#58: USA, Italy and England, April – June 2005
A Sudden Death, Zack Attack and Vipers’ Dance

May

The biggest news this month involves Russell’s adventures, so I’ll let him tell the story in his own words, then return to write the rest of the news.

——————————> RBS

How do you stop a  90-lb dog accelerating like a low-slung bullet train? Take it from this recuperating veteran: you don’t want to attempt a diving tackle on a concrete driveway. But perhaps you could have guessed that without my demonstration.

It began when Mama Cat made a sudden, successful bolt out the opened front door of our house. From 100 yards away, Zack zoomed into motion like a comic book villain. Grasping in a half-second the predicament she’d put herself in, Mama took off like a waddling badger in the opposite direction.

Having prior experience of Zack’s near-fatal attack on Mama’s daughter, I ran to intercept his charge. My shouts didn’t penetrate his pumping adrenaline. I launched myself at his neck and shoulders in my best recollection of the Harvard School Junior Varsity defensive secondary. The juggernaut never even broke stride. Empty-armed, I slammed into the concrete, literally face-first, bending my glasses and breaking my wristwatch in the process. After that, things got a bit blurry.

Having demolished the first line of defense, Zack caught up with the cat, who’d climbed into a cypress. To Nancy’s horror, he uncoiled from the ground like a firetruck extension ladder, snapping the cat in his huge jaws at the peak of his leap, two yards into the air. Nancy grabbed his pelt with both hands and shouted, but Zack only shifted his bite for a better grasp.

Mama managed to slip free in that split second. Then she, Zack and Nancy tore off down the hill and into a thick flowerbed, all in a galloping pack. Hobbling but game, I caught up in time to seize Zack’s choke chain, accomplishing with an interrupted air flow what my leap of faith had failed to achieve. With the dog removed to a fixed leash back up the hill, Nancy and I were able to retrieve the moaning cat crouched under thick lavender bushes. She had no broken skin or gushing blood, but we feared for internal injuries. An emergency visit to our vet and subsequent observation at home seem to confirm that she’s severely bruised, psychologically as well as physically, but without life-threatening injuries.

When the dust settled, we took stock of my parallel damage. Miscellaneous scrapes were stinging  but minor. Intercostal pains across my chest emerged only later that evening. (As it turned out, they proved the most painful over the long run.) More dramatic was a giant goose egg that had instantly popped up above my right eyebrow where my head had slammed into the pavement. This bump quickly spread into a rainbow patch above, below and around my eye. When the swelling subsurface bleeding didn’t let up, we decided on a trip to the Amelia Hospital’s Emergency Room in our town’s historic center.

The affable physician on duty seemed bored and eager to capture Nancy and me for an open-ended chat about career choices. A radiologist examined my x-rays and confirmed no hairline fracture of the eye socket. The crew was worried, however, about my continuing sub-surface bleeding, so they convinced us I should go to the Terni regional hospital for a CAT scan and specialist’s examination. With no further delay, I was rolled into an ambulance whose driver must have trained with Michael Schumacher. The normal 45-minute trip took 20 minutes, Nancy following as best she could in our car.

At Terni Hospital, the Emergency Room staff were comradely to each other but condescending to patients and families. At one point, for example, two nurses suddenly appeared to wheel my gurney into the CAT scan, literally shoving Nancy aside as if she were invisible. On a lighter note, one orderly quipped, “I’m sure you got tapped by a lucky punch. I bet the other guy looks much worse; he’s just ashamed to come in for stitches.” And seeing my California place-of-birth on the admitting forms, another nurse asked if I could get her an introduction to ER’s George Clooney.

After the CAT scan showed no damage, the presiding doctor said “Arrivederci” and shook our hands. We thought we were on our way home until I noticed the nurse pushing my gurney had hit the UP button on the elevator. A slight translation glitch: the doctor had released us from the ER, but the hospital had in mind to keep me under observation for three nights. Nancy and I caucused and agreed to one night for safety’s sake, barring complications.

My four-bed ward was spare to the point of bare-bones, the assumption being that accompanying family members will bring needed items for their loved ones and provide basic care. No hospital gown, drinking water, toilet paper, soap, toothbrush or toothpaste. The one saving grace was an individual plastic urinal, termed a pappagallo (parrot) by the Italians. The wives of my three male roommates sat at their besides all night and provided assistance. After Nancy arrived with water and other necessities, she sat with me for a while, but then we agreed it made more sense for her to go home and both of us to get some sleep.

The next day, we had to arm-wrestle the hospital bureaucrats to get me released, even after an eye exam completed a series of tests demonstrating I had no serious damage. It turned out that the government hospital needed me to stay at least two more days for them to claim reimbursement from the Ministry of Health. Once they found out I was a private, paying patient, this resistance dissolved. (Though please note: if I’d stayed the other two nights, the Italian health system would have paid for everything, even for a resident foreigner.)

