Scouring

It used to be sponges. You know the kind with the scouring pad on one side; sometimes dark green, but lately I’ve been buying them with multi-colored swirls.

Sweetie had grown up using rags, a method I believe she has secretly always thought superior, but for the sake of our relationship has decided to consent. Rags never made sense to me, where was the fun in that? Sure you could wash them when they got dirty instead of throwing them out, but they didn’t have any abrasions. I tried, for a while, just using the thin green abrasive ones, similar in feel to the backing on those Scotch Bright yellow ones, the ones for Heavy Duty pots and pans, but they don’t hold enough water for my liking. That, and the fact that little bits of egg or flour or peanut butter would get trapped and it would retire to the top of the sink, too new to throw away but too disgusting to feel comfortable using again.

For some reason earlier this month Sweetie decided that the only way to get the toilet REALLY clean was to pull out an old box of S.O.S. pads hidden in the back underneath the sink, and to scour the hell out of it. And you know, somehow her using those little steel-soap pads flipped a switch. Sure I had known about them before. My mother, in fact, used them when I was a kid, just like every other kids parents probably did, but I never really got it until Sweetie took the plunge.

As Sweetie I’m sure would tell you, I’m not a neat freak by any stretch of the imagination. Though I will do my steps of the cleaning-up-the-trailer or taking-out-the-garbage dance, I’m quite comfortable with a mess level that is up a little higher than hers is.

When we left college, Sweetie and I took jobs cleaning up the college dorms trying to raise enough money to move to Seattle and get an apartment. It was slow tedious work, where everything you cleaned would get inspected twice and where you learned that toothbrushes were great at cleaning the cracks of refrigerator door molding, how to really clean a stove, where old pee gathers and rots in the bathroom, and a number of other facts that I’m not sure my stomach is ready to go though right now. It did, however, set a precedent for both Sweetie and I to realize just how clean, clean can be.

I thought of the broiler pan, with its hard baked on enamel finish and the blackened burnt-ness left from the last time we had steaks, or the time before when we had fish. Would the pads work on that? I had to find out.

Somehow SOS pads have just the right amount of scrub-to-clean ratio needed for me to be entertained for the half hour or so it took to clean it. I would have gone on to the Pyrex right then if my hand hadn’t started cramping up due to the pinching position you have to hold for the pads to be effective.

I got to the Pyrex last night, and for one brief shining moment, all the brown baked on mess is gone, replaced by a look it hasn’t had since new. A look where you can see though the edges and the handles and it shines from the overhead sink light. I wanted to attack the oven-door glass but again my hands aren’t strong enough.

I can wait. I have a half-full box waiting with my name on it and I’m not afraid to use it.

The Mediation

Well things have started to settle on the lawsuit front. For the past few years Sweetie and I have been embroiled in a lawsuit with Seattle Children’s Hospital over some sub-par care Ike had received when he still had his old illness. We had a mediation with them at the beginning of the month in which we reached an agreement and later this week we will sign all that paperwork and put it to rest.

The mediation was harder than I was prepared for, at least emotionally. I had come to think of myself as toughened up and ready for anything, at least where Ike is concerned. But it’s one thing to talk, and quite another thing to be, or so it seemed in that office, near the top floor looking out at the melting-snow-covered view of First Hill.

I had my ass kicked: Sweetie and I both did. When the day was over, after wandering around trying to remember where we parked, we sat in the car thinking how the simple act of turning on the ignition was really pretty difficult when you stopped to think of it. I mean first you have to find the keys, maneuver them past and around the steering column and aim for a small slot located at a right angle from where you’re sitting.

All I could do was stare.

Fortunately we came prepared. By that I mean we had stopped for coffee on the way and after only a few more sips I was able to get the engine to turn over and we made our way out of the parking garage and into the slushy remnants of the regions first snow fall of the year.

The boys were staying with my brother’s family while we were gone. Sweetie and I took roads we hadn’t been on since we lived in Seattle, winding our way though the back streets, across neighborhoods left stranded by the lack of snowplows, in the hopes that a few more minutes of rest would give us enough energy to get us home.

