For the August meeting of the
West End book club we read Jenny Lawson’s second book, Furiously Happy. We had Let’s
Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir on our 2015-2016
schedule, so some of us knew what to expect in terms of wit, humor, and honesty.
It appears that reading a
Jenny Lawson book had an effect on me. It made me feel free-er to look at
myself, my life, and it can influence my writing, if I let it.
As a gift to my
readers, and for my husband, I wanted to share a story, “Alarms in the Nighttime.”
My husband has put up with me
for 39-plus years of an interesting life. Not as interesting as Lawson’s, but
we’ve had our moments. One of those moments came into play for this story, and
I let myself run with it. As Jenny would say, “It’s mostly true.” Enjoy.
Alarms in the Nighttime
By Mary Davidsaver
My brain is trying to tell me something important like, “Wake
up, the world has problems that need attending to. You need to move!”
I should probably
open my eyes.
I roll over and mumble
to my husband, “Is that another storm warning?” The past evening had been
filled with our smart phones going crazy every few minutes with thunderstorm
warnings and watches. Most were not too close, but when the Iowa City area had a
funnel cloud spotted on the ground I’d gotten into gear and packed up my
computer along with my most important notes to stow away in our storm room. My
standard procedure for the midwestern tornado season.
By now I’m aware
enough to make out that the loud noise is not coming from a cell phone, and my
husband is saying, “That’s the SMOKE alarm.”
It provides a good
jolt of adrenaline. I’m fully awake now and fumbling for my glasses. By the
time we’re both out of the bedroom and standing by our kitchen table the awful
sound stops. We’re both like, “Where’s the fire?”
I don’t smell
anything. He doesn’t smell anything, and his nose is much more sensitive than
mine. We do a quick search of our rather smallish home and come up empty. No
smoldering menace to be found.
My brave husband volunteers to stay up to
keep a watchful eye out, or in this case a watchful nose, for anything we might
have missed. “I’m awake anyway,” he says. He proceeds to start up his computer
and finds the instruction manual for our alarms. By now I’m not going anywhere
either, so we start our search to see if we can tell which alarm did the deed.
Which one woke us up at MIDNIGHT.
He says, “You have
to look for a blinking red light.”
“Why me?” I ask.
“Because I’m color blind,” he says.
When we first
started dating he downplayed his eye condition to merely “color challenged.” I
remember this clearly. This color identification business shifted as he’s aged.
What was once a “challenge” has become a badge of martyrdom and a ready excuse
to get out of all kinds of color-based tasks. So, I take the lead on this hunt
through our darkened house. I stand under each of our six visible alarms (there
are three more tucked away out of reach) and patiently count to one hundred
hoping my bleary eyes will catch a tiny green dot change to a tiny red dot. And
wink at me.
I make the circuit
twice before I discover the offender. It’s in MY room. My personal writing-space
room of disorder. I’m, like, thinking about how this room should be any different
tonight, or rather this morning, than any other time. I can only come up with
one answer—the caterpillar.
I’m trying to help
Monarch butterflies. To that end I welcomed four kinds of milkweed into my garden
over the past five years—with little tangible success. This year I became
determined to assist some
caterpillars through to full butterflyhood. Over the past month I was
harvesting the tiny white eggs, complete with milkweed leaf, and raising them
in recycled Blue Bunny ice cream containers. My goal: to get them of a size
that when reintroduced into the main milkweed patch they’d make it the rest of
the way on their own. You see, I was SO sure that the precious eggs and
hatchlings were being preyed upon by hungry ants, stealthy spiders, and nasty beetles
that I put up with the fuss and muss of having wild things indoors. Well, in my
garage. Things were going fine and I’d already released a couple of
caterpillars. Then it got hot. Then it got hotter. The poor dears would lie in
the bottom of their respective containers and NOT EAT. Not good. (Caterpillars
are designed to eat—and do the other thing that’s opposite of eating.) When
they tried to escape the over-heated confines of their plastic cells, I had to
make the ultimate sacrifice, I brought them into the air-conditioned comfort of
my home—specifically, MY room.
On the night, or
the morning, of the alarm going off I still had one caterpillar to go. I was
waiting for the right time, for another break in the hot spell. How could I
make this last creature go from 79 degrees of cool comfort to 95 degrees muggy
torture? I couldn’t be that inhumane. My sleep-deprived brain was telling me that
this bug had somehow emitted enough methane, or whatever gaseous byproduct that
comes from digesting milkweed, to set off the alarm. Perhaps there’d been a
build up over the past few weeks and the tipping point had been surpassed. How
do I admit to my husband that it’s all my fault?
But before I could
come clean and confess—I was SAVED.
My always clever
husband presents his own theory. He declares with a straight face, it was still
dark so I’m guessing it was a straight face, he says “It was those radioactive
spiders.”
I restrain myself
and listen to him explain about how old-time smoke detectors used radioactive
stuff to do their detecting work. Combine that with the spiders that travel
into the country by hitching rides on bananas, which everyone knows are sources
of radioactivity, and you get spiders that can set off smoke alarms all
willy-nilly.
What could I do
but agree with him? I was so thrilled to be totally off the hook.
That last
caterpillar went free a couple of days later—and I placed a moratorium on
raising any more Monarch eggs—for THIS year.
P.S. My husband read this and he totally disagrees about the martyr thing.
P.P.S. He likes to have sliced bananas on his cereal.
© Mary R. Davidsaver 2017
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