Life. What We Can Do

When I was little my dad got himself a hunting dog. A papered Brittany Spaniel named The Lady Angeline. Angie. She was supposed to become this bird dog and my dad was supposed to become this bird hunter. I know he did take her out at least once because I went with them and got a tick, on the back of my neck, just at the hairline and to the left of my spine. In the soft hollow place below my skull. It was a hard little pointy bump I knew had not been a part of me when I got up that morning.

I showed my mom and she showed my dad and he diagnosed it because he had been to medical school and was a hunter. There was a lot of conferring and a call to the doctor to check on diseases. First they tried just nudging it to get out, sort of irritating it. Failing to achieve surrender, they tried coating it with oil to suffocate it. Ticks, my father informed me in response to my urgent queries, (you can suffocate if you get oil on your body?!?) breathe through their bodies, somewhere, not through their noses. Obvious, once I thought about it; its nose was buried in my scalp. Somebody, maybe the pediatrician or maybe a witch doctor my parents palled around with, told them to light a match, blow it out and put the very hot end of the match on the tick's behind. This treatment would make the tick want to back out of my head to determine what the heck was up and possibly, like Abraham, see that it was needful for it to obtain another place of residence. Apparently it was vital the tick come out of its own accord and under its own steam to insure that its head not remain with me though its body be removed, as might happen if some impetuous person tugged roughly on it with a tweezer, which some had threatened doing. Should the head be left behind (here's the part that makes me wonder if this were not advice given by a local shaman) it would continue to work away at me, sucking blood until, well. Until things got very bad. Basically, there'd be no stopping it, once it was free from the civilizing restraints of its body.

I wondered about this a great deal at the time.

If a tick could work so much more freely without its body than with it, why did it have a body in the first place? And if having your head separated from your body couldn't kill you, what on earth was going to do the job? Should my parents, with no prior tick handling skill of which I was aware, be successful in getting the thing to back willingly out of my head, was it going to be safe to release an insect unkillable into our bathroom and by extension, the rest of our house and my bedroom in particular? How was I ever going to feel safe playing outside or inside again knowing that the heads of ticks, unstoppable, could be roaming at will, seeking hairlines in which to thrive? (My mom had told me they favored the hairline.)

I was a child given more to brooding fearfully about matters of disease, monsters and the apocalypse than to just asking questions so I clamped my mouth shut and turned the whole thing over in my head, which was upside down resting on a towel folded up lots of times so that it would cushion my forehead where I was sort of standing on it leaning down on the toilet in the bathroom where the light was good.
I thought about parents and the mayhem they wrecked in the world.

Parents just did things, that was the trouble, they didn't think or stop to weigh the consequences, and look where it had gotten us.
They walked into a mess, say, throw up, and started cleaning like it was doable.
They packed up and drove all alone into the wilds following a map to a place no one had ever seen since the map got made and set up a tent, really just a house made out of clothes or sheets or something and made fire with newspaper and cooked food with just sticks and said don't put toothpaste in the tent because of bears. Goodnight, go to sleep.
They held you down and dug out your sliver. They scrubbed it with soap and rinsed it with alcohol.
They drove to Mexico even though you couldn't drink the water or eat the food, even though you might get lost or stolen and no one would ever see you again (this you knew because they told you), even though you drove past cars with all the doors open and the trunk and the seats out and the people's stuff strung out along the border crossing where the border cops had taken someone apart. "What happened to those people, Daddy? Why's their car like that?" "What? Oh, the border cops took them apart." Laughing.
They walked you across the street and put you into school where neither you nor any of your little sisters had ever been before and that was that. They expected you to stay there. And to tell them all the time how your day was and that you had learned stuff.
They bought a house; who knew how they were going to pay for it? "What if we can't pay for the house sometimes?" "What? What did you say? Oh, well then the bank takes it."

????????????

They bought a bird dog.
And they thought they could take a tick out of you with no prior medical or dangerous animal containment training whatsoever.
In the bathroom you were going to have to use in the night.
When the light would be bad.

Head down, for some time now, knees locked, legs starting to shake.
Dad says, let's try the matches. No, get the whole box.
And, even apart from everything else and the threat of wild tick heads lunging ferociously under my skin toward my brain, even aside from that, a whole box of matches, blazing, blown out and headed for my hairline is not a pleasant thought. I am so tired now, I am afraid I will just roll over my own head, perform an unintentional somersault across the toilet and slam onto the tile floor on the far side, probably snapping off the tick body and dooming myself to an eternity shared with the insatiable head. We're Mormons, we know about eternity.
Spine stiffened. Lips compressed.

You do what you have to do. When he dropped me off at the dentist to get my first tooth filled, when my dad got me out of kindergarten and dropped me at the dentist, careful to watch from the parking lot that I got into the office OK, assuring me he'd be back to pick me up when it was done, I checked myself in at the desk. What was I going to do? I had never been in a dentist's office before, but the only human in the room when I entered asked my name and I told her and she told me to wait. Till they called me. And they told me the shot wouldn't hurt much, and it didn't, much, and they told me to go back out to the waiting chairs. And after a while the lady at the desk asked if my dad was coming back and I said he said he would and after a while she told me she was sure he would be there soon and after a while he came.

