Harold’s Room
Chapter Three
I’m back. Please, don’t look so enthused! Please! Lisa went to get her nails done so I thought I’d have a taste of George Dickel Cascade Hollow, listen to Mr. Leslie West, and pound the keys. Yes Leslie, I WILL call you legend no matter what you say, and I bloody well wish you would come here to play for Harold and me! It has been a very long time since I saw you, Felix and Corky. A long, long time. But I can still see it in my head, and hear it in my mind. It was at the old Coliseum, which has excellent acoustics (the philharmonic used to play there), and a true musician knows he doesn’t have to make your ears bleed to get your attention. Your talent and personality did that. And I could hear every word you sang. I will never forget your chubby butt bouncing around that stage, your guitar setting the place on fire, the audience going wild, and Felix and Corky grinning ear-to-ear as we, and they, watched you work. God that was a great night. You, sir, are definitely on my top ten most influential rock/blues guitarists of the modern era list, and Harold loves you to death! He is camping out tonight in the potted jungle letting you sing him to sleep on the little Logitech iPod player. Oh baby, he’s down! He wasn’t hungry again tonight. He took a very quick bath. He didn’t want to lounge this evening. Twenty minutes and he was done. I can hear him clunking around the tub when he wants out. Sometimes he sits in there for an hour or more, but not lately. It’s that time of year when he has “other” things on his mind. Eating and bathing, two of his favorite things, are no longer of primary importance. Lisa doesn’t want me to talk about those “other” things, which involve ladies of his persuasion (but eventually we will). She refers to it as “pimping him out.” Like I said, Leslie, he’s down. I got him out of the tub and brought him back into his room, and within two minutes he was climbing his hut, pausing briefly at the top and then sliding down the other side into his hot tub. Oops. You weren’t supposed to know about those. I purposely left them out of the description of his room. Disregard them, please. We’ll get to those. At this point in the story they do not exist. He only has his two green glass apple plates and his potted jungle. And of course MY bloody smoking room! I have to get on with it now Leslie, but I truly wish you were sitting here with us, sipping some fine Tennessee sour mash, and maybe strumming your guitar if you didn’t mind too much. But hey, you’re the one who said “I came here to play!” I just heard you say so. Walk the walk Leslie. Come here and play. You just let us know when and we’ll get the guest room ready. Ron Wood, I hope you’re listening. We’d fix up the guest room for you, too. I met you briefly, and you asked if you could play my brand new Alvarez, blonde, acoustic guitar that I had just purchased hours before on my lunch break, and which was leaning against the wall. Like I would say no? You played for me for fifteen or twenty minutes that day, told me my new guitar had a beautiful tone (which was why I picked it out of all the guitars on the wall), but that the action was a bit high and I should take it back to the music store and have them adjust it since I just bought it. Oh it sucked to be me that day. A private concert and some advice from the recently announced new guitarist for The Rolling Stones. You were still with Rod Stewart on the Faces farewell tour at the time we met. I’m sure you don’t remember, but I sure do. You don’t forget something like that. I no longer have it. I never learned to play it, much to my regret. I gave it to my ex stepson Zach during the divorce. HE can play. Really play. I can’t. I can’t even touch type. I know where the keys are, but I type with three fingers on each hand and have to look. One thing I wish: I wish I still had had the little brown paper bag to give to Zach with the guitar, on which was written, “Tested and approved, Ronnie Wood,” and dated. I lost that during a move in 1980, much to my chagrin. Something like that is unforgettable and irreplaceable, but I remember, and he knows that you played and approved it, and you, sir, are a scholar and a gentleman. Not like Lou Reed. I admire him and his body of work, but he did not make a very good impression on me as a person. Yes, I met him. Once upon a time I did have a real life. I managed the “head shop” in the basement at Folz City Boutique, and I met some really cool people there. Thank you Bob Folz. Thank you Larry Aiken and Cotton. Thank you. It was a wonderful time to be alive. But enough about me. I am of no importance in the grander scheme of things.
