The Cottage and the Kennel Visitations

Ginger Cottage was billed as the Villa Palmieri for our summer pandemic Decameron. The photographs on the website must have been taken the second renovations were completed 15 years ago. If you compared the photos to what the cottage actually looked like, you could, with a bit of imagination, conclude that the presentation was not an outright lie … but it was about as close to an outright lie as one could get without lying outright.

What awful thing from my past compares to these present circumstances? This is a game I play with myself sometimes as a survival strategy for a wretched experience - ranking a new crap experience in a theoretical pantheon of earlier crap experiences. I suspect that trying to remember the intimate details of every bad experience might not be the wisest of choices, but I can’t help myself.

Of course, the cottage website photos didn’t convey the smells – an odd aroma of cleaners, old water, and vomit from the bathroom to the sickly sweet acidic odor outdoors drifting in from the nearby timber mill that wasn’t mentioned at all on the website.

Which reminds me, there are plenty of trees around, nice big ones, too. Sadly, we were warned not to hike through the woods. Apparently, if we were ticks, we would be hanging out at the tick Woodstock going on in those trees. Cindy and Beth decided, somehow, that the ticks were only fair what with global warming and all. I’m not quite sure how you tie all that together, but it made sense to them. So, I decided not to say anything. I know Cindy would be upset if I revealed the true state of my mind.

Oh yeah, it just came to me. An experience possibly worse than the weekend stuck in this cottage. When I was 17, I spent one fiendishly long evening as the night watchman at a veterinary hospital. The promise of this job was amazing. The vet paid $50 a night, and all I had to do was keep stoners from breaking in to steal the vet’s drugs, feed the dogs in the kennels, take them out on the runs twice, clean up a bit, and then the rest of the night was mine. It sounded wonderful. I figured I’d make $1,000 a month easily for almost no work. A friend of mine had this job once, and I know on several nights we had eaten pizza, drank beer, and played poker in the vet’s empty waiting room … all while he was supposedly working. But that night, my one night there as the watchman, was on the shortlist of my lifetime’s bad events.

The cabin's laminated instructions card points out that the woods also has spiders. Large ones. So, I guess as you’re walking through the woods, slightly bent, looking out for crouching ticks ready to pounce, then you’ll miss the abundant spider webs festooned gracefully among the trees.

Add in the frequent rain showers that slick up everything outside, and you begin realizing that you’ve exchanged your home pandemic lockdown for a country cottage lockdown of a different kind. I never appreciated our home that much – until now. It’s lovely to find one redeeming quality from a bad experience.

So, I’m stuck inside a small space filled with semi-broken tables, mismatched chairs with stained upholstery lit by an oddly arranged assortment of light fixtures whose light is either too bright or too dark, depending on where you are, and nothing in this “luxury” cottage would have looked great when it was new, and time has not been kind.

There were three crises that night at the vet hospital, kind of like A Christmas Carol only in a vet hospital during the summer about two weeks before school started. I suppose the vet even played a Jacob Marley role as he told me that there might be crises during the night. He looked nothing like Jacob Marley, of course, but I can't say that I wasn't warned.

The first visitation began when a frantic lady called the hospital's emergency number because her two pet Pekinese had gotten into a fight and one dog put a claw through one of the other dog’s eyes. I tried to calm her down, told her that she could come in, and called the vet who reluctantly said he would come in. The woman burst into even more tears when the vet said that all he could do was take out the dog’s eye and that the fur would grow over it. He scolded me for calling him. Then he went home. The dog would lose its now dead eye sometime during the next day when convenient.

If it was just me in this cottage, or even if it was just Cindy and me, I would probably spend my time buried deep, deep in a book imagining other places, and other worlds. Cindy doesn’t usually take offense at my reading, and she has little idea about what an escape tunnel it provides me.

But it’s not just the two of us.

Cindy and I were invited to the charming cottage in the woods by her cousin Beth. She arrived with her current boyfriend Samson. I think he’s actually called Sam, but the repeated displays of male preening during our short time together here suggest something more biblical to me.

Samson is doing is best to charm the ladies because, well, that’s just what he does. He sort of stylizes himself as a reincarnated James Dean. But it’s just a costume, a poser as the surfers used to say. Whereas James Dean pretty much seems to have been a rebel without a cause, Sam is a stylized rebel, which really means his persona is more like a theatrical costume that he can put on and take off as needed.

Sam is flirting with both Cindy and Beth. They seem charmed, my wife and her cousin. I suppose Sam has some fantasy of bedding two cousins together. Cindy and Beth have always been quite prudish, and I suspect they’d be horrified at the thoughts that are almost certainly running through Sam’s head. What would they think if they truly understood boys like Sam.

But it doesn’t really matter what happens. So long as Samson can go back to work on Monday and tell his buddies a semi-believable story about an encounter with two sexy cousins or some other exciting tale, then I’m sure it won’t really matter if it didn’t exactly happen or happen the way he tells it. But that’s just a guess based on the other Samson’s I’ve known, and what my friend Marty says about this specific Samson; Marty works in the same office with Samson.

The second “visitation” at the vet’s came when the vet showed up suddenly to meet the SPCA volunteer who was bringing in a poor German Shepherd who had been found hit by a car. The accident had crushed the dog’s pelvis. The poor dog whimpered plaintively all the way until the vet put him out of his misery. I’ve lived long enough to see more than one human die, and I’m not sure I’ve seen anything sadder than that German Shepherd. But this wasn’t the “best” part of that evening. Oh, wait, I almost forgot about the dog in for rabies observation, and the vet had said I didn’t have to take the dog to the run if I didn’t want to. Wow, a rabid dog, and I don’t have to handle it. Lovely. But this still wasn’t the “best” part.

