Raccoon Resort

In the middle of the night, I hear a distant banging, like a shutter come loose on an old beach house, hitting the wall, back and forth, as rhythmic as the waves of the tide.
I struggle out of that half-sleep state to the realization that I’m not on a beach and my house doesn’t have detachable shutters.
Damn It.
I get up and listen for the direction of the noise. It’s louder in the bathroom and I get suspicious. Retrieving a flashlight from the nightstand, I go back to the bathroom window. A mask and two eyes shine back.

Oh Happy Day. My two month squatter, caught at last.

I let him sulk until daybreak.

The cage is too big, too muddy, too heavy to lift up through the window and cart through the house. The only thing to do is to shove him over the edge of the roof. Now how to do that without being bitten or scratched?

First try – a household broom. Rocky starts to snarl as soon as I poke at the trap. The broom isn’t long enough.

I trot downstairs, through the kitchen to the garage, and back upstairs with a janitor’s broom. I manage to finesse it out the window without taking off any paint in the process. This doesn’t work either. It’s only long enough to move the cage to the edge of the roof…where it gets stuck on the guttering. I push harder. The gutter bows. At this rate, I’m going to rip the gutter off, too, and just add to the damage already done. I need a hook.

I snatch a hanger out of the closet and try to attach it to the end of the broom. It promptly falls off in the middle of the roof, out of reach. I think about crawling out the window. Considering my propensity for broken bones, I promptly discard that idea. The hangar can just stay there.

Down I go, to the garage again, to survey all my garden tools. There has to be something longer, with a sharp edge. My eyes light on the Japanese hoe, and back up the stairs I go, looking like an off kilter pole-vaulter.

The corner of the hoe catches on the corner of the cage and I manage to move it. Another shove….and a crash.

I laugh. Victory is mine, you destructive SOB. I have lost my mind.

Down the stairs, out the back door, to the side of the house to look. The raccoon is fine, the trap only slightly dented.

I let Rocky settle down a bit, then load him into the wheelbarrow and deposit him in the middle of the driveway, with a sign attached to his trap. He looks like Hester wearing her scarlet letter. As if this raccoon feels any remorse! MK comes over and takes him to his new home.

I know where he lives. He’ll be getting my bill.

and now, to suit our great computer….

How did it come to pass that a computer now chooses who will be selected for an interview and who will not? These big companies with their boilerplate questionnaires and replies! Do any human life forms work there? They reduce your resume to catch phrases and snippets of data. Without the correct words, or combinations thereof, you are kicked to the curb by an inanimate object.

Where in their on-line forms can I insert that I have half a Master’s Degree? Or that I passed the CPA exam in one sitting? Or that I have managed personalities so diverse that Sybil would look normal by comparison? No place for gray with these Large Corporate HR Departments, it’s all black/white, yes/no, no fuzzy logic, no room for a good hunch that this one, this applicant might be a good fit.

You should’ve seen the questionnaire I had to fill out today. Do you like working in groups? Can you juggle more than one task at a time? Do you hate meetings? Do you use mustard or ketchup on your hot dog? Do you take showers or baths? Do you get impatient with questions like these? Seriously, it was about that idiotic.

Another irony….most have on line jobs boards where you can set up job searches based upon the resume you’ve just submitted. I can’t count the number of emails I’ve received….Here, apply for this one! It’s got your name written all over it! Your skills match! And when I do….another reject letter, three months later.

And the replies they send….not only months later, but boilerplate again…..

"Thank you for expressing interest in Corporation from Hell. Although we were impressed by your skills and experience, unfortunately we will not be taking your application any further…"

"While you display valuable skills, we have chosen to pursue other candidates…"

"While your credentials were impressive…."

Oh for Pete’s sake. Who are they kidding? And more to the point….would I really want to work for a company run by robots? I would love to see the applicants that make the first cut for a face to face interview. Are they robots too?

Must I become merely magnetic ink?

a true tale

There was a divorced woman who lived alone in a small red brick ranch house in a small Middle American city with her calico cat. She had recently retired from the city’s school system, where she’d worked since the mid – 1960’s. Retirement wasn’t what she’d thought it would be. She tried to fill her time with gardening and reading. She did have, as Norma would later write, a million friends. There was a small group of girlfriends she looked forward to seeing every Friday for early dinner and conversation. They didn’t meet at a fancy place, but somewhere that they could all afford on fixed incomes.

One Friday, she didn’t show up.

“Wonder where Bertie Jo is?”
“I don’t know. She said she was coming.”
“She always comes.”
“I just talked to her yesterday; she didn’t say anything.”
“I bet she went to see her daughters for the weekend.”
“That’s got to be it.”
“But she didn’t mention she was going…”
“I bet she just forgot to tell us.”
“You’re probably right.”

And the ladies went on with their conversations of children, grandchildren, and husbands, and forgot to worry about Bertie Jo.

Mary, the neighbor across the street, who’d also known Bertie Jo since 1960, wondered, too, why the package from UPS sat on the front step all weekend long.

Four days later, at the request of one of her daughters, the town police came and broke into her home and climbed through the dining room window to discover her, lying crumpled, next to her bed…gone….

After the autopsy, the coroner told her daughters that her girlfriends could probably not have helped her, even if they’d come looking for her that Friday night. The mortician had to tell her daughters that it was probably advisable that they not look….

Bertie Jo’s girlfriends made assumptions, which cost her daughters the opportunity to see their mother one last time before laying her to rest.

I know the story is true, because one of her daughters was me.