This is My Story

When I was nine years old, my dog Red died. I was devastated. Red had been ours since I could remember. I had dressed Red in ill-fitting outfits, tied bows in her shiny red coat, and commiserated with her over the injustices of the world, which mostly had to do with mean girls and cute boys. In many ways, Red had been my best friend, so when she fell over on Christmas Eve and was put to sleep the day after Christmas, it goes unsaid that my heart was broken in a million ways.

Well, as any mother is apt to do, my mother desired to divert my heartache, so one night she brought home a surprise. With a white terry bath towel hanging over the silver thin-wired cage, I was hopeful that a puppy could have somehow, miraculously been squeezed into that tiny rodent cage ready for me to snuggle to my chest. Frankly, I was nothing but horrified as my mother pulled off the towel to reveal that my new pet was a small white mouse. A mouse named Frodo. It took me approximately two weeks to conjecture that the name “Frodo” was the Greek word for odor. And, I was also certain that Frodo was determined to kill me, torture me with lack of sleep by running incessantly for hours on end at night on his treadmill. Frodo was not my friend. He was the most odiferous creature that I had ever met and us being friends would never happen. That’s why when my mother gave him away to my younger cousins I only mildly protested. And, when it was revealed to me that Frodo had met his demise in the terrifying clutches of their cat Tuffy, I had to feign grief, so my mother didn’t think I was completely heartless. Honestly, I thought he was better off, since to live in the human world, it was just going to be an uphill struggle for him, being so smelly and all. Looking at the upside, at least he didn’t get squeezed to death by a boa constrictor.

It has been a really long time since I’ve blogged. I’ve had ideas, but I just haven’t had the time. Well, now is my time. It all began one night, as Rick and I were watching one of our favorite shows, “Hoarding: Buried Alive.” This particular episode showed a man, a broken man, a lonely man, a very troubled man surrounded by, of all things, thousands and thousands of rats.

Now, at first glance I am apt to say, what the heck? What’s wrong with this guy? He looked like a dirty Kris Kristoferson (Yeah, a DIRTY Kris Kristoferson!), and one with a sweaty headband, as though he stopped mid-Richard Simmon’s fitness video and decided instead to start collecting rats. At least he was color-coordinated and he might have been an Oakland A’s fan, because he wore primarily Kelly green and gold shorty shorts.

This episode was shocking. All the squealing of the rats, as he fed them was repulsive. As he sat in their vile midst, they crawled all over him and pecked at him. He explained to the camera that he had stopped sleeping inside the house years ago, since they would oftentimes peck at his eyes and ears while he slept. Gross! I would have thought he slept elsewhere, because there were thousands, maybe even a million rats inside his house. Never mind the fact that some of the rats were trying to eat him alive!

Anyway, I knew from my brief stint with Frodo that this dirty Kris Kristoferson rat collecting character was not only living in filth, he was inhaling the filth, enduring the stench of thousands of rodents defecating everywhere. It didn’t take long for one of the probing producers of the show to ask how he came to collect and hoard rats. With the question barely out, the man began to weep. His face contorted and his heart was clearly breaking, as rats crawled all over him, tugging at his tattered gold sweatband.

The image on the television faded into a picture of a woman and a man embracing. They were young, happy, and seemingly in love. The man in the picture seemed like only a whisper of the man on the floor covered in rats. He was barely himself. The woman’s mouth was wide with a bright smile.

When asked the question, “How did you get to this,” the man’s face twisted with obvious heartbreak. For what seemed like long pregnant pauses, he finally released words that explained that his wife, the love of his life, had died. She had suffered a heart attack and though he had found her in time, the ambulance did not. He fought and fought to keep her alive, but she died in his arms before paramedics could arrive. Then, one day he bought a pet rat to keep him company, and soon after that, she had babies, and not long after that, they had babies, and so on and so on and so on.

Some of the rats he knew by name, while others lived behind the drywall in the studs of the house. He could not possibly know them all, but to him, it didn’t matter, because they were only there to fill the big, dark, voluminous void. Well, by the end of the hour-long show, the Rat Man got the help of a therapist and settled on keeping just one rat for companionship.

Now, you see, it’s a strange thing to write about, this rat man, but there is something romantically beautiful in his sorrow, don’t you think? Having seen the “Red Violin” years ago about a heartbroken man who, in the sorrow of losing his wife in childbirth, opens her veins to paint her blood over the unfinished grain of a violin he’d been working on. It’s Romeo and Juliet romantic desperation: It’s knowing that death may tear asunder, but love goes on. Songs, poems, novels, and movies are written about such things, about the kind of love that makes you do crazy things, like live with thousands of rats, or painting the unfinished wood of a violin with your dead wife’s blood. I’m not saying that everyone should conduct themselves like that, but I do think there is respectable behavior one should exercise after their loved-one dies. Frankly stated, there is behavior that says, “love,” and then there is behavior that says, “How much was the life insurance?” That’s all I’m saying.

To me, it’s more romantic to live with a hoard of one million rats than to quickly move on, buy yourself…say, a big stupid truck, some new off-road vehicles, a new motorhome, and let’s just go out on a ledge here, and say, move in with another woman less than a year from the untimely death of your wife! Yeah, let’s just say you move in with and buy a new house with this new woman less than a year after your wife of nearly 46 years died completely unexpectedly. Yes, let’s say you get maybe…a quarter of a million dollars and you do something freakishly insensitive like that after you sold off every conceivable thing of your dead wife’s at a garage sale. Let’s also just throw in there that you sold your daughter’s paintings at that garage sale, but you told everyone that you got them back and gave them to her, but you never did anything that honorable, because you are completely and utterly without honor! You are so remiss of honor that you probably don’t even know how to spell it!

