About Laurie Goodman
Getting to Know Laurie Goodman
Most puppies chew on things they shouldn’t. Boxer puppies are no different. Shoes and cardboard are some of their favorite targets, and while no one wants to see their wedding shoes chewed up by a four-month-old puppy—yes this happened to me—the real fear is that a puppy will ingest something that will cause them physical harm.
For my dog Atticus, the stinkier an item, the more it appealed to him. Luckily, the kitchen trashcan lived behind a faux cupboard door.
It never crossed my mind to worry about the bathroom trashcans. I’ve had dogs all of my life and while some might grab a tissue or two from the trash it was never much of a problem.
It didn’t occur to me to worry about the feminine hygiene products that are disposed of in bathroom trashcans.
One late afternoon I was getting dinner together. I should have sensed trouble, because Atticus was quiet. Boxer’s have two speeds when they are puppies—on and off. I should have known he was up to no good. By the time I realized that Atticus had pulled something out of the bathroom trashcan, he was on the move.
I caught a quick look at the item as he darted past me, but by the time I managed to corner him, it was gone. I knew he had swallowed it.
I grabbed the phone and called our vet.
As horrific as this conversation was for me—yes one of my vets is a male, and of course his wife had worked the earlier shift that day—I told him what had happened and asked if I should bring Atticus over. I envisioned some horrible procedure he would have to endure—I had watched Emergency Vets—to bring up this foreign object.
But my vet didn’t instruct me to load Atticus in the car and get him right over to his office. Instead, in his matter of fact way, he told me that I should try giving Atticus 2 ounces of Peroxide, in three separate doses, twenty minutes apart. Between each dose I should run him, which would make the Peroxide foam up inside of him and cause him to vomit.
Even with the urgency of the situation, I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Was he kidding? But there was no chuckling on the other end of the phone. He was serious.
So I hung up the phone and went to grab Peroxide from the bathroom.
Now have you ever done something that is clearly ridiculous and in retrospect you think, “what the heck was I thinking?” Well that’s what happened after I poured 2 ounces of Peroxide into a tiny bowl and placed it on the floor in front of my boxer. He took one whiff of the offensive liquid and backed up. I grabbed the bowl and tried to pry open his mouth, but he kept his lips glued together.
How on earth was I going to get him to drink this crap?
I have to admit for a second or two I started to panic. Time was of the essence. I had to get him to throw up the offensive item before it tried to move from his stomach to his intestines.
But I was home alone. My daughter was with a friend. And my neighbor—the only one I could even begin to ask to assist me with such a task—wasn’t home. My husband worked too far away to be an option.
So I looked around the house thinking, I need a medicine dropper. But the only medicine dropper I could recall had come with the baby acetaminophen, and we hadn’t had any of that in the house for years.
I glanced around my kitchen. Where could I find something like an eye- dropper? All of a sudden a lightbulb went off in my head. What about a turkey baster? I yanked open my utensil drawer and grabbed my baster.
Maybe, just maybe this would work. I placed the small bowl of Peroxide on the counter and sucked it up with the baster. Then I opened Atticus’s mouth, and before he could object to the weird instrument I was shoving down his throat, I squirted the liquid inside.
The look on his face as he got a taste of the Peroxide was pretty funny, but I didn’t have time to admire it. I put his leash on and pulled him out into the backyard where we ran around in circles.
When nothing happened after twenty minutes, out came the turkey baster again. Atticus wasn’t quite as receptive to this dose, but by now I wasn’t taking no for an answer. I squirted the next dose down his throat and away we went running around the backyard.
Within two minutes I saw foam bubbling up at the corner of his mouth. After another minute or two, he was vomiting up the offensive item.
I hadn’t even needed the third dose.
I called the vet back expecting all kinds of kudos for my ingenuity. He just said, “That’s great. He should be fine.”
That’s it, I thought. No pat on the back? No incredulity that I’d managed to solve this problem by myself?
I hung up the phone, a little deflated that my quick thinking hadn’t elicited more praise.
I looked at Atticus certain he would at least smother me with affection for saving him from extensive surgery or at least, a disgusting procedure at the vets.
But he just looked at me, like “What’s the big deal, mom.”
Then he went in search of more trouble.
Slow and Steady Wins the Race
When I first returned to school to get my Bachelor’s Degree at the age of twenty-two, I was excited, but a bit apprehensive. I knew I didn’t want to be a paralegal my entire life, but a turbulent relationship with my father had all but crushed my confidence.
It was my psychologist who encouraged me to return to school at a weekend college not far from where I lived. The program was mostly made up of courses that required independent study—only five three-hour classes a semester, but tons of research and writing in between classes. The structure of the program worked well with my life—I had a full time job, and before long a husband.
I started with just one class to get my feet wet and build up my confidence. An A in that class made me crave more courses.
Before long I was taking three classes a semester—which was the limit at the weekend college in any one semester, since most students had full time jobs and families.
The best part was, I wasn’t just chalking up credits to graduate—I was actually enjoying the journey.
But one day, some of the students in my class started talking about their projected graduation dates. Until that moment I hadn’t really affixed a date to my graduation.
