance of the genetic makeup of the H1N1 virus? Do we need to expose our children to mercury, obfuscate what to call this virus or that, turn away from vaccines altogether because a blog somewhere on the Web insists they cause autism? Where is the voice of reason in the midst of all these conflicting messages?

All that writing made me hungry. I’m gonna go grill up some pork chops.

It hasn’t rained here since June, if my memory serves. What was a rushing stream in the spring has dwindled down to a sophomore of a creek, propelled more by the turbine at the source of it than its own volition. The campus in our part of town has run in-ground sprinklers everywhere, including our front and back lawns, so we continue to see emerald green grass everyday, even while other parts of town are blanketed in shocking states of yellowness. A few times some dark clouds have rumbled through, menacing the ground with threats of a downpour, but none have come, even when we hear thunder overhead. It’s almost as if the rain refuses to fall all the way down to us because we aren’t worthy of anything but bone dry stillness. I can almost appreciate the oddity of last winter’s incessant snow, but as the television was out of order for five weeks, almost is as good as it gets.

Susanne and I have been staring at little blue lines this past week, namely the lines on the ovulation indicator multi-packs we’ve bought. These packs were found between the KY “his and hers” jelly and the female condoms, as if the pharmacy itself was in conflict over procreation. According to the back of the box, one will see a clear blue line on the right indicating a “control” condition—showing us the indicator strip is working. If you also see a clear blue line on the left, it means you’re ovulating RIGHT NOW, so you should run to your nearest sperm producer and harness his goodness. Or you could settle down and not jump on the first available man in proximity.

The issue with the test, however, is that these lines are nowhere near as clear as the little illustrations on the box. And by nowhere near, I mean something like the distance between, say, 3rd base at Yankee Stadium and the outermost ring of Uranus. So there we were, scrying into the vast whiteness of the indicator strip, our noses precariously close to a swatch of material very recently peed upon by Susanne. Is that a line or not a line, we wondered? It’s certainly not as dark as the test line, but that line isn’t very beefy, either. So maybe we’d just pee again, “we” meaning her, and “again” meaning tomorrow. So on we went.

Same result. Next day. Same again. I looked at all three test strips in my hand. Maybe this one was darker. Maybe yesterday’s was better, or maybe not. I looked away after memorizing the potential trajectory of lutenizing hormone as documented on the indicators, and saw a big black box in the air with two impossibly thin,  yellow lines, wherever I cared to look. Dear me, I’d burned the darn things into my retinas! I was going to see hormone levels until I died now. I wondered blithely how many people have lost their sanity staring at hormone indicator strips and realized, astonished, that even one life lost to this is too many. Where was the public outcry?

Meanwhile, our impregnating friends sat in the corner of the dining room, which was an arbitrary choice, really, as neither of us were trying to make a statement about the dining room. It’s got the nicest furniture in the house, actually, so what’s not to like? According to our “vendor,” the little helpers are guaranteed to be frozen solid for at least a week, so we strung ourselves along from blinding ovulation test to blinding ovulation test, reassuring ourselves nervously that any minute now, we’d be ready for prime time.

Tick tock, went the days, which sounded something like the biological clock noise we were hearing anyway. Okay, we don’t believe in bilogical clocks, but we were watching the calendar all the same. Finally, the indicators indicated something slightly more than a ghost of a line. Would we ever see a definitive line? Where did we draw the line [sic] at saying we should try now or not? We understood intellectually that we should only expect ovulation was happening when the lines were the same width and darkness, but we also read online that some women just don’t have that huge surge, and ovulate anyway.

All bets were off. The swimmers were waiting near the head of the dining table, calling out to me in the night. We’re so cold, Everett…help us! Save us!

Neither did we want to miss the timing window nor did we want to open up the canister to a warm vial of sperm corpses. So now was the time.

“Please tell me there are instructions inside this thing,” I said, and I broke the seal and opened the lid.

Inside sat another container, this one metal, with another seal. I began wondering if I wasn’t going to find a gate to hell inside a Russian doll set of containers. Helpfully, a set of instructions was sitting on top of the inside container.

I read through them, then went to the kitchen and put on oven mitts. It was at this point that Susanne saw me, started laughing, and ran to get the camera.

