Copyright © 2021 by Ralph Robert Moore.

Return to lately 2021.

When last we left me, I had broken my right hip, and was in the process of healing.

With the aid of a walker, I was able to shuffle my way out to the kitchen, to prepare breakfast for Mary and me.

I was discharged from the hospital on a Sunday. The following day, Monday, in the mid-afternoon, a The New Yorker canvas book bag slung around my neck like a horse's feedbag, filled with Mary's cold uncapped beer, a bottle opener, an empty glass, a bottle of whiskey, a steel cannister filled with ice cubes, I pulled my way up the stair rails of our red brick home to the second floor, to my study.

I wanted to read my emails, see what was happening on Facebook, start a new story. And a stupid broken hip wasn't going to stop me.

Over the months that followed, I got stronger. Was able to drive again. Walk around in supermarkets, unassisted, even though my body listed to the right with each step.

And then things started going wrong.

One important lesson you hopefully learn early in life is, If something goes wrong, fix it right away, because you can be sure as fuck something else about to go wrong is right behind it.

In our case, the first thing that went wrong was our dishwasher.

We only had it for about a year. Paid a thousand dollars for it.

I lowered its front door one morning, and the upper rack sagged down. Broken.

How did that happen?

Called an appliance repair place we had used before. Their guy came out, did a temporary fix until the part we needed arrived.

Two days after he did the permanent fix, the dishwasher no longer cleaned our pots and pans.

A residue of food scum left on everything in the dishwasher once the cycle was complete. Even the forks.

The repair guy came back out. Ran some diagnostic tests, announced we needed to replace our control panel.

Five hundred dollars.

I wrote him a check.

He spent an hour or so installing the new control panel, and it worked like a charm.

Pots and pans, plates, forks, everything spotless.

For two days.

On the third day, a residue of food scum again on all the surfaces.

That discouraged me.

I decided not to call the repair guy out again, but simply buy a new dishwasher.

Fewer headaches (I thought).

Early one morning while Mary still slept, I researched dishwashers online, bought one from Best Buy.

About a thousand dollars.

Best Buy would deliver the new dishwasher, install it, and haul off the old dishwasher.

I received an email from Best Buy confirming the delivery date, between 8:30 and 12:30.

I showered, dressed, removed all the spray cans, cleaners, etc. from under the sink to make the installer's job easier.

12:30 came and passed. No delivery. Called Best Buy. They contacted the guy installing the dishwasher, he called me. He was running late, he'd be at our home in a hour.

4:30 I called Best Buy back. They tried calling him, but he wouldn't pick up the phone. I have no idea what the fuck that was all about.

I cancelled the purchase. Four words, but it probably took about three hours on hold on the phone over two days to accomplish. First I had to reschedule the delivery, since the guy never showed up, wouldn't pick up his phone, apparently disappearing somewhere on the north Texas highways, and for all I know had been whisked up above the clouds and anally probed by note-taking gray aliens (and if that was the case, he has my utmost sympathy), then had to call the next day, and cancel my order because the initial delivery never took place.

This whole time, without a dishwasher, I'm handwashing our dishes each morning before Mary wakes up. And I'm actually getting pretty efficient at it. Flipping white plates over, scrubbing down around the interior curves of heavy stainless-steel skillets. If I ever decide to come out of retirement, I can probably walk into any restaurant, ask the hiring manager to lead me to a pile of dirty dishes, and impress the fuck out of her or him. "You're hired!"

But here's the thing. Our pipes below our sink are apparently clogged, so I can only run the water so long before it backs up into the sink. And because the kitchen sink is fairly far away from the water heater in the garage, by the time the water out of the faucet is hot enough to clean the dishes the sink is already filling up, so I can only wash a few dishes before I have to turn the water off and wait for it to lower.

Which means washing the dishes is an on again, off again, all day project.

Frustrating.

We need to get a plumber out here to unclog the pipes below our kitchen sink.

I called out a local plumbing company, and they snaked the pipes under our sink, which took about an hour, after which the water swirled down both sides of the sink with no problem. So that problem was solved. I could wash our dirty dishes during one early morning session.

