Category: suburbs

Most every morning around 6 a.m., I take my two greyhounds, Rufus & Otis (a.k.a. Rutabaga and Oatgorilla), on a mile-long walk on the loop of our neighborhood. This morning,

1) A neighbor parked a car in his front yard and, as we passed, I noticed the headlights were on. I thought I’d check to see if the door was unlocked so I could turn off the lights and save the battery. As I walked around that side of the car, a rabbit who was hiding in their grass revealed himself by bolting away. Rufus & Otis did their best to dislocate my shoulder by leaping through the air after him. Caught in mid-arc, they snarled and snapped at each other. No injuries, but I unleashed a loud, reflexive “HEY HEY STOP!”, which I’m sure the neighbors didn’t appreciate. (The keys were in the ignition, so I took those out and left them on the driver’s seat.)

2) I could hear a neighbor’s dog’s distinct yowl-bark from way down the street. I was resigned to Missy barking at the boys as we passed by, which the neighbors also wouldn’t appreciate. As we got closer to their house, it turned out that Missy was barking because a decent-sized bear was in the yard across the street. Ru & Otis again leaped up to snarl, albeit with a lot less, “Let’s go get him!” action than with the bunny. The bear quickly ambled across the yard on all fours, then got up on its hind legs and placed its front paws on a tree. It was looking at us, and I imagined it was thinking, “C’mon, man, it’s 6 o’clock in the goddamned morning; don’t make me climb a freakin’ tree at this hour. . . .” I walked backwards about 50 feet with the dogs and kept an eye on the bear. The boys snarled a little, but didn’t seem all too eager to go meet the bear. Last I could see of him, he didn’t climb the tree. Missy was still barking her head off.

The bear was smaller than this guy, whose pic I took earlier this summer when he was walking through another neighbor’s yard.

And this, dear reader, is life in Ringwood, NJ.

What I’m reading: Comics weekend! The Search for Smilin’ Ed, Low Moon, Black Blizzard, Pim & Francie, and (the opening of) BodyWorld!

What I’m listening to: High Violet, Squeeze: Singles, 45s and Under, and Heligoland

What I’m watching: Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Commitments

What I’m drinking: D.H. Krahn’s & Q-tonic.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Skipping Sunday’s greyhound hike in favor of a party hosted by their grey-girlfriends Ruby & Willow. Otis tried to impress everyone by eating vegetation until he puked, while Rufus cooled down by lying in a kiddie pool.

Where I’m going: Louisiana for Amy’s godson’s birthday!

What I’m happy about: Finding a new linen suit, a watch, some slip-ons, and a few other articles of clothing in the last week-plus.

What I’m sad about: That my credit card company thought those purchases were so out of keeping with my regular spending patterns that they froze my card until they could call to confirm that a 39-year-old man was indeed buying Vans.

What I’m worried about: Getting the July/August Top 20 Pharma / Top 10 Biopharma Companies issue written; the month of June tends to be pretty exhausting for me.

What I’m pondering: How a bat got into our house on Saturday night. We took the dogs out downstairs for their pre-bed bathroom break, but I always close the door right after we get outside, to keep bugs from getting in. After we got ’em upstairs, I noticed a fluttering wing reflected in the window of the kitchen. I thought a bird had gotten in and was bashing into the walls, but once I turned the kitchen light on, I realized that it was a bat. I hurried the dogs down the hall into the bedroom, since they would’ve gone bananas trying to catch it (and maybe rabies). Since the kitchen only has a half-wall to the dining room, and there’s no partition between the dining room and the living room, the bat zoomed around among the three rooms for quite a while, hitting corners and not necessarily dive-bombing me. I started out trying to swat it with an old issue of SI, then graduated to trying to smother it in Amy’s cooking apron so I could get it out. The area’s cluttered, so a tennis racket would’ve led to my demollishing half the space. After 5 to 10 dizzying (literally, in both cases) minutes of chasing it around, ducking when it came at me, and spinning repeatedly to keep an eye on it, I got the idea to hang a bunch of dog-blankets from the ceiling beam of the dining room, where it connects with the living room. This managed to confine the bat to the dining room and the kitchen, giving me a slight advantage. Then I grabbed an old curtain I was getting ready to throw out, and after a dozen more failed attempts, managed to get the bat tangled up in it. It was heading straight at my face when I got the curtain up. I’ll carry its harrowing squeaks to my . . . well, not my grave. I mean, it wasn’t so scary, but I saw where Bruce Wayne was coming from when he got the idea. Anyway, it was a good thing for me that we were directly in front of the Sliding Glass Door To Nowhere (which once led to our deck). I tossed the curtain, bat and all, out the door, and heard it land in the back yard. The bat was caught inside, still squeaking panickedly. I hurried downstairs, shook up the curtain, and freed the poor creature. I like to think its last squeak before it flew off was one of, “Thanks! Sorry about the misunderstanding!”