I got a flat tire this morning.  I have a lot of experience with changing tires.  I live almost a mile in from a paved road and my “driveway” is like a ride in Disneyworld, especially when it rains.

For a while I was averaging a flat tire a month.  I finally broke down and bought “tire insurance” after I got a flat on my way to get new tires.  I’m pretty certain I’m in the running for Claimant of the Decade.

The tires aren’t hard to change on my Jeep.  I must look like I can handle the situation, because about twenty cars drove by and no one stopped to help me…though I did get a few slow-downs and one thumbs up.

A car finally did pull over…after I already had my Jeep jacked up and the tire off.  It was a guy and his wife.  She told me that she made him stop to help.

While he finished the easy part, I asked him whether he would have stopped if she hadn’t made him.  He said probably not…”You can’t take a chance on being accused of doing something wrong with some of these crazy women.  You read about it all the time.”

Huh?!?  Oh yeah…right…I read that headline in the National Rattler…right under the incredible story of the cat who could speak French.

Maybe I’ve been out in the sun too long…but I can’t recall reading countless stories about men who had heinous experiences because they stopped to help a woman change a tire.  I’m sure there are isolated incidents, but this urban legend sounds like an excuse to me.

His wife asked him if he would want someone to stop and help her.  I think he hesitated a little too long before answering yes.  She didn’t react, just looked at me with the blank expression that all women have…I call it the “Universal Stare”…a visual shorthand that says:  “What’s the point…and aren’t you glad you’re not me.”

I didn’t appreciate the art of tire changing.  My father made me see the light.  When I turned sixteen, he took on the task of teaching me to drive.  He had black hair when we began.  By the time we finished, he had a white streak and a twitch in his left eyelid.

He finally deemed it would no longer be a criminal act for him to take me for my driver’s test.  In an end run, he threw in a monkey wrench.

The morning of my test we went out to get in the car to go to motor vehicles.  The left rear tire was flat.  The spare was laying on the ground next to it, along with the jack, which was in three pieces.

The conversation went something like this:

Me:  You have a flat tire.

Dad:  No…YOU have a flat tire…and before you can get your license, you have to know how to change one.

Me: (standing with my hands on my hips…looking all cute…wearing hot pants and my lowest platform shoes…for driving)  Dad…look at me…when will I EVER have to change my own tire…”

My father took the keys and went into the house.  I wasn’t allowed to get my license until I was 17.  I did a lot of walking in that year.  I also learned how to change a tire, change the oil and air filter, and jump the battery.

Years later, when I was living in Manhattan, my Dad would just hand me his keys and I did all the driving.  He told me that it required blind ambition and a lead foot to navigate traffic in the city and I was perfect for the job.

Eventually I moved to Queens and my parents came down from Connecticut to help me paint my new apartment.  My mother called me into the kitchen.  “I just slapped a bug with the paintbrush.  It ran under the stove.”

That whitewashed cockroach eluded me for months.  I finally found his little carcass, legs up, right after one of my atomic boric acid raids.

My Queens apartment was in a beautiful brownstone, across the street from a huge apartment complex which turned out to be a project crawling with drug dealers and illegal immigrants.  I had gone to look at the apartment in the daytime.  The neighborhood was quiet and there were elderly people on the stoops and children playing on the sidewalks.

At night, the elderly went inside and locked their doors.  Some of the kids became lookouts and hustled up and down the sidewalk for the drug dealers who sat inside their big cars…obeying alternate side of the street parking while pushing their wares.

Personally, I never had any problems with my neighbors.  There were cops who stood at the corner every night and were familiar with my routine when I got off of the Number 7 train.  I also learned how to say a few choice words in Spanish that let the loiterers in front of the bodega know I wasn’t buying and I wasn’t interested.

Every Saturday morning I would drag my laundry cart around the corner with my bag of change and do my wash.  I went early, because if you didn’t stand guard over your clothes there was no guarantee you’d get them all back.  As diligent as I was…I know I saw a sweater of mine on some chick walking down Queen’s Boulevard a week after I made the mistake of going for coffee while my clothes were in the dryer.

I was standing folding my clean towels in my bathroom one morning.  I reached into my laundry basket to pull out another towel and I felt something go over the top of my foot.

“Well, there goes my cockroach free zone.”  I thought…until I looked down.  It wasn’t one of the large mutant roaches that I played tag with.

It was a boa constrictor…about six feet long and as thick as a baseball bat.

I have never again uttered a noise like the high pierced scream that came from me that day.  It must have been one of those sounds only a dog can hear, because no one came running and pounding on my door.

