The Geiger Counter

It’s almost the holiday season again, and that means it’s time for me to think about one of my favorite Christmas memories; the time I saw a dog almost poop on Santa Claus. 

We took our little girl, just a toddler and glowing with the magical spirit of Christmas, the one time of year when all things feel possible, even kindness to and from our many fellow travelers to the grave and headed to the local fire station so she could sit on Santa’s lap. The building was buzzing with holiday cheer, everything that could be festooned was, and the lights glinted in the eyes of the crowds of children. 

“This might be TMI…” began a local clerk the other day when I was buying a bag of potato chips.

TMI, for those who don’t know, is an acronym people use before saying something they absolutely should not say. It stands for “Too Much Information.” It’s basically an extreme mispronunciation of, “Cover your ears.”

“… but I had to have a toenail removed because of a fungus issue,” the person continued. 

“Oh,” I replied, holding my wallet in my hand and waiting for the clerk to finish the story and scan my Pringles. I looked behind me at the half dozen people waiting in line, trying to simultaneously indicate to the clerk that we were in public, and to them that I did now know the person I was speaking to. “I’m … sorry?”

“Then I stubbed my toe, and wow, it really hurts when you don’t have a toenail,” they added in what was, I believe, the summit of this unexpected narrative mountain. 

We lived like vampires for a day, recently. It was the worst day of the year to do it. 

My daughter got strep throat last week, so the doctor prescribed antibiotics. She’s allergic to the antibiotics, we quickly learned, and she developed an itchy rash all over her face, chest, neck and legs. While caused by the medicine, the hives were triggered by the sunlight. So we had to spend nearly all day indoors on June 21. 

For those of you who no longer worship the Old Gods and follow the ways of our ancestors, June 21 was one of the most significant days of the year; it was the Summer Solstice, the day on which our sun shines down on us for the longest period of the entire year. It rose at 5:20 a.m., and didn’t go down until 8:42 p.m. Our lives right now are filled with light, but each evening, from now until the winter, the sun will set a little earlier, and our days will be slightly shorter, which is basically the way it feels to get older. 

More than merely cheese?

My daughter threw a lot of cheese at people on a recent Sunday afternoon, only confirming something I’ve long suspected: If something comes out of a cow in Wisconsin, people will eventually pick it up and give it a fling. 

When I first moved here many years ago, one of my first jobs as a reporter was to cover the state championship Cow Chip Throw, at which competitors hurl dried discs of manure as far as possible. There was a corporate toss (they weren’t throwing corporations), a little kid toss (they weren’t throwing children), and even some fairly famous past champions with special techniques, including licking their fingertips. You would not believe just how far a slice of dehydrated cow dung can fly through the early summer air when the right person is behind it.

Someone compared me to a little old lady the other day. 

I was talking to a new friend named Judy, who we met while on vacation in St. George, UT. She’s in her mid-70s and nimble as a bighorn sheep, spending her time hiking, playing pickleball and exploring the alien landscape around her, this New Englander in the desert, this widow to a husband of so many years now walking the world alone. She’s a storyteller, a raconteur in orthopedic shoes, and she makes the most delightful offhand comments. 

We visited her house while on vacation a couple weeks ago. She sat down at the kitchen table and rifled through several guidebooks and pamphlets, suggesting various places we should visit while there. 

“There’s a really good hiking trail in Beaver Dam,” she said, reading from a beige brochure, then looking at us over its pages with marked skepticism. “Well, I’ve never seen any beavers there.” 

We took our eight-year-old daughter to her first “grown up” concert last night. It was the luminous Sierra Ferrell at the Stoughton Opera House, and I fear we might have done our daughter a disservice. Ferrell and her band were so perfect that I suspect every other concert she ever goes to will be a disappointment. It was magical from start to finish.

“Everyone up and left, but they left their dogs and cats. The first few days I went around pouring milk for all the cats, and I’d give the dogs a piece of bread. They were standing in their yards waiting for their masters. They waited a long time.”

“But the dogs and cats had absorbed heavy doses of radiation in their fur, and were liable, presumably, to wander out of the Zone. The hunters had to go in and shoot them.”

“The first time we came, the dogs were running around near their houses, guarding them. Waiting for the people to come back. They were happy to see us, they ran toward our voices. We shot them in the houses, and the barns, in the yards.”

“We met these strange dogs and cats on the road. They acted strange: they didn’t recognize us as people, they ran away. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with us until they told us to start shooting at them.”

I used to often stop and chat with an elegant woman named Cécile, who worked in an office a few steps from mine in the City of Middleton. I edited the local newspaper (which was essentially just an ongoing saga about how much the community’s leaders at the time loved concrete and development of literally any kind) and she worked at the nearby Chamber of Commerce.

She had red hair and freckles and narrow-framed glasses that sat like windows through which you could catch her eyes’ glint. She was, apparently, middle-aged, but she had the demeanor of someone in the jaunty days of youth, as if she was in on some kind of cosmic joke and recognized how funny the world was, just beneath all the griping and despair. She did not solve all the problems of the world, but you always walked away from a conversation with her a little lighter, a little better and a little less burdened by all that falls upon your shoulders.

From time to time, people tell me they are under the impression I am a single parent, because I never mention my wife in these columns. Actually, my wife, who exists and is named Greta, doesn’t appear here for one particular reason. 

The reason, of course, is that making humorous (read: true) observations about one’s spouse in a newspaper column is the type of thing that often ends up mentioned in court, during contentious divorce proceedings, and it’s my sincere desire that my columns never end up as “exhibit A” in any trial, particularly my own. 

The truth is my wife is simply too busy to be a character in these stories. She is a successful graphic artist, and when she’s not at work, she is usually busy cleaning up messes in our home. This sounds helpful, but she and I have very different definitions of the word “mess,” so it’s actually a bit complicated. 

It was so hot in Raleigh, North Carolina last week that it seemed like you could hear the sun. It was like a movie in which the sun was a character, and I was talking about it, only to pause mid-sentence and gasp: “He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?!” We were visiting my little sister, who recently gave birth to her first child.

Cassie Geiger is six years younger than me, and in my mind, she is a sarcastic, independent, generous, Korean Peter Pan. One of my earliest memories is waiting for her at the airport with my parents, when I was six. It was as if she was being carried to us by a massive metal stork, in which passengers could still smoke cigarettes and move around the cabin, in those days. Today, I don’t only think of her as a baby, of course, but I do think of her always as my little sister, as a kid who tagged along, and each time I think of her, I must manually change her to an adult in my mind.