Fleas and the Universe.

My dog has fleas. Not only does Petey, aforementioned dog, have fleas, but my sweet man just fractured his collarbone. And the house that I rent and - I should mention - moved into a just a few months ago is being foreclosed on, so I quite likely have to move out. There's actually more, but you get the idea. As I was moaning and groaning about my current plight during my daily call to H., she offered the following, "I wonder why all this is happening to you at once?” which I interpreted as “The Universe is trying to tell you something.” I should add here that I wasn't, in that moment, all that open to H.'s thoughtful comment because I don’t know what the Universe is trying to say. It’s all mixed-up smoke signals and flea bomb clouds to me right now.

Back in the summer of 1991, right before my father became ill, he was feeling blue. I didn't know this at the time because he was a private person who didn’t want to burden his daughters with the ickiness of life. I have since learned that that summer, he carried around a list in his shirt pocket of the all the things that were bothering him; they included financial stress, something to do with work, and finally, the fact that our dog, Riley, had fleas. It’s true. Riley’s fleas were on the list.

I sometimes wonder if all that sadness being literally placed near his heart was the impetus for the cancer to bloom. Within days of feeling shaky on his left side, my father was paralyzed by a tumor from the neck down and rushed from our little seaside town to a reputable hospital two hours way. My sister had just begun college in Illinois, so it was my mom and I who sent the dog to the kennel and headed up to Boston for what was to be the better part of five months. During that time, Riley’s fleas, at loss without a host, populated like gremlins in our three-story, wall-to-wall carpeted home. It was a nightmare situation, times two. Not only was I watching my father rapidly disappear, but during the respites from the hospital I had to walk around my house with plastic bags tied around my legs. To top it off, I also had to disrobe in friends’ garages, plopping clothes in the washing machine, before being allowed into their homes. My mom and I waged war on the fleas over and over again until we won. It took a while. We saved our house, but we could not save my father.

I had forgotten all about his list until this morning after days of bombing and vacuuming every inch of house, washing as much as I could in the hottest of water, trying to entice the cat to eat anti-flea pills by hiding them in cat treats only to discover that Petey has been eating them (he is currently way over-medicated), sprinkling and watering kill'em kernels all over the lawn, etcetera, etcertera, etcetera. I have been a crazed woman.

But here’s the thing. I can’t fix my man’s collarbone and I can’t control the foreclosure. I haven’t decided what to do about those eggs hanging out in my ovaries, and I don’t know if teaching is the career for me for the rest of my life…or what else I would do. I do know that I don’t want to keep a list of my fears and worries next to my heart, so I'm writing them down and sending them off. I know and appreciate that my own collarbone is intact and I'm while I have to move, I'm not losing my investment in a house. And dammit, I’m not going to let these fleas get the best of me, or of Petey.

There’s a lot I can’t control in this life despite my greatest of attempts, but there are few that I can. The rest, I get to choose how to handle, imperfect as my approach may be. Is that message, Universe? Okay, then. Just...easy on the fleas, please.