Letting my dog Waldo out first thing in the morning is like uncorking warm champagne. From a bottle that’s been shaken. The door opens and Waldo explodes in twenty-five directions at once, a night’s worth of energy expended in one exuberant dash.

He has a couple of badly-frayed rope toys and he will grab one of them as he flies, shaking it furiously as he races toward his favorite tree. He has learned that he can bounce off the stockade fence, catapulting himself toward a tree branch that’s about six and a half feet off the ground, grab the branch in his mouth (after dropping the rope toy) and swing from it for a few moments. He lets go and drops to the ground with a loud “Ungh!”, then tears around the backyard like a gameshow contestant, racing to each of his favorite spots (usually where there are holes in the fence) before beginning the circuit all over again.

A number of years ago I visited the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord. It’s a wonderful place because most of his things are still there, right down to a beat-up hat hanging by the side door, waiting to be grabbed on his way out. I love to read Emerson’s essays and I remember thinking excitedly, “If I get a dog, I’m going to name him Waldo.”

It’s hard to convince people that my dervish is named not after the cartoon character, but after the premier American transcendentalist of the nineteenth century. But Emerson did write “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” which, I suppose, could be applied to Waldo. Like most dogs he is notoriously set in his ways. but his mind is always working on self-improvement. How to counter-surf faster, how to tease Jasper the sheltie in new ways, how to remind Rosie the collie that he will be the alpha.

When he was younger much of his energy was devoted to escaping the back yard, and he was successful a few times. One day a woman rang my doorbell to ask: Do you have a nutty black and white dog? She pointed to Waldo, who was furiously trying to get back into the back yard but couldn’t figure out how. When he saw me he ran into my arms and let me carry him into the house.

Another time Jasper “told” on him and I looked out to see Waldo’s tail disappear under the fence. I made the mistake of chasing him: across a busy street, through an alley filled with poison ivy, into someone’s back yard. It was like a dream–he kept me in sight, of course, but always at a distance of about twenty yards. He’s not a small dog, but he’s spindly and fast.

He spotted a woman coming out of a busy breakfast restaurant nearby, and I swear I could read the little thought-balloon over his head: “AHA, THIS will mortify her!” He disappeared past the startled diner into the restaurant, and for a brief moment as I approached I weighed my options: one–pretend he wasn’t my dog and head for home, or–two–face the music and follow him into the restaurant? Sigh. By the time I entered the cook was chasing Waldo around the dining room, where he briefly jumped into the lap of a man who was dreamily drinking his coffee and reading the paper (it was a Sunday morning). “Get him out of here!” the cook yelled, and then I screamed, “NO don’t let him out–I’ll get him!!” The Marx Brothers would have been proud of me as I tackled Waldo and carried him out. He was exhausted, as I was.

My little transcendentalist finally brought the tree branch down after whittling it away with his teeth by swinging from it one time too many. I’m surprised he didn’t try to bring it into the house, but it WAS about six feet long and had undoubtedly lost the allure it had when still attached to the tree. Now he’s got something going on the side of the house–it may be a fallout shelter or possibly just a place to bury Jasper. (I caught Jasper in it one day and could only see the top of his head.) I’ll have to keep my eye on this.

After a hiatus of several months I’m returning to the blog with the first in a series of recollections of utterly stupid acts. “Stupid” might be too harsh–maybe “bizarre” is a better descriptor. In either case, these will be anecdotal situations that arose as a result of my own behavior, that of my family, friends and possibly coworkers, or even my dogs. I probably shouldn’t begin with this particular story because I’m setting the bar awfully high and I’ll probably never be able to top it, but here goes.

About ten years ago I was on my way home from work and decided to stop at the bank. I could easily have been stopping at CVS or the gas station, but what ensued might not have been as comic as it was in the shadow of a financial institution. If I’d been on my way into a church it would have been tragic, and if I’d been in front of a liquor store it would have been run of the mill. But nearly running yourself over with your own car in front of a bank is inspired, in its own way–a postmodern take on the desperate stockholder leaping to her death from a ledge. A bit ironic.

I don’t remember why I needed to go into the bank that day, as I am a devoted user of the drive-up ATM. I haven’t actually talked to a bank teller in years. But on that weekday afternoon I decided I needed to enter the bank, so I pulled my car over to a curbside parking place that was available a few feet from the entrance. This particular bank is on a busy street, a short distance from a busy intersection. It is also directly across from a high school, and there were plenty of idle teens in the area, just waiting for someone to ridicule.

