Responding

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 10, Verse 29

"God protects the upright but destroys the wicked."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

If you ever needed proof that religion is full of steaming hot shit, you need look no longer than the eight words quoted that begin this post.  

God protects the upright but destroys the wicked.  Sorry-- I just had to write it out fully a second time to see if they were kidding or what.

Apparently, they're not kidding.  

Don't worry, my dear sweet ones.  This isn't going to be a vitriolic post about the two faces, hot feces steaming stench of religion.  No.  I'm not in the mood.  This is going to be a mix of the good and the bad, the same kind of bad as me, things that are on my mind.  This post will probably meander like a gray Camry piloted by a grayhead somewhere along the gray streets of Graysilvania.  

Remember that post about the old Russian nanny?  We hired her.  She was great.  And then she quit.

Hey, it was a good week.  A really good week.  Some parents never even have a good nanny for a good week.  

She gave us some bullshit.  Pain.  Her shoulder.  X-rays.  I don't know.  Maybe she didn't like our kids or our house or the commute or the fact that we can't pay her what she's worth or that we're Jewish or that she found a better gig or I don't know.  Or maybe it really was her old Russian shoulder.  I'm so tired.  I'm so tired of hypothesizing and moralizing and responding.  When I worked on the unit at the psych hospital and someone would go off, someone would push the panic bell, and I'd respond.  A million thoughts raced through my head as I'd run-- toward what, you never knew-- you just responded.  

When felony car Six-Zebra-Four didn't answer the multiple dispatch calls on March 9th, fifty years ago, LAPD officers responded.  From everywhere.  They converged on Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger's Plymouth, abandoned on the side of the road.  The officers were gone.  They were miles away, standing side-by-side in a pitch black onion field, their arms and hands raised high above their heads in supplication-- or was it surrender-- while two career criminals pointed guns at them.  For a second, their hands touched in the moonlight.  Two police officers, both Marines, alone and sweating through their sport coats in the night.

Campbell was shot dead and Hettinger ran through the screaming darkness.  He escaped a bullet wound, but he was forever damaged by losing his partner, haunted and taunted by unceasing thoughts about what he could or should have done differently, labeled a coward by his department.  At Ian Campbell's funeral, Hettinger wandered over to Campbell's mother and murmured, "I loved your boy."

They had been partners for two weeks.

I went to a social media workshop today, and I wanted to throw up the entire time I was there.  From 9:45-11:50 the bile was riling.  Rising.  Writhing.  Former beauty blonde glossy lipstick pageant queens making twice what I make were prattling on about Likes and Tweets and Pings, Clicks, Impressions and Analytics.  And I listened and took notes and crossed my legs and forced it down and everything hurt.  Self-important prats.  Disingenuous.  Inauthentic.  Superficial.  And my mind was sick.  It was thinking about nannies and shoulders, and a white-hot bullet crashing into Ian Campbell's mouth and racing for the bell through a field of onions screaming in the hellfire of darkness.  

And I didn't know what I was going to talk about in therapy.

Don't worry-- I managed to think of something.  I always do.

Eh, eeezokay.

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 11, Verse 15

"Be sure you know a person well before you vouch for his credit!

Better refuse than suffer later."

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She was nearly an hour late this morning.  That nanny of ours.  

How nearly?  I don't know that it matters.  I don't know.  Not anymore, I don't.

We were spoiled at first-- a miracle-nanny.  Obliging, unstoppable energy, knew where everything was, loved our children in a beautiful way, the answer was always "yes".  She went out of her way to help our family and, in turn, we did the same for her.  

Then she went off and got a real job.  People do that, you know.

This one?  This new one?  This nanny of ours.  

Jesus.

Now, I'll admit that it's very First World Problem of me to be complaining about my nanny's ineffectiveness.  On a BLOG, no less.  I know, I get it.  Sue me.  But, first, can you run my nanny down with your car?  Then we won't have to go to court, I'll just give you anything you want.

You don't know a person when they come and interview for an hour.  You don't know a person even after someone vouches for their credit, their backbone, their work-ethic, their ability to understand numbers on a clock and put spoons back in a place that's so painfully obvious spoons go it makes you want to strangle tiny marine animals.  You only know a person once they've infiltrated your house and your life for a month.

And now we know.  

So we've been interviewing.  The first one was on something.  She terrified my wife and I.  We hope she's forgotten our address.  Speed makes you forget things, right?  

