In Between

It’s November and I don’t know how that happened. I mean the way time speeds up and then it’s already passed. Just yesterday I was planting tomato seedlings, and suddenly, I am yanking the overgrown, flopped-over plants out of the ground. At the library we all said we would dress up for Halloween.

The theme was “Decade You Were Born.” I didn’t want to do it. I’m not a dress-up kind of person. But the night before, I threw something together. A gauzy flowery top and tights, a peace sign drawn on my cheek. I was the Summer of Love. No one at work could guess. People don’t remember that summer. I don’t remember that summer. 

But then, I was a baby. Flash forward, and I am teetering into Old-Lady. A patron at the library told me I look like her child’s grandmother. The little girl toddled over to me and plunked down in my lap. A whoosh of baby scent and I went rushing through time and space. I was the child. I was the mother of children. I was the old lady stranger, cross-legged on the colored-square carpet at the library. It was fall.  It was spring. It was fall again. 

A kid came in dressed up in her Halloween costume, and I asked her what she was. Rumi, she said. Her nanny saw my puzzled look. It’s from KPop Demon Hunters, she explained. 

Oh, I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. 

It's a movie, my manager piped up. What? You haven’t heard of this? 

Apparently, it’s all the rage in her house. Her four-year-old is obsessed. Every morning they blast the soundtrack in the car on the way to preschool. Now my manager can’t get the songs out of her head. I laughed, but there was a twinge of achy nostalgia. Those days are gone for me. 

But who says so? I watch the KPop movie with my husband. Within two minutes we are delighted, a word I never use, but it truly fits here. Something about the music (which is insanely catchy), the bright colors, the message about accepting who you are and everyone joining together to defeat the darkness. What’s not to love about that? 

Halloween is over and we barrel toward winter. It’s spring. It’s summer. It’s fall again. I wake up. I go to bed. I drive to the library. I drive home. In between, I am planting something. I am dressing up. I am holding a stranger’s child. 

I am singing.  

Things I Don't Know

I could fill a book with the things I don’t know. What am I saying? I could fill thousands of books. I’m thinking about a few weeks ago in Paris and how I didn’t know where Paris was on a map in comparison to Rome. How I didn’t have any sense of Paris itself. Where was the Eiffel Tower, for example? Where was Notre Dame?

We visited Notre Dame. It’s been rebuilt since the fire that pretty much destroyed it in 2019. I was newly working at the library back then when the fire was burning. My partner at the desk pulled up the news on her computer, and we watched the fire overtaking the roof, the spire falling. I gasped when it teetered and dropped. I had no connection to Notre Dame. I’d never seen it in person. I knew next to nothing about it, and yet, I was still horrified and near tears. Something about the history of it. The beauty. 

Notre Dame is on an island on the Seine River, another thing I didn’t know. We crossed a bridge and joined a long line to get inside the cathedral. The bells were tolling. I was looking up at the roof that I’d watched burn six years ago. Now everything was gleaming and bright. A priest was saying mass in French. I didn’t know what he was saying, but also, all of that longtime Catholic school teaching hammered into me, I knew. 

Last week I was sifting through my photos, still a little jet laggy and coming down from the high of our whirlwind trip. I had sworn of the news but the news had not sworn off me. 

I can’t watch anymore, I told a friend. It’s too much. I compared it to driving along and seeing a car burning on the side of the road, except every road has a car burning and every moment of the drive, there is another car in flames, and another. 

No, my friend said, it’s worse than that. It’s not a burning car. It’s like your own house is on fire. 

It was funny that we were having that conversation the same day we weren’t looking at the news, because later, when the news seeped in, there was the East Wing of the White House, demolished. I gasped when I saw the photos. I had been under the impression that nothing could shock me anymore, but there I was, shocked anyway. 

It’s like Notre Dame, I said to one of my co-workers. But we did it to ourselves. 

She shrugged. Notre Dame was over 850 years old, she said. That part of the White House only goes back to 1902. 

Still, I couldn’t get over the comparison. I don’t know how we come back from this. But then I’m a coward, a long-buried terrified part of me awakened, the part that avoids the streets where the cars are on fire, the one who flees the burning house.

Something else I learned about Notre Dame. There used to be a rooster perched on top of the spire, an enormous weathervane that contained saintly relics. When the spire fell, the rooster crashed with it. The people in Paris thought it was gone for good, but miraculously, they found it in the ashes. The saintly relics were intact too. A few months ago when the new spire went up, it went up with a new rooster. The original is inside the cathedral. 

A symbol of hope, I heard someone say. I took a picture of it. 

