Critter Patrol

I am getting grief from the animals lately. Yesterday I took our dog for a ride to where we were working. She's a good dog, been with us for 11 years, and usually doesn't wander. I was up near the house talking to people and my son was running around with the dog. Suddenly he comes to me and says "Dale went down the hill" and points to the woods across the road from the house.

I went over there and called her. I didn't hear anything, not her chain or anything running through the brush. I called her a few more minutes and decided to take my van down the hill to where the woods cleared for the power lines, figuring she had just followed something through the woods and come out there.

I get all the way down there and I'm calling her. No dog. My son is starting to get upset and I am starting to get a bit worried because she usually doesn't disappear. She usually finds her way back, no problem. My phone rings and it's my partner, who's up at the house I was just at.

"Did you forget something???" he asks.

"No, I was down the hill looking for her!"

Sure enough, the dog had found her way back to the house, no problem. If I had just waited there a few minutes more, it would have been fine. Stupid dog.

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The night before, I woke up at 3 in the morning. I swore I heard something chewing and it sounded like it was coing from the master bathroom. I went in there and turned on the light. It stopped. I went back to bed.

I heard it again. I walked tot he bathroom but didn't turn on the light. I listened and was sure it was coming from a blower duct under my sink. Turned on the light and didn't see anything. I went back to bed.

I heard it again and I heard it again. This time I checked everything , all the drawers and cabinets. There was nothing anywhere.

I told my partner yesterday morning and he said I was "crazy" and that there was no way anything could get up in there. I know what I heard.

So last night my mother is going to put something away in the stove drawer and all of a sudden she shoots across the kitchen. There was Mickey, hopping through the muffin cups in the muffin pan. I didn't see him but she did. I opened the drawer slowly and he must have scurried off. Jack, our Schwans guy, was here and he even was looking for him.

I busted my partner first thing this morning. "So I was crazy, huh?" We pulled out the drawer a little while ago and you could see his droppings. I dropped a d-con packet behind the drawer, so hopefully he won't be around much longer.

You'd think one of the two cats in this house would do somthing about it. "Fat putty" who's around 30 pounds laid down and stared at the drawer, as if to say Come on out so I can look like I know something about mice. "Psycho-kitty" was nowehere to be found. You'd think he would at least be interested in playing swat the mouse, but noooo......

They're all out to get me.

On Hearing Flight 93 Cockpit Recordings and Reading the Transcripts

Marion Britton was someone my family knew. Her brother was the Pastor at our church growing up and the families have remained close over the years. I have some very vivid memories of Marion at various functions at her brother’s churches over the years and at family functions. She was a single woman, so she was very involved with her nephews and her brother.

We knew Marion had gone down on Flight 93 a few days after 9/11. Her brother hadn’t known she was on the Flight until someone came to tell him during a prayer service he was conducting for the victims of that day at his church. Two days later, he was helping ordain a new group of Pastors, fresh out of seminary.

I read the transcripts yesterday and reports of the testimony. One terrorism expert recounted a phone call Marion made to a friend.

Up until now, it was easier to believe the stories of the heroism, and I’m not taking anything away from the stories of heroism on the flight. No one will ever know for sure what happened on the Flight nor who did what. Marion was a “fluffy” woman, and I had an image in my head of her sitting on one of the hijackers. Yeah, it made that day a lot easier to bear. Reading the testimony about her phone call was hard, to say the least. The L.A. Times reported on the testimony of Det. Sgt. Ray Guidetti of the New Jersey State Police who was assigned to an FBI anti-terrorism task force in Newark:

Marion Britton called a friend. Guidetti said the friend told her: "Don't worry. They'll probably take you to another country." But like the others, Britton was bracing for the worst. She said two people's throats had already been cut.

"It felt like the plane was turning and was going to crash," Guidetti said Britton told her friend. The friend then heard screams and the phone went dead.

Does hearing this make me angry? No. Mostly, I am just sad. Does it make me want to see Zacarias Moussaoui put to death? No, because that will make him a martyr in so many people’s eyes. Let him waste away in isolation somewhere.

And now I think about that movie being made. My visions that I had in my head of what happened to Marion are now gone. I wonder about the depiction in the film.

Everyone who’s saying it’s not right and it’s too early are right. I’m not even as close as many others to the situation and it’s been affecting me more than I thought it would.

Some things I think are better left to the imagination. Having the truth forced down our throats isn’t always the greatest thing.

© 2006 Patti Aliventi

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41 Years Ago Yesterday.....

I had a boyfriend and I always remembered his birthday because it was a day off of my grandmother's birthday. We dated on and off for 3 1/2 years but there was always a feeling of inevitability that we would end up together. His family really liked me and thought I grounded him and humanized him.

He always wanted to be a police officer his whole life. It was almost 20 years ago now that the dream came true and I watched with his family as he graduated with a huge class of recruits as a NYC Police Officer.

That 20 years is important. See, NYC Police Officers can retire in 20 years. Maybe that's why I've had this urge to move up here. Despite living near the city, I always preferred a rural atmosphere. He came from far out on Long Island, where the developers hadn't quite reached back then (although they are fast encroaching nowadaze) and really liked not feeling like you were on top of your neighbor.

All of those dreams came crashing down in May of 1987 when he and his brother and another friend were killed in a car accident. It still hurts to this day to talk about it and think about it.

And yesterday would have been his 41st birthday. Would I be doing the same thing? Would we have been planning to move out of the NYC area and to a more rural area with our kids? I am sure he would have loved this life as much as I do - for all the differences we had, this was one thing we both appreciated. We had problems where I was more emotionally needy than he was, but his parents thought I always helped him that way. But he had the perfect demeanor for a police officer.

I thought his birthday was today - but it was my grandmother's that was today. I only thought about it very late yesterday. Is that the reason I was so emotional yesterday? I don't know. Honestly, I don't think so because other things have been building for a while and yesterday it was like the dam burst with that. Maybe it was the subconscious part of knowing his birthday was yesterday or even thinking it would be the next day.

I still miss him a lot sometimes. My son is named for him and he's got the personality that can bring a smile to my face at just the right time. Sometimes I think he is still with me, or us, like the time my son went down a flight of stairs and didn't even have a bruise on him.

But there are times like this that are hard, when I mourn the life I might have had, if he had lived. The realistic side of me sometimes says that I don't know that it would have worked out - we could have ended up bitterly divorced as well.

But I would have loved to have found out.....

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