At the same time, our last remaining cat born from Lady's litter back in 2002, the same year Mary had her stroke, Sweet Pea, started slowly dying. I could feel the knobs of her spine under her fur when I rubbed her back. When you can feel the knobs of a cat's spine underneath her fur, in my experience, that means she's shutting down. Can't do anything about it.

And on top of that, Mary herself is going through a phase where she doesn't have a lot of energy. She starts eating less, getting out of bed less. This really concerns me. If she becomes bed bound, that'll probably lead to another hospital stay and, likely, another long stay in a skilled nursing facility. Which is no fun at all.

And the kitchen faucet develops a steady drip, drip, drip that can't be turned off.

And the toilet in our master bathroom starts leaking water onto the floor beside the toilet every time we flush.

It's a bit overwhelming.

Since the Best Buy dishwasher didn't work out, I went online, researched top of the line dishwashers, and decided to go with Bosch.

Ordered one from Home Depot.

They'll deliver the dishwasher, install it, and haul off the old dishwasher.

Except, that turned out not to be true.

Because of Covid-19, our delivery would be delayed by a week.

But, okay.

On the appointed day, I'm keeping an ear turned to our phone while we watch TV. The people who will install our new dishwasher are scheduled to arrive anytime between 8:30 in the morning and 4:30 in the afternoon. That's an eight-hour stretch where I have to stay alert each time our landline phone rings. Because although like a lot of you we get a number of scam calls each day, one of those rings will be authentic, and I don't want to miss picking it up before it goes to our answering machine, because if it does go to our answering machine, I figure the installer will reasonably decide to drive to someone else's home instead, who at least answers the phone and confirms they're home. No installer wants to drive to a house where their doorbell pressings go unanswered. That's wasting their time. I get it. So each occasion the phone starts to ring, I slide out of bed and limp towards our phone, muting the TV as I pass it.

And almost all the calls are scam calls.

This comedy goes into the early afternoon, at which point Mary and I are rewatching The Godfather in bed, we're almost at the end of the movie, it holds up well, and our Incoming Call display on our TV screen, juxtaposed in the upper left corner during the scene where Michael Corleone first meets Mo Green in Vegas, has a 469 area code, which the Home Depot representative told me the plumber would have.

I hobble to the ringing landline, mute the TV.

"Hello?"

"Mr. Moore? Just letting you know you're my next stop."

"I appreciate the update. So when do you think you'll be here?"

"My GPS says 30 minutes."

Great. I tell Mary, give her the remote so she can watch whatever recorded show she wants, move out to the breakfast nook table, to be closer to the front door when he arrives. Start reading Quentin Tarantino's novelization of his most recent movie, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, a movie I really, really enjoyed. I moved to California from Connecticut a few years after the events in the story, spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, and recognized a lot of the locations shown in the movie. I'm really enjoying my read, even though Tarantino has a habit of sometimes using too many words, like saying, 'He nodded in the affirmative' instead of just, 'He nodded.' But it's a great read so far.

Knock on the door. I limp over to it, mask in place.

Two guys on our cement porch, big box containing our new dishwasher on a dolly.

Usher them in.

Happy.

They'll get the new dishwasher working. No more handwashing dishes. One of our many problems solved.

The taller guy goes into the kitchen, squatting on his knees, checks out the old dishwasher to be removed.

I go back to the breakfast nook table, picking back up my paperback, another person's words in front of my eyes. Feeling optimistic. Going back to 1969.

After a minute: "Sir? There's a problem."

Fuck.

"A problem?

Rise from my black chair, walk around the counter separating the breakfast nook from the kitchen.

"Yeah. The shut-off valve? Under the sink? It's missing its knob. We can't install the dishwasher until the knob is replaced. I can have a plumber come out to do that, and then we can reschedule the installation."

The shut-off valve allows you to turn off the water flow, which you need to do in order to get the dishwasher installed.

Great.

"Okay. Will you schedule that, please?"

He looks up while still squatting on his knees. "On it."

So, no dishwasher installation today.