And, let’s just say for the heck of it your daughter gets all the sympathy cards and one in particular is strangely affectionate from a woman, a friend of her dead mother’s, who apparently doesn’t have the good sense of a goose telling you how she thinks of you… (inhale deeply – go to happy place, Michelle – happy place) “daily.” Yes, let’s just say for amusement sake, there is a woman out there who acted like a friend who was all along thinking of you. Ha, ha, ha, isn’t that so funny? Yeah, it’s that same woman you took off work to help when she went to court, even though you never took off work for your own wife, even when she had surgeries. Ha, ha, ha, still funny, huh? It’s almost enough to send someone on all night drive to that little hellhole town in Nevada – oh, yeah, it’s Nevada, the whole state is a hellhole – I almost forgot. Anyhoo, it’s almost enough to send a daughter on a Dorito eating, Mountain Dew guzzling trip to make a little visit to that so-called “friend” and have a good, old-fashioned Punching-My-Mother’s-Fake-Friend-in-The-Face-Day – almost. No worries though, my honey has talked me off bigger ledges than this one and I’ve got homeschooling to do today, so…

Hmmm, whose ever going to believe you were in love with their mother when you act like this? Who???? And, just hypothetically let’s say your daughter had come to you wanting your help to get her mother healthy and you instead turned your chemically dependent wife against your daughter, I wonder what the daughter would feel about you? I wonder. I’m just saying hypothetically, of course, just for the sake of conversation really, that if you were to do something like that you’d be a total and complete moron. I would say that your daughter who watched you be physically abusive toward her mother might not ever want anything to do with you again. And, I’m guessing, you know complete conjecture here, that if you did something like and on top of it all, you blamed your daughter for your wife’s untimely death…came to her house even with her children present, and told her she was solely responsible for her beloved mother’s death and when she freaked out and kicked you out of her house, you told everyone she had gone crazy and cussed at you for no good reason, she might want to gouge your face off with her fingernails if you ever darkened her doorstep again.

And, I’m guessing that if she were blind-sided by some cards signed “With Love” from a woman she has never even heard of less than a year after her mother’s death, your daughter might want to go 100% postal on you. It might give her Vietnam War/Viet Kong torture flashbacks, even though she was only eight years old when that war was over. For the sake of pure conjecture, it might even make her husband go out, purchase a high-density rubber, anatomically-blurred kickboxing bag, which your daughter would unceremoniously name after you and kick, punch, and elbow in the face until she can no longer stand.

I’m guessing that when or if, you called her house she’d hang up on you every single time for the rest of eternity, because she knows you are evil beyond compare. And, when the cards continued to come with happy thoughts from some equally moronic woman, saying how she can’t wait to get together and quoting scripture, I’m thinking that your daughter’s husband, wanting to avoid a complete and utter meltdown, would grab that card with all of its idiotic verbiage and religious verses, run mad-dash to the nearest shredder and politely tell her, “Oh, honey, you can’t handle that,” and hold her until she is in a pile of tears.

Of course, let’s also say, just say for instance, that at your deceased wife’s funeral, which you wouldn’t pay one dime for, you wouldn’t even allow God’s name to be spoken. You gave a mandate to some half-witted, pretentious, spiritually and mentally corrupt cousin to make sure no one mentioned God, or anything religious, so let’s just say that now with these bizarre religious cards showing up from you and Shack-Up-Suzy in your daughter’s mailbox, it’s as though you’ve had a lobotomy of all common sense.

Not that any of this pertains to actual circumstances, because it would be so completely ludicrous if it did, but if something like this happened I’m guessing your daughter would revert to the Old Testament praying like David, calling on God to rip out certain people’s tongues, and hoping that jackals, bears, or lions would conduct some serious business on the perpetrators of evil. I’m just guessing, though. I mean, what do I know about stuff like this? Ha, ha, ha, I think my eye is twitching uncontrollably like it does sometimes when I…when I…when I think about these fictional things – yeah, a fictional thing that’s what it is, just fictional, purely fabricated conjecture. Silly, huh? Stupid twitch!

One might think a girl would give up on God in such circumstances, but nope. Nope, not this girl. Just for the record, some might even get stronger, stronger than they ever imagined they could be. I’m guessing there is a woman out there who will never stop loving her mother, never stop knowing the truth – a woman who believes in God and His perfect ways so profoundly that nothing that a man could do could sway her from God’s might, from His sight, from His side. I’m guessing there is a woman who has been used long enough as her father’s scapegoat, who couldn’t care less what anyone who believes him thinks about her. I am guessing that a woman like that would be a woman utterly unafraid, unabashedly honest, and strangely content, because of the overwhelming love of God, because of what an Almighty God has done for her. I am thinking that a woman like that would never ever stop praising God, because this is my story, this is my song, praising my Savior all the day long:

“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!
Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.

This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Savior all the day long;
This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Savior all the day long.

Perfect submission, perfect delight,
Visions of rapture now burst on my sight;
Angels, descending, bring from above
Echoes of mercy, whispers of love.

Perfect submission, all is at rest,
I in my Savior am happy and blest,
Watching and waiting, looking above,
Filled with His goodness, lost in His love.