Why didn’t I use the drive-up ATM? Why didn’t I park in the lot? Why was I driving a manual transmission car? Why did I neglect to engage the handbrake? For that matter, why did I leave the house at all that day? I still don’t have the answers to these questions. I turned off the engine, opened the car door, and stepped out into the busy street. I didn’t realize that this busy street was slightly inclined until I was half out of the car and felt the open door knock me over as the car rolled back. I landed face first in the street, facing the oncoming traffic.

My mishap had all the earmarks of a desperate act: the visibility, the misuse of technology, the absence of warning. If I’d succeeded in running myself over I would surely have become one of those shocking but irrelevant headlines on CNN.com like “Bride Impales Herself on Wedding Day” or “Tot Has Flesh-Eating Bacteria.” “Woman Sues Self for Hit and Run Injuries” might now be my legacy, instead of “Stupid Acts, Part 1,” but luckily I didn’t succeed. The one far-reaching decision I had made that day was my choice of shoes.

Black suede Nine West loafers, size 10. As I was knocked over, my left loafer came off and lodged itself under the front driver’s side tire, stopping the car. Charlie Chaplin could not have choreographed it better. In the split second it took to realize that my biggest worry was going to be abject mortification, I jumped up from the pavement, grabbed the life-saving shoe, got back into the car and tore off before anyone could get a good look at my face. I think I overshot my house by a half-mile, so intent was I on distancing myself from this pratfall. I may even have waited for nightfall before returning home.

I went on to wear the Nine West loafers–with much gratitude–for many months after. In time I learned to entertain people at luncheons and meetings with an account of my mishap. But I didn’t return to that bank branch for a good couple of years, and only when I was no longer driving the same car.

My local newspaper ran a story last Sunday about Boomers having to clean out the cluttered homes of their Depression-Era parents. I’m facing this gargantuan task myself. My father died in 1999 and my mother last year, and now my sister and I have over sixty years’ accumulation of furniture, papers, clothes and “tchotchkes” to dispose of. My father was the prime keeper—old car batteries and fix-it manuals, scraps of wood and empty cardboard boxes, not to mention my pink ice skates, back issues of photography magazines, old fuses, dismantled wristwatches and every Christmas decoration they ever owned.

In the past you might responsibly have left most of this stuff by the curb for the trash pickup, but in this time of eBay and recycling, disposing of one’s things needs to be considered. And of course there’s the emotional journey of letting go of so many memory-laden things. Yes, it’s overwhelming.

So I read the article with interest and learned that I am not alone with these feelings. There were several touching accounts of creative approaches to this obligation: one woman made a wall hanging from her father’s ties, another kept her mother’s favorite chair and made it a sacred space for herself. But the article, for the most part, was the usual potpourri of cliché and expert-speak. “Coming face-to-face with all the possessions … can be such a powerful emotional experience,” one psychologist states. I suspect he said something much more complex that was likely boiled down to this banality by the newspaper in the interest of what I like to call “mental chewability.”

But the eye-catching bit of wisdom to my mind was the admonishment by one expert that “adult children should be paring down their parents’ stuff while they’re living, not waiting until they’re gone.” I had a mental image of a middle-aged son or daughter, wheelbarrow piled high with sentimental jetsam, emptying the house while the bewildered parent was trying to enjoy the last years of life. “Mom, I just can’t face doing all this after you’re gone so I’m going to start now. I’ve got a life to live—out of the way!”

My God—no wonder Baby Boomers are the objects of ridicule!

First of all [she said, struggling to get onto the soapbox], are we so simple-minded that we can’t figure out ways of living with the contradictions of seeing our elderly parents off on the final leg of their journey? Do we really have to sell the stuff out from under them in the interest of efficiency? Can we not tolerate a little clutter for them? So what if my father kept every swizzle stick, for pity’s sake. He spent two years on a boat in the dangerous Pacific in WWII, built me my first sandbox, taught me how to drive and rescued me every time my car broke down. He enjoyed having his stuff around him as he aged—he loved to spend time in the basement with his model trains and various fix-it projects that never quite got finished.

The problem here isn’t material clutter, but rather the one-size-fits-all philosophy of this kind of “news.” Some of us will have parents who downsize efficiently. Some of us will spend years caring for a parent with diminishing cognition and all the attending complexities. Some of us will expeditiously liquidate our parents’ estates, others—like me—will need more time to divest themselves of what’s left of their childhood. However they handle it it’s not a sign of mental illness, as one of the experts in this article would have you believe. It’s human nature.

