Originally I was going to just display the books I am reading, but now I have decided to show one book a month, give everybody a chance to read it as well, and at the end of the month, we’ll have a discussion.  Here.  On the blog.  It’s not going to be a live chat. I’ll just start the discussion and you all can weigh in throughout the day, commenting as often as you wish.  I think that’ll work best as we all have different work schedules and live in different time zones.

The first book I have chosen is Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  It has been brought to my attention that this title is not on Kindle, but it should be available at any library, or you can order it here.

I have marked December 1st on my calendar as the book discussion day.

I would love to hear any suggestions you all might have for future books.

Yes, that’s my sleek nightstand pictured above.  There’s my beautiful bed where I recline in my organic pajamas and read, whilst my hired man Batman massages my feet.

Okay, this is what my nightstand really looks like.  I have photographed it exactly as I found it this morning.

Devin is working on her college applications and last night she made the mistake of telling me the topic of one of her essays.  It was something like: If you had to come up with a title that would describe your life up until now, what would it be?

Devin joked that she was considering calling her life Of Mice and Bats.

This got me started.  I wanted to help.  ”How about The Beautiful and Damned?”  I offered.

“No,”

“A Little Princess!”

“Mom!”

“The Scarlet Letter!”

“Okay, stop, I really don’t need your help.”

“The Bad Seed!”

“I’m going upstairs now.”

“Psycho! The Creature From the Black Lagooon! Apocolypse Now”

Silence.

“The Thing!”

What will she do without me next year?

I mentioned in a recent comment that Batman dropped by last week.  I wasn’t here, but when I arrived home, the guys working on my bathroom told me he had been there all afternoon and had rigged up some contraptions that would rid the house of bats for good.  I hadn’t noticed any contraptions, so I went back outside and saw what he had done.

Oh Batman!  Dear, sweet, misguided Batman!

We’re having our bathroom done. First, the shower needed to be fixed, and then we determined that the shower needed to be replaced and now the entire bathroom is being gutted and rebuilt. It’s the bathroom next to our bedroom. I really hate the term “master” bath, I always have, since I was a child, but it’s the bathroom attached to our bedroom.

I’m sharing this because they just started the demolition of the former bathroom yesterday. I left in the morning, to work elsewhere, and when I arrived home, the dogs met me at the door, just freaking out. They were explaining to me, with their contortions and whining and carrying on, that they had allowed strange men into the house having no idea that their intention was to attack my bathroom with jackhammers. Daphne and Lulu really seemed to feel reponsible for the whole thing. The noise was incredible. There were two jackhammers going in my bathroom.

As the workers finished for the day, I looked at the gaping holes where our shower and tub used to be and asked if any of the holes led outside. “We’ve had problems with bats,” I explained.

The nice jackhammer guy (let’s call him Jack) said, “No, don’t worry, those holes just lead into your attic.”

“Oh my God,” I screamed, ducking and running from the bathroom, “our attic is FILLED with bats.”

“Um…You live in a house with an attic filled with bats?”

“Yes,” I said. Then, seeing his perplexed look, I quickly explained that we didn’t stock the attic with bats. If it was our choice they’d live elsewhere.

Jack asked why we didn’t have the bats removed and I told him about the bat/wildlife removal expert (we call him Batman) we called in last spring to help us with the bat problem. First, Batman wanted to get rid of the bats in the early spring, by sealing their tiny entrances and egresses, before they had their babies. The bats would be having babies in a few weeks, Batman explained, and if he sealed them from the house after the babies were born, the mothers wouldn’t be able to return to them and the babies would die. He started to explain what a stinky situation that would be, but he had already lost me with the words,”mothers” and “dead babies.”

“Are the mothers pregnant now?” I asked Batman.

“Yes, he said, “so you really need to get them out before they have the babies.”

“But where will they go? What if they can’t find another unoccupied attic in time?” I said. Somehow, even pig-faced, flying rodents become somewhat precious to me when I am forced to consider their babies. My attic was, in fact, a bat nursery, and I had to think of the mothers, all plump and expectant, all warm and safe, hanging by their toes from the ceiling.

I determined that that the bats must be allowed to remain in the attic until after the babies were born and able to fly, and then Batman could seal off the house.

Well, the spring came and went and Batman became very busy, but we decided there was no rush. The bats were not coming into the part of the house where we live. They live in a crawl-space part of the attic where nobody goes. So, we passed the summer watching the bats soaring and dipping over the fields each evening, and I felt a sense of proud ownership toward them, I have to admit. These bats had been born and bred in my own house and they were a fine-looking bunch. These Leary bats are special, I told myself, then I screamed and shuddered and ran into the barn when one swooped a little too close to my head.

