An officious odor in the house led me to a rotting mouse in the crawl space under the pantry trapdoor.
All I had to do was release the trap, dump the mouse into a plastic bag, and toss it in the trash. Easy, right? In theory. But in case I haven't made it clear, I am petrified of the crawl space. I will make things as difficult as they can possibly be if it means avoiding a trip to the seedy underbelly. For the next several minutes I brainstormed all the ways I could retrieve the mouse without actually setting foot under the house. What if, I thought, I fashioned a pair of oversized tongs out of the mop and the broom and scooped up the rodent and the trap? But then what? Would I carry it through the kitchen and risk dropping a maggot-infested rodent on the tiled floor? I'm ashamed to say that the tongs idea was the extent of my ingenuity--one of the many pitfalls of majoring in English. I would have to once again lower myself through the dark portal and into the tarp-lined bowels of my abode. "I am not having fun!" I announced on my way down, just so matters were perfectly clear.
My fear of dead rodents in traps is easy to explain: I'm terrified they're not actually dead and when I go to lift the spring the creature will hurl itself at my face. (Easy to explain, yes. Rational, absolutely not.) For some reason, the task of releasing the mouse from the trap in the confines of the crawl space was profoundly more unsettling to me than releasing the mouse from the trap in the freedom of the backyard. I lifted the whole contraption--mouse attached--into a plastic bag, hoisted myself up into the pantry, and marched outside with the bag as far in front of me as I could hold it.
I dumped the contents onto the grass and squatted next to it, my upper lip curled in disgust. I inspected the trap, searching for a way of lifting the metal lever without actually touching the mouse. Finding none, I slid my finger under the bar and into the fleshy stomach of the rotting rodent. When I pulled the lever up a patch of grey and white fur came up with it. Sick, I thought, and then said it aloud three times in quick succession. I held the trap open with one hand and dumped the mouse into the plastic bag I was holding with the other. Just to be safe I knotted the bag and dropped it into a bigger paper bag. Good riddance to bad rodents, I thought, and flung it into the trashcan. I went inside and took a long hot bath.
Oh how I wish I could say that was enough crawl space for one day, but apparently it was not. Several hours later my brother came over to do some work on the floor in the laundry room. Soon after I received a lesson on how to remove a toilet from the floor, I got a call on my cell from my brother. "Come to the crawl space," he said when I answered, his words garbled like he had something in his mouth. "The pipe burst."
I raced to the pantry and dropped into the seedy underbelly where my brother was on his side in a pool of rat pee and murky water with a flashlight in his mouth. "You have to turn the water off," he said. His flashlight was pointing to a knob behind me. The thickest, grimiest spider web I've ever encountered in my life hung between me and the valve, but with water spewing from the pipe above my brother's head I had no time to circumnavigate the arachnid death trap. I lowered my head and plowed right through it.
"Thanks," my brother said as soon as the water had stopped. I nodded and surveyed the dozens of miniature lakes that had formed across the tarp. "Well," I said, "good thing I already got that mouse." The faint smell of decaying rodent lingered in the air. I'm gonna need another bath, I thought.
It didn't dawn on me until five minutes later that I'd just turned off the water.
Around lunchtime yesterday I started smelling a foul odor in the kitchen. The kitchen being a place where foul odors are not always entirely foreign (rotting food in the refrigerator, rotting food in the cupboard, that disgusting tofu marinade I made the other day using maple syrup that I suspect has been open in the pantry since Clinton was in office), it took me until this morning to identify the smell: rodent. Maggoty, rotting rodent. Unfortunately, I know it well.
I sat around for a couple more hours hoping that I was odor-hallucinating. After I was sure of what it was, I sat around for another hour convinced that the smell must be coming from the wall--a location I could not reach--rather than the crawl space underneath the house--a location very much accessible but also very much disgusting and terrifying.
Now, as I've already established on this blog, I am a strong, self-sufficient feminist. I don't believe in being "rescued" by a man when I am perfectly capable of handling the situation on my own.
My dad picked up on the fourth ring. "Hi, Daddy," I said. "There's a dead rodent under the house. Do I have to go get it?" Even I knew the rat wasn't going to walk out on its own. "We've got lots of plastic gloves in the shed," my dad answered. "And don't forget a flashlight."
I pulled on my ratty paint pants and an old sweatshirt and tied the hood so that only my eyes and nose were exposed. I slipped on a pair of latex gloves, slipped on a second pair for good measure, and grabbed a flashlight from the cabinet outside the bathroom.
There are two entrances to the crawl space: one is through the room at the bottom of the basement stairs and the other is through a trapdoor in the floor of the pantry. Because I smelled the odor most strongly when I stood at the top of the basement stairs, I figured I'd start there. There is no door separating the crawl space from the basement room--all you have to do is climb up onto a landing that's about four feet off the ground. Unfortunately, the path to this landing is blocked by a junk pile that is utterly Himalayan in size. With one hand on the thick pipe protruding from the wall, I lifted one foot onto a set of flimsy plastic shelves that sagged and nearly buckled under my weight while my other foot managed to find one square inch of floorboard between several empty canning jars and a saute pan with a glass lid. I fell catapulted myself into the emptiness in front of me and miraculously entered the crawl space without causing any sort of damage.
