It’s moving towards midnight. I am in Tacoma, in a semi-swanky condo full of artful appointments from Africa and Japan, giant-screen TVs, and a 180-degree view from an 8th floor corner. I’m at my mother’s, atop a hill overlooking the city and its waters and industry, its wooded hills and high stone bridges. Earlier, Mt. Rainier was looking like a sweet old dame, pink-haired and wearing a lacy white shawl, but James Brown and his old man cape being flung from his shoulders comes to mind just now ’cause, hey folks, there is a real volcano over here; the stream of cars on the freeway below, sibilant, and me, sticking here at the glass-topped dining room table on my Mother’s laptop wanting to tell you how Shelby set out on a mission to find a thermometer.

Nan calls mid-day, halting and croaking, she has a terrible sore throat, she feels hot, it feels like someone or something is sitting on her chest. She coughs like a tuberculin sailor into the phone for half a minute, and so, of course, I am hopping around my little cottage pulling on my pants and shoes, loading my pockets with what-nots that may or may not save the day, thinking “We need to take her temperature!” and “I have no freaking thermometer!” And, not sure you know this, but of course you do, thermometers on a good day in a global pandemic have all skipped town laughing, “You won’t get me!” and have left us to stare dumbly at those weirdly vacated white spaces on our storeshelves, as in, “What the hell happened here? Who took our stuff?” so I knew before I went skittering into the four stores I skittered into, I was already behind the pack.

“Think, Shelby… think!” I said to myself, and a meerkat I had no idea was parked in my head popped up like the heroic and comical little characters they are, and said, “Look! Over there! A Pet Smart! Whatda’ya think?” and for all the world I thought, “Oh my God! What a good idea! Surely they have something to take a mammal’s temperature with in there.” And so, with Excitement, which is what I decided to call the meerkat, I burst into the store, scanning and scouring the entirety of Pet Smart, lest some clever little device I’d not thought of beforehand might be found lurking chameleon-like on some not-often visited shelf in the back left-side of the store, and lo, after rejecting the sticky temperature strips that go on the outside of your fish bowl, for they only go so high, and with rapid explanation and urgent back and forth with a game employee, I set my hand upon a digital temperature reader attached by a slender black wire to a little sensor, one made to hang in a terrarium, or aquarium, one with a picture of a snake and a lizard on the package, a “sort” of thermometer, I reasoned, but one I was thrilled with securing given all those thermometer hunters out there unsuccessfully, (and laughably, I quietly tittered with Excitement), trying to bag this most elusive and highly prized of objects de pandemie charivari, when I had done an end-run and captured it in another of its lesser known haunts, the pet store. I had found the talisman necessary to my mother’s rescue, necessary to prove to the callous Kaiser-Permanante that “Yes, you better damn well see her, and I mean today, because she has a fever and it’s 111…wait, that can’t be right. I’ll call you back…”

And that’s what happened. Except her fever wasn’t actually quite high enough, 99.6 as measured by a humbly borrowed mercury-thermometer, and whatever was sitting on her chest decided to get up and take a smoke break, check out the view. Her throat is better now, and I’m surprised, because she laughed long and hard when she saw what I’d brought her from the pet store. Maybe that was the medicine she needed. Imagining me in my car careening around with a meerkat, buying medical supplies for her at a pet store, thinking I’m such a clever girl with my Can Do.

She needs to stick around to see what other great ideas that meerkat comes up with. “Right, Mom?” “Right, my girl.”