Several weeks ago, we got another call from Batman. If we wanted the bats out by winter, now was the time. They would be hibernating soon.  I had thought bats were migratory for some reason and when I heard that they hibernate, visions of sleeping bear cubs came to my mind. Visions of warm, cuddly, sleeping mammals.

“Where will they go?”

“Someplace else,” Batman cried. The man’s job is to get rid of bats and he was losing his patience with me. I was having a hard time letting go. They weren’t just any bats, now. They were our bats.

So I think you know how the story ends. I imagined my bat families flying from house to house, knocking on eaves and loose clapboards, only to be driven off by the territorial winged residents already there (and bats hate those bat houses, we have them all over our property – it’s the one place where bats won’t roost). I imagined them huddled in a tree, the mother’s frozen wing wrapped around her young, the father wringing his disgusting claws in despair, and the little ones asking, “Why can’t we go back in the warm house?”

“Because the selfish witch lady wants the whole place to herself, dear one.”

I explained all this to Jack and I saw him catch the eye of another guy in his crew a couple of times. He wasn’t exactly backing away, as I told him the story of the bats in the attic. He was leaning away. Just leaning.
There was no way for him to cover up all the holes to the attic, last night, so he shut the bathroom door, and sealed the bottom with duct tape, just to keep anybody from crawling over and offering their rabid thanks.
Today, when Jack returns and unseals the bathroom, I’ll take a picture of the mess for you all.

In addition to learning how many people are reading my blog, I can also see what “search terms” people use to find their way here. These are the words that people type into Google or some other search engine. Some of these are very funny. “Ann Leary,” Anne Leary,” “Denis Leary,” are, of course, the most common search terms, but I also, almost daily, get “Lady Chatterley’s crisis.” I blogged about Lady Chatterley’s crisis once, but never dreamed that people actually googled this term. I’m not kidding, it’s a daily thing. Do people not understand what the crisis is all about? Are they looking for some kind of literary erotica site? Lady Chatterley’s Crisis would be a great name for such a site. Hmmmm, I have a sort of fun idea brewing in my head right now….

Today I also saw that “a bat just flew past my head and now I’m afraid I have rabies” was one of the “search terms” that led some poor hapless soul to my blog. I know this person’s pain well, having had bats not only whiz past my head but also clinging to my pajamas. I can understand being so deranged with fright that I might start entering fully formed sentences into search bars, expecting to be linked to the Center for Disease Control or, at least, an “All About Bats” site, and I can also imagine the dismay this poor individual (covered with invisible but deadly, rabies-laden bat spittle) must have felt when he or she landed here.

This week, though, my favorite search term is: “christian novels with clamshell railroad washington coast.” Yes, somebody googled that phrase and found their way here. And, if you’re still with us, my Christian bookworm friend, I too love the clamshell railroad/ Washington Coast book genre, but can’t recall ever blogging about it. Nonetheless, welcome!

This is how my day began:

My dogs woke me up at 4:30 a.m, just as they have every morning this week, because there was a raccoon in our garbage. I decided to let Daphne chase the raccoon away. But did it run away? No, It climbed up our house and then stared at me with such pleading, terrified eyes, that I called off Daphne and was tempted to pack it a little “to-go” bag of garbage.

Now it’s 11:00 at night and I’m typing this in my bed with my sweatshirt hood pulled over my head. I’ve pulled the drawstrings of the hood so tight that I’m left with nothing but a tiny hole to peer out of. Why? Because this just flew past my head:

Okay, well is was actually almost an hour ago, and it wasn’t a vampire bat, but still – it was a bat, in my house, flying past my head. It flew a mission of terror through our house, provoking much hysteria and panic. It whizzed past my daughter’s head and she did what anybody would do in her position – she snatched up a rug from the floor, placed it on her head, and then she screamed and ran in circles. My son, being 6’5″, felt like an easy target so he assumed a squatting position and sped across the living room in a most comical crab-walk, bellowing about rabies. I chose to cling to my son, who, even squatting, is taller than me so I felt that he was a sort of human shield (I know, my maternal instincts could use some work).

Finally we decided to flee the house and we sat in my car, huddled together like three terrified, twitching rabbits. I’m usually brave about wildlife but I have a history with bats so I was freaking out. We left the door to the house open and from the car we watched the bat put on a show that was clearly meant to shock and awe. First it swooped back and forth through our living room, our dogs chasing it and leaping at it. Then it landed on our floor and staggered around, dragging it’s disgusting form across our rug with its winged feet. For some reason, when it did this the dogs stopped chasing it. In fact, they backed away from it and then began looking for us. Finally the bat found his way outside. But we’re still worried he might have a friend or two hanging around. I mean literally hanging around (I’m afraid to look at my ceiling for fear of seeing one.)