Really? Our child should see these pictures someday? Can i t be the cover of our baby photo book? I pulled out the vial, at the end of a long metal stick, and watched the air around it condense and freeze in a bright white frost. We put the vial on a table mat to thaw out. Both of us came down with a case of the giggles, the likes of which we hadn’t experienced since 6th Grade sex ed class. I don’t think people understand how funny the collision is between “Catholic school” and “sex ed class,” but I always thought it was hysterical.

Fast forwarding to this morning, I called FedEx and requested they pick up the containers, and left everything out on the front stoop. I really didn’t want to have another conversation with the truck driver, in case he asked me how the animal husbandry went.

I looked up and saw dark clouds in the sky, and laughed at them. Waiting for a rain drop is like waiting for two thick blue lines around here.

Like standing on a straightaway section of train track, Susanne and I have looked ahead and known children are in our future. We’re good with it, excited at the prospect of little fingers and toes, unintentional smiles, and impromptu cooing. We’re also well aware of the all-night feedings and intense lack of sleep, followed by intense stress and a certainty that you have lost your everloving mind.

canister of fun

Understanding that one can’t actually plan a pregnancy, we went ahead anyway, armed with optimism and a copy of the Mayo Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy. This was better, we’d heard, than the What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which apparently should be renamed What to Fear Greatly When You’re Expecting. Fear-mongering was not going to be a part of our process. We patted ourselves on the back for our intelligence and ability to learn from our friends.

Susanne, ever the feminist, wants not to refer to the little one—when there is a little one—as an unborn child or as a baby. I asked what we should call it instead, and she immediately responded, “let’s call it my parasitic fetus.”

“Really,” I asked, not wanting to betry my own feelings on the subject, since this is her body and her pregnancy, after all.

“What? It’s a parasite, you know. It’s going to suck nutrients out of my body and grow in my abdominal cavity.”

This is true, I thought. Still, I felt it was a little negative. I kept my opinion to myself.

“Okay, honey, it’ll be our little parasite.”

“Parasitic fetus,” she corrected.

So there we were, me reading the Mayo Guide to her before bed, interjecting the phrase “parasitic fetus” or “parasite” into the text where “unborn baby” and “fetus” were written. Things got a little convoluted when I came across “child.” What could I use for “child”? In a heartbeat, I had it.

Reading aloud, I said: “Nutrition during your pregnancy can have long-term consequences for your parasitic fetus after birth.” Susanne giggled.

“It’s okay, honey,” she said, patting me on the arm. “You can just call it a baby.”

Whew. The book would have taken 14 percent longer to read.

Looking forward again, on our metaphoric train tracks, we felt some vibrations from a vehicle ahead, and knew it was time to place an order with the sperm bank. Yes, I am not a sperm-producer, so last spring and summer, we identified some candidates for the job, whittling down to two finalists: the nerdy biochemistry student and the sweet librarian. Sweet librarian won out in August, mostly due to his sentimental answers to the questionnaire and the lack of autoimmune disease in his family. We did notice, however, that having a drunk uncle is an excellent indicator that one may choose to donate sperm—nearly every family history we read showed a maternal or paternal uncle with an addiction problem. I began wondering if it wasn’t code for something else, but so far, I haven’t come up with any ulterior meaning.

Lo and behold, the FedEx driver showed up on Thursday with our Very Special Delivery. I say “the driver,” because in Walla Walla, there is literally one FedEx Ground driver, a strapping middleaged woman with curly hair, always tied back, a body frame like a wine barrel, and a determined air. This woman could jerk and lift 300 pounds, I bet. There is also a sole FedEx Air driver, a beanpole, balding guy with wire frame glasses from the 70s and a chatty manner. He rang our doorbell. On our stoop stood a beige plastic container the shape of a Chinese mushroom, plastered with “medical specimen” and “perishable” stickers.

“Wow,” he said, clicking buttons on his electronic inventory machine, “I don’t usually deliver these to private homes.” He had a wild look in his eyes that concerned me.

“Oh,” I asked automatically, not really wanting to have this conversation.

“Yeah, I usually take them—”

Here I thought that he was going to say a fertility clinic, or something else that would make it obvious that we needed help in the getting pregnant department.

“—to a vet lab or a ranch.”

Okay. I did not anticipate that one.

“Well, we have a horse in the back yard,” I said, and I could feel Susanne cringe in the next room.

“Oh, the horse sperm container is much smaller,” he said, using his hands in a “this is much smaller” gesticulation.