Later, when I got home I pulled out my transcript and started doing the math. According to my calculations I would graduate in 1997—it would take me 9 ½ years at the pace I had set to graduate.
I would be thirty-one.
What?
There must be a mistake!
I did the math again.
Nope the math checked out.
For some reason this was horribly discouraging to me. Thirty-one suddenly seemed ancient.
At my next therapy session, I didn’t even wait for any of the preliminary nicities. I looked at my psychologist and said, “It will take me 9 ½ years to graduate.”
I remember my psychologist just looking at me.
“I’ll be thirty-one by then,” I railed, as if he couldn’t do the math.
But he didn’t seem fazed at all. “Well you’ll be thirty-one in 9 ½ years whether you finish your degree or not.”
Of course this seemed so obvious, but it was his matter of fact way of saying it that caught me off guard. Of course he was right. In 9 ½ years I would be thirty-one no matter what I did in the meantime.
In the decade it would take me to complete my degree in psychology, there were a lot of hurdles that could have derailed my studies, but I just kept plugging away. In 1997 at the age of thirty-one, I graduated Magna Cum Laude from the College of Notre Dame with a BA in Human Services.
Starting Over
Going to graduate school to get an MFA in Writing had long been a dream of mine. I’d been writing since I was a young child, but for one reason or another, grad school had never fit into my schedule or my budget.
But with my daughter preparing to head off to college, suddenly the time was right.
In the low-residency writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, the majority of a student’s work is done at home, throughout the course of the semester, with packets turned in at the end of each month—made up of creative work, critical essays, and annotated bibliographies.
By the time I was approaching my last semester, I was stumbling towards the finish line. I’d tried to set a steady pace, but the last semester is extremely intense. As part of our graduation requirements we must prepare and give a twenty – thirty minute lecture, give a reading from our creative work, and present seventy-five pages of publishable quality creative work.
I have to say, I may have grown a bit cocky by the time I reached this point in my graduate program.
My critical thesis the prior semester had gone surprisingly well, especially compared to the experiences of my classmates. And when my advisor from that prior semester told me my creative work was already of publishable quality, I relaxed a bit thinking my worries were over.
But I was assigned the chair of the writing program as my advisor for my last semester, and I had heard horror stories about her packet critiques . Unfortunately, these stories proved to be true. One of my critiques was twenty-nine-pages.
I sent her my creative work and waited for some guidance on how to proceed during the semester.
The news was not good.
She said there was much work to be done. I had too many gaps in my story. I furiously made revisions.
But the news wasn’t any better for the next packet. She didn’t like the way I vacillated between past and present tense in my story. Could I try writing the novel in past tense?
Panic started to set in. This would mean rewriting the whole novel. I only had three more packets before the semester was done. And now I needed to start over.
But it was the last line of her note that made my heart stop. At the rate I was going I might not have everything completed in time for graduation.
I called my advisor as soon as my hands stopped shaking enough for me to dial the phone.
She asked if I would be willing to start submitting weekly packets? It would mean a furious pace of work, but I would get feedback and guidance at a much quicker rate.
I said I’d do whatever needed to be done.
The comments on my first weekly packet were surprisingly favorable with very few revisions needed. The next packet even received some raves. Before long I was churning out a steady flow of work.
In the end I finished my creative work with time to spare.
In my final evaluation, my advisor remarked that: “Laurie is that rare student who can respond to comments and criticism while also maintaining her vision of the story.”
A month later I graduated with my class and received my MFA in Writing.
Who’s Afraid to Fly
I had just completed my first residency at graduate school in Vermont. After twelve days of living in a dorm in upstate Vermont, with several hundred other MFA students, I was excited to be heading home.
The only hesitation came at the thought of flying. After a close call in an airplane years earlier, I was no longer a fan of flying. In fact, I usually did everything I could to avoid it. But I lived in Baltimore, Maryland and Montpelier Vermont was over 500 miles away. Driving was a possibility, but flying seemed the obvious choice.
The flight to Vermont had proved unremarkable. I’d even met another student traveling who was to be one of my classmates.
On the flight home, though, my friend was seated in the back of the plane. I ended up in the first row. Luckily, I was too filled with excitement about grad school to be nervous about the flight. Instead, I pulled out one of the books I needed to read and started working.
I’d barely cracked open the cover when the woman next to me told me she was terrified to fly. Worse yet, she’d never flown without her mother by her side—her mother who was too sick to make this trip.
I could feel her fear building as the flight attendants started giving instructions. She kept fidgeting in her seat and readjusting her seatbelt. I knew the signs of anxiety—I’d had them myself just a few weeks before.
I tried casual chatter. Sometimes if you can distract someone their mind has less opportunity to form crazy thoughts.
As we rolled down the runway and the plane took to the sky, every little noise and jolt elicited another, “What was that?”
Obviously chatting wasn’t going to be enough.
I reached for her hand. She clenched mine back. Just that small amount of human touch seemed to help her immensely.
We chatted more as the flight went on. I don’t believe I ever even got her name. It didn’t matter. We were just two reluctant fliers sharing a ride in the sky.