Wherever You Go, There You Are

The zombie and the robot in Costa Rica.

The thing about vacation is that though it is wonderful in lots of ways, there are some things you can’t escape no matter how far you travel.  On Wednesdays on the weeks I don’t have the kids, I get sad.  This happens predictably, routinely and irrationally.  It doesn’t matter that two days later I will get the kids back, Wednesdays are always soaked in melancholy. They have swim up bars in Costa Rica and lovely tropical rainstorms and white sand and warm ocean.  But they also have Wednesdays.  So on Wednesday, I started to get sad about the kids not being with me.  And when I get sad I like to revisit all the things that make me sad about not being with the kids – divorce, custody issues, ex husband baggage, ad nauseum.  The solution to this is to stay busy.  Normally I obsessively sort sock drawers or go to Target for paper towels, spend an hour testing lip glosses on the back of my hand and then leave without the paper towels.  But the only stores around were the Super Mega Ultra Mercado or something like that and the Grupo Do It, which was the Costa Rican Home Depot, not (as it sounds) a place for groups of people to do it.  I needed a plan. “Let’s kayak tomorrow,” I told Arun. Kayaking was sponsored by the hotel and the next morning we met the rest of the participants and the hotel guide down at the beach.  We were to paddle over to the nearby beach, which was adjacent to a some kind of private nature reserve.  We kayaked over and when we pulled the kayaks up the shore a little ways, I saw a dog running towards the group of us, wagging his tail.  He was incredibly skinny.  Every rib was visible, every nub of his spine protruded painfully from his back.  His pelvic bones jutted out from near his tail.  It was, quite honestly, hard to look at.  But he kept wagging his tail.

Up the beach a ways, I saw there were a few more dogs in this little shelter where two men sat with rakes.  The other dogs did not seem nearly as thin as the one dog.  I watched them and after a while, the men got up and started to amble away from the beach, along a dirt path, into the trees and the dogs followed.  It bothered me.  Couldn’t they see how bad that dog was?  Didn’t they feed it?   Of course this was a westerner’s criticism.  Likely these men had no money for extra food and stray animals were a part of life.  I’d seen whole families living in tin shacks, alarmingly close to the road.  Hungry dogs were the least of their problems.

We paddled back to the hotel beach and Arun and I lay down on loungers.  I kept thinking about the dog.  I was sad to begin with – missing the kids made me feel listless and unmoored.  The swim up bar wasn’t even doing it for me anymore.  Arun (TBZE) fell asleep on the lounger.  I went to get some breakfast.  I knew then I’d be heading back to the other beach where the dog was.  I went to the bathroom and got paper towels.  I filled my buffet plate with breakfast fajitas and bacon then surreptitiously transferred it to the paper towels, then wrapped it all up in a little package.  Though the other beach was easily accessible by kayak, it wasn’t easy to get to on foot.  A long walk separated the two beaches and what looked and felt like lava rock underfoot skirted the shoreline.  It was a tricky journey in flip flops, trickier still while carrying a paper towel stuffed with fajitas.  I had no plan.  I just thought I’d find the dog and give him the fajitas and go.   When I got there, just one of them men was there raking sand and picking up little bits of trash.  No dogs.  He waved to me and I waved back and then pretended to be admiring the sand and the shells.  Eventually I sat down in the sand and put the fajitas in my lap and waited.  But the dogs didn’t come and as I often do on misguided missions like these, I started to feel ridiculous.  Usually this vague feeling of ridiculousness is then confirmed by something going terribly wrong.  Case in point, I used to work with home-bound seniors for the United Way.   One of them was too frail to do her laundry.  She lived in a trailer park and I would go there and pick up her laundry and take it to the trailer park laundromat and wash it all for her.  Once I forgot quarters and so I thought I’d just take it back to my house and do it.  Only I had a really shitty washing machine and an even shittier dryer and everything took forever.  Plus, my house was probably a good half hour from the trailer par  k.I took so long doing her laundry, she called United Way, concerned that it was all a scam and I was a scam artist and that my good deed was actually a ploy to steal her polyester nightgowns, her ancient stained towels and her sexy underpants.  As I was in the middle of doing her laundry at my house, United Way called me and were like, hey what are you doing with her laundry? and I stammered through my explanation all the while feeling like I was being accused of being weird and pervy, which might be true, but not in the way they were insinuating.