When I took my youngest child to the doctor and he told me she had pneumonia he also told me that the people with this flu who had been admitted to the hospital with pneumonia were getting much, much sicker. He told me, unofficially, that he thought I should try to take care of her at home. He told me what to do, what to watch for. And I nursed her like he said, I took fierce care of my baby, only two. I did everything he had said and a whole lot more, everything I could think of or find out about and I prayed like crazy for about three days while she didn't get worse but she didn't get better but the people in the hospital got sicker and sicker. And on the fourth day she was getting better. And I had done it. And I fell right down and prayed and knew I had done just what I could do, no more, no less. So had everyone else.

What else can you do?

When I finally broke up with my charming, harming, talented smart funny abusive boyfriend and felt like I might be standing up and starting to live and finally allowed to die, both at the same time, I gathered up just enough strength to call my mom. And that was a good thing because it turned out there was something worse than the breakup. Hashing it out on the phone, being comforted, being defensive of myself, of him (!?), with my mom was worse and I got myself off the phone and that was the first step of the rest of my life.

Sometimes you're brave and sometimes you aren't smart enough to be scared. Sometimes you know what to do. Sometimes you just don't stop moving altogether and that's all you can do. Do something, my neighbor said. The amazing nurse who saved his brother's life, worked like crazy on this man, just this man in an ambulance, working all the way to Fillmore after jumping on the ambulance in Meadow, doing his job and working and working and never knowing who he was working on till he heard the name, till his brother was admitted in the emergency room. Do something, he said, telling us about working, throwing himself into saving his wife who died, anyway, young, of a heart attack after the birth of her third baby. It almost doesn't matter what you do. Do something.

I held perfectly still with my head upside down and gave my life into God's hands. I think for the first time. The dentist would be later.
It was all I could do.

Movement. Stuff. Talking. Smoke.

OK, my dad says. That's that. Do you want to see it?
I ask, is the head there? No one has mentioned it but this seems to me the obvious point, I mean, what are we talking about here? Huh? Like the baby's born and we have to inquire as to the sex?
What do you mean? my mom asks. I guess it's there, it'd be too small, really, to see. She's blind, my mom. No driving without glasses. Lucky, she says as they go off down the hall to return all the removal paraphernalia to all its rightful places, lucky it was the wrong season for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

Spotted???

Relief.

Now I know they're messing with me. This is a joke. Spotted Fever? For real. Come on, five years old is too old not to see through this flimsy pretense. At least if you're going to make stuff up to freak me out, do better with the names. Spotted Fever, indeed. So all that stuff about the rogue head was just my dad trying to give me nightmares again.

But I never forgot it. Never forgot the danger of a disembodied tick head, checked my children thoroughly after every encounter with the wild. Hairlines, folds of skin. Lyme's Disease, fevers with spots. We just don't see that here, my brilliant and beloved new pediatrician tells me, rubbing her thumb gently across the great raised red disk that is not Lyme's bull's eye but a bite made by something, something out in the wilds of our yard, on my daughter's forearm. We don't see that here.
OK, we stay in Utah. Forever.

Do you want to see it? It is a small black bug, sort of spidery looking but with short legs and, of course, too few of them. It must not have had much time to suck up my blood, because it never got big. My dad has told me, while I was upside down waiting for one of his tricks to bring the tick backing out into the daylight (blinking?) that ticks on dogs and deer get so big they are like grapes, like walnuts. They can get splatted with a soft and terrible burst and a splash, leading, I suppose, to the aforementioned problems of an unbound tick head, but I no longer believe in that. My dad certainly found leisure to convey a great deal of tick lore to me in the sensitive time while I was wrong way to the world and before we knew how the tick and I would part company. A suspiciously large amount of upsetting detail. We are alone in the bathroom, my tick and I. I am young and have elf eyes. I can clearly see that still stuck onto the body is its head which is bigger than the period at the end of a sentence and I can clearly see periods even though I can't read and don't understand what you use them for. The tick is lying on a piece of toilet paper and I have the abandoned tweezers to poke it. Abraded, oily and burned of bottom, my tick, and bits are coming off. (A shiver of fear, what can a leg do, really, on its own? Do I believe? Or not?) And unquestionably dead. Even I can see that. The light in the bathroom is good. The tick lost. I won. I won by coming through the ordeal unscathed. The tick lost by coming through the ordeal dead.

What else could we do?

My mom has come back to relieve me of the tweezers and remove the headrest towel. Good job, she says, putting stuff away up high. I am nonplussed. What? For standing on my head for forty hours? For not falling over when they were putting matches in my long hair? For not voicing questions about slow, grisly death? For figuring out that they were teasing me about spotted sickness and ticks roaming free without legs and stomachs? Good job to find that tick, to notice so quickly. I don't know how long it would have taken me to realize I had a tick on me. Good for you. And she is gone to make dinner out of some tuna fish.

I turn it over in my head. What kind of people? Who doesn't notice they have a tick on them? How lame is that? My poor, malfunctioning mom. Silly. If she is so inept as that, why at this very moment...

I am frozen with revelation and with horror. At this very moment...

But, wait, there's more. What if the whole world, or even only some of it, is as inept as my mom?

But that could mean...How will I ever go back to school? Church? Play inside? Or outside?
I walk cautiously into the breakfast nook where I can climb (quietly, this is not allowed) onto the table. I can see her well from here. She's cooking. She doesn't like to do that so she doesn't notice me. I start scanning her for pointy little bumps.

What else can I do?