"Okay, dead rat," I said aloud, "show yourself." I took one step and slammed my forehead into a beam. (As it turns out, it's called a "crawl space" for a reason.) Harnessing my mild irritation into a determination to get the hell out of there as fast as possible, I crouched down and hobbled forward with renewed vigor. "Here, dead rat," I called. "Here, you filthy deceased rodent." I took a few steps and shuffled in a circle with the flashlight. A few more steps and another circle. Ten minutes and no dead rat later, I reached the conclusion that the smell was not coming from the crawl space. Never have I been happier to know that the rodent decaying in my house was inside a wall. God knows how I descended Mt. Basement Crap without breaking an ankle, but seven minutes later I was upstairs in clean clothes drinking tea and watching Arrested Development.
The horrid smell had reached the living room but there was nothing, short of starting up the chainsaw and hacking a hole in the wall, that I could do about it. A half-hour later the stench was almost unbearable. With a heavy sigh I pulled on my dusty, cobwebby crawl space ensemble and headed to the pantry. The instant I lifted the trapdoor the odor was overwhelming. I stepped aside to let the pantry light enter what I called the "seedy underbelly" of the house and there, three feet below me, pinned in the steely maw of an unbaited mouse trap, was a rotting mouse. "I'm so glad I thought to look here before I tried the basement," I said to an empty pantry. A tiny maggot, caught in the beam of my flashlight, crawled across the mouse's exposed eye.
I don't know how it took me so long to discover this song, but it didn't even take seven seconds for me to fall in love with it. This music video is the sweetest, most heartwarming I've seen in a long time. It's so nice to be reminded of the good in humanity.
It's been a while since I did a song for PCM so I thought I'd change that this week. This is one of my favorites of all time: "Miss Me" by Joe Purdy. I first heard it when I was studying in Melbourne and I fell in love with the lyrics because I felt like they were telling the story of my life. I'm learning it on the guitar right now and let's just say that it doesn't sound quite as good as the original. I hope you love it.
Some movie star told you this ain't where it's at
so you packed your bags and one night you headed out.
Said these small town blues got you going insane,
gonna move to the city, gonna change your name.
You'd never look back at where you came,
swore you're never gonna be the same.
Do you miss me?
You're a big girl now, got your big girl shoes
and you're running around with your big girl blues.
And I know you don't doubt yourself anymore,
when you feel like like leaving you walk out the door.
And I bet you ain't got nothing left to learn
and it's better that way 'cause you never get burned.
And you try not to think about what might have been,
'cause you know this town is just sink or swim.
Do you miss me?
Well the last time I saw you you were waving goodbye
from the back of a train with a tear in your eye.
Now I hear you're in love with some big-city man,
together you're making your big-city plans,
and you hope he don't find out about who you are,
that we used to catch fireflies in mason jars.
We used to go down to the county fair,
we listened to bluegrass in the summer air
and we danced all night as the rain came down,
and you held my hand as we slept on the ground.
We wrote our names in the old oak wood,
I guess some things don't work out like they should.
At the beginning of August I received my first jury summons in the mail. It came over a month before the day I was due to arrive in the courthouse, so I tossed it aside and let it sit for five weeks collecting dust on the corner of my desk. As the date approached, though, panic set in. Friends I didn't even know I had emerged from oblivion to tell me their jury duty horror stories. One was sequestered overnight. One sat on a murder trial that lasted six weeks.
I was doomed. My only shot at freedom was to pull a Liz Lemon:
I texted several friends about my predicament. One suggested I "use Liz Lemon's way of getting out of it." Another wrote "I don't think it's fair for you to be on jury duty because you're a hologram." (I'll have it known that I suggested this very approach to my dad when he was summoned several months ago and he didn't even consider it. Rude. Also, thank God I have friends who get me!)
My mother was also a huge help.
Me: What if I wear like nine different prints?
Mom: And twitch.
Me: What should I wear? I need something that says "I'm crazy, but not so crazy that I'm embarrassed to walk around in this."
Mom: I don't think you can accomplish both.
Me: What if I showed up in a bathing suit and snorkel mask? And my polka-dotted rain boots! Or high heels!
Mom: Go with the rain boots.
Me: Is it too late for me to have Lynn (my doctor) write a note saying I'm schizophrenic?
Mom: You'd have to convince her first.
Me: But I hear voices!
Finally the Day of Duty arrived. It began as no day should ever begin: at the unholy hour of 5:00 am. I ate breakfast, made lunch, showered, decided against the bathing suit/snorkel mask/rain boots ensemble, practiced my "Excuse me, Imperial Guard?" intonations, and headed to the bus stop.