I watched it slither into my linen closet.  I shoved everything within reach in front of it and made a barricade…and then I called my Dad in Connecticut.

Me:  Dddad…I have a snake in my apartment.

Dad:  A snake?  Are you sure?

Me:  Yeah Dad…I’m pretty sure it’s a snake.  I barricaded in my closet.

Dad:  Don’t worry then…snakes don’t climb.

Snakes don’t climb?!?  As he was saying this, it was climbing over the top of the barricade, it’s tongue flicking in and out.

Me:  It’s climbing over the barricade…

Dad: Open your front door and shoo it out…it probably came up through the toilet.

I used a broom and “shooed” the snake toward the door.  It took a detour and went under my couch.  I called 911.

911:  911…

Me:  I have a large snake in my apartment.

(The 911 operator was Spanish.)

Operator:  A snik?  Are you chur?

Me:  Um…yeah…I’m chur it’s a snik.

About an hour went by and two uniformed police showed up.  One was a little white guy and the other was a large black guy.  I brought them up to speed on the status of my snake and pointed to the couch.

Me:  It’s under there.

I was dressed in leotards, tights and leg warmers…so they humored me…and pulled back the couch.

The black cop’s hair pinged from the sides of his head like Buckwheat from the Little Rascals.  The other cop backed up, almost out into the hallway.

Cop 1:  How do you think it got here?

Cop 2:  Probably came up through the toilet.

The snake was coiled and did not look very sociable.  By now I had gotten used to it, and I did what I should have done from the get-go.  I trapped it under my big wicker basket.  The two of them supervised as I got a garbage bag around it.  It wasn’t happy and kept striking inside the bag.  I insisted on taking it to the zoo.

The curator examined my reptilian trespasser.

Me:  Where do you think it came from?

Curator:  Most likely someone in your apartment house had it as a pet.  It probably got loose and got into the walls looking for food.

Me:  That makes more sense to me.  Everyone keeps telling me it probably came up through the toilet.

Curator:  Or that too.

To this day, I always look before I sit…if you know what I mean.

My Dad showed up a week later with a shotgun for me to keep under my bed.

Dad:  Don’t worry about aiming…just point and pull…whatever it is, you’ll blow a hole in it the size of a pie plate.

I never saw my Dad shoot a gun…let alone blast a hole the size of a pie plate into anything. He knew he couldn’t be there to help me handle snakes that might come my way…but it made him feel better to know that I could…and it made me feel better too.

I got a flat tire this morning…

I could have changed it myself.

I miss you Dad…big time.

Day three hundred and one…knowing how to change a tire…still learning how to handle snakes…

Cynthia Neilson

My glass house has four walls.  It’s an older model, so it isn’t shatterproof.  I’m not afraid of fielding stones that might be thrown at it…being a former stuntwoman, I’ve learned how to duck and roll and get out of the way…and I have my own protective gear.  If you toss a stone my way, you’d better put some guts behind it, because if I don’t deserve it, I will be throwing it back…make no mistake.

I hold myself responsible for things that I say and do.  If there is blame to be placed for something I have caused, I will own it.  I don’t go out of my way to deliberately hurt people, as I don’t like the feeling when it is done to me.  In spite of my hard candy shell…I am all marshmallow inside.  I can handle being hurt…I just don’t like being disappointed.

I’ve been disappointed in the construction on my cyber pyramid for the past couple of weeks.  I’ve had to weather a complete computer meltdown and am rebuilding files that were lost in cyberspace.  It was a catastrophe when it happened…now it’s just an annoyance and inconvenient.  I really do prefer to fly without a net, and I think my writing is better when it’s off the cuff.

When I started building this cyber pyramid, I encouraged readers to add their own “graffiti” to the walls as well.  I’ve read all of the comments that the cyber travelers have left…good and bad.   I’m learning something new every day…some of it I’d rather not know…but that’s part of it.

Most of the guest graffiti artists have true talent and I welcome their addition to the wall.  While I don’t always understand or agree with some of the messages, it is now a part of this blog and will remain so forever.

And then there are the parasites…Cyber Carpet Baggers, who jump on, attaching their tentacles so they can push their wares.  Content is not important…it is quantity, not quality and the finish line for them is a profit margin.

My pyramid has been vandalized by Carpet Baggers.  Ads for Viagra, Xanax and Fetish Porn have been plastered across its side…links to links to links….