 

Quiet Space

I didn’t go to the protest yesterday because I had to work a shift at the library. I did drive by, though. A good two thousand people turned out in our neighborhood. The crowd stretched down to my street. My husband was one of the people. He was waving the American flag. 

The library was quiet when I got there. I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t the library always quiet? I mean, it is. But not in the old shushy way it used to be when I was a kid a million years ago. Now we’re a meeting place. We host community programs and school visits and lectures and English conversation classes. Patrons do work on the computers. Tutors tutor their students. Toddlers screech and laugh and throw tantrums. 

Every once in a while, a parent will warn their kid to be quiet, and I enjoy piping up to say, It’s okay. This isn’t a quiet space. You can talk. 

What’s quiet about the library is there’s never any background music blaring. Never any ads. No one ever tracks you or tries to sell you something. If you want to sit there all day, feel free. We have decent bathrooms and drinking fountains and comfy chairs. Also, if you want book recommendations, come up to the desk and I will give you some.

Everyone, no matter what their income level or ethnic background or immigration status, can check out a book. Or one hundred books. When I was a little girl, the library was my favorite place. I walked there with my mother and younger brothers. This was after my father died, and we didn’t have a car. The trip was about a mile and took us up a big hill and through a lovely, sprawling public park. 

The youth librarian was friendly and kind. She helped me pick out books, and after getting to know my reading taste, she’d have books chosen and waiting for me. Eight or ten, which is about all I could carry home. When I was eight, my mother remarried. We moved into a nice house. We owned a car. We were doing okay on the surface. But not far under the surface things were not good. Still, I had the library. 

I walked up the hill and through the park by myself. I read my way through the youth department. When I was eleven, I won a prize in the summer reading program, and the librarian took a picture of me holding a book and sitting formally in front of the big windows. In the photo I look somehow both shell-shocked and grateful. 

It is not an exaggeration to say that books saved my life, that the library did. 

I worked there all afternoon, missing the second protest in the city, the big one downtown. My husband waved the flag at that one too. I know why so many people were gathering. Fear. Anger. A desperate need to speak out against corruption in this administration, the creeping or already crept over authoritarianism, the cruelty. 

A reminder too that there are so many of us who care about what we are about to lose. Public schools and National Parks. Public Health and scientific research. And libraries, although, I suspect they are far down on many people’s lists of institutions worth fighting for. 

Meanwhile, I checked in books and checked them out. Chatted with a stranger about their favorite movie. Helped someone who was fiddling with a job application. Found the perfect book for a little girl and put it into her hands. 

  

First protest, 2014, to save school libraries, Art, and Music

Me, age eleven, in my quiet space, my happy place

Off the Map

We were going to take a plane from Rome to Paris but a friend suggested we take a train. This way we could really see the countryside. We could split the trip in two parts: up to Turin in Northern Italy, and the next day, through the Alps and on into Paris. So, that’s what we did. 

On the train we sat at a table facing each other, my husband and I, and our daughter and son-in-law. His parents live in Paris, which was why we were heading there, and he was hands down, the best person you could have in your corner on a trip like this. Equal parts tour guide, translator, ticket purchaser, restaurant-picker-outer and food orderer, and interpreter of French cold medicines. 

Also, he brought me coffee every morning and would serve it accompanied by a little biscuit that’s supposedly for digestion. The “biscuit” is a cookie with a chocolate glaze and you dip it into your coffee and the chocolate melts, and now I’m pretty much spoiled for life.  

But back to the train ride. The train travels 180 miles an hour and you hardly feel it. The Alps come looming up and then blur past. I was reading a novel called Rodham on my phone. The book is a fictionalized reimagining of a young Hillary Clinton before she met Bill and their early time in grad school getting to know each other and falling in love, but then suddenly, halfway through the book, she dumps him, and then it’s an alternate reality that turns out so much better for her, and for all of us. 

I felt like I was in an alternate reality myself. The days in Rome, in Turin, in Paris. The train speeding along, the little towns. I didn’t know where I was. I wanted a map, but at the same time, I didn’t want a map. When the train would race into a tunnel and wind around a snow-capped mountain peak, I would try to shut my brain down and just take it all in. I was doing the same thing at all the places we went. The churches, the castles, the little cafés. Everything was beautiful. It was almost too much. 

The bright green paint on an ancient door. The purple flowers climbing up a stone wall. The arrangement of cheese on a pretty plate. The days stretched on and I never knew what time it was. The statues and cathedrals and cobblestone streets blurred together like one of Monet’s Impressionistic paintings. 