Sam isn’t really Cindy’s type, and I suspect she’s lapping up the attention more to irritate me than because she’s actually charmed. I don’t think Sam and Beth have been together very long, but long enough for Beth to become peculiarly clingy. As I recall she had to have months of therapy after her last boyfriend left.

I know I probably sound petty and mean, but being in this cabin is nothing I sought out or wanted. Cindy so wanted to leave home that she clearly ignored any sign that the weekend was going to be like this. I don’t understand why people buy expensive houses and fill them with expensive furnishings if the goal is to runaway from them at the first chance.

I found a tattered copy of Tender is the Night among the cottage’s odd book collection. Fitzgerald was right next to Food Can Fix It by Dr. Oz. An interesting pairing. Both seem like odd choices for holiday reading, but who knows. The bookshelf holds a coverless copy of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, which I might start reading if Samson carries on much longer. I read about half of Cellini once, and Samson seems like a character from that world.

The rain has started again. Heavier than last time.

“Hey, Tony, maybe we should get a fire goin’, huh?” asks Sam.

“He’s called Ted, Sam,” injects Cindy giggling.

I point out that it’s 20 outside, meaning that a fire would be ridiculous.

Sam and Beth look at me like I’ve spoken gibberish.

“Ted doesn’t do Fahrenheit,” says Cindy triumphantly.

“What is that in American?” asks Sam.

I tell Sam that I think that’s about 68 in Fahrenheit.

“Oh. Yea. Ok. I just wanted to chop some wood, you know,” says Sam coming as close to flexing his muscles as one could without actually looking like a cartoon character at the beach.

I nod understandingly, wondering why he doesn’t just spread his peacock plumage, then ask myself if Sam would even know how to chop wood. I’d guess his hands are actually softer than Cindy’s.

“How long did you live in France, Tone?”

“It’s Ted,” interjects Beth.

“Ted. Sorry.”

I tell him that I lived in Paris for a little more than 10 years.

“So, you speak French?”

“A bit,” I say. The last thing I’m going to do is speak a word of French.

“Cool,” responds Sam, launching into a predictable story about a ski trip last winter. If I had spoken French, he would have launched into a story about photographing great white sharks in South Africa.

My final “visitation” at the vets happened, predictably, I suppose, when I went to bed. The dogs howled. They kept howling, one howl above the rest. The vet had mentioned a basset hound that had gone blind from cataracts. This dog’s howling kept the crowd going at full volume. At first, when I switched the light on in the kennel, the basset hound stopped howling but then it start again the second I turned the light off. I thought that maybe the howling would stop after a time. So, I went to bed amidst the howls. After 30 minutes, I got up again. This time the basset hound would only stop if I stood in front of its cage. After a while, I went back to bed again. The second I climbed into bed, the basset hound started up again. This time, it would only stop when I knelt by its cage. After a while, I went back to bed again. The next time, the poor dog would only stop when I knelt by its cage and petted it. I considered sleeping on the concrete floor in front of the kennel, but I couldn’t figure out any way that would work. I eventually went back to bed and tried to outlast the dogs. They barked all night long without stopping. I saw my easy $1,000 vanishing in a puff of smoke, as it was abundantly clear that I might have trouble graduating high school if I tried to keep this job, let alone get into a good college. So, I quit after just one night. Yes, this weekend in the cottage so far just about matches that experience.

Beth and Cindy are held frozen as Samson relates his latest skiing adventure. His poses and gestures so well fit the James Dean motif that I know Samson must know what he looks like doing this … which means he must have practiced all this in a mirror. I wonder if the real James Dean practiced his look in the mirror. Oh well. Back to Tender is the Night. Even though I know what’s going to happen to Dick Diver, the novel still seems less predictable than Samson.

The rain picks up and is briefly joined by thunder and hail.

Beth, Cindy, and Sam begin rummaging through the odd assortment of games in the cottage. So much of the Monopoly set is missing that they spend 15 minutes trying to figure out how they can work around the missing money, missing property cards, and a complete absence of Community Chest cards. It’s amazing how many Community Chest cards four adults can remember. They next find a Trouble game, but the die in the pop-o-matic has apparently been cut out from the bottom of the game board and can’t be found anywhere. The Scrabble set is obviously missing a few letters. Well, actually, you probably couldn’t have much of a game with an F, E, X, Q, and W. At last they find a Game of Life that seems to have enough Linklater bucks to make a go of it. I wish them luck and return to my book, as they dig into the game.

The rain seems to be about to stop.

Samson thinks it might be a great idea to drive down the highway to the bar at the crossroads. He claims the portable sign in front said there would be live country music tonight. Cindy and Beth immediately begin practicing their version of a line dance. Sam starts recounting wild stories about getting into fights at redneck bars, which while entertaining are completely fabricated, I’m sure.

I imagine that I’ll spend the night peacekeeping, which might work unless Sam tells the natives that I lived in France. At that thought I involuntarily wink, practicing I guess for an imaginary bar patron standing in front of Sam, looking in my direction.

I suppose I can buy rounds of drinks as peace offerings, as I know Sam will inevitably want to come as close as possible to getting into fights as preening for Cindy and Beth. I suspect that Sam doesn’t really know the first thing about bar fights, which I’m sure he also knows, and I figure this means that he’ll have to subtly manipulate any opponents towards me instead. If only I had a "God Bless Our Snipers" t-shirt, as I suspect that might defuse many tricky situations.

Of course, I could stay here tonight and not go with them to the bar. No. A thousand outcomes, all bad, rush through my head if I stay here tonight … and half of those options involve me driving to the rescue. Hmm, after this cottage weekend is done and dusted, I wonder if it will rank above or below the veterinary night watchman experience. We'll see, I guess.