I expected some of that now and then…but suddenly I was inundated…thousands of links began to appear…most of them laughable…some of them illegal…and the worst of the bunch…the ones that jump the boundary of class and decency.

I struggled with whether or not to remove them…I do not believe in censorship.  I do, however, believe that in order to write on the pyramid wall, you should have read the blog.

I could not shut Pandora’s box…the links produced other links even more shocking than the front line attackers.

I really looked forward to the genuine posts, but washing the nonsense off of the wall was taking up hours of time.  The comment box has been shut off temporarily.

I expect it to be up again soon.  In the meantime, I will continue blogging and hope that in your cyber travels you will stop by and take a look.

Day Two Hundred and Ninety Two…forewarned is forearmed…

Cynthia Neilson

I live outside of the Nashville area.  When someone who lives in the city asks me where my farm is, I tell them to keep driving until they see people climbing the poles to answer their phones…I live about ten miles past that.

Don’t get me wrong, I love living in the country.  I can’t picture myself returning to reside in  NYC, even with the lure of fantastic museums and theatre and great Italian bread from Brooklyn or REAL pizza.

All New Yorkers know that there is something in the water that makes the bread as good as it is.  Italian bread connoisseurs can attest that an authentic loaf is crunchy and firm and the inside should be filled with hollow spots.  And real pizza needs the proper amount of fresh mozzarella and just enough olive oil dripping out after you fold your slice in half to eat it.

Neither of these exists in this area…oh, I’ve heard rumors of sightings…but they turn out to be just that…rumors…and wishful thinking.

There is no pizza or Chinese food delivery here either, and my kids had a hard time adjusting to that at first.  Back in NYC, the guys at the pizza parlor knew my voice when I called in to place a order for delivery.

Any time visitors make plans to come and spend time on our farm, there is a standing request to bring bagels and bread from Brooklyn.  One time I had a pizza FedExed to us from our favorite place on Staten Island…but it wasn’t the same.

Cultural and epicurean differences aside, I consider myself lucky every day to be able to walk out of my door and look at nothing but trees and hills and creeks…and my horses grazing in the pasture below me….

Until the day before yesterday, when all ten of them decided to go on a walkabout and ended up at a neighboring farm about a mile from my house…as the crow flies.

Early Tuesday evening, as I was headed toward Franklin, almost sixty miles away, I got a call from my neighbor.  We’ve had a lot of storms and a tree was down on their electric fence.  My little darlings simply tiptoed over it and were enjoying a snack in the neighbor’s hay field, even though two giant fresh rolls of hay were sitting in their own pasture.

She had managed to shoo them into another one of my pastures and she shut the gate.  I was going to have to move them until the fence was fixed, but I decided to wait until the morning to go and get them.  It gets really dark here at night, especially in the woods, and wrangling a bunch of horses on foot in the dark isn’t a smart thing to do.

I never knew what “pitch black” meant until I moved out here.  There are no tall buildings or a lot of street lights and our nearest neighbors are all almost a mile away.  Eventually we got used to how dark it gets and we can find our way around this farm in pitch blackness.  If you know where you are, walking around at night in the dark is amazingly peaceful…just not when you’re leading a herd of horses.

I got up at the crack of dawn and set out to find my little band.  My only mare, Smoker, was waiting by the gate for me with a disgusted look on her face.  The nine boys were nowhere to be found.  She turned and looked over her shoulder toward a really steep hill.

There they were, standing at the top of it, staring down at me.  They must have climbed like commandoes to get there, it was almost a cliff face.  Just great.

I am the alpha female to this herd.  They follow me because I feed them.  It is as simple as that.  I was going to have to climb up there to get them to follow me down.

Smoker walked over and stood next to me.  She whinnied to them and there was a lot of sarcasm in it.  Ordinarily, horses have the sense of a three year old child.  She is one of the rare exceptions.  She has always separated herself from the herd when they have behaved badly.  She is a tattle tale…when I see her standing by the fence and none of the rest of them are around, then I know something is up.

She was a reining horse before I bought her, a Poco Lena mare, which in the quarter horse world, is royalty.  When she first arrived she had a nasty attitude and her ears were always pinned back.  The previous owners had ridden her with a gag bit because she was difficult to handle.   I have used rubber snaffle bits ever since I got my thoroughbred from the track and learned the hard way how NOT to hang on a horse’s mouth.