He thought we’d ordered bull sperm? Seriously?

I may have, at that point, emanated more sounds in an attempt to form words, but I don’t recall much.

“You’ll open this up and find like, a tuna can in there.”

The FedEx driver was schooling me in animal husbandry. Yes, he was.

“Well thanks,” I said, picking up the container, the height of a toilet seat.

“Sure thing,” he said. “See you soon!”

Oh my God, let this happen on the first take. Please, sweet baby Jesus.

Living next to a recycling center, as I’ve mentioned before, is fascinating for its ethnographic opportunities. We see a specific kind of person venturing here: because it’s only supposed to service the college, the managers of the center have posted signs not to dump here. So the people who pull in at all hours of the day and night, are doing something very strange—they’re recycling, which is good, but they’re using a facility not meant for them, which is wrong. They make their way down the gravel-lined alley, frustrated that they can’t approach in stealthy silence, unbuckle their seat belts, for one should click it or ticket, and quickly remove their folded cardboard, tossing it over the chained and locked fence, before scrambling to get back in their Volvos, Saabs, and BMWs, acting like they’ve just bought a dime bag in the red light district. I can barely fathom such inconsiderate but ecology-focused behavior.

My favorite dumper, if such a thing is possible, is a man who comes by in the spring and summer, with a faded yellow bike jury-rigged to a red wagon. He wears only overalls, sometimes wet at the cuffs from standing in the nearby stream, and work boots. A neighbor posited that he is only “two clips away from fun,” because he’s obviously not wearing a shirt, and possibly goes without underwear as well. I had no idea why he kept coming by with boxes until I saw him one day in a coffee shop, collecting recycling for the transaction of a Mountain Dew. He does the dew. And then it was like looking through the lenses at the eye doctor’s office, and I could see—he goes around town, collecting cardboard, getting a few bucks for it or a soda, and this is his hobby.

He’s very regimented about how he disposes of the boxes. When the college wanted to stop the flow of recyclables coming to the center, it installed an 8-foot fence that it could close when the sole part-time employee left for the day. This was like putting up a Kleenex as a room divider. People just toss boxes over the fence, or push them through the gaps in the gate. They, for their trouble, look an extra modicum of guilty, but they do it nonetheless.

But my wagon man was thrilled. No more simple, setting the box on the ground. Now he could fling them over with gusto! Even when he comes by and the gate is rolled back, he still stands next to the fence and one by one, tosses them like frisbees. If he doesn’t like how they land, he’ll walk in, pick them up, and toss them again. In a sea of entitled people who ought to know better and use the city recycling center, I enjoy that he enjoys the cardboard fling so much. And I wonder who takes care of him.

It sounded like a fun little outing, going to our friend’s aunt’s house, an hour away, to pick cherries. I think of things like picking strawberries, down at one’s feet, where I can walk away whenever I think I have enough, or picking blueberries, right at torso height and brambleless.

Cherry picking is not those things. And one cherry tree has something like a gazillion pieces of fruit on it. Such was it that a couple who showed up—in response to the aunt’s mass email announcement—walked away with 150 pounds of cherries, and I couldn’t tell which part of the tree had been hit. Getting the fruit out of the tree entailed extremely high, rickety metal ladders, which, given the knee issues of mine, Susanne forbade me to climb, and plastic buckets we were supposed to string around our necks so we could pick with two hands.

The aunt and her sister chuckled quietly as we walked toward the tree, thinking that these city folk would be poor farmers. Susanne, however, proved them wrong, getting her little body in between large branches heavy with cherries, double fisting clumps of berries and quickly accumulating several full buckets. We joked that she was a migrant farmer in a past life, and if the political science professing career dried up, we’d be just fine with her picking prowress.

I, meanwhile, thought the tree was quite the pugilist, and I came away with several scrapes on my arms and torso as if I’d gone five rounds with the thing. For my part I hauled in something on the order of 8 quarts, certainly laughable by the aunts’ standards. They sat on their porch  smoking cigarettes and drinking Mexican beer as dusk overtook us. Aunt Maureen—affectionately called Mo—is quite the antiques collector, and her home is filled with old things, especially kitch from the 1930s and 40s. Our friend warned us before we walked in that she has a lot of “Aunt Jemima stuff,” which amounted to dolls in black face, framed sheet music about “how funny the Negroes are,” and old Amos ‘n Andy stills.

