So I am biking home from the women’s clinic, slowly, against the wind, with my throbbing kidneys, when I get the phone call. It’s hard to answer the phone while biking, I think, there’s enough going on without having to flip open the phone and field a call.

My kidneys are not happy. They have been trying to deal with this bladder infection that has plagued me for two weeks. My temperature scoreboard rises and falls as the kidney team falls in the mud and then struggles onward. I push along towards home with my antibiotics stowed in my purse and my phone ringing in my front basket.

Okay, what is it? I answer the phone while pedaling, bumping over the curb and onto the sidewalk. Eldest daughter, Laura, is calling me.
“Elsa fell out of a tree at school,” she says.

“Oh, great.” I think, “How are we going to get her to the hospital with no car?” Maybe I was supposed to think, “The poor dear…” But this mom is dealing with too much right now. “If she’s gone and hurt herself,” I fume, “I’ll break her skinny arm.” No, of course, I wouldn’t but I just don’t want her to have any more accidents. She’s already been in a cast and on crutches several times. Once she was dancing on rollerblades, once someone stepped on her hand. She fell out of a tree before, at the beach with grandma and pa. She fell on her head that time and couldn’t walk for a few hours; but that didn’t knock any sense in to her apparently.

“Actually, I jumped out of the tree,” explains Elsa, after she has been dropped off at our house by one of our kind car-endowed friends.
“I was trying to jump onto the top of the wall from the branch, and I slipped.” Of course, she slipped, she’s not a cat.

I am sorely chagrinned. I thought I had trained her better. Whenever we climb trees together, I go over the rules: always have at least one solid handhold and one solid fooothold; never trust a dead branch; branches are strongest near the trunk; when jumping out of a tree, hang and drop or make sure you land on level solid ground. I don’t climb trees as often as she wants me too, because usually, there are too many people around, and you know what they are going to think of a 44-year-old sitting up in the branches. Someone that old in a tree is obviously out of her tree.

“You shouldn’t worry about what people think of you,” she counsels wisely. “You should just be yourself…and you’re still kind of a kid.” OK, but do I want grown-ups to know that?

My mom climbed trees well into her forties; we went for walks in the woods and we climbed trees. When Grandma Gilmore was a little girl, she fell out of a tree onto her head; almost bit her tongue in half. Of course, she was hanging from her knees on the bottom branch when she fell. When her tongue healed up, she went back to climbing trees. She is the shortest in her family of 13 siblings and calls herself “the low point.” Maybe she had to climb trees to get a bit of height. Climbing trees gives you a new perspective on life; it sure did a lot for Zaccheus.

“Are you still mad at me?” Elsa asks sweetly from the couch where she is icing her sore knee. “I forgive you,” I say, “but no more tree climbing unless I am with you.” I don’t want her dropping from the trees like a piece of ripe fruit if I’m not there to catch her. Besides, I need a good excuse to go climbing again.

If someone had asked me, eight months ago, if I would enjoy having a companion whose idea of fun was to hunker down in a field, chewing on a piece of cow poop, waiting with a twinkle in his eye for the chase and the scolding to begin, I would have slapped them with a large dead fish (the kind dogs love to roll in) and said, “Are you crazy?”

So why am I, on this Tuesday morning, April 17th in the year 2007, racing around in a field surrounded by curious neighbors, trying to catch a mischievous Golden Retriever as he dashes about scooping up mouthfuls of dung, daring me to try to come and pry it out of his mouth? “If only I had a lasso… or a gun,” I muse grimly. I am supposed to be in bed recovering from a bladder infection. But the dog has no sympathy or understanding of my discomfort. He is just pleased as punch that he escaped into the field just as the girls were leaving for school, and has no intention of cutting his romp short.

I pretend that I am leaving on a walk without him. He doesn’t buy it. Shaking the snack bag doesn’t help either. The smell of victory poop in his maw is too strong. He’s staying in the field. I want to just leave him there, but I’m sure someone would complain. Dogs can’t run free. Being in the middle of Tokyo has its disadvantages. So I step gingerly over the barbed wire that is supposed to remind people that the field is off-limits, and I attempt to corral the manure-drunk mongrel and convince him that I have his best interests in mind.

Bjorn, who is named after the Norwegian word for “bear,” is interested in racing about in berserker mode. Perhaps he somehow knows about the berserkers, clad in bearskins, madly rushing into battle, hungry for danger and action. When berserker warrior were stuck on ships, they would sometimes beg to be let loose at some landfall so that they could gallumph about smashing things. My furry berserker does seem to have a daily desperate need to chew on things. He races past my legs, a bit of dung-mingled straw hanging out of the side of his mouth, like a dangling cigarette. I suppose he thinks he looks cool, like an adolescent trying a smoke on for size. He passes close enough to me that I think I might catch him, then pauses in a corner of the field every once in a while to laugh at me while sticking his tongue out disrespectfully. He is only pretending to pant; we both know that he’s gloating.

Finally realizing that my arms are too short to grab him in the midst of one of his wild but calculated orbits, he dares to race by even closer. The loop of leash in my hand snaps out far enough to sting his backside and I holler for the umpteenth time, “Sit!” He finally gets it. I am mad and it’s the end of play time. Grabbing his collar, I smack his furry back and give him a two-finger snap on the nose, which he hates. I am blowing hard with anger and frustration. I do not want to take him on a walk, but I know he needs one. So off we go to the quiet roads and trails of Tama Cemetery. What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger, right? Could be, though, that it just makes you insane.