The first time I used a rubber bit on Smoker, she stood chewing on it for a minute, and then pushed her ears forward and smoothly trotted out.  I threw away the gag bit and we’ve never looked back.  She has had three foals in her years here on my farm, and I was privileged to be in the stall with her when two of them were born.  I missed the third one by a few minutes…I ran to get my kids at school and when I came back, there was a little colt standing at the fence.  Smoker taught her babies early on that I was the boss, and when I had to handle them she would push them up against the stall wall so I could get a hold of them.

One time I walked up to her and thinking it was her baby, she turned to nip him and got me instead.  She had a look of pure horror on her face when she saw it was me she had bitten instead of her colt.  She put her nose on my shoulder and snorted her apology in my ear.

Ordinarily, when I’m gathering up the herd, she’ll walk right next to me, second in command.

Yesterday morning she followed me over to the bottom of the hill, looked up at the rest of them…and turned and headed back to the gate, looking over her shoulder to let me know I was on my own.

Everything is blooming now, and I pulled myself up the hill with some kind of vine that looked suspiciously poisonous.  I guess I’ll find out in a day or two.

When I finally got to the top, they were lined up along the ridge turning their heads away from me like I was invisible.  I started back down the hill, clicking to them.  They wouldn’t follow me.

I climbed up again and they started to move away from me back toward the other farm.  I hadn’t thought to bring some grain with me as an incentive, but like a hillbilly McGuyver, I filled my pocket with stones and shook my jacket.

I can tell you straight up that this would NOT have worked with Smoker.  But it worked with the boys, and they started down the hill behind me.  The plan was not fool proof…they all wanted to be the first one to get to me…so  I had to use trees as a barrier between me and the thirty six legs and nine thousand pounds scrambling in back of me straight down the cliff side.

We made it to the bottom and they followed me through the gate to the main pasture.  The rest would have gone like clockwork if we hadn’t run into the first snake of the season near the creek.  He was laying stretched across the path and looking a little lumpy, like he had just eaten.

The horses came to a dead stop.  He wasn’t moving and neither were they.  I went to look for the longest stick I could find.  I don’t mess around with the snakes here.  Some of them are poisonous and I air on the side of caution and don’t bother introducing myself unless it’s unavoidably necessary.

I kept poking at it with the stick and it only moved enough for me to know it wasn’t dead.  I was considering how fast I could flip it out of the way and run, when Smoker solved the problem for me.  She impatiently marched up to the snake and stepped over it…and it wasn’t in a dainty way.  The snake got the message and slithered out of sight.  The rest of the horses followed her and I left them eating their own hay in my lower pasture.

This morning when I drove out they were down near my front gate…along with my two pigs, five deer and about twenty turkeys…all grazing side by side like a Dark Side Noah’s Ark.

Smoker was laying down and I waited until I was sure she was just resting.  She’s an old lady now and I wonder how many more springs I’ll see her down in the pasture standing with her ears pinned back, waiting for one of the boys to do something stupid and give her an excuse to tattle.

It’s night again…dark and rainy.  The creek will be up in the morning and I wonder if I’ll be able to drive over it.

The rain is drumming steadily on the metal roof of my porch.  There is no wind, so there is not a lot of bite to this storm.  It is springtime in the south and it is about to be the prettiest time of the year here.

Yeah…I miss good bread and pizza…but right now I’m listening to the rain and thinking about how lucky I am….

Day two hundred and eighty eight…some of the best times are the ones that you just happen to find yourself in…

Cynthia Neilson

Today is my birthday.  It would take a cake the size of a kitchen table to fit all the candles that I have earned.  I don’t mind the bonfire…that amount of candlelight after a certain age can be really flattering.

I am what I am…today.  I can be whomever I want to be tomorrow.  That is the beauty of a life that is being lived.  We don’t have to stay the same…every day is new.

While the skin I have today fits a little differently than the skin I had twenty years ago, (my ex-husband would tell you that my mouth is the same size) I’m growing into my age and I try to make it work for me.

When we’re young it seems like we put a lot of time into pleasing other people.  It is almost more important to be liked than it is to be loved.  Popularity is the golden ring and we all grabbed at it or wished we had.

I’ve never won any awards for my tact… I’ve pretty much say always said whatever is on my mind.  I had a lot of playing time during the end game of my marriage answering my own questions and I have to catch myself when my know-it-all personality shows up like a ball hog.

I have said my share of cringe-worthy things, some of which I would have liked to reword.  But I have very few regrets.

I just don’t give a lot of thought to whether or not anyone likes me anymore.  Enough people do, and the ones that I would have to work to win over are simply not worth the effort.

Age has afforded me that luxury…that…and the fact that I can’t remember ten minutes from the next what I say anyway….