I went to a small, all-girl Catholic high school. I don’t remember ever considering going to the public high school when I graduated from eighth grade in 1967–the only question for me was which girls’ high school to attend. And that really wasn’t much of a decision, since my mother, my aunt, and two of my cousins had attended Saint Patrick’s. Going to high school didn’t excite me particularly, and St. Pat’s was the path of least resistance, so I took their entrance exam. It was given on the same day as all of the other girls’ schools—St. Xavier’s, St. Mary’s of the Visitation, St. Mary’s Bay View—preventing us from hedging our bets and applying to more than one school. We were forced to plight our troth with one and only one of them.

At that time Rhode Island was, and may still be, the most Catholic of the states. How Catholic? I remember my mother keeping the custom of visiting seven churches on Holy Thursday to say a prayer in each. Saint Lawrence, Saint Augustine, Saint Pius, Saint Casimir, Holy Ghost, Saint Thomas, Blessed Sacrament—all these churches (and more) within five miles of home. There were even two Catholic churches across the street from each other on Atwells Avenue. We’d usually be home within the hour.

I entered high school right after the “Summer of Love”, which was a cultural rather than a personal experience for me. Our mandate was to test the limits of authority, and there was no better setting for this than an all-female, Catholic institution. Saint Patrick High School was run by an order of nuns called the FCJ’s, the Faithful Companions of Jesus—women who took unusual-sounding names like Mother Fidelis or Mother Assumption and who seemed sturdier and less impulsive than my grade school nuns. Even their habit was forthright and uncomplicated. The school was a dour old building in an Irish working-class section of the city.

The poor FCJ’s were creatures of another time, completely unprepared for this generation. (Several of them had taught my mother thirty years earlier, and “we thought they were old then,” she remembered.) I remember one in particular, Mother Bernardine, instructing us to write the answers to our exams on “foolscap,” triggering an overreaction of titters from her teenaged students. We didn’t know what “foolscap” was but we knew it had gone the way of the horse and buggy, and the disconnect was hilarious to us. At that time, the nuns’ definition of rebellion was using hairspray or sneaking a smoke in the lavatory, which was also hilarious. I can still remember one nun’s stricken expression when one of my classmates refused to participate in phys-ed. “Mother, I have my period!” she protested loudly as the rest of us snickered.

The idea of the single-sex high school has also gone the way of the horse and buggy, but it had its virtues. Not having boys around freed us from the mating ritual, at least during the hours school was in session. In another sense, boys are always around at that age. In their physical absence we talked about them, worried about our looks, spent far too much time applying make-up and playing with our hair. But something of the essential “girl spirit” that often goes underground during puberty survived for us in their absence, and it emerged in an unembarrassed willfulness that drove the nuns crazy. And what sometimes began as the impulse to simply make trouble often ended up as healthy rebellion against ideas and customs that really needed to be questioned.

LaSalle Academy was the nearby Catholic boys’ school, and it provided social opportunities and boyfriends for girls at the orbiting girls’ schools, of which St. Pat’s was one. Saturday night mixers, basketball and football games: the girls owned these just as much as the LaSalle boys did. The nuns and priests realized that they could not split the schoolyard in half forever so they tried in their way to infuse our social events with their ideas of Christian wholesomeness, sometimes in a heavy-handed way.

When Homecoming rolled around in the fall, the seniors at each girls’ school would pick their nominee for homecoming queen and send her photo to LaSalle where the boys would then vote for their favorite from these nominees. I suppose this wasn’t very different from public high schools except that it was a little more diffuse. There were more social systems involved but the machinations were the same. The prettiest and/or most popular girl and boy were generally chosen to participate in this performance that allegedly signified something about girls and boys and the memories that life is made of. Whatever it meant, we were ready to make fun of it.

During our deliberations at St. Pat’s, a girl I’ll call “C.C.” nominated herself. C.C. was what we called a “ballbuster”: she was tough and funny and not afraid to rock the boat. She was also what one would politely call a “big girl,” which was not the usual homecoming queen body type. She didn’t wear make-up or spend a lot of time combing her hair. She was much more interested in shaking up the status quo by challenging the teachers and making the rest of us laugh.