As I was saying, Harold settled in nicely. He had all the room in the world, anything and everything he might want to eat (as long as it was on the “approved list” in my brand new turtle care guide), a mineral block, a snug place in the potted jungle where he was comfortable, and two new friends who admired him and were rapidly learning to care for him a great deal. Things went on nicely for a month or so, Harold getting his bath every other day, first in the sink, and then, after I read my turtle care guide, in the bathtub where he wouldn’t feel confined. He didn’t mind the sink after the first few times in it, but he does prefer the tub. We only use the sink now if I’m in a hurry and want to make sure he’s hydrated before I leave. I broadened his diet with lettuce, cantaloupe, strawberries, grapes, blackberries, watermelon, grilled chicken breast (stolen from Lisa’s lunches – she won’t boil it), and anything else I could get my hands on that was on the approved list. I started a worm farm out at the edge of the woods by spreading dead leaves and detritus in layers, covering that with cardboard, and covering the cardboard with more dead leaves so it wasn’t unsightly. They don’t like unsightly here in “the retirement village.” Harold liked the results. Then I made a serious mistake, at least you can sort of look at it that way. Harold doesn’t.
Actually, I made two mistakes. I told you Harold is picky. I have no one to blame but myself. I started going to the bait shop every other week or so, picking up three or four little styrofoam cups of mealworms. I remembered that they were one of the staple foods for my fence lizards when I was growing up, and they really, really liked them. I put six in his plate. Harold had never in his life seen a mealworm. He ogled at and sniffed around the mealworms at all angles in his Harold Finch stiff-necked/animatronic sort of way for several minutes, and then he took an exploratory bite. Shall I say, his reaction was “enthusiastic?” He was on them like a duck on a June bug! It was mayhem. He was into his food dish with legs flailing, snapping at the worms left and right as they crawled past him. It was ugly, if you happened to be a mealworm in Harold’s vicinity at any rate. Things here have never been quite the same. The next time I brought in earthworms from the carefully prepared organic worm farm, washed clean, presented on his platter with a beautiful array of lettuce and fruit, I got “the stank eye.” “What is this? Earthworms? Earthworms are for plebians! I am aristocracy! Where are my mealworms!” I was suitably abashed. The meticulously prepared earthworm farm lies abandoned, composted into the earth, and the only ones gaining benefit are the robins and some of my masked friends who like to dig. I continued to frequent the bait shop for a bit longer, but Harold’s food bill increased dramatically. Then it occurred to me that when I was growing up I had gotten some of my mealworms for my former reptilian friends from my neighbors across the street who raised them for fish bait. Hah! I hit the internet, and within six hours a small mealworm farm kit was on its way next day air. It was late August, hotter than Hades, and the only way they would ship live mealworms was overnight. It was expensive, but still one of my smarter moves. Though at certain periods of the year Harold stretches it to its limit to produce, I have not been to the bait shop since. We have still not had to purchase any additional breeding stock either, and when our air freighted “medium worms” bred with what remained of our bait shop “jumbo worms” some sort of mutant developed, so we now have quite a few “gargantuan worms.” This development does not displease His Highness. They’re juicier.
On to my second mistake. I read in my turtle care guide that grain products are good for turtles. I didn’t happen to have any, but I did have organic, stone-ground, no preservatives whole wheat bread. I pinched off a few pieces one day and tossed them in with his mealworms and tomatoes. Same reaction as the mealworms. “What’s this?” Stretch out the neck, look at it from the left, then the right, then the left, then the right. Sniff it. Sniff it. Take a tiny little bite… I got “the stank eye.” “Damn you man! You’ve been holding out on me! Why didn’t you give me some of this before?!” Gobble, gobble, gobble. Harold now frequently partakes of what Lisa referred to shortly after she first observed him eating them as “sausages and toast.” They have become his favorite meal, and I sometimes have to withhold them for a few days so he will eat “what’s good for him.” I keep the mealworm farm under the lower shelf of my table so it is handy, and I have frequently caught him sitting there watching the worms and beetles crawl about when I have deprived him. He is so mistreated, poor thing. All he has on his plate are nasty old tomatoes and blueberries and lettuce and stuff. I got “the stank eye” again over that right shoulder. “That’s rabbit food!” I believe was his intended response. Harold, my friend! How can you have any dessert if you don’t eat your meat?! Or in your case, how can you have any meat if you don’t eat your dessert? I created a monster. A picky monster.
