Notes for the Other Side

I went downtown to the main library for an author event, Maggie Smith and Saeed Jones “in conversation with each other.” That is a thing writers do now when they’re on a book tour. Maggie Smith is a Columbus author known for the poem “Good Bones” and her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Saeed Jones is a poet and memoirist who used to live here and often wrote on social media about how great Columbus is. Last year he moved to Boston, and a few weeks later a group of Nazis marched in his old neighborhood. He didn’t say this, but maybe he is relieved that he moved away.  

The two have a book out called The People’s Project, a collection of essays they solicited from other writers and artists after the last election. I started reading the book in my seat before the writers took the stage, feeling a little anxious in the growing crowd. Going to a thing like this, alone, and downtown on a week night is way out of my comfort zone. I think it’s a leftover fear from the pandemic. 

But when the conversation started, I immediately settled into it. The writers talked about how the book grew out of their initial post-election confusion and despair. How do we navigate through this very divided world—which people are worth teaching and who do we run away from in order to protect ourselves? 

Maggie Smith said she doesn’t like when people say, This isn’t who we are. Or, This isn’t America, whenever something appalling happens. She said, It actually IS who we are. Saeed Jones said there is no polite response to people who are actively trying to harm others, and you will never be able to diminish yourself in a way that will satisfy bullies. He said, the most vulnerable people—trans and gay people, immigrants, Black people have rarely been protected by the system. They know what some of us are just now waking up to. So, please listen to what they have to say. 

He told a story about the protests he saw on his college campus last year and how young and hopeful his students were. He thought they were adorable and he wanted to make sure they had proper winter clothing and were eating nutritious meals. Later, he watched the news and saw how the students were framed as dangerous agitators. He said, But listen, one kid made a garden! They were reading poetry to each other and saying prayers!

While the authors were talking and reading pieces from the book, there was some kind of disturbance going on in the back of the room. A man’s voice talking loudly, and then rising to yelling. I looked back and it was a man having a mental health crisis, the librarians hosting the event, speaking softly, trying to diffuse the situation. 

The crowd got quiet. Saeed Jones and Maggie Smith stopped talking. Some people watched, but I looked away, ashamed. Here we were, these comfortably middle class mostly white people, just minutes before nodding along and feeling hopeful, listening to two authors speak about the broken world and how we could still find joy in it, and now the broken world was in the room with us. 

The man kept yelling. He shouted, You think I’m stupid. He yelled, Don’t mace me. 

Nobody was going to mace him. These are librarians at the Columbus Metropolitan Public Library. I used to work there and I had their de-escalation training. Keep your voice low. Say, What can I do to help? And, I hear you, And, I know, I understand. The man screamed, Fuck you. 

Saeed Jones said, Please don’t call 911. His voice was quiet and sad. It made me want to cry. I was afraid and sweating and feeling myself shut down because I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of people who are broken. Someone is going to be hurt, one way or another. 

But then it was over and the man moved along. The room let out a breath. I assumed the talk would go on and we’d all have to pretend nothing happened. But both writers addressed it. Saeed Jones thanked the staff for treating the man with dignity. He said, That person is drowning and many of us don’t know how to save the drowning without getting pulled under ourselves. He was glad there are people who know what needs to be done to help. 

One of the librarians spoke too. Her voice was shaky when she said thank you to the crowd for holding a calm quiet space while the staff did their jobs. 

The conversation was over and the writers readied themselves for the book signing. But I left. I was still sweaty and feeling sick to my stomach, and now, worried about walking out to my car alone. Which says something about me, I know. 

I made it home and flopped out on the front porch swing, jittery and wrung out. One of the passages Maggie Smith read from the book was from the writer Alexander Chee who talks about how we will celebrate when we make it to the other side. It's a thing people about to go into battle say to each other. Maybe we won’t all make it there, “but what matters is that it is said, and the group decides to do this. To attempt to survive is an act of love.” 

On the porch swing I was drifting off. There’s a fire station at the end of the block and I could hear a firetruck pulling out, sirens blaring. A car horn. The squawk of a crow. Little girls riding their bikes back and forth in front of the house.