Back to handwashing all our dirty dishes.

"The plumber will contact you within 24 to 48 hours to schedule an appointment to come out and install the shut-off valve."

This was a Wednesday. Saturday, I still hadn't heard from the plumber. Called Home Depot's service number. The woman I spoke to asked if she could put me on hold while she called the installers to find out the status of the plumber's schedule. Of course. I was on hold for half an hour. Listening to the same Home Depot upbeat commercials over and over and over again. I hope I never again hear that corporate optimism.

Finally, she came back on the line. "I'm having difficulty contacting the installers, but I'll stay on the line until I do. In the meantime, you can hang up."

I did, made breakfast.

Monday, I called Home Depot's customer service again.

It was a guy this time. "May I put you on hold for a minute?"

Fifteen minutes.

"The plumber will call you in a couple of hours to schedule an appointment."

This was at 8:30. At 11:30 the phone rang. A woman from Home Depot. "The plumber will be out sometime tomorrow. He'll call you a half hour before he arrives."

"Can you give me any sort of window? Like, between 8:30 and 10:30? 10:30 and 12:30?"

"I'm sorry, sir. He can't set his schedule until he knows all the locations he's going to that day."

So I'm showered and dressed at 8:30, waiting for our phone to ring, sitting back down on the bed each time the phone only rings once, or rings twice, the start of a third time, goes to our recorded message, and it turns out it's another scam call. I walk backwards each time to my side of the bed.

He finally arrives in the early afternoon.

I'm so happy to see him.

"Is your existing dishwasher a plug-in, or hard-wired?"

I have no idea. "I think it's a plug-in."

"Okay. Just saying, if it's a hard-wired, and if your circuit box doesn't have a circuit specifically labelled for the dishwasher, you'll have to have an electrician come out and turn off the power to the existing dishwasher before I can uninstall it. For safety reasons."

Fuck, fuck, fuck. "Okay."

Gets down on his haunches. Five minutes later, while I'm in the breakfast nook continuing to read Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, yet another 'affirmative nod', I hear the loud buzz of an electric screwdriver.

He's pulling out the old dishwasher.

Which I hadn't expected. I thought he'd just be replacing the shut-off valve, but apparently in addition to that, he's going to install our new dishwasher.

So, I'm happy.

After he's installed our new dishwasher, and started it running through its cycle, he straightens up, grins. "You're good to go, sir."

Makes to leave.

"And you're going to haul off our old dishwasher?"

"That's a separate team. You can call Home Depot, and make an appointment for that."

Thirty more minutes on hold.

They'll come out Thursday to haul the old dishwasher away. Call me the evening before to give me a window as to when they'll arrive, i.e., 8:30-12:30, or 12:30 to 4:30.

I wake up Thursday morning realizing I never got a call from Home Depot Wednesday evening as to what window they'll use to haul off our old dishwasher.

At 8:30, get them on the phone. "Let me check on that for you, sir. Is it okay if I put you on hold?"

Fifteen minutes later, she comes back on the line. "The local installers have no record of you requesting that your old dishwasher be hauled away."

So, the Home Depot representative I spoke to at this same 800 number two days ago lied when he said he had set up an appointment to have our dishwasher hauled away this Thursday? Or the local installers neglected to enter my request on their schedule?

I reschedule the request. The earliest time they can come out is August 4, the following Wednesday. "And it's definitely scheduled? They'll definitely come out?"

"Absolutely, sir."

While I'm waiting for that issue to be resolved, I move onto our next problem, the steady drip-drip-drip from our kitchen sink faucet, which has now turned into a continuous thin stream of water.

Explain the problem over the phone to a plumbing service we've used before. "And they'll fix the problem? Either repair the leak, or if necessary, obtain whatever parts are necessary to replace the nonfunctioning parts?"

"They can replace any defective parts, but that would cost extra."

"Which is fine with me. But they will definitely obtain any replacement parts needed, and resolve the issue?"

"We can absolutely do that, sir."

So now I'm down to two problems I have to resolve. Excuse me, three problems.

Biggest problem: I have to have the kitchen faucet fixed so it doesn't stream water anymore.