I arrived at the King County Superior Court in Seattle at about 7:45. After I passed through security I got in line at the Information Desk to ask the whereabouts of the Juror Assembly Room (JAR). The woman in front of me had asked the same thing and when it was my turn I pointed down the hall and said, "I'll just follow her." She slowed down so I could catch up. "Do you not want to be here either?" I asked, and she thrashed her head from side to side, her eyes wide.
We made our way to the JAR where we handed our dinky paper badges to the lady at the desk who scanned them and told us to pick up an information pamphlet and have a seat. The JAR was long and narrow with about 25 rows of ten seats extending back into the bowels of the courthouse. The chairs all faced forward toward a podium and there were TVs mounted on the wall every three or four rows. After I read through the hot pink juror information sheet I wedged my NPR tote bag (which I had taken to make myself look smart so they wouldn't pick me) between my legs and the armrest and pulled out my book (which I had taken to make myself look smart so they wouldn't pick me).
At 8:15, without a word from anyone with authority, the lights went out and a video started. A grainy image of the Constitution served as a backdrop, and as the camera zoomed in to highlight the words, a very slow, deliberate female voice declared "We the People" as though she were being scored on enthusiasm. I laughed and then promptly shut up when I realized that in a room of 250 people I was the only one who found it entertaining.
The video, which lasted roughly ten minutes, covered all the details of how we were chosen for the jury pool and the entire procedure of whittling down hundreds of people to get the final twelve jurors. When the video ended we had a short break and the judge approached the podium and covered all the details of how we were chosen for the jury pool and the entire process of whittling down hundreds of people to get the final twelve jurors. (What she discussed was almost literally word-for-word what was said in the video, so, you know, that was necessary.) Partway through her speech an elderly man toward the front of the room
raised his hand and shouted "I can't hear you!" The judge adjusted
the microphone and promised to speak up. She then launched into a lecture on the history of juries, which date all the way back to ancient Greece and "a play by Sophocles about a jury." At the end of her spiel she told us, "I can find out the name of that play by Sophocles if anyone's interested." First of all, don't everyone rush up at once. Secondly, Your Honor, maybe you should learn your Greek playwrights before launching into an oration on literary history. The play is actually a trilogy by Aeschylus, not Sophocles, and it's called Oresteia. (And while we're at it, it's Pike Place Market, not Pikes Place Market. You live in Seattle, for God's sake.)
We were then introduced to the bailiff, a fast-talking woman with a short, frizzy brown triangle of hair that fanned out midway down her ears and narrowed to a point at the top of her head. A minute into her talk the same elderly man raised his head and once again shouted "I can't hear you!" I decided then and there that I would like to adopt him as my grandfather.
Then came the important stuff. "Most trials run for about a week and a half," the bailiff told us, "but your trial is special." I shrank into my chair, knowing full well that in this context "special" was not the same word spelled out in daisies and teddy bears on stickers at the top of my first-grade homework assignments. "As you all know," the bailiff continued, "today is Friday. Normally we do not have sessions on Fridays. We only have sessions on Fridays for two reasons: One, it's a high-profile case." Shit, I thought, I'm going to be looking at positive rape kit results and photos of dead babies and bloody, mangled limbs. "Two," she said, "it's a long case. Now, I already said that normally trials run a week and a half." I held my breath. "This trial will run through the end of the year." A collective groan swept across the room. "So let me get this straight," whispered a man in the row beside me. "If I refuse jury duty, the amount of time I spend in jail will be less than the amount of time I would have to spend on the jury."
Because not all of the 1,000 potential jurors summoned to the courtroom last week would be able to serve from 9:00am to 4:30pm, Monday - Thursday, for ELEVEN EFFING WEEKS, we each received Undue Hardship forms to fill out in case sitting in a courtroom for the rest of 2012 would put a significant damper on our lives. (Side note: Is it not alarming that there are people for whom this would not cause undue hardship? This perplexes me.) The bailiff had told us to be specific in our responses so I laughed when I received my form and saw that they had provided only five lines spanning half the width of the paper. In college, "be specific" meant a seven-page paper. In my most compact handwriting I began to explain that I had plans to fly to New York at the end of this month to visit my 90-year-old grandmother (this is actually true, so if I have to go back on Tuesday that judge is heartless). I still had another reason for dismissal but I had run out of room on the form. I leaned over to the woman next to me--the one I had followed to the JAR--and asked, "Do you think we can write on the back of this?" She raised an eyebrow. "Are you writing an essay?"
I turned in my form and sat through yet another talk on when and where to find out if we had to go back on Tuesday, which included the same elderly man raising his hand and shouting, "Last time they rejected me!" which was by far the highlight of my King County Superior Court experience. After seven people had all asked when the trial would start, we were free to go.