We went to his house! Monet’s! And saw his garden with the pond and the lily pads, looking like they were pasted on the surface. The curved bridge. The flowers. I could not stop taking pictures of the flowers. One day I made the mistake of looking at the news. It was horrible as always, but it felt very far away. I had a head cold and the French cold medicine was possibly making me loopy. 

Je monte avec. Je descends avec. was written on every door of the train. "Don't forget your bags," our son-in-law translated for us. But then he added that it literally says something like, "I get on with it. I step off with it."  

Maybe the world back home wasn’t the real world, but this place was, with the bakery on every corner and the high-speed trains and a street musician randomly playing the Norah Jones song Come Away with Me as we strolled along the Seine. Maybe there’s no maybe about it. It was real. It is real. 

I’ve taken it with me. 

Roman Holiday

I am in Rome. Not in Rome exactly. But on a hill outside Rome. The hill overlooks a lake. The lake used to be a volcano. On the other side of the lake/volcano is a castle and a little town.

My family is here for a wedding. Our longtime dear friends’ daughter is getting married today. Friday we all flew in from various places and checked into the hotel, which is actually a monastery that dates back to the 13th century. I hadn’t slept at all on the plane.

Mainly, this was due to how packed in we all were and then there was the guy in my row who had a cat in a carrier under his seat, and at some point during the night flight he said, Sorry! because his cat had just pooped in the carrier. But who needs sleep when you are in Rome for a weekend-long wedding?

We arrived just in time for lunch, which was spread out on tables that overlooked the lake. The scene was like something in a movie, the kind with the stone veranda and the tablecloths and the gardens and the pasta and wine, and then suddenly, Meryl Streep comes whirling out singing. On the plane (before the cat incident) I was reading the book Taste by Stanley Tucci, which is about his love affair with Italian food, so I knew that the pasta was only the first course, and there would be many more courses, and I was right. Grazie, Stanley Tucci.

Can you believe we are in Italy, we kept saying to each other. (No, was what I was thinking.) It was the wine and the zero hours sleep. That view of the lake. I couldn’t get over it. The castle and the cute little town on the other side.

The next day we all hiked through the forest and walked on precariously narrow roads to see the castle up close. Apparently, it’s a big deal because the pope uses the place as his summer home. Twenty thousand steps later we were back at the monastery for more pasta and several other courses. The placemats had words written in Italian, and I tried to parse it out. Something about eating and living was my guess. Which seemed like a nice sentiment.

But then I went on the monastery tour and learned that the place was briefly a kind of health center in the early 1900’s and their motto was EAT SLOWLY AND CHEW WELL. In the cute little castle town, I drank a cappuccino and slowly ate and chewed very well a cannoli and snapped a picture of a sign outside a gift shop that said, Earth without Art is just EH.

I walked with my best friend, the mother of the bride, and had a flashback to a million years ago, when we were young mothers, chasing our little kids around the backyard and filling their plastic sippy cups with chocolate milk, and now here we all are, wandering the cobblestone streets and clinking our wine glasses.

Last night her daughter made a toast and for a brief jet-laggy moment, I could see the chocolate milk sippy cup instead of the champagne glass. Outside the window was the suburban backyard and the other little kids shrieking on the swings. And then it was back to where we were, where we are, in the ancient monastery.

Cheers, we said.

Lunch on the terrace

View of the lake and the castle at night

Paper Journey

I have a friend who is walking the Appalachian Trail. She started in Georgia, back in April, and now, she’s in Maine, only a few days away from completing the whole thing. I wish I could write about her journey, but it’s not my journey. My journey has been following her journey, looking up her location on my phone (she shares it via a GPS app) and finding the corresponding place on the four-foot long paper map of the trail that I have hanging on my refrigerator.

In the mornings when I am making my coffee, I mark off where she has camped for the night and squint at the mountain elevation and the nearby ponds and rivers. When I started my journey marking her journey, I had to squat in front of the fridge to see where she was on the map. Now, I am fully standing, the last bit of her trek level with my freezer.

At this point she has walked approximately 2100 miles out of the 2198.4 total miles of the trail. Many days she walks 20 to 25 miles. I have only walked that much in one day a few times in my life (these were touristy trips around big cities—New York, Boston, San Francisco, DC) but I have never done it two days in a row, never mind for weeks or months. I have rarely walked long stretches alone.

I have never camped alone. But I have stayed in hotels alone. I’ve gone on writing retreats solo and driven long distances by myself (long distances being ten or eleven hours, which is roughly the amount of time my friend has been walking each day.) I used to be afraid to be alone, especially at night, but over the past few years this fear has gone away. I don’t know why.

