The Ants Come Marching

This summer, Garnet has been dealing with ants in the house.

A stray on her desk in the studio might be one thing but a battalion is definitely another matter.

They entered through a gap between the wall and window above the kitchen sink and climbed all over the utensils drying in the dish drain. So everything had to be washed again.

After she patched that crack, another battalion appeared in the cabinet that houses such precious foodstuffs as the Ovaltine for Doobins’ morning glass of “Ovaltine milk,” as he calls it. So Garnet had to pull out all the food and wipe down the insides of the cabinet.

I have had my own visits from ants this summer.

His Dogness has always been a finicky eater, and, somewhere along the way, I started offering him food out of my hand as a way to encourage him.

Eventually, I was feeding him his whole meal by hand.

Although I’m mildly embarrassed that I do this – as you can imagine Mr. Whitfield makes fun of me for spoiling him - I find it a satisfying way to spend time with His Dogness. So I have never made a serious effort to try to break him of the habit.

And he has never stopped wanting to be fed that way. As more than one person has said, if someone were feeding you by hand, would you want him to stop?

During the summer, after we come back from our morning walk, I sit on the front steps to feed him.

The powdered medication that he takes for his kidneys has to be mixed in with his food. So I bring everything out and go through the ritual of mixing the powder with his food while he eagerly awaits his first bite.

As he eats, bits of food inevitably end up on the brick walkway that my father put in for me. If a big piece drops, His Dogness takes care of it himself.

If it is too small for him to bother with, I leave it.

After His Dogness has his breakfast, I go in and give Garnet a good-morning call. Next comes my breakfast and reading the paper followed by getting ready for work. By the time I take His Dogness out again just before I head off to work, at least a few ants are working on the bit of dog food.

Sometimes, lots are.

If the piece was small, it may be long gone by the time I come home. If it was a larger piece, they may still be hard at work. By the next morning, though, there is no sign of the food and no sign of the ants, and we start the process afresh.

I find it all quite satisfying.

Ants in the house, highly irksome.

Ants outside, highly entertaining.

Context is all.

Three Cubes, Please

We were all sitting in the living room at Garnet's house when Sparkle Girl got up and headed into the kitchen.

Seizing upon the opportunity for a little free service, both Garnet and I asked her to fix us glasses of water with ice.

"Do I look like Cinderella?" said Sparkle Girl.

Sparkle Girl's Big Breakfast

When I first met Sparkle Girl, she took miniscule bites. If one of her American Girl dolls had come to life, it wouldn't have taken bites any smaller.

And it was easy for Sparkle Girl to become distracted when she was in the middle of a meal. Some conversational topic would capture her imagination, and, forgetting her food completely, she would wander off in whatever direction her mind was taking her.

When it became clear that she wasn't going to return to her meal anytime soon on her own, we would remind her that she was in the middle of supper.

Also, it could be hard to tell when she was done because, if given the opportunity, she would have ladled out about twice as much food onto her plate as she could possibly eat. It was as if she liked having spare food just in case. The first couple of times that you asked whether she was done, she would say, "Oh, no," and eat another teeny-tiny bite or two.

One way or another, I had plenty of opportunity to ask myself such questions as, "If it's going to take this long to eat supper every night for years to come, are you going to be OK?" I never was able to say, "Yes," with any confidence.

Besides, all these ways of approaching a meal were alien to me.

I might forget what I'm saying while I'm eating but I would never forget that I was eating while I was talking. (More than once, Garnet has suggested that I complete a bite before completing my thought.)

I grew up in a family where the rule was that you ate whatever you put on your plate. And, with five children in the family, if you didn't act quickly, everything was gone before you had all that you wanted.

When we lived in West Virginia, my friends Artie's mother would bake cookies and leave a plate of them out on the counter. As we walked through the kitchen, Artie might take one and I could do the same. It was all that I could do not to stuff a couple in my pockets before taking a final two so that I would have one in each hand to wolf down right then.

I need not have worried Sparkle Girl's bird bites. She soon started taking Sparkle Girl-size bites. She still likes to load extra food on her plate but reminding her that she's welcome to take as much as she wants as long as eats whatever she takes curbs most excesses.

And, as for total amount consumed, she has become an eating machine. After she suffered an emotional reversal recently, Garnet and I told her that we would take her and Doobins to her favorite restaurant for breakfast and that she could order whatever she wanted. She could even order two drinks if she wanted to. (She sometimes has trouble deciding between iced tea and Sprite.)

Once there, she ordered pancakes, bacon and grits and was on her way to ordering a side of biscuits and hash browns until Garnet and I told her that she was welcome to share our biscuits and hash browns. And, if that proved not to be enough, we could order more.

I thought that I would at least be finishing up the remains of the pancakes. I was, oh, so wrong. As soon as breakfast arrived, Sparkle Girl added a biscuit from Garnet's plate and some hash browns from mine to her pile. Then she was off to the races.

Where she put all that food, I will never know.