I’m sure we all laughed at her nomination before we realized that here was the chance to give the figurative “finger” to the custom of picking a “queen.” I won’t say that this was a unanimous realization—my guess is that it was spontaneously embraced by those of us who had never expected to be nominated, and this momentum took everyone by surprise. It was a rejection and an acceptance, in one gesture. By nominating C.C. the “anti-queens” were symbolically sending one of our own, and if we could get enough of the LaSalle boys onboard we might make some waves.

So we voted C.C. our homecoming queen candidate. And the nuns immediately shot us down, not even realizing the trap we’d set for them. In order to reject our nomination they had to reject our nominee, which meant acknowledging that this was all about looks and their own sanitized version of youthful sexuality. We didn’t really expect to succeed but we had fun hoping, we had fun watching the nuns squirm before our vision of young womanhood.

Several years ago my mother moved into the Alzheimer’s wing of an assisted living home.  That process was heartbreaking for all of us, but we’d arrived at the point where she could no longer be left alone at all.  We were actually long past that point, but sometimes you have to go there: to the land of close calls and crossed fingers.  It’s hard to let go of the belief that one’s home is the best of all possible places as we age, even though I knew that was no longer true for my mother.  She could no longer figure out how to use the telephone or most of the appliances, yet she remembered that she had once used them easily, so she kept trying.  Confusing the cordless phone for the television remote, she once dialed 911 while trying to change the channel.

So we moved her to an assisted living facility about five miles away.  Seeing her bereft of her memory and abilities was hard enough, and seeing her in this state in a strange place was harder.  But we all survived, and I can see now that my mother lived a richer final year there than she would have at home.  One of the reasons for that was the social life at the assisted living home: the relationships between staff and residents and among the residents themselves.

I hadn’t expected this to happen, but her friends there came to mean a lot to me, too.  One of the first and most special was Millie, a woman of about the same age as my mother.  My mother’s name was also Millie, so she was often called Amelia–which she didn’t like–in order to distinguish her from her friend.  But because they were drawn to each other by temperment and circumstance people called them “the two Millies.”

They were both tall, sweet-natured women.  When I arrived for a visit I would often find them sitting together at a table in the bright central area of the wing, sometimes with several other women, sometimes alone.  Millie was more articulate than my mother, which led me to guess that her dementia might not be Alzheimer’s but Vascular.  One day I arrived to find my mother newly permed.  “Doesn’t she look lovely?” Millie said. “She looks just like a girl.”  My mother beamed.

I often visited about an hour before dinnertime, in order to have a built-in exit. It was easier to say good-bye as my mother was moving on to another activity than it was to leave her alone in her room.  At the end of one of my visits the aide stopped by to let us know that dinner was on its way–preparations began well before the cart arrived in order to make bathroom visits and to convince reluctant residents that it was indeed 5 o’clock.  As we walked to the dining area my mother detoured into Milllie’s room, and they came out hand-in-hand.  “I couldn’t forget her,” my mother told me.

In another lovely coincidence we discovered that they shared a birthday, having been born a year apart on the same day.  I confirmed this with Millie’s son, who was a frequent visitor.  We often chatted with him and his wife when our paths crossed.  I remember passing him one day as he was arriving and I was leaving.  “They’re in my mother’s room,” I said.

Millie’s abilities declined after an illness sometime in the fall, and she moved to the skilled nursing unit across the hall.  Her son would bring her back to visit her friends on my mother’s unit, but it just wasn’t the same without her.  A big part of the loss was the impossibility of discussing it with my mother.  “Do you ever see Millie?” I once asked her.  She looked at me blankly.  “Who?” she said.

Change happens literally overnight in this kind of situation.  A virus or a simple fall is the difference between life and death, and so it was the case with my mother.  She was normally quite healthy and did not require a lot of assistance with her daily routine, but one day she fell when getting out of bed.  This was the beginning of the end, as they say.  Two hospitalizations later, we moved her into the skilled nursing unit where Millie was, but my mother was too far gone to resume any friendships.  Millie herself looked good and was moving around very well.  She sometimes sat with us during the two weeks my mother spent on that unit.

Hospice was now a large part of my mother’s fading life, and soon she no longer got out of bed.  I ran into Millie’s son and daughter-in-law a couple of days before my mother died.  They both hugged me and I saw tears in their eyes.