“Aunt Mo has a funny sense of humor,” our friend said, in summary.

We therefore ignored the offensive portion of the antiques in Mo’s house, and considered them an unfortunate piece of American history, artifacts of a time when people were more openly, though not necessarily more, racist.

Mo was not afraid of new technology, her love of things archaic notwithstanding. Perhaps it was just that gadgets needed to have proper motivation. For example, her cat, Sharon, had both a locator microchip implanted in her neck, and a “finder collar” that was wirelessly connected to a button Mo could push to show her where the cat was in space. This would have been only a small point of interest except for the fact that the feline did go missing later that evening. And then we identified the flaw in the cat radar screen: walking up to where the cat should have been, there was no Sharon. It was like the scene in Aliens when Riley is looking at the green blip, knowing she should be right on top of the thing, but there’s no alien.

Or is there?

Sure enough, Sharon had taken solace directly above where we had gathered. Turns out she had a bad tooth and wanted nothing more than to alleviate her pain, and barring that, figured hiding under her caregiver’s bed was her next best bet. So kudos to the cat finder company: they’ve gone and taken very useful technology and morphd it into something only a crazy pet owner would desire.

After a summer meal of salmon, corn on the cob, fruit salad, and rhubarb crisp, we took the cherries to the car, realizing we’d picked about 50 pounds worth. Aunt Mo was grateful to have people harvest the tree so that she didn’t have a rotting mess on her lawn come next week. Getting home, we made every kind of cherry everything: dried cherries, preserved cherries in syrup, cherry preserves, liquor-infused cherries, cherry ice cream, and cherry pie and for the love of Pete, we still have a boatload in our kitchen.

So chalk one up for Walla Walla, having lots of summer produce for us to pluck out of trees, and teaching us about 19th Century food preservation. Next up, skinning a wild boar and using the hide to make moccasins.

In my quest for all things interesting in the Walla Walla valley, a friend (former physical therapist of mine, actually) and I went out to Dixie, Washington, a town a little to the east of town. Unlike towns on the east coast, many miles of farmland separate Dixie from Walla Walla. We curved around the rolling foothills of the Blue Mountains, passing the occassional pickup truck, but otherwise we had the road to ourselves. About 10 minutes later, my friend pulled into what seemed to be a random house behind some strategically grown pine trees, put there, presumably, to break the desert wind and keep the house from a near-constant pounding. A large German shephard came out to greet and inspect us, not necessarily in that order. He clearly knew my friend but not me, so he gave me a good growl as a warning that I not do anything  stupid nor make any sudden moves.

As we walked around the free-standing garage, I saw that there were other people assembled here, a kind of makeshift Zen meditation and country sermon, as it were. They sat on a variety of plastic lawn chairs and wooden benches, and all among them, floating with the sound of tiny racing cars, were hummingbirds. Tom, the 84-year-old who has lived in this house all his life, shook my hand and welcomed me into the inner circle, and I moved slowly (for the hummingbirds skirt away if they see jerky motion) to a bench to watch the nature show. My friend stood just next to a bird feeder and put her fingers out in case a hummingbird decided to sit on her for a few moments. They aren’t still long, not while they’re tanking up on sugar water just before they go to sleep.

Hummingbird’s hearts beat at a frenetic 500 to 800 times a minute, until they sleep at night, and then they take a mini-hibernation before resuming their pollination activities for the next day. Their metabolisms are astronomically huge — weighing in at something like 1.3 ounces, they are the smallest birds in the world, yet they take in great quantities of fuel. On this night we saw something like 100 birds, totaling 3 species, my personal favorite being the orange Rufous. They have neck feathers that if they catch the sun at just the right angle, seem to glow from inside each feather. It was mesmerzing.

I was clearly the newbie to the group, as I had not brought a camera. I’ll make sure that I take one along next time. Tom’s house, festooned with hummingbird feeders of all kinds, draws something like 600 to 700 hummingbirds at the height of their season. It’s one of only a few places in the world with such a concentration of them. Perhaps only pictures can describe the joy of sitting and watching a group of hummingbirds jockey for position at a feeder — the male birds let the female birds in, but show no chivarly to other male birds, which they yell at to find another watering hole. Scratch that — perhaps only seeing them in person and experiencing it oneself is satisfactory.