Have to get our old dishwasher hauled away. It's sitting in our living room like an uninvited robot.

I have to repair the leak in our master bathroom's toilet that leaves a pool of water on the floor after each flush.

Oh. And I also have to find some new cats for us. Four problems.

Friday morning I call Home Depot, to confirm someone is in fact coming out this Wednesday to haul off our old dishwasher. "Let me put you on hold for just a sec, Sir?" Back on the line. "Yes. You're on the roster for August fourth."

The plumber is supposed to come out to our home sometime between 8:00 and 10:00 Saturday morning to fix our leaky kitchen faucet. He'll call us half an hour before he arrives.

Show of hands. Who thinks he calls by 8:00?

Who thinks he calls by 9:00?

10:00?

Fewer hands.

10:30, I call the company. "We had a plumber scheduled to come out between 8:00 and 10:00, but he never showed up, or called."

"We never know when they're going to arrive, Sir. It'll be sometime between now and 5:30 this afternoon."

Which I know is a lie. Every time we've used this service before, they've always given a two-hour window, and they've always stuck to it. "Can you tell me where we are in the schedule? Are we next? Or five stops from now?"

"I sure can't, Sir. They constantly rearrange their stops." Really? Why would they do that? In the background on her end of the phone, I can hear a small child complaining about his i-phone.

I cancel the appointment. Call a different service we've used in the past. They'll be out next Tuesday between 8:00 and 9:00 in the morning. Call a half hour before they arrive.

So, I'll be honest with you. I'm feeling stressed, and depressed. It used to be, you had a leaky faucet, you call a plumber, he comes out, sits on the floor while he reaches up under the sink, a wrench, some replacement parts, and twenty minutes later he's back on his feet, giving you his bill, complaining about his ex-wife.

Saturday morning while Mary sleeps, I quietly shave, shower, get dressed. Sitting on the edge of the bed watching the morning news, volume turned down to whispering level, waiting for a phone call I fear won't come.

And miracle of miracles, the phone does in fact ring at 9:15. I hobble quickly across the foot of the bed to the phone in our bay window. "Hello?" Nothing. "Hello?" "Mr. Moore? I'm calling to let you know Nick will be arriving in about 30-45 minutes to fix your leaky kitchen faucet."

I am elated.

Nick arrives 30 minutes later with another guy.

I'm sitting at the breakfast nook table reading more of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, expecting any moment Nick is going to say, "Mr. Moore, we have a real problem here", but instead his head rises above the black counters of our kitchen and tells me my options. He and his trainee can fix the leak, but they'll need to replace the faucets and the water valves. About a thousand dollars. Fine. I approve the work.

I read Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood while Nick and his assistant make all kinds of loud noises under the kitchen sink. I hear things like, "That didn't work? Really?" and, "It's too small. It's not the right size!" This goes on for. Three. Hours. While I'm sitting on my increasingly numb ass.

Finally, they're done.

They're no longer talking in terse fragments, but instead joking happily with each other as they stand up from behind the kitchen counter. Looking around at all the stuff on the kitchen floor they have to haul back to their truck parked outside at my front curb.

Mary and I have a new faucet at the back of our stainless-steel double sink, and all kinds of new pipes in the cabinet under the sink. I initial and sign my name several times on Nick's tablet.

Another of our several problems solved!

So now we want to get our old dishwasher hauled off. After a couple of times someone was supposed to show up and haul off the old dishwasher but never did, we're now scheduled to have it removed this coming Wednesday. I'm tense, because this has failed twice before. But, lo and behold, I do get an automated message from Home Depot Tuesday evening saying the dishwasher will be hauled off the following day, Wednesday, between a window of 1:30 pm and 5:30 pm. They'll call us half an hour before they arrive.

So, elation that this might actually happen this time, but dismay it's going to be so late in the day.

Mary and I like having all our service calls early in the day, so we have the afternoon and evening to ourselves.

But whatever.

