Journal of a Sabbatical

October 21, 1999

banks bite

Today's Reading: Thirty Years by John Marquand

So, I called the 800 number before I left my house for the bank this morning. The 800 number said my checking account balance was $yyyyy and the amount of funds available was $yyyyy. They matched. I am so naive I amaze myself. I thought this meant I could get my money out of the bank. Isn't that what available means?

So there I am again at the bank being sent to a supervisor who explains to me that the 800 number doesn't look at the same screen that they look at in the brick and mortar bank where I am attempting to get a check. So why did she tell me yesterday to call the 800 number before I came back? What are these secret screens? Have I entered the twilight zone?

A long story about how I really want to get my car tomorrow and I can't register it on Saturday so I really have to get it tomorrow... whine whine whine ... elicits the strange advice that I should just write out a personal check to the RMV and have the runner from the dealer register it before I buy it. Disbelief clouds my face. They can register it without the title? I'm not buying that for one minute.

Here's where I start acting like a naive idiot with low self-esteem. I apologize to the bank supervisor for being such a jerk as to try to get my own money out of the bank.

I go across the street to Starbucks and spend the last $$$ in my wallet for a caffe latte. I'm afraid to go back across the street to get cash out of the ATM. What if it won't give me any?

The Honda dealer laughs when I tell him the bank said I could register the car before I pay for it. We set up a time to rendezvous tomorrow morning. I contemplate closing my account at the bank, but think better of it - can't close it 'til the money I deposited shows up.

Now things get really interesting. I am so full of anxiety, anger, and weird energy that I start tackling chores like the light in the front hall.

The light in the front hall has been out for a week. Earlier in the week I offered to give Pajama Woman a bulb to put in for me. She told me her son had already fixed her side. When I get the glass dome off, I discover the bulb isn't burned out after all. It's gone. There is no bulb. This would explain why the switch doesn't turn the light on. I clean the dome and put a new bulb in, all the while wondering why Pajama Woman didn't tell me her son had taken the bulb out.

Since she's threatened to have her son change the bulbs and clean the fixture in the outside light over the front steps, I strike preemptively. Cleaning the fixture takes awhile - there are lots of dead insects stuck on the glass. When I go into the bathroom to fetch more glass cleaner from under the sink, I discover that Wilbur has peed outside the litter box - copiously. He's never done that before. I clean that up and change his litter box before getting back to the light fixture. Finally, armed with clean light fixture and new bulb, I go back to the front steps. This results in my front door and the outside front door being open simultaneously for a few seconds.

As I'm about to close the door, a flash of orange passes to the right of me and vanishes into the shrubs in front of Pajama Woman's unit. Oh great. First he pees all over the bathroom floor and then he runs away from home. I set the light fixture down on the porch and go running after him, calling "Wilbur, good kitty, come here." I hear his distinctive meow from somewhere and run in that direction. There he is, sniffing a pile of trash behind an enormous rhododendron. I squeeze in behind all the bushes and grab him by the scruff of the neck and whisk him out of there. We both get leaves and berries on us. I make a mental note to tell Pajama Woman there's a pile of pizza boxes, and other smelly trash next to her unit - also a shit load of broken glass. Wilbur and I are lucky we are only dirty from our encounter with the mysterious world behind the shrubbery.

With Wilbur safely back inside, I finish with the light fixture and then make another pass by the next door unit to see where the broken glass is from. Her basement window is broken. I check mine. Mine's intact. I decide Pajama Woman is not Martha Stewart after all, as her window has clearly been broken for some time. I begin to feel slightly less inadequate about my homemaking skills.

With all this cavorting behind the shrubbery, my shoes have gotten dirty and I've tracked muck and leaves and wet mulch into the hallway. I commence scrubbing years of grime off the hallway floor. I scrub and I scrub and the floor looks dirtier. I'm just moving crud around. I wish by some miracle I would be momentarily transformed into Martha Stewart - just long enough to clean and decorate the hallway in preparation for the legions of trick or treaters.

Most of the years I've lived here I have either not been home on Halloween or not had any trick or treaters if I was here. Most of the kids in the complex now are kind of old for trick or treat. So why am I worried about it? Pajama Woman is planning for hordes of trick or treaters and is planning to leave the porch light on to signal that trick or treaters are welcome. So if she leaves the light on for them, I have to provide treats too or risk vandalism for the trick of having the porch light on and not providing treats. Of course, the kids around here don't need Halloween as an excuse for mischief. Almost any excuse will do for strewing trash about the place as they sing "I love Bud".

Pajama Woman has other Martha Stewart-like plans for our common front hall. She announced she wants to rip out the Formica on the walls and replace it, but she didn't say with what. I am terrified that this plan will work about as well as her patio plan in the back. The back yard is all dug up, with a half finished patio and a mound of dirt covered with weeds - with flourishing sumac sprouting out of it and invading my yard. It has been this way for months. I can just see the front hall with all the Formica torn off and the walls growing sumac.... and she wants to put window boxes on my kitchen and bathroom windows - can you grow sumac in window boxes?