The New CD

Well the Prairie Dogs have moved one step closer to legitimacy with the launching of their site at CDBaby.com. Lisa, my good friend in Indiana, has been helping me with the Prairie Dogs home page and right now all these things are starting to gel. I am humbled by the hard work all my friends have done to help me get these sites to the place that they are today, they have given their time and artistic talents for free and for that I am truly grateful.

There’s a feeling around the trailer park that we’re at the start of a very good year. It’s an intangible feeling really, it’s not like I can put my finger on any one thing. Getting the CD out was one step, settling our case with the hospital was another. There’s a feeling around here that we’ve pushed our way to the top of this hill and we’re just about to start on our way down.

The sun being out lately has helped as well. Sweetie, being a lifetime Tacoman, doesn’t seem to mind the gray as much as I do. It’s as if her body was born with an extra store of vitamin D that is accessed when the weather becomes too much. Myself, I run out just about now. Spending the short winter days staring out the window with my arms pulled up under my armpits, squinting into the fog for a patch of sun to break through.

Things are just starting to slow down here at the mill as well. The first of the year tends to kick everyone’s ass at first, but after a few weeks we get caught up and things start to get back to normal. I'm thinking that should help getting this site updated more often then it has been.

Please take a look around the cdbaby.com Prairie Dogs site if you get the chance. For those of you who already own a CD, Thank You. For those of you who don’t, you can listen to all the songs there, and make up your own mind. Oh and if you really want to charm me, spend a little time writing a review. At the very least, someone might say, “well, at least their friends like them.”

Jesse Thorp

It came rolled up in a poster tube, sticking up out of the mailbox all white and taped up. The blue ballpoint pen told me it was from a family named Thorp in Selah. Sweetie knew right away who it was from. She’s like that some times, the way she keeps things locked away for future use.

“Where’s it from?” she asked me again when I told her the name on the return address. But she knew already, knew before I even told her.

Inside the tube was a large poster, and a three-page letter with a small picture of a bare-chested young man with his arm around his dog paper-clipped to the top corner.

Jesse Thorp was a sixteen-year-old boy who died when the PT Cruiser he was driving lost control and veered off a highway back in the fall of 2000. He was also the boy who’s liver Ike got when Ike was so sick and no doubt on his way to an early death.

Jesse Thorp was the boy who’s death saved Ike’s life.

We had learned his name a day or two after the surgery. The transplant unit keeps this information confidential, but in this age of online Internet access it was just a simple search of some local online newspapers that didn’t take much more than ten minutes to find. I don’t think we even hesitated…it was just something the both of us wanted to know and so we found it.

Ike’s middle name is Jesse, spelled the same way and all, named after my Great grandfather who lies buried in a cemetery above the town of Missouri Valley, Iowa. When Ike was first diagnosed with his illness we heard of another boy who died named Jesse, who had shared the same illness as Ike and who died in a clinical gene therapy trial gone wrong, looking for a cure. It is a name that for some reason keeps coming back to us, not a common name, but common name around here.

It was a terribly sad letter, and so out of the blue that it really shook us up. The way that it works is that it’s up to the receiving family to make first contact, which we did almost two years ago. I guess we always figured that we would get this letter someday. But it was a very hard read nonetheless.

I don’t know what it is to lose a son. Not one that you have seen grown up, that you have put a life’s work into. I know what it is to live in that place between life and death. I know what it feels like to be powerless when your son is just barely holding on to life. I know what it’s like to have a doctor tell you that your son isn’t going to make it. I know that kind of fear, but I don’t know that kind of loss.

I tell you one thing. It makes all of life’s problems seem very small and insignificant in comparison, when all the things you felt were so important and pressing and meaningful in the blink of an eye become absolutely irrelevant.

You hold your family closer and everything gets kind of quiet, like you’re watching snow fall, or a fire in the fireplace, or the last few rays of light in a Key West sunset.