I’m going to back-track for a minute. You’ll recall I said Harold has bright orange-yellow, asymmetrical, full head markings. We’ve had some visitors the last few days, and maybe I should clarify why I found that so striking in comparison to them. All of the box turtles I have been associated with in the past, both distant and recent, have had significantly fewer markings (which is why Lisa calls them turd heads) and all symmetrical, same on the right side as on the left, like a butterfly’s wings. Few had any neck markings at all. Harold looks like someone purposely took a small trim brush, stuck it in a can of paint and shook it at him, splattering it all up his neck and head in random patterns of differing sized and shaped blotches. His forelegs are covered with bright orange-yellow scales, and his rear legs have a scattering of the same. His shell has typical box turtle patterns, also in orange-yellow, not quite as bright, with slightly wider lines than most I see around here, but their markings do vary greatly. There is one young female I’ve seen for the past several years with beautifully blurred cream colored shell markings. The lines are very wide with soft edges as if they wicked into the surface of her shell in the rain. Hard to describe, but unlike any others around here. Harold likes her. She has come to visit a couple of times. More about that later.
As I said, Harold seemed very comfortable, but I noticed that sometimes he liked to sleep under the tables on the right side of the room, as if he felt more secure. Like under the TV table at the cabin. And I had never been very comfortable with his glass water and food dishes on a ceramic tile floor. As it began to appear Harold might be with us a while from the lack of any indication of his plastron healing any time soon, I made a trip to a local pet store. I wandered up and down the two aisles devoted to reptiles, and I found what I though might be just the ticket, in as much as it said Turtle Hut, Large, on the sticker on the side of it. It’s made of cast resin and looks like about a foot long section of a twelve inch diameter pine log sawn in half lengthwise and hollowed out. I snatched one and put it in my cart. Then I found a resin feeding bowl that looked like a flat rock, about five inches in diameter, hollowed out in the middle, with side walls that I hoped a mealworm could not climb. They can certainly climb out of green glass dessert plates. Harold likes to sit in his water dish, and they had the same bowl design two sizes larger and about three quarters of an inch deep, way big enough for Harold to sit in, so I got that, too. I also got a twelve ounce plastic jar of box turtle food pellets, chock full of vitamins and minerals. I figured I could mix water in to soften them as the instructions indicated, but instead of mixing the resulting puree with fruit as suggested, I would mix it with his bread chunks. That has worked, to some degree. He is picky and sometimes refuses the “spiced croutons” which remind me of Thanksgiving dressing. He demands raw bread, no additives, please.
At any rate, enough about turtle husbandry for now. I got home with Harold’s new toys, retired the old food and water dishes, placed the hollow half log under the big oval table with the front opening pointing towards the corner so Harold could see out both the left and end lower panes, and the back opening towards the center of the room. I then placed the left side of the new water bowl snugly up against the right side of the new turtle hut and filled it. I put a bit of tomato, a couple of blueberries, a few pieces of bread and five or six mealworms in the new food bowl, and watched as half of the worms promptly crawled out and started scrambling to find cover. I put them back in the bowl, covered them with the pieces of bread, and they settled down a bit. I went to the kitchen for a drink, headed back into Harold’s room, and as I was stepping back down through the door I heard a very odd scraping/scrabbling sort of noise, like a squirrel going up the side of a tree, but slowly. Very slowly. I looked around for Harold but could not for the life of me find him. I looked in his spot in the potted jungle behind Herman (dubbed so after Harold arrived), the life-sized, friendly looking plastic box turtle who used to sit in my outdoor flower garden in that former life I mentioned, but now sits in front of the potted jungle. I looked behind Dunbar, the seventeen inch long, ten inch wide, eight inches at the hump golden, art deco turtle statue that guards the left side of Harold’s courtyard. I looked in the new turtle hut, the back of which faces his courtyard, by the brick with the old schoolhouse painted on it that sits smack in the glassed corner at the same forty-five degree angle as the oval table. Sometimes Harold stands looking at the brick as if he is trying to look in the windows of the schoolhouse. He’ll stand there without moving his head more than an inch or two to the left and right for