Jaci Dawn

In Flanders Field

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John McCrae

Just thinking about things and letting my mind settle. Sometimes I have to do that.

I like to mull things over.

When Arwen was a toddler, I occasionally tried leaving her at some Day Care or another. She always sat on the outside and observed. She wasn’t one for jumping in to the situation. She wasn’t afraid of it and she never, ever cried when I left her, but she mulled over the situation before getting involved.

Levi, on the other hand, screamed and wept and dramatically threw himself at my feet when I tried to leave him in the church nursery.

I am a lot like Arwen in the need to sit and mull it over awhile before taking action. But eventually, I do take action.

There’s a lot going on in my head. Not so much in my life, but a lot in my head. So I am sitting back and mulling it over.

And working through the dreams that come when I am getting ready to face something in my life.

So – night before last, I dreamed of a plague of frogs. Tiny baby frogs just new from being tadpoles. Some little kid was catching them and putting them into little canvas bags. One escaped and got into the bed and someone stepped on it. UGH. I tried to catch some frogs but they were hopping into the swimming pool and the swimming pool was filled with brightly colored exotic sea creatures like sea-spiders and other poisonous creatures that can also climb up onto the land. Oh, and there were slugs marching toward the pool with the frogs. Only the slugs were much slower.

Last night I dreamed I was a teenager and the alarm went off. I had to hurry and get ready for school because for the first time ever I was going to ride the bus. I had to compete with several older sisters for the mirror in the bathroom so I could put my make-up on. I was determined that no matter how terrified I was of the new situation (school and bus) and no matter how terrible I am at putting on make-up, I was going to face this new situation head-on. I was going to bluff my way through.

Frogs? Make-up? Freud or Jung?

Sometimes my dreams are just fodder for short stories. They don’t mean anything, they’re just good fiction.

I feel guilty that I am not blogging as often as I should but right now life has a ”
sit-back-and-mull-it-over” feel to it. Frogs in dreams excluded.

At least I wasn’t naked and going to school in the other dream. I was dressed and putting on make-up.

I don’t even wear make-up beyond a little eye shadow and blush.

I’m pretty certain there are deep meanings to all of this.

I don’t like stepping on little frogs and I really do not like the idea of things sharing the swimming pool with me. That’s why God created chlorine.

Digressing: when I was a pre-teen, we spent many many days at the public swimming pool in Winnemucca. We got monthly passes and swam nearly every day. One time we were there at closing time and they kicked us all out. As we dried off and dressed in our little chlorine-smelling dressing rooms painted pale blue, a voice called out. “Hurry up and change!”

My best friend replied loudly, “Into what?”

There was a dead silence before the life guard got the joke.

I think I am waiting to decide what I am changing into. I hope it isn’t a frog or a make-up obsessed teenager. Wonder which one is worse?

Last Friday it seemed like life moved as fast as molasses in winter.

The visit with the lawyer took 45 minutes. Then we had to go to the court house to file our updated paper. Of course, at the court house, we ran into people we knew. And Terry, being an ex-cop, knows everyone.

He ran into another ex-cop.

The quick stop at the court house took almost an hour. And I will say this for small towns and county court houses: there’s no metal detector at the door! No security! It’s wonderful and takes me back to a more innocent time.

The Clackamas County Court House in Oregon City has one entrance now: on the side, through imposing metal detectors manned by burly guards who rifle through your purse. You can’t take nail clippers into the court house.

I carried my purse into the White Pine County Court House. Inside my purse are two knives. No one even asked.

We paid the water bill at City Hall and we wandered over to Murdoch’s Towing to pay a bill. I let Terry go in to pay that bill.

While I was sitting there, waiting for him, it occurred to me that I should get a photo of the business right across the street.

Ely doesn’t hide her brothels behind a “high board fence” or out past county lines.

Ely embraces her brothels.

According to Wikipedia, the VIP Spa is probably not a licensed brothel, but the Stardust Ranch is.

You can read more on Nevada’s “institutions” here.

I honestly never think about photographing brothels. It’s one of those things that are not on my radar. They just are. But sitting in Terry’s truck and waiting for him to pay the bill at Murdoch’s spurred me to think like a tourist. Really: do you want to photograph the murals around town or get a photo of what really happens in Ely after the sun goes down? Hands down: the brothels win.

I took a ghostly photo of Ely the night we pulled in.

Doesn’t look like much, you say? Well, I say: take another look!

It really isn’t all bugs on the windshield.

Tomorrow I’ll just share Ely pics. It really is a picturesque little town.

But I sure looked when we crossed over the Cascades south of Mt. Shasta! Trivia: most California sightings of Bigfoot take place in the northern counties around Yreka, Weed, Alturas, Mt. Shasta and the coast range.