Late morning Wednesday, I cook breakfast for us. Scrambled eggs. It's quick, it dirties very few kitchen items, and it's delicious. It's taken me decades to learn how to cook perfect scrambled eggs, but I finally figured it out. One small stick-proof skillet. Whirl five jumbo eggs in a bowl with a whisk. Don't add any seasoning, water, milk, half and half, prayers, or anything else. Turn the skillet on to high heat. Two tablespoons of unsalted butter in the skillet. Once the butter is melted, add the whirled egg mixture. And this is very important. Ignore the raw egg in the skillet for about half a minute. Be indifferent to it. You're God, and the raw egg mixture in the small skillet is a deer's black nose trying to push through a bramble of branches to where its delicate teeth can finally nip up into her mouth a bouncing dangle of blueberries. After that stare of indifference, using a flat-edged spatula, wooden or plastic, scoop around the rim of the small skillet, folding the mixture inwards, towards the center of the skillet. Only fold. Never move the spatula in a scrambling motion. Once the eggs are almost cooked, but still moist, spoon them onto heated plates, and season their tops with salt and freshly-ground black pepper. Perfect with buttered, seeded, rye toast.

Around 3:30 I get a call. The guys who are going to haul off our old dishwasher will be there in about 20-30 minutes.

They actually arrive in about 15 minutes.

Load the old dishwasher on a dolly, pile all the packing material from the new dishwasher on top, slant it through the front door, down to their large truck parked at our grassy curb.

Almost everything broken is fixed again.

As I said, a few weeks prior, Mary started getting weaker.

Had more trouble getting out of bed. More trouble pushing herself backwards in bed up against the three pillows behind her back to watch TV. She used to sit in a black chair in the kitchen while I cooked our breakfast, but now that was too much for her. She stayed in bed while I turned on burners, dropped down butter.

Ate very little of her meals. Fork listless in her right hand while we watched Hot Bench. Which of course made her even weaker.

She had heart valve replacement surgery in late 2019. Could another of her valves be malfunctioning? Each morning as I helped her out of bed so she could use her walker to make her way to the bathroom, I pulled up both pink cuffs of her pajama pants to see if her calves were swollen, a possible indicator of low blood flow caused by a heart valve failure.

And each inspection before we had had any coffee yet that morning, her calves were as slim as they were decades ago when she first raised them up to my shoulders.

She lost the strength to climb the stairs each day to our second floor, where she watched true crime shows while I worked on my writings.

I worked with her to regain her strength.

Having her do a little bit more each day on her own, rather than me doing it for her.

While I prepared our breakfast each morning, she made a circuit of our first- floor rooms using her walker. Eventually, she made a second circuit in the afternoon.

Building her strength back up.

She ate more of each meal I served in bed. After a week, cleaned her plate each meal.

And one glorious day, she shuffled her walker through our lower rooms to our staircase at the front of our home, looked up those steps, let go of her walker's side handles, grabbed onto the staircase's wooden rail, and God bless her, found the courage to climb up those stairs, step by step, all of them, to our second floor.

Mary's a hero. Always has been, always will be.

Now she's back to normal. Doing everything she used to, before she weakened for a while.

And then there's poor Sweet Pea.

The last remaining cat from Lady's litter. As I said, she had been slowly declining. She died during the night. I was up early, heading to our master closet to dress for the plumber's visit, and found her stiff body stretched out on the closet's carpet.

She kept to herself most of her life, while her siblings took center stage. After they all died, she started hanging out with us more, and the past year the three of us got to spend a lot of time together. Which Mary and I both appreciated. Maybe Sweet Pea did too.

While I was getting ready to tell Mary that Sweet Pea was dead, waiting for her to fully wake up first, I realized that the closet carpet where she died is where they had all been born, 19 years ago.

Probably a coincidence?

The day the two guys arrived to fix the drip in our kitchen faucet, at one point one of them said to me, "Do you have cats?"

I was surprised by his question. Talking from behind my black face mask. "We used to. But eventually, they all died. The last of them died a few weeks ago."

Ducked his head. "Oh. Okay. I was asking because there are two cats hanging around outside your front door, and I wasn't sure if maybe we let them out by accident."