I’ve gone on hikes before. I’ve strolled small segments of the Appalachian Trail, jumping on and off in the Smokey Mountains, and probably a few other times without realizing it. Before my friend left for her journey, she invited me to walk with her on a hilly trail by her house. She wanted to see how it would feel to carry her twenty-five pound backpack. I carried nothing but a water bottle. We walked to the top of the hill that was really more like a mini mountain, and I chattered away the whole time because I do that when I’m nervous. Unsurprisingly, I was out of breath when we reached the top.

My friend was not out of breath. We looked at the view for one minute, the valley down below, the little house where she lives, a lake beyond that, and more mountains, and then we turned around and marched down. I didn’t talk much this time. I gulped my water and wiped the sweat off my face. I marveled at my friend who was striding along in front of me as if she wasn’t hauling a twenty-five pound backpack.

When we reached the bottom, I asked her if I could put the backpack on. I wanted to see what twenty-five pounds felt like. Let me tell you, it felt like a lot. I tried to imagine carrying it for more than two minutes. I tried to imagine hiking back up the mini mountain. Hiking three mountains, twenty, fifty.

Hiking for five months. Plotting out where I would camp for the night and where I would pee. Calculating how much food I would need and how to fit it in my backpack. Settling myself into a tent at night and looking up at the stars. Taking the kind of journey where you step out of your ordinary life and set yourself on an unfamiliar path. Knowing, even as I imagined it, that I would never take a journey like this, and I could be okay with that. I have had other journeys. With luck, I still have more to come.

I hoisted the backpack off my back and went home. I bought a paper map and taped it to my refrigerator.

Paper Heart

All morning at the library’s drop-in toddler playtime, I was bleary-eyed and slightly loopy, my arm throbbing from a recent vaccine shot, a tender red knot at the site, and hardly any sleep the night before—the vaccine doing its work, but also, on alert for my husband, who’d just come home from the hospital, one of those same day surgeries. 

Modern medicine is a miracle. A dose of vaccine to keep a potentially scary virus at bay. A threading up through a vein and into the heart muscle (or something along those lines. I don’t quite understand the surgery they did on my husband.) What happened was this: 

He had a procedure last year to take care of a heart issue. The heart issue was fixed. But then he got sick with Covid, and the problem came back, and the doctor recommended the procedure again. He was scheduled for October, but suddenly, a sooner appointment slot opened up, and we jumped on it. 

While my husband scrambled around doing the pre-surgery prep work, unrelated-but-sorta-related, I scrambled around trying to find a place that would give me a Covid vaccine, the guidelines not at all clear anymore in Ohio. Could I walk into a pharmacy or did I need a prescription? Did I qualify to get a shot or would I have to make an impassioned case for myself? (Listen, this virus fff-ed up my husband’s heart!) 

I marched into a nearby CVS, ready for battle, prepared to beg if I had to, but it was all very anti-climactic, with Fred the Pharmacy Manager kindly jabbing me, no questions asked.

The surgery went off without a hitch too. A half a day at the hospital and we were home, my husband groggy, but already feeling better, his heart back in normal rhythm, and I went off to work, jittery from little sleep, a whoosh of worry catching up with me, my panging arm, but happy to be distracted by a beach ball being flung at my head by a three-year-old. 

She was surprised when I caught it. Honestly, I was surprised too. I tossed it back at her and she caught it easily, surprising both of us again. We threw the ball at each other approximately five thousand times and would probably still be doing it now, but I had to take a timeout to turn on the bubble machine, and then there were towers to build out of squishy blocks and touch-and-feel books to touch and feel. I forgot 

about my throbby arm. I forgot about the hours waiting in the waiting room at the hospital, trying to read my book, but mostly distracted by the time ticking by, one hour into the surgery, two, nearing three—and shouldn’t my husband be out by now??—the nurses calling out names to give updates to other loved ones waiting, fidgeting for my turn and when would it be my turn? 

But then it was my turn. A few minutes alone in a smaller private room, the cardiologist impossibly young and confident. 

Everything went well, he said, and something something about heart valves and arteries, electrical charges, closing a loop. I didn’t know what loop he was talking about. He had taken a red pen out of his pocket and he was drawing a heart on a piece of paper. 

I watched, mesmerized, as he squiggled and scrawled, for a moment everything making perfect sense before it slipped away from me, but no matter. The point was the heart was healed, 

and time skipped forward. The waking up out of surgery, the ride home, a careful walk upstairs to bed, an anxious sleep, until morning at the library, beach balls bouncing around the room, my own heart catching, slowing, beating regularly again.