I did see a zombie in Medford.

She was hitch-hiking and I gave her a ride. True story.

It was an adventure for the pair of us. The whole whirl-wind trip to take care of the legal end of my dad’s estate operated under a phenomenon I like to think of as “Nevada Time”. Nevada Time is a slowed-down version of life. Tasks that normally take ten minutes to complete take thirty minutes to complete on Nevada Time.

The up-side of Nevada Time is that 90% of the people are nice. They’re nice because they are operating on Nevada Time and they have all the time in the world to be nice. You might as well be nice when you’re stuck in a time warp because you aren’t going to get out of it any sooner by being nasty.

Nasty was the bank in Reno. My brother had already been dealing with them. “Bring this, this, and this and that’s all you need.” So he brought everything and they said, “Oh, your sister has to be here in person.” “She lives in Portland.” “Sorry, she has to be here in person.”

At some point, banks forget what it is to be bereaved. I’ll let you guess which debit-card-charging bank we were dealing with.

Anyway, I showed up and we sat down with Richard at the bank. And he can’t connect the dots between Jack and John. My dad went by Jack. He signed everything John. His legal name was John. No one called him John. Our lawyer filled out the Trust paperwork using the names interchangeably, but she didn’t specify it was John “Jack”. Richard, the man at the bank, didn’t even know that Jack is a common moniker for John. He wanted two pieces of ID from both of us, too, and then he refused to complete the trust paperwork.

We drove to Ely.

That’s a five-hour drive from Reno.

If you ever make the drive on US Hwy 50, stop at the Toiyabe (TOY-yah-bee) Cafe in Austin and have an ice cream cone. Austin is a pretty cool little tourist stop.

Somewhere out of Eureka, there’s a Major Deer Crossing. I have never seen the Major Deer but he must be a pretty commanding buck because there are several signs warning drivers to watch for him. There are probably some Private Deers, too, but the signs don’t say that. Just Major Deer.

We stayed at the Jailhouse and had dinner at the Hotel Nevada. No photos, sorry. I think this is a case of familiarity: these places are so familiar to me that I forget to take photos. When I was a teenager, we would sneak into the Hotel and ride the elevator. It was the only elevator in town in the early 1970’s and it had an escape hatch on the top. If you pushed the hatch out, you could set off the alarm. The elevator would stop on the third floor, we’d dash out and calmly sneak down the stairs while security tried to figure out why the alarm went off in the elevator.

Ely is a real small town.

Friday we met with the lawyer and straightened out the John/Jack business. Then we went to the small bank branch inside the main grocery story and took care of setting up the Trust Account. They didn’t ask us for two pieces of ID: we were Jack’s kids and that was all they needed to know. The gal at the bank did say, “But of course he was Jack! We all knew him!”

Gotta love small towns.

We had to go to the DMV office to take care of a vehicle title. It took us 2.5 hours to find out we couldn’t take care of the title right then, but the Ely DMV Office got my signature on all the paperwork so I do not have to return to Nevada to sign anything.

While we were there, I noticed that the stream of people lining up behind us had to take numbers. I didn’t notice that we were supposed to take a number because 1) no one was in line ahead of us when we came in and 2) there was no ticket dispenser. The numbers were written in black marker on 5×7″ pieces of cardboard: 1, 2, 3, 4 – through 30. They recycle the numbers every day. Nobody got their nose out of joint when someone mixed up the numbers: Number 7 became Number 9 and everyone knew what order they came in the door without the numbers anyway.

They were very nice at Ely Nevada DMV.

My only question is: can we transport that office to Portland? They were so NICE.

The only problem was that they operate on Nevada Time and it took all of Friday just to set up the trust account and to get turned down at the DMV office. Actually, it took 2.5 hours for DMV to tell us we couldn’t straighten out the title issue.

I could have rounded up ten Bigfoots in that amount of time.

Tomorrow: more observations on small towns and Nevada Institutions.

I am about to go on a marathon drive to Nevada and home. It isn’t a pleasure trip (when is a trip to Nevada a pleasure trip for me?) but it is a necessary trip.

My brother and I are co-executors of our father’s estate and now that we are through probate court, we have to finalize some things. Don’t ask me about probate court, just never assume that because you have a trust and a will that your heirs get to sidestep probate. But we’re through and we’re legal and we’re about to wrap this up.

I am leaving Harvey this time. My husband can dog-sit.

So why am I writing about this? Because part of my drive takes me through the heart of Bigfoot country. Sometime tomorrow afternoon, I will be driving the lonely stretches of highway between Weed and Susanville, California around Mt. Shasta. And maybe – just maybe – we will get to see Bigfoot.

