It's Im-Possum-Hole

I pulled into the driveway last night to discover a large, pale mammal clinging to the garbage can, staring at my 2002 Saturn with large pink eyes. Sleepy? I thought groggily for a moment, remembering my old ferret - and then realized that Sleepy didn't weigh fifty pounds. This ferretlike beast was calmly eating a moldy pizza, and it didn't seem to mind the rattle of the ascending garage door or the blinding wash of high beams.

That was how I met the possum.

Erin shrieked when I pointed it out to her; slowly, it waddled towards the back of the garage. This was worse, though, because now Erin leapt out of the car - and I was the schmuck who had to pull the car all the way in and risk getting a pair of rabies-infected beaver teeth to the ankle. I didn't honk the horn, since I knew my sweetie was asleep - and once startled, getting her back to sleep involves a wiffle bat to the skull. Instead, I pulled in slowly, as if the car itself might be bitten and shriek in pain, silently urging, go away, large scary possum, go away.

I got out. Nothing attacked. I scurried back to the house, my ankles crawling, and hopped in.

It was kinda cute, in an embryonic larval mutant ferretish way.

I mentioned the possum to my wife this morning, and she told me, "It must have burrowed into the garage somewhere. Take a look around."

And this is how I found myself, wandering around the garage like I was an old hand at possum hunting, wondering what the hell a possum hole looked like, and thinking, this is it. This is being a grownup.

Because if I assign a new task to my daughter Erin, she always asks a me thousand questions. If I ask her to to do the dishes, she has to have the answer to each of the fifteen million options involved in using the dishwasher; how you start it, how much detergent to use, what settings are best for this load, how you program it... And I try to deflect her questions back at her.

Because if I had to sum up adulthood in a single image, it would be me, staring at a container of cleaning fluid, trying to make some sense of the directions and thinking, you know, if I don't do this, nobody else is going to.

Being a grownup is pretty much faking it. I don't know a whole lot about insurance, but I have to make the claims. I know zippo about cleaning storm drains, but either I have to call someone - and hope that I call the right person - or I try to fumble through it myself. (My wife has just pointed out that they're called gutters - apparently the holes in the ground are storm drains - thus proving I really know jack shit.) Just today, I had to call three guys about roof repair, and all I know about roofs is that they apparently serve a critical function by forming some sort of barrier between the sky and my head.

There's no manual. You just fake it. That's all you ever do. I suspect there are people hooked up to breathing machines, their lungs as thin as toilet paper, thinking, What now?

So there I am, shining a flashlight into the crevices of my garage, scratching my head and nodding as if I look for possum spoor every other day. The cement is unbroken, and I wonder how big a space a possum needs. I point it at the ceiling, wondering, do possums climb? Of course they climb.

I don't fucking know. Neither does the possum. Difference is, he gets to eat pizza.