My sister bought her house! Yes indeed. She wanted some help identifying weeds in her garden, so I found a UConn site with weed flashcards (I have a lot of prostrate spurge and roundleaf mallow and some bull thistle in addition to bindweed; dandelions are not a weed). I recommended the UConn Cooperative Extension Center to her and added something, meanly and obviously unnecessarily but this is my sister, about how our mother spoke of their helpfulness and knowledgeability and, I therefore assumed, how much they must have dreaded her calls.
CLH replied, "with the UConn extension, can I email the appropriate person with a description and ask? and were you serious about BJWL, wouldn't that have been a toll call...what if they kept her on hold."
Ha! So I replied with perhaps the longest single sentence I have ever run:
You mean like the time the summer after I broke up with SSP and she called me at work in Waterford to tell me she had fetched the mail and he had written me a letter and by the time the call was transferred to me who was not at my phone at my desk in JBM's office but somewhere else legitimate so that the switchboard tried Westinghouse first and then Engineering and maybe CHC's assistant whom I also worked for and finally into some other office of which I would have zero memory except that this is where I was run to earth and I picked the phone up and the first thing I heard was BJW, expecting that this was the switchboard again, irritatedly saying, "You know this is a toll call that I'm paying for" as if it were the switchboard's fault I was an office floater and I said "Hi Mom" because who else would it be and she, having called as if in kindness to tell me I had a letter from my dumped and now regretted exboyfriend but not in so much kindness that three minutes of paying for a toll call hadn't already taken its...toll, now made her call even longer by telling me her story of switchboard woe before finally getting around to telling me why she had called in the first place, which intent didn't do a pisscup's worth of good for my state of mind, already poor, because I was an utter wreck for the next three hours until I could get home to read the thing. Hence why I never give her my work numbers anymore. She used to call me for no good reason at all at Phoebe too.
I just made up "pisscup."
Oh, and my freshling dorm had a switchboard too. There was one phone in each of the six floors' three sections, for incoming or campus calls. She had called me I don't know how many times and the switchboard had picked up so she paid for the connections before being switched up to 4S where someone would pick up, knock on my door, and rouse no one, probably deliberately wasting her money. When I came back from wherever, I took a shower, so that the next time she called that afternoon (what was her name, the woman at the end near the phone who therefore always had to answer? poor thing), someone said I was in the shower, which the neighbor dutifully reported to BJWL, and since I was physically present, the neighbor then was commanded to go into the bathroom to alert me, where I protested I was in the shower, whereupon the next step was that I should just wrap a towel around myself and get to the phone pronto. This in itself was pretty damn funny, since I did not have a bathrobe freshling year (do you remember you gave me your old Victoria's Secret peach terrycloth one by sophomore year, a good thing since then I was in a co-ed dorm) but the two towels she was least unwilling to risk to the rigors of campus living, worn to a crisp and waaay too small to "just wrap around myself" as I came to the phone. Once at the phone I asked for 30" to scurry to my room to put on actual clothes, she told me no because she had already called x times and had to pay for each call even though I wasn't there (this was a Saturday afternoon) and she had to tell me this even though, again, it made the call longer than it needed to be. Which was pretty damn short, since as I remember whatever it was she was calling to tell me was not, as she says, "earth-shattering."
Yet it was between the freshling year making me stand exposed dripping and lathery in the hall and the Millstone incident of 1991 that she expended next to no effort to track me down to tell me that Gram died in time for me to attend her funeral. NCS and I had gone to his house for the weekend, and that was a phone number she had. Although even if she had called there, I can just imagine the guilt I would have received from both ends, from the one for leaving school for the weekend (Labor Day weekend, before classes started, and I had been living with the Beasts for the past few weeks to work Add/Drop anyway) and being so very far away in time of crisis, and from the other for so selfishly wanting to leave his home to attend my great-grandmother's funeral. I was dependent on others for transportation in any event; do you think if NCS had been unwilling to chauffeur me and I had taken the train to Saybrook, anyone would have picked me up?
Yeah, I think that's how the extension office works. The Colorado one is downtown, near Dot Org's previous address. That used to be pretty convenient (yep, still--well, not bitter, but a tad resentful: working in the hinterlands has not yet become just a funny story, as these former resentments about our mother have). I used to go over and talk to them about dealing with bindweed and identifying trees and how to compost. But not all the time! Not in a bothersome way! Not demanding attention if they were otherwise occupied! I promise!
And huh, I hadn't thought of how BJWL would have dealt with calling Norwich. This could be one of the ways BDL has improved her general outlook and her stranglehold on her pursestrings.
Not, thank heavens, mine. I would be somewhat more somber and off my rocker were that the case.
Last night we ate on the patio, and as RDC grilled and I surfed, suddenly Blake, in his cage on the table under the umbrella, cocked his head to peer at something nearly beneath him and shrieked. "What's in the raspberries?" I asked. We looked: a baby starling.
Three years ago we stayed out of the backyard all one Saturday (scheduled to be the tomato-planting day) because parent starlings wouldn't attend to their fallen baby when we were in sight. They fed the thing all day, but later when I was in the grocery store and had called RDC to ask him about some item or other, I heard our buddy shriek and a whole bunch of other bird agitation: RDC said a crow had just swooped by the window (scaring Blake) futilely pursued by all the starlings in the neighborhood. When I got home, there wasn't much to throw away besides the feathers that I left where they had been torn out.
Last night there were no parent starlings around. The hatchling was nearly fledged and could get a couple of inches of loft before succumbing to a force greater than its own. Overnight it succumbed to a force greater than gravity: I spotted its little big-footed corpse on the walkway as I laced my bike shoes. I used a terracotta pot to transport it to the dumpster (is that why pots should be washed between plants?). Then, as I wheeled Shadowfax to the street, I saw another dead bird, this one a housefinch old enough to be male-colored, dead in the grass under the pear. So I've got that pleasant task awaiting me this afternoon. Is my feeder diseasing the birds? This is the fourth whole (not killed by a predator) dead finch I have found on my property in the past six months.
I called RDC from work to tell him the starling didn't make it and that I'd thrown it out but to beware of the still-there dead finch. He called me a while later to tell me a magpie was eating the squab from the pigeons' nest the neighbors never clear from their soffits. He knew that would cheer me up. And it did. The avian flu that I would prefer be responsible (rather than myself) for the finches' death killed a large fraction of my favorite local bird--it's been months since magpies made a daily appearance in my life--so I hope fresh warm squab offers a lot of yummy nutrition.