twenty or thirty minutes. I sometimes wonder if he actually sees somebody in those windows. I have no other explanation as to why he would stare at that brick that way for so long. I looked behind the ficus tree, behind and under our chairs and the tables. No Harold. Then I heard a slight scratching noise behind me in Harold’s courtyard. I crawled back over and peered into the turtle hut again. Nothing. I could see right through and out the windows. I heard the noise again, very near my head, and looked up. There sat Harold, perched on top of the half-round log, looking me right in the face. “Heh, heh, heh! Fooled you, didn’t I? You didn’t think I could climb up here.” In fact, I had no idea he could climb that log, but he can, and he does. He sat there for a bit, maybe ten minutes, peering out the windows from his advantageous height, then slid down the right side of the hut, splash! Into the water dish. It has become a favorite activity of his: Up the left side of the hut, then down the right side, and splash! He doesn’t do it all that often, but some days I have seen him do it four or five times. He crawls into the water dish from floor level all the time, so he knows how to get in it, and he has to go out of his way to get to the left side of the hut, climb it, which requires a good bit of exertion on his part, and slide into the pool. He has to be doing it by choice. Because he thinks it is fun? Who’da thunk it?
Okay! Which of Harold’s idiosyncrasies shall we discuss now? We have just scratched the surface. Harold likes hummingbirds. All birds, actually. I think he is jealous of their wings from the way he watches them. But he particularly likes hummingbirds. Maybe he thinks they are big beetles and wants to eat them. I don’t know. I mounted a couple of pulleys in the soffit of the eave above Harold’s corner so I could hang a feeder up there, and I can lower it to refill it, or to refill the ant trap I made out of a PVC pipe cap and stainless steel turnbuckle that it hangs below. Cheaper than and as effective as store-bought traps. More durable, too. All you have to do is drill one hole in the end of the pipe cap, then screw the turnbuckle tensioner through the hole, install the turnbuckle on the tensioner and screw it down tight so the pipe cap won’t leak. Simple as that, and they have been in service now for eight years. I usually hang the feeder shaped like a hot air balloon up there, and Harold likes to sit by the schoolhouse brick with his head craned upward watching the hummingbirds zip around the feeder and participate in their aerial dogfights for feeder supremacy. It is fun. I do it, too. I sit in my chair, not by the brick. They move fast when they want to. Like tiny missiles. I wouldn’t want one to stick that beak in my eye.
Several years ago we decided to move the window mounted pink house seed feeder down to the lower panel below the far sliding window, right above the ledge of the sunroom floor. The squirrels like to eat out of it, and they climbed the screens to get to it. Squirrel claws and window screens do not get along well together. I tried everything I could think of to get them to stop, to no avail. When in Rome… Down came the feeder. The squirrels appreciated it greatly, and I appreciated them not tearing up the screens. One in particular has taken a fancy to the pink house feeder and spends a lot of time there. Harold and Little Bit, as we call the squirrel, who I swear has not grown any larger the last two years, have developed a relationship. I swear to God this is true! (My God is currently incarnated as Ruby, a bag lady from Selma, Alabama, and boy are there going to be a lot of surprised people when judgment day comes around! I can’t wait to see your faces! Be very careful how you treat people you do not know.) Little Bit arrives usually mid-morning, and she runs up to the window, presses her front paws and face to the glass and looks for Harold. She looks left and right, up and down, left and right, and then at me, as if to say, “Where is he? What have you done with Harold?” She is not afraid of me in the slightest. I have crawled under the right hand hickory chair on many occasions to tap the glass right by her head so she will turn toward me and I can take her picture. She just looks at me as if to say, “What?!! I’m trying to eat!” When she comes looking for Harold and he sees her he ambles over to the window and they stand there for a few minutes, nose-to-nose, just looking at each other and rubbing noses through the glass. Then Little Bit is satisfied and starts in on the seed, either in the feeder, or on the outside ledge of the sunroom floor where I usually scatter some extra. Harold frequently sits with her and watches her eat, sometimes for an hour or more. I swear it! In Ruby’s name, I swear it! This they really, really do! I have witnesses. More about Little Bit later. A truly harrowing story. But it is recent, and I want to try to stop disrupting the time flow of the narrative, so later.