The second one, I fell in love with.  Now, I know what you're thinking: for me to have fallen in love with a nanny, she must have been eighteen and showed up here in a white tank top and cotton shorts and had the ubiquitous pony tail bobbing around on the back of her head.  

Well, that would have been okay, but, no.

She was easily in her sixties.  Russian.  Sort of beached herself on our dainty orange couch.  For the purposes of blognonimity, we'll call her "Pronshka".

Pronshka punctuated many of her sentences with an ambivalent shrug of her shoulders and the catchphrase, "Eh, eeezokay."  Like, "Oh, you no chhave yarrrd?  Eh, eeezokay", and "Zay cchave vaffles for brakfost?  Eh, eeezokay."

From the first minute of her, I was hooked.  I'm a novelty-person kind of guy.  Give me an aberrant personality type or an immigrant or a dwarf or a hot girl in a tank top and cotton shorts (sorry) and I'm just good to go.  Pronshka was dynamite.  A goldmine.  For starters, she's nannied longer than I've been alive, once for a family for twelve years.

"Boy vhen I start he vos two, now heez fourrdteen.  Vee play bask-it-bol, bee svim togedder-- eh, eeez okay."

I closed my eyes for just one moment after she said this, silently relishing the absolutely amazing vision of this coptic hassock bounding down a local middle school's basketball court and doing cannonballs into the crisp, blue water.  

IT WAS TOO.  FUCKING.  MUCH.   

Throughout the interview, she mopped her brow, chin, neck and ample mustache area with a handkerchief.  Every time she did it, I got closer to heaven.  This is hilarious, I thought-- I want my children to go off to work and I'll stay home and she can nanny me.  I want to play basketball with forehead-sweat Pronshka.  Hell, I'd even swim with her.  And that's saying a lot.  

I know that, with her, she'd be the boss, not us.  My wife doesn't like it when I say, "Good girl" and "Good boy" to the children for doing something right, "because they're always good boys and good girls-- praise the action" she implores.  And I do, I've gotten MUCH better over the months, but, during the interview, when my daughter acquiesced and plopped an animal cracker in my mouth at my request, Pronshka approved and said, "Ah, she giiv dehdee a cookie-- good gell".  I said to my wife after the interview, "If you think you're going to tell that sweaty Stalin-loving missile-silo not to say "good girl" to our daughter, you're crazy".  

But, who cares?  With her, our children will not want for anything, our house will be cleaned and orderly with frightening efficiency (except the bathroom, she doesn't do bathrooms, and she expects Christmas off as a paid holiday, and one paid week of vacation, and she probably wants День защитника Отечества off, too, but, eh, eeezokay) and she knows what the fuck she's doing, in contrast to our nanny now, who knows just southwest of nothing.

She spoke at length about "vot she doo vit zeh behbehs" during the day, how she is a big fan of taking them outside, and she doesn't care if it's fucking snowing or now-- Moscow, you know-- she takes them out to play.  During a fractional lull in the conversation, she looked at my wife and she looked at me and she said, 

"You are Jew."

 And I don't put a question mark there on purpose because I'm reasonably sure there wasn't one.  I sucked in a pained breath and said,

"Yup, yea.  Yea, we are."

"Yiss," she said definitively, "I know.  My fadder vos Jew, no my mother," her brow knit as she repeated,

"Fadder, he vos Jew."

She saw us staring at her.  Or, maybe she didn't.

"In Rah-sha, used to be no goot, you know, to talk.  Jew.  Thees ees, bat now, eet ees, eet ees diff'rint.  I cchav friends-- Tel Aviv-- eh, eeezokay."

And, to tell you the truth, if I were a different kind of man, I would have stood up and ended the interview right there.  But I'm not that kind of man.  I'm the kind of man who falls in love with folksy, bizarre fat Russian women plotzed down on my couch, wiping themselves down with their husband's old pocket squares.

As we saw her out after around an hour that could easily have been recorded for television, she said, "Look, if maybee you don' like me bekoss my age, I am too old or too fat-- I am good.  No bad habeets, no drink na-tink, no smoke na-tink.  I strong and I work."

Oh, Pronshka.  Not like you?  Never.  

Не могу жить без тебя

Literal translation: "I can't live without you"  

Short version:  "Eh, eeezokay."