Where was I going with this.  Right, stray dogs.

A lot of my attempts to help are simply not helpful. As I sat there on the beach with the fajitas soaking through the paper towel and the sun beating down, I thought: okay now you’re just being stupid.  So I emptied the fajitas out of the paper towel onto a little stretch of scrubby grass near the beach and tossed the paper towel in a trash bin.  Of course as soon as I did this the skinny dog showed up, trotting towards me on the dirt path leading to the beach.  I whistled to him, but he ignored me and instead headed for the shelter area.  I went back to the spot where I’d left the fajitas and scooped them up with my bare hands, which turned out to be a terrible mistake because in the roughly 90 seconds they’d been on the grass, they’d been colonized by stinging ants, which then swarmed all over my wrist.  Sting, sting, sting! Here are three hundred bites for your hand so you remember how ridiculous you are! There was no way at that point I was going to drop the fajitas though.  I started walking towards the shelter and now a man had shown up and was sitting on a chair listening to a radio.  Still, the dog ignored me.  What was I going to say if the man asked me what I was doing?  How lame did I look holding a fist full of fajitas, with ants crawling up my arm?  What if I started swelling up because of the ants and I collapsed on this beach that was only visited once a week when the kayakers came.  I’d die here.  And then, ha ha ha, the dogs would eat me, which was good because they’d get a meal but bad for all the obvious reasons.  I continued my lame attempts at getting the dog’s attention, which mostly consisted of me standing awkwardly whispering “I have fajitas.”  After a while I realized it simply wasn’t going to happen.  I dropped the fajitas in the same spot, washed my stinging hand in the ocean and headed back over the rocks.

That night, I reminded myself that by now Arun already knew I was slightly crazy and so it was okay to say what I said next: “Tomorrow I want to go to the supermarket and get dog food for those dogs we saw today.” Bless his heart, Arun said, “Alright.”  The next morning we got up early and we drove the 30 minutes to the Super Mega Ultra Ultima Mercado or whatever and went to the dog food aisle and picked out two big bags of dog food and a Red Label bottle of Johnnie Walker because I wanted to bring something for the men who’d been with the dogs too.  Arun reasoned that bringing actual food for the men might be insulting and would insinuate they were too poor for groceries.  Much better to insinuate they were heavy drinkers instead.  We drove back and Arun carried the two bags of dog food in plastic bags, one in each hand and I stuffed the bottle of Johnnie Walker in my tote bag and we walked through the hotel like it was all perfectly normal.  It was by this time blisteringly hot, Arun was carrying massive bags of dog food, was wearing flip flops and we had no idea what we were going to say to the men in the beach shelter about our bizarre gifts

Lucky for me, Arun speaks Spanish, which is super helpful when you need to explain to a confused Costa Rican man that your wife is a bit unbalanced and a lot crazy and she wants you to have this dog food and to please take it so you don’t have to deal with her weepiness for the rest of the day.  I don’t know what he actually said once we got there, but I’m guessing it was something similar.  I asked him later and he said “I just said my wife likes dogs and she wanted to buy them some food.  And also here is some alcohol.” Whatever he’d said must have been the magic words though because the man stood up from his chair extended his hand to Arun to shake it and thanked him profusely with a big smile.  And that was before he’d even seen the Johnnie Walker, so the thanks was for the dog food.

I wanted to write a Happy Stepfather’s Day post but never got around to it.  But I will say this: As we were walking towards the man on the beach that morning, I could see the bags were digging into Arun’s hands and one of his flip flops was falling apart and the back of his shirt was soaked with sweat.  All because he wanted to make me happy and because he wanted to help, however foolish the mission was.  He knew I was sad and he knew why and he knew that a cocktail wasn’t going to fix it.

So in lieu of a Happy Stepfather’s Day post, I’d just like to say that very clearly I have married the right man this time. A lot of times it’s hard to articulate why you love someone and you speak in generalities.  But I think affirmation comes in moments like these that are stashed away in your brain as images.  The image of him walking in front of me will stay with me for a long time – the pattern on the shirt he was wearing, the red plastic bags holding the dog food and how once he got to the beach, he kicked off his flip flops and walked straight towards the man, with no hesitation and no doubt.

Tagged as: anxiety, arun, custody, divorce, Target