A thousand dollars later, after our kitchen plumbing was working again, the same guy said, "Those cats are still out there, man."

I put down Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and went out the front door with him.

On the concrete patio right outside our front door, two tiny gray kittens, mewling by the red brick of our home.

Left hand, right hand, I picked up their negligible weights, two scrawny bellies being lifted by my two palms, and carried them into our home.

Put them in the utility room off our kitchen, closing the door so they couldn't get out.

Once the large truck out front by our curb pulled away, opened the door to our bedroom off the kitchen, walked over to Mary's side of the bed. "Our kitchen faucet drip is fixed. A thousand bucks. But there's even better news."

Mary's lovely face looking up from her pillows. Judge Judy on TV saying, 'If you don't stop talking, they're just going to cut off your microphone.' "What?"

"Why don't you get out of bed and follow me?"

I led Mary out into the kitchen. To the closed white door to our utility room. "Open the door."

Looking at me, smiling, puzzled, trusting me, her right hand reached down, twisted the brass doorknob clockwise.

Opened.

The.

Door.

Two little gray kittens on the floor inside, looking up, mewling.

Back bending, she gave out an exhale of love. "Where did they come from?"

We haven't given them names yet. We're waiting to learn more about their individual personalities before we do. Names are important. I'd guess, based on the fact they still mewl rather than meow, and their tails are thin, like a mouse tail, rather than a fluffed cat's tail, that they're probably about a month old. And because they look so similar, I'm sure they're siblings.

It's weird living with little kittens again. They know no rules. I've been feeding them bowl after bowl of cat food each day, to where both their bellies are swollen, and they jump up in the air like dolphins rising from the waves as the two bowls of food lower, but still, when Mary and I go to eat a meal in bed, they leap up on the sheet, charge towards our plates like goggled kamikaze pilots on a suicide dive towards American warships. We have to eat with one hand, fend them off with the other.

Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

But that's okay. We have cats, again.

Another plus to once again having cats in our home is that when we hear a weird noise in another room, I no longer have to pause the TV, get out of bed investigate that noise. I can just say, "It's those damn kittens."

And now, I'm going to tell you something many of you might dismiss as nonsense.

When things were really bad, when everything was breaking down, and I was washing our dirty dishes early each morning, while the windows were still dark, then going upstairs to check my emails, Amazon book sales, I came down the stairs at the worst of it, and in our kitchen, on the long black counter to the left of our double stainless steel sink, there were paper towels spread across, cleaned wet dishes and pots and pans, eating utensils, upside down coffee cups, drinking glasses I had washed before going upstairs, and…on a separate white paper towel, a display.

A display I hadn't put there that morning.

Mary drinks beer. We get gnats occasionally in our home, bothersome, so I bought Mary a set of different-colored rubber caps from Amazon she can place over the opened tops of her beer bottles, to keep the gnats out of her beer.

I also bought her blue elastic bands she can use, after she brushes her hair each morning, to twirl her hair into a ponytail.

The display on the white sheet of paper towel I hadn't put on the black counter had four rubber caps, two side by side, the third lying at an angle atop the side of the fourth rubber cap; two blue elastic hair bands next to the rubber caps, lying side by side. The placement of each item looked deliberate. It did not look random.

I did not put them there.

I have no idea whatsoever how the fuck they got there.

But I absolutely believe it was someone sending us a message. Things will get better. And they did.

Am I full of shit? If you think so, I'm absolutely fine with that.

But I know what I saw.

And it's a great reassurance to me.

After Sweet Pea died, I'd walk into our master bathroom each morning passing a pan of kitty litter on the right in our bathtub.

That's where she used to angle her body backwards, lifting her tail, blank look in her eyes, pissing and dumping turds onto the litter, burying them afterwards.

The pan's bottom is filled with fresh kitty litter. Unsullied. I had cleaned and refilled the pan the night before Sweet Pea's death. I could put it away, but I've left it in there instead, as a reminder that someday in the near future there will be new cats welcomed to our home.

And now we have those new cats.

Life is good.

And now again our once pristine pan of kitty litter is happily full of fresh cat shit.