Way, way back in 1986 I was sent to the hospital the Monday after Easter with chest pains and pains in my left arm. Those poor nurses up in cardiac did not have a bloody coffee maker! Theirs broke and the hospital wouldn’t buy them a new one, so when I wanted coffee (and I start drinking it when the sun comes up and don’t stop until it goes down) I had to wait thirty or forty minutes for them to send it up from the kitchen. That is not acceptable, so I asked my ex-wife, Fran, who is the mother of my three sons, and a wonderful, compassionate person I still care about greatly, to stop and get a coffee maker and some decent coffee, and we set it up on the sly in the little kitchen area up on the third floor down the hall from my room. It was supposed to be an anonymous donation to the unit, but the next day I went in to get me a cup o’ java, and there hung a sign on the coffee maker: Courtesy of Mr. Appel in room 326. Damn that sweet second shift nurse I had! I wish I could remember her name. An “older lady” to me at the time, I would bet she wasn’t much older than I am now. She was the salt of the earth, and I was treated like royalty for the rest of the week they kept me in there with that damned monitor hooked to me. Oh well, my physician and good friend James wanted to be sure. You don’t want to screw around with chest and left arm pains. Maybe he did it to teach me a lesson. He was a tad upset with me. “Why didn’t you call me yesterday when it started hurting! I want you over in the emergency room right now.”
“I have to take Fran home and get a few things first, James.” (Yes, I have always called him James. I just like to.)
“You need to get your butt over there now.”
“No, James, I have to go home first, but I’ll come right back. I either go home and then to the emergency room, or I don’t go at all. An hour, hour and a half, tops. I promise. Deal?”
“Deal. But if you don’t show up I am going to be so pissed…” I promised. I went. And there I was. For a week. Before the coffee maker incident I had already attained a bit of notoriety up there on the third floor, and that has to do with why I brought this up. I absolutely hated to walk down the hall in my hospital gown with my bare buttocks hanging in the air, clutching and grabbing at that damned thing (please pronounce all of these as damn-ed, if you don’t mind). My sweet mother Ginny showed up Tuesday evening with a gift for me in the form of a lightweight cotton, short-sleeved, adult male, Mickey Mouse night gown. She knows me too well. I loved it, and I kept that thing until this past spring. Yes, the spring of 2015. Mickey and I were together a long, long time. It killed me when I dropped him in the trash can, it just killed me. At any rate, I used to wear Mickey on Saturdays when I did my chores during the summer, and sometimes on Sunday mornings when we sat with Harold to have coffee and read the paper. One Sunday a couple of years ago I was sitting there drinking my coffee as usual, I thought with Harold, while Lisa was attending to something in the main house. I was having a grand time watching my friends out back, just sipping away and talking to my short friend, when I realized he wasn’t there. I looked around, no Harold. I yelled to Lisa, “I can’t find Harold! I’ve looked everywhere!”
“I’ll be right there,” she called back. She came in a minute or two later with her hands behind her back, walked over to me, and set Harold in my lap. He had on a Mickey Mouse gown. She had purchased a small swathe of material with a Mickey Mouse pattern, not quite like mine, but close enough, cut out an oblong piece, stuck a piece of doubled Scotch tape at the neckline, and stuck it to his shell. “Twins!” she cried. Yes, I have pictures. We both thought we looked extremely fashionable in our “matching” outfits. Harold’s gown was actually a cape, and he knew it, and it was not his last. And yes, we will hear more about those later. I might add, this year for my birthday I got a brand new, hand sewn (by Lisa’s step-mother Jaylene), long sleeve, Mickey Mouse night gown, in the exact same material pattern as Harold’s. The Twins ride again! YES! I have pictures of us with me in my new gown, too.