I’ve been on vacation.  And while ON vacation,  I couldn’t even think about being interested in anything in the world, let alone vaguely amused by it,  when the kids didn’t go to school for six or more hours a day.  It’s all about keeping them alive.  Or safe from me.  Nothing is humorous, not the health care debate, michael jacksons obsessively covered and unsurprising death, not even the woman who blogged endlessly about motherhood and how much drinking helped her deal with it and then announced mid summer that she was quitting drinking.  Thank god I picked Middle Age as my blogging topic although I’d certainly quit middle age were it an option. Here’s a summer story.  My friend Wendy and I  jog every day we can in the summer.  We spend our summers at the same place on the ocean and we have boys who are great friends.  Wendy and I just like hanging out.  Our runs are usually talk marathons with topics ranging from death to divorce (is there anything else other than, perhaps, food although I prefer to eat food rather than talk much about it).  We run at just about the same speed although I’m a bit more pitiful since I have six years on her.  This summer has been a hard one for both of us.  I think we’re both at some sort of mid-life crisis cross roads, happy one day, confused the next.  So on one particularly beautiful morning, one of those days, in perfect symphony, we headed out wondering if we should just keep going.  The kids would get used to living without us, the husbands would find younger, much more sympathetic wives (at least for that initial fake phase before they showed their true colors and became “demandingshrews” with all sorts of needs that didn’t include giving blow jobs), we could travel and sleep in in the morning, cook breakfast just for ourselves and the only fights we’d have to break up would be in barrooms.  We could use the bathroom with no one walking in and earn housekeeping money having sex which is sort of the way it works for me now.  We glumly rounded the corner in a glade next to the ocean where the path widened and there was actually a picnic table.  Suddenly one or the other of us shouted “What the heck is that”.  Up ahead, mid-glade, whatever a GLADE is, was the largest, grey seagull either of us had ever seen.  It had to have been thirty five pounds.  And not a looker of a bird.  Sort of a seagull version of Marty Feldman, for those of you who remember him.  Just sitting there looking, shoulders hunched, eye wide (I say “eye” because only one was visible) and head tilted at a bizarre angle as though it had spent the night on a pullout couch…something MY summer vacation included a lot of.  We got closer and it didn’t move.  We got really close and it stared at us with one terrified Feldmanesque eye and still didn’t move.  And that’s when I noticed the clear fishing line wrapped around it’s beak and wing, closing it’s beak and effectively attaching it’s head to it’s wing.  Ugh.  Big problem. Way bigger than a pull out couch kink.  And not a good look.  Ugh again.  And it was such a nice, well needed run.  Suddenly, here we were, mid marital bitch and being faced with one of those real decisions.  An ethical, moral, substantive and not superficial dilemma and I was just not in the mood.  “What do we do?” asked Wend.  “Two choices.” said I.  “One.  We keep going and have our nice run and continue to hammer our husbands until we feel better.  If we choose one, the bird will sit here all day looking unattractive and probably feeling horrible then get ripped to shreds by a coyote or a fox once it gets dark.  Two.We saved the goddamned bird.”  I looked long and hard at her.  She looked back and grimaced.  “You know we have to try to save it, right?” she said.  I nodded.  We decided that she would stay with the bird, I would run back to the road and try to find a box or a towel and a pair of scissors or, better yet, a vet with a specialty in ornithology.  The road was about five hundred yards away and there was a little wildly overgrown cottage just to the left.  It had the air of Unibomber residence about it and I paused outside the cottage wondering whether I was going to get shot or spend the rest of my life in captivity if I went to the door.  I noticed that the beat up Subaru circa 1979 parked outside had Obama and Save the Organic Farm stickers.  In my experience, Subaru owners, Obama lovers and anyone who wants to save a farm, let alone an organic one,  is unlikely to own a weapon that they will use to shoot ME.  I was a bit more unclear on the captivity part but, feeling the birds terror,  I took my chances, made my way through the puckerbrush and knocked at the screen.  I could see, peering in, that this was a unique house.  So special.  A home to make me feel proud.  A home that made me feel, well, almost Scandinavian.   A place that made me realize that I was not a total failure in the housekeeping department.  Because this house was what TOTAL FAILURE looked like.  And it was the perfect place for my mission because it’s owner had clearly never thrown ANYTHING away.  The woman who came to the door had the sweetest elderly face I’ve ever seen and white hair hanging to her waist.  She didn’t seem at all dismayed by her failure as a housekeeper but more confused by my presence.  I knew instantly that I would not become her captive because there was no room in her house for me.  Phew. I explained my needs and she sprang sprightly into action grabbing a box from a heap of ten thousand box choices(you just never know when you’re going to need a cardboard box or 500), carefully determining perfect seagull size,  grabbed the stinkiest towel I’ve ever smelled from a stack of probably equally stinky towels and found a precious pair of sewing scissors that couldn’t have been better matched by the vet specializing in ornithological surgery.  She asked if she could join the rescue and I said the more the merrier.  On the way down the path she made me sniff two wild yellow primroses perhaps, in a failed attempt to make me think that the fierce stench was coming from them not the towel. I could smell nothing other than urine, pet hair and something that might have been dead emanating from the towel but the gesture was sweet.  