I just received an email reminding me that I promised another chapter in the Bats vs Learys saga. I meant to do a Part Two to this, but then couldn’t make up my mind which bat invasion I should write about next. I’m a little embarrassed that we have such a wealth of bat stories. We just went through a long period where we kept forgetting to close the chimney flue. If you’re new to country living, please take my advice and never leave the chimney flue open in the summertime. The first time we did this, we were in a rented house. It was before we moved up here full-time and were not so wise about the wild things that fly and crawl and slither into Connecticut country houses at all hours. Our children were very young – maybe three and five years old, and our friends Ted and Amanda Demme were visiting for the weekend. Long story short – I left the flue open and after dinner we saw something fluttering around the living room.

“I wonder what that is,” Denis said cheerfully.  Then the thing came fluttering into the dining room, aiming straight for Denis’s head and all hell broke loose. The rapid-fire tragic-comic stunt sequence that followed included (but was not limited to) Denis trampling our children, Denis using the most foul language imaginable in front of our children and Denis nearly knocking the very pregnant Amanda down a flight of stairs.

It occurred to me during those frantic moments, that until that night, I had never seen Denis genuinely afraid. During our years in the city, his courage had certainly been put to the test. There was the night, for example, when I woke up with the spine-chilling suspicion that there was another person in the apartment. I poked Denis awake and he grabbed a baseball bat and searched each room, tapping the thick of the bat against his palm. Another time an agitated homeless crack-addict guy approached us on the street and Denis assuaged him with a cigarette. His bravery was most admirably on display when our building became infested with mice and he would walk ahead of me into the kitchen, while I clung to him, my face buried in his back, whining, “Do you see any? Do you see any?” I had watched Denis stand up to Harvey Weinstein, out-curse a frenzied cabby, walk past gangs from the nearby housing projects without lowering his eyes and once when a snarling pit-bull came barreling toward us in the park, Denis, who loves dogs, began slapping his thigh, and before I knew it, he and the dog were playfully rolling around on the ground together. What I didn’t know then, was that every man has something that makes his blood run cold. For Humphrey Bogart in “The African Queen” is was leeches. For Denis, it’s bats.

Next: Bats vs Learys Part III – The Final Reckoning

This happened a few summers ago now, but I remember every minute of it like it was yesterday. It was early morning. I was sitting at our dining room table in my pajamas, talking on the phone and writing something down. When Devin came downstairs, I stood up for some reason, still nattering away, and she said, “Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!”

I snapped my fingers and frowned – the universal mother’s sign-language for “shut your trap, I’m on the phone.”

“MOM,” Devin said again, her voice rising now. I looked at her, and that’s when she said THOSE WORDS. She was staring down at my thigh, backing up and stammering, “Mom, there’s a …bat on … your… pajamas!”

Time stood still then. I was staring at Devin, blinking, the phone held to my ear. Later, we would puzzle over my eventual response, which was, “Is .. it … real?” For some reason I was whispering and looking intensely into Devin’s eyes, when I said this. I couldn’t bring myself to look down at my pajamas.

“YES!” Devin screamed, and I then I had to look down and there it was – clinging to my threadbare, paper-thin pajama bottoms – a furry, hideously ugly, maniacally grinning brown bat. He gripped my pajamas with claws that came out of – get this – his wings!. He was grimacing up at me! That’s right, he was leering at me with his half-human/half-pig face and the next thing I knew I was standing at the opposite end of our house shrieking my head off and clinging to Devin, who was also shrieking her head off. In our flight through the house I had somehow managed to brush my cheerful, pug-nosed passenger from my pajamas (and drop the phone) and Devin and I just stood there, clinging to each other, alternately shrieking, laughing and crying.

I’m telling this story now because it’s bat season again. The bats are coming out of hibernation and will soon be darkening the sky around our house every evening. Don’t get me wrong – I love the idea of bats. When we bought our place in Connecticut, we were well aware of the area’s bat population and were pleased that our property was inhabited by so many of these useful creatures. According to an article in the local paper, a single brown bat can devour between 3,000 and 7,000 mosquitos in one night. At dusk, Denis and I used to watch them fly out from under the eaves of our old barn and dart about the sky, and we would gaze up at our little mosquito-assassins and smile. In our minds, there was a beautiful symbiosis between the bats and the Learys. We owned the property, but were willing to allow the bats to live on it. In return they would kill all the mosquitoes so that we could sometimes eat our supper outside. We lived under the misconception that there was a mutually understood, unwritten treatise clearly defiining the boundaries of our territories. The bats got the whole outside. The only place off-limits to them was the inside of our house. We knew that bats sometimes carry rabies, but what we didn’t know was that up close, the bat’s creepiness quotient is off the charts, and, like a terrorist, he doesn’t set much store by boundaries. He rules through fear and intimidation and travels about with the smug knowledge that he can go anywhere he damn well pleases. And he does.

NEXT: Bats: Part Two, starring Denis Leary