Aside from my midlife attention deficit and blurry close-up vision (nature’s facelift) the whole age thing really doesn’t affect me that much.

I don’t ever think about what I can’t or shouldn’t do…it gets in the way of what I still want to accomplish.

I keep moving…

Age can be a hindrance for some women, especially if they find themselves single and over forty-five.  Once they’re past their best child-bearing years, their allure of danger and unpredictability fades away with the scent of their musk.  They lose their perfume.  And no amount of paint will up their curb appeal.

Me…I just keep changing it up…just enough behind the trends to look like I’m on the cutting edge.  I’ve recently added yoga to my workout regiment.  I’m not that good at it…yet.  I have a hard time standing still and I had an intimate encounter with the knotted waistband tie of my workout pants trying to hold one of the poses.

The amount of living in your years is what matters most.

I used to think that past a certain age, it was silly to make a big deal out of birthdays.  But I now believe that all of them should be celebrations.  Age tends to make you appreciate the privilege of growing older.

I don’t ask for things on my birthday.  I’ve never really been a girl who says “I want…”  I’m making an exception today.  As I carve this story into my cyber pyramid, my younger brother is running out of time.  His heart can’t be repaired again and a transplant is no longer an option.  Hospice angels are caring for him and I am certain he is aggravating them as much as he says they aggravate him.

We joked today about him getting to go to the front of the line at Disneyworld in his Jazzychair.  He’s always been so anti-drug and finds hysterical irony in his narcotics collection and morphine drip.

He has a little bit of personal business to finish.

So that’s my birthday wish…let him have this one victory so he can leave knowing he did what he needed to do.  Please.

When I started this pyramid on January 1st,  I made a promise to myself to do five things everyday:

1.  Make my bed.

2.  Don’t litter.

3.  Look up and let go.

4.  Eat cake.

5.  Laugh and cry.

I did all of that today…but most of it was crying from laughing too hard…you have to understand my family…we’re Italian.

Day Two Hundred and Eighty Four…Happy Birthday to me.  I have everything that I want…and a lot that I don’t need.  I am lucky.

Cynthia Neilson

The news lately has been draining like a clogged up sink.  Bits of hope and despair floating in a pool of barely moving stillness…emptying just enough to make room to fill again.  The level stays the same…too many snakes…none of them getting the job done.

It isn’t what we don’t or can’t do…the real question is:  Will we ever be satisfied?

We’ve been treading in stagnant water for a long time now.  Like all of the great civilizations in the past, we make huge strides at warp speed and ride the high tide…flopping in the sand when the water recedes…caught up in man-made seaweed.

Human beings are not hardwired to be happy with things staying the same.  We tinker…then when the wheels are moving too smoothly, we throw a monkey wrench in the spokes…I’ve tossed a few myself…so I speak from experience.

We are all competitive.  It’s the character flaw that inspires us and hinders us.  It moves us forward and holds us back.  It is the purest definition of a necessary evil.  We need it to bring change…sometimes at any cost.

And we’ve got the suffix as our human fail safe.  There is an equivalent in every language.

If you consider life an experiment, then suffixes have become the control…the things that stay the same that we are constantly comparing ourselves to…striving to overcome…wishing to change…hoping to achieve…

Led by General “Est”…followed in battle by Colonel “Er” and his infantry…among them…”ing” and “ed” and “n’t”…wielding them to power the punch and soften the blow.

Biggest…bigger…oldest…older…youngest…younger…thinnest…thinner…fattest…fatter…wisest…wiser…strongest…stronger…weakest…weaker…don’t…can’t…won’t…

For such a competitive civilization, we have very thin skin and we behave like children.  We get disappointed and disillusioned and we always seem surprised when we don’t agree with each other.  And yet the reactions of children are the most honest.  Maybe adults are what we become when we finally figure out that honest is a variable and open to interpretation…and manipulation…and abuse.

The world is complicated and there are no simple answers because the controls in this great experiment called life vary and sometimes madmen are in charge of the laboratories.

We all need to simplify.  We can’t go back to cave days when communications were single syllable grunts of affirmation or denial…but we can be more positive and stand behind what we say and do without feeling the need to soften the blow or pull the punch.

Wish…dream…hope…overcome…strive…achieve…understand…accept…tolerate…

question…wonder…believe…know.

All of the stuff that happens after “I am” is what life is all about.  That is your control.

Day two hundred and seventy six…make it the best day…start with “I am.”

Cynthia Neilson