I come away from this experience glad to have escaped without serious damage to my aging body. I remain alarmed that Zack’s killer-machine mode, although rarely triggered, may eventually cost us a cat. As an interim measure, I’ve set up a tackling dummy in the fruit orchard…

——————————> Back to Nancy

The enclosed photo, taken after R returned from the hospital will give you some idea of just how well he whacked himself, even though half the discoloration is diffused by the light falling on his face. Basically, the whole right side was black, purple and blue.

For happier news, springtime means house and garden projects. This year, we hired a fabro to make metal arches for a rose arbor over the old, round cistern and a grape arbor over the modern, rectangular cistern. Roses and grape vines were planted last year and are already creating the look we’re aiming for. In another year or so, the grapes will have grown over the newer cistern, creating a quiet bower away from the house.

May is a traditional time to celebrate transitions in this part of the world, and we were honored to be invited to two First Communions and a Confirmation, all three followed by the typical multi-course lunch. It’s truly a privilege to participate in these festivities, but I must admit that the 60 year-old backside gets awfully tired after 2+ hours on wooden church benches.

The month ended with another privilege: seeing the mating dance of vipers. The males rear up on their tails and push each other until the weaker one retires, leaving the stronger to mate with the female, who bears her young live. Thanks to Zack barking wildly at some noise just to the side of the garage, we left our computers in time to see two males soaring above the greenery like something out of a snake charmer’s basket.

June

Our hope for a good night’s sleep after returning from England was defeated by the Cookie Monster. Some sort of animal gets up on the roof in the middle of the night, lifts the tiles and searches for mice. Whatever it is — local opinions vary as to whether it’s an owl or a type of weasel — it’s doing us a favor, but it makes a heck of a racket while it goes after a midnight snack.

We’re very much buoyed up by this year’s visit to the Winchester Writer’s Conference. Russell entered the “Life Writing” Competition, submitting requisite memoir outline plus sample pages and was awarded first prize! You can imagine how much this will help in his quest for publication.

For my part, two of the best-known agents in England asked to see my book, and an editor who specializes in mysteries said to get an agent and have him/her send the book to her. On the other side of the coin, I learned that crime writing (as they call it in UK) is the most over-submitted type of book — literally thousands of submissions yearly.

After the conference, we had a nice time touring Sussex and spending a couple days in London. We took the train from Winchester down to Southampton, rented a car and drove east to a B&B in a tiny village. We visited Bodiam Castle (built in 1385, moated and in ruins, but great fun to reconnoiter), Bateman (Kipling’s last home, perhaps most memorable for his study and original paintings for The Jungle Book), Lakehurst Place (HUGE garden operated by Kew Gardens and home of a Millennium Seed Bank where the world’s most endangered species are preserved), and Standen (one of the finest examples of Arts and Crafts architecture and interior decor, a place we could move into right now).

London found us touring the Victoria and Albert’s new exhibition on  the International Arts and Crafts Movement. Such wonderful pieces, some of them so beautiful it broke your heart to see them in a museum and not in a home, the way they were meant to be. We were reminded of the happy time Russell house-sat a Greene & Greene home in Sacramento before we were married — no furniture, but what glorious architecture.

Waterstone’s famous bookstore was having a three-for-one sale, so we ended up buying 25 books, saving enough to pay for shipping to Italy and then some. What a special treat!

Quite a number of years ago, I realized I was getting older when people stopped calling me “miss” and started saying “ma’am.” In London, we both experienced a new threshold: young folks stood up to give us their seats on the tube. After a busy day of sight-seeing, it felt just fine to have reached that milestone.

Let me go back in time to report a couple events here before we left for England.

Early one morning, I opened the door at the top of the stairs to greet Zack and let him out, only to find steps and walls covered in blood. Out beloved dog was seriously bleeding from the nose. We got him outside, where we could examine him and realized this was more than we could handle. Luckily, Graziano arrived just in time to help us bundle Zack into the car and take him to the vet. There he was tranquilized and all six lo-o-o-o-ong nasal passages examined. We were all hoping he’d only breathed in one of the barbed seeds so prevalent this time of year, but no foreign body was found. The doc took blood samples and ruled out Leishmania, a death-sentence, as well as making various other exams. Finally, he concluded that Zack suffers from a common German Shepherd ailment — a lack in one of the genetic elements necessary for normal coagulation. The treatment: vitamin K administered three times a day by injection. After the second injection, the blood stopped drizzling from Zack’s nose, but he has to take vitamin K tablets three times a day, perhaps for life. Death diverted.

Another morning, I heard a loud “whoosh” above the house and ran out in time to see a giant hot air balloon soar over. The annual Tiber Valley balloon parade from Todi to Rome was passing by, thanks to winds wending them our way. Some years we see them; some years we don’t. This was a good year.