We returned to the glade to find Wendy looking worried because Ole One Eye had tried a daring escape into the bushes no doubt sensing that someone was about to wrap her in the stinkiest towel ever and thinking perhaps that being torn to shreds by a fox was preferable.  So there we were.  Standing next to One Eye.  Box.  scissors and stinky towel.  NOW WHAT.  This felt a bit beyond us all particularly since none of us were really sure how much shredding power was still in the seagulls un-fishing line fettered feet.  I decided I’d do the wrapping and holding, the nurse with a towel, if you will.  Wendy could get all the glory as the stench-free surgeon. And our sweet elderly friend could step in where she felt comfortable.  I think she might have been the crisis counselor although not the one with the DNR order.  Too sweet for that.  I grabbed the towel, yelled for the girls to head One Eye off at the pass and we ran around the glade for three or four minutes like something out of the Three Stooges, only stinkier.  Finally,  I swooped, Wendy held the box, I grabbed, we threw the poor terrified bird into the box and held her down.  Wendy, with nerves of steel, started snipping.  “Ooohhh, I’m so frightened.” our  friend, the non-housekeeper kept saying.  I will admit to some serious heart pounding myself.  The bird initially made several attempts to remove my fingers only to be foiled by the fishing line closing her bill.  Eventually she settled down, staring calmly at us with her only eye, either suddenly understanding that this might work out better than drawing and quartering by the locals or just overwhelmed by the smell.  The smell kept me calm too, trying to control my gag reflex.  Wendy kept snipping.  A piece of line here, a piece there.  A chicken bone came out with one long strand that was securing the wing,  a good sign indicating that the bird had probably swooped on a child crabbing which involves no hook just a piece of chicken and a less than bright crab who won’t give up even after he’s lifted out of the water.  The hook might have meant serious damage, way beyond our NON expertise.  Finally, with a quick snip, Wendy freed the bill, leaving a small bit around the lower bill but the bird able to freely open and close.  The bird took a second to catch on.  I only understood when the bird did because the bird grabbed me.  It didn’t hurt but it got my attention.  I leapt, released my hold and the gull hopped out of the box and QUICKLY shook free the towel.  In a childs story, now would be the point at which it looked at us with a deep long stare of grattitude.  A communication between man and animal.  In this case, the bird did stop, the bird did look and I believe the bird glared and silently communicated the following… “I can’t believe you couldn’t find a cleaner towel”.  She flapped twice, made some sort of sound and took off.  Wendy, our new friend and I hollered with joy, we returned the scissors, the box and, as much as I wanted to keep it, the towel, said goodbye to our new friend with the crazy messy house and returned to our jog, so proud of ourselves.  We couldn’t stop talking about the how’s and whats of our rescue effort.  Finally we settled into our run again.  We’d gone about a mile, flush with success, when I said to Wendy…”So what do you think that was about?”.  Wendy got a knowing expression on her face.  She said that she looked at the bird and wondered if it was us, bound in invisible thread, struggling with our obligations but needing someone to set us free or even better, that we needed to set ourselves free.  I pointed out that the bird might have been an analogy for marriage, our marriages, bound by something invisible and suffocating that needed help and some freedom to return to its former marital bliss.  Again, that we needed to free ourselves of whatever it was that was damaging, starving our marriages.  We ran a bit farther and finally agreed that the bird was just a sign from god telling us that even goddamned seagulls need our help.    

So what’s the point of my summer story.  Here’s the point.  Life goes along at it’s own pace.  Ups, downs, boring periods, fun times.  But how often do we get the chance to do something that scares us.  Something that we don’t know how to do or something that makes us very, very nervous.  Not often.  Kids do it every day.  They start new schools, play new sports, eat something that freaks them out.  And they feel proud when they do it.  We grownups just don’t have the opportunities.  Or we don’t take them.  Figuring out how to help that bird was scary.  I’m still a little amazed we did it.  I can’t tell you how good I felt for days afterwards.  Even now, I’m writing about it, aren’t I.  Just a little bit high.  And because I’m a sap I like to think there’s a bird out there retelling the tale of the rescue to all the other cawing gulls, partly to explain why she’s become so smelly but also a bit in awe of our kindness and skill.  That feeling of succeeding at something that doesn’t come naturally is too good to be passed up.  I think we should make it a rule, those of us of a certain age, that at least once a year, we make a choice to do something that scares us to death.  That we really don’t want to do because it’s hard.  Take a leap.  Be afraid.  Push yourself somewhere you really don’t want to go.  It’s the reason that I jump off the wharf in front of  my parents house every summer.  The wharf is a big wooden dock that juts into the tidal river that runs by our front door.  Kids leap seventeen times a day.  Adults do not.  It’s high, it’s cold, there might be sharks(not really, but “Jaws” ruined my life), it seems like an injury waiting to happen.  But I do it.  Early on in the summer.  Every summer and I’ll never stop.  Just because it reminds me of what it’s like to be young.  Nothing is old when you’re young.  I stand there.  I take a deep breath and I imagine the cold and that feeling of being airborne.  I imagine my leg getting ripped off by a shark.  I understand that airborne and fifty are not a good combo.  Neither are legs and sharks.  I get nervous.  And being a little nervous can be very exciting. It takes me a while.  Then I jump. And you should, too. Because when you sputter back to the surface, just for a minute, you’re eleven.  And eleven is a very nice place to be.