If we don’t see one on our way down, no worries: we’ll backtrack through the same country on our way home over the weekend.

I’ll have my camera handy just in case.

I should have waited until today to post my blog about Harvey’s Great Escape. There were so many images and emotions passing through my mind as it unfolded and I posted without taking time to truly think about every thing. In retrospect (which is always 20/20 vision), I could have written a much better narrative. The sad thing is: I knew I needed to wait 24 hours before posting, but I was caught up in the adrenalin of the escapade.

Today I have given a lot of though to it.

First, there was Harvey. As soon as he was out the gate, he was on an adventure. In all the times that Murphy has escaped, he has only been playing a game. Murphy has crossed streets, robbed cat food from porches and danced just beyond our reach, teasing us – but he has never taken off on a dead run away from home. It has always been a game of “catch-me-if-you-can.”

I was floored when he came right to me and didn’t try to nip at my hand when I reached for his collar. Murphy was the best dog ever yesterday. He went up one hundred notches in my estimation: a suddenly mature dog with no desire to play “tag” in stranger’s yards.

I was extremely thankful to Murphy.

Selma was in her front yard, watering. I rarely see Selma these days. I think she hides from us. Maybe our dogs bark too much at her when she is in her backyard? Although Virginia on the other side of us doesn’t seem to think our dogs are a bother at all… And Selma was smiling as I nabbed Murphy and hauled him back to the yard. And Selma was smiling when I spoke to her on my way to find Harvey. She’s 83. She reminds me of my dad.

The people who tried to stop Harvey on his mad dash touched my heart. Every one of them was concerned that my big white dog would run out into traffic but every one of them was involved in their own life – just like I am – and did not have the time to offer to help me catch an errant dog.

Except Brittany, who reminded me so much of my 30-something-niece in Oakland. Brittany, who had followed Harvey up the road and then turned around to see if someone was following him with a leash in hand. Brittany, who opened her car door to a stranger and said, “Get in.”

There was Harvey, too. I got close enough to him once to see the look in his eyes. He was wild. He was somewhere between terrified of being captured and terrified of his new-found freedom. He wasn’t happy being loose: he was scared. He knew who I was, but he was scared of me capturing him. Even when I did finally corner him, he looked terrified.

This baffles me. I’ve never hit him or kicked him. When I call him to me, I have always rewarded him with lots of loving.

But I have only had a little over a year to make an impression on Harvey and someone else had two years to impress him. Someone did something to him to make him think running fast and hard is the better alternative to coming to his name.

He knows his name. He knows his commands.

He’s a good dog. He’s a sweet dog. And once he is on a leash, he is completely under control.

Murphy is not under control on a leash: he controls you. All 85# of Murphy control you. I was so blessed to have Murphy decide he wanted to go home when I snapped the leash onto his collar, because he dragged me home. He weighs 2/3’s of what I do and he has more muscle tone.

Harvey, on the other hand, is like a horse on a lead when that leash snaps into position. A horse weighs between 800 and 1100 pounds, but with a lead in hand is a pussycat. Harvey is completely under control with a leash snapped onto his collar. He heels and the leash is not taut.

So why did he run like he did? Why did he look so crazed and wild? What goes through his doggie head?

Where is Cesar Milan when I need him?

I sure would like to know Harvey’s story.

Who did he belong to the first two years of his life and what did they do to him that he still thinks he has to run at a dead sprint away when he is “free”? What is Harvey’s story?

Hint: Chrystal thinks he’s been hit by a car. He certainly has a funny way of walking and he won’t cross the busy street to the east of me, but he did run south in the bike lane on it.

By the way… I thought I did pretty well for a slightly overweight 50+ year old woman jogging after Harvey. Until today when all my muscles suddenly hurt. Just kidding – I don’t hurt nearly as much as I thought I would.

And there was Brittany. Whatever possessed her to decide to track the big white dog like she did? Why did she decide to pull over and open her car for me? I will never know but I do know this: I love that woman. I really do. I think you can love someone you hardly know. I really do. And I love Brittany. I wish her the very best life has to offer her: Karma, Heaven, blessings, love, happiness, joy. You name it: if it is good, I wish it on Brittany.

And the people with the big back yard.

I’m still reeling from the kindness of strangers.

You’d have a hard time convincing me people are not inherently good. I’ve discovered otherwise.

And here’s my vow: to be that kind of good person in return. Always.

By the way: Harvey is an English Setter. Everyone asks me that. He’s a purebred dog that someone just let run away. I will never just let Harvey run away.

Murphy, my former nemesis, is a purebred Wirehaired Pointing Griffon. And I will never just let Murphy run away.