I write all this after seeing Millie’s obituary in the newspaper this past week.  She died on Mother’s Day, which is both sad and wonderful.  She was one of those completely unexpected bright spots in a situation I’d thought we would have to merely endure.  She and my mother reminded me of the rich lives we can have despite dementia and its privations.  Rest in peace, Millie.

How could I resist this face?

Waldo is a testament to the dangers of roaming Petfinder unsupervised.   My 14-year-old collie Lily had died in April and my 6-month old sheltie Jasper needed a friend, so first thing every day I would find myself there, sniffing around for the perfect pet.  From week to week Petfinder remembered my parameters—Animal: Dog; Breed: Collie; Sex: Any; Age: Any.  I soon came to know the bewildered faces my search turned up, over and over, and I was usually relieved when I saw the “adoption pending” note near their pictures.  I actually applied for several candidates only to discover that I would not make the cut as an owner because I worked during day or my backyard fence was in poor shape.

And then one day I spotted an adorable male puppy listed by a Massachusetts rescue organization.  In his picture he was held firmly by two male hands; he was squinty and cute and described as part Aussie, part Border Collie.  “Border Collie” should have been my first warning but I disregarded it.  I only saw his remarkable coloring: not really merle, not really brindle, maybe harlequin?  I imagined having two puppies to play with—this would be fun!  So I filled out the online application and waited.

Two weeks and several phone calls later I sat in my car at 7:30 on a Wednesday morning in the parking lot of a municipal animal shelter, awaiting Waldo’s arrival.   He was not, it turned out, actually at the Massachusetts rescue (some 50 or so miles away) but at a shelter in Beebe, Arkansas (some 2000 miles away).  And now he was on the “puppy bus” making its way to Rhode Island, a prospect that had given me pause when I’d first learned of his whereabouts.  Little did I know that there are folks who make their living ferrying homeless southern animals (where overpopulation is at a critical point) to their new lives up north.  As I watched the bus pull into the lot I was expecting a smelly, traumatized puppy, but I was in for a surprise.

There were at least ten other dogs arriving at their “forever homes” that day.  Over and over again, dogs were fetched from the RV and placed in the arms of their new families while other family members and friends took pictures of that first hug, that first walk, the sweet strangeness of the meeting.  Some of the dogs were puppies and some were older dogs who had undoubtedly found their worlds fractured by this dislocation.  The human reaction to all this was beyond poignant.  I remember thinking that most of these people had probably taken time out of work to be here, had brought a new toy or a bag of treats, had gone to some length to bring these abandoned dogs into their households.

The pup that was handed to me was clean, happy (somewhat frantically, but that’s okay) and well-cared-for.  Nails trimmed, no fleas–he was even wearing a collar with a little dog tag bearing my name and address.  The bus (actually RV) driver handed me a neat manila envelope with his medical records and papers, and Waldo was mine.  In the car he wrapped his paws around my neck.  He had the beginnings of spindly legs and the longest tail I’d ever seen on a dog, and it wagged furiously as he sniffed, sniffed, sniffed.

Within five minutes of his arrival home Waldo had done his business on the couch, which, I suppose, is like hollering, “MINE–ALL MINE!”  Jasper had long since gotten used to a slow-paced life with an elderly collie, and he was visibly affronted by Waldo’s challenges to his territory.  Anyone who has known a Shetland Sheepdog will recognize the particular expression of  indignance that precedes a sheltie outburst.  Jasper was by that time a graduate of puppy kindergarten and I’m sure this speckled, untutored yahoo was the last thing he wanted to see.

He and Waldo would develop a tempestuous relationship, a rollercoaster of wild play and noisy competition.  But they came to a truce by bedtime that first night, which was good, because I was exhausted.

I don’t know that the world needs another blog, but that really isn’t the point. The world doesn’t “need” another piece of music or another Boston cream pie, but those are a couple of the things that make life interesting.

Blogs are bits of conversation, and anyone can join in, which is what makes them wonderful.   The other day I had a nice telephone conversation with someone who had mistakenly dialed my extension at work.  While I looked up the correct number he commented on the name of my workplace (which is a person’s name), and we ended up chatting for a few minutes.  I couldn’t see this person, but we had a brief connection that put me in a better mood as a result.

And so I’d like to try to start a conversation or two by making observations here in the form of short essays.  There’s something to be said for seeing your own thoughts in print–it gives some shape to the chaos within.  Putting it all into words–playing by the rules of grammar and composition–is a kind of discipline.  So here goes.