A few weeks later, Sparkle Girl and I were out and about early one morning when she announced that she needed breakfast and she needed it now. We stopped off at a K&W. She had never been to one for breakfast and marveled at having so many possibilities right before her eyes. Her tray and mine were both filled to capacity with her choices while we still had almost half the line to go.

She would have been happy go back for a third tray and keep ordering but, at that point, I pulled out the "if this isn't enough, we will come back for more" ploy.

As she worked her way through her waffle, bacon, grits, etc., she talked about attractive combinations for future breakfasts there.

Her body is certainly putting all that food to good use. When I come over after walking His Dogness after work some evenings, she looks distinctly taller than the day before.

At about 5 p.m. on a recent Saturday, we were eating what Garnet and I thought of as an early dinner. When I said something about dinner, Sparkle Girl said, "Dinner?"

I wasn't sure what she was up to. Did she think of it more as supper than dinner? So I asked whether that was what she meant.

"Supper?" she said. "This is lunch."

I reminded her that we had indeed eaten around lunchtime. Admittedly, it was informal. We had pulled things out of the refrigerator and cupboard, and everyone had eaten whatever caught his or her fancy. Certainly, I was full when we were done.

Oh, no, she said, that wasn't lunch; that was a snack. So what we were eating at 5 had to be lunch, and we were going to owe her supper later.

For many years, my grandfather owned a grocery store in Concord. After he retired, he set up shelves in the basement and continued to buy things wholesale. When my grandmother needed something, she would just send one of us grandkids down into the basement. Along with Campbell's soup and other national brands, the shelves also had garden-grown vegetables that had been canned in Mason jars.

You would walk along the aisles until you came whatever Nannie needed, grap it and take it back upstairs.

The day may come when we need to do something such as that in Garnet's basement.

King Doobins

I wasn't there for this one. Garnet was.

The other day, Doobins comes waltzing in wearing nothing but his briefs.

"Mommy," he said, "I want you to make me a king costume and a crown."

Why? asked Garnet.

"So I can put them on," Doobins said, "and go, 'Woo-hoo! I'm a king.'"

Sickness Is...

This is something that I wrote when I was a kid. I don't have any idea how old I was. My mother came upon it the other day and passed it along:

Sickness is wearing your pajamas all day.

Sickness is flipping through the phone book to find funny names.

Sickness is when you have to drink a lot of fluids and all your mother gives you is Kool-Aid.

Sickness is dialing 77 and listening to the recording say, "I'm sorry. The number you are trying to reach is not in service."

Sickness is taking naps because it is the most enjoyable thing to do.

Sickness is having tomato soup and one saltine for lunch.

Sickness is not reading "Elephant Jokes" because it hurts when you laugh.

Sickness is trying to guess what time it is and unplugging the clock so that you are right every time.

Sickness is when the only thing that doesn't ache is your left ear lobe.

Sickness is when you get to stay home from school but don't even enjoy it.

Sickness is watching the soap operas and getting nauseated.

Sickness is reading all of your Thor comic books for the 30th time.

Sickness is taking capsules 65 cubits by 73 cubits by 8 cubits.

Sickness is counting the flowers in the drapes and trying to decide what to do with the fractional parts.

Sickness is getting excited when you discover that it takes the second hand a minute to get around the clock.

Sickness is getting to eat all of the ice cream you want and not wanting any.

Sparkle Girl the Art Critic

After Garnet's father fixed up the room in her house that she uses as a studio, Garnet painted it. The ceiling is a metallic blue, and the walls are blue with sparkles.

The effect is quite striking, especially when the sunlight streams through the windows. But the granulated sparkle paint should have come with a warning: "This paint is incredibly difficult to apply. A gallon covers far less surface area than you could reasonably expect from a product so expensive. And before you're done, you will wonder, as you pause between curses to catch a breath or as you drive to the home-improvement store to buy two more gallons that you never dreamed you would need, what possessed you to buy it in the first place."

Putting it on was like trying to paint with sand, Garnet said. I will have to take her word for that. Eager as I was to help, some incredibly important project of my own - precisely what it was escapes my memory at the moment - prevented me from doing so.

Garnet's birthday arrived not long after she finished painting the studio, and, as a present, her parents, sister and brother-in-law gave her a posh professional easel.

These days, when Garnet works at her easel in her perfect studio with its sun-kissed walls, she looks like an artist in a movie that will bring her the adulation she so richly deserves before the credits roll.

Her current work-in-progress depicts two women looking up at light streaming down from above.The other day, Garnet was using a color that goes by the name of Metallic Regal Red to paint one area when Sparkle Girl came in and asked why she was painting the sky red.

Once Sparkle Girl mentioned it, she could see it that way. Until that moment, though, the thought had never crossed her mind.

She just thought of it as space, she said.

"Outer space?" asked Sparkle Girl.

No, just space, said Garnet.

Sparkle Girl thought about it for a moment and then said in a tone that left no doubt that she thought Garnet was making an artistic misstep, "Ah, well, you're the artist. You can do whatever you want."

And off she walked.