One of the girls called out, I love you. The other girl called back, I love you too. Their voices were so bright and happy. 

Small Things

A velvety bright pink flower that looks like something out of a Dr. Suess book. A praying mantis on the stair rail. The way my daughter’s dog snuggles up to me and stuffs his head under my armpit. I am training myself to take notice of small things. To pushpin myself in place and time

because here is what I usually do: the flower. What IS it? I have to take a picture on my phone. Try the plant ID. 

(It might be Celosia argentea, known as cockscomb because the ruffly appearance looks like the crest on a rooster.) (I also learn it may have come from India and had to be nurtured back from extinction, and isn’t it interesting how it found its way here, to this community garden in Washington DC, where my husband and I are visiting our daughter and son-in-law over the weekend?) 

And the praying mantis, which I do not stop to photograph because my daughter is yelping, running up the stairs with the dog, afraid, apparently. A bug! It’s a giant bug, Mom! 

It’s a praying mantis, they’re supposed to be good luck. (Are they good luck? I want to look this up too but we’re running up the stairs together, the dog sprint-loping ahead of us. He’s such a sweet dog—and then I am vaulting back into the past, the Pandemic year, when the dog lived with us in Ohio, along with our daughter and soon-to-be son-in-law, the times we all smushed together on the couch, binge-watching Master Chef, the gourmet meals we ate, courtesy of the soon-to-be son-in-law who took over the cooking. 

Which reminds me, we are going out to dinner tonight at the restaurant where he is a chef! The last time we dined at this lovely place, he sent samples out from the kitchen, a tangy feta dip and sesame bread with the perfect combination of crusty crust and soft center that I have been dreaming about ever since—but wait, a nagging worry: 

all of the things I’ve been reading about in the news about the soldiers occupying DC and scaring off people who just want to eat at restaurants, this further spurred on by the conversation I had with a library patron the other day, when she asked me if I had plans for the weekend and I said, going to DC to visit my daughter. And she said, Are you afraid? 

And then she told me a story about the country where she came from and how her family had to leave because there was a war, but they’ve been back since then, and even there, in a war-torn country, they don’t have soldiers stationed in the street. And I said, Yeah, it’s crazy.) It is crazy.

But back to the flower, the praying mantis, the comfy couch where I am sitting, the sleeping house, the light filtering in through the windows, the trees, the leaves yellowing (yellowing? When did this happen? How am I just now noticing?) the dog loping out to curl up next to me, his grunty, satisfied snores, and I am here again, this place, this time. A reach for my phone to look up praying mantises. 

A pausing and letting go, content, just for the moment, to wonder. 

What's Real

Chaos erupted the other day on my Spelling Bee app. One of the people in the “Hive Community” confessed that she was using AI to solve the puzzle. The people who solve the puzzle using their own brains and find joy in figuring things out attacked her. It was a brutal takedown. Someone compared himself to John Henry.

I looked up John Henry. When you do a search online lately, the first answer that comes up is generated by AI. But here’s a trick I learned: You can type in what you want to search and add minus AI and the answer will come up the way it used to in the olden days, 2023 ish. It looks like this:

John Henry -AI 

(Make sure you put the minus directly in front of the AI or else you’ll get a whole slew of AI junk.) For the record, back in the late 1800s, John Henry supposedly went to battle with a steam powered drill on the railroad and won. Someone wrote a song about him. The moral is: Fight back against the machines that are taking your jobs. I forgot to mention that John Henry died shortly after. The moral is: The machines win in the end. 

Don’t get me started on how I feel about AI. Besides the fact that it steals human research and writing and art, and pollutes the environment, and destroys jobs, it’s not AI. Meaning, it’s not intelligent. (At least not yet.) You think you’re talking to some sentient being, but you may as well be having a conversation with a magic eight ball. 

Meanwhile a lot of people seem to really enjoy chatting with their magic eight balls. I don’t know how to make sense of this, so I do what I do whenever things don’t make sense to me. I read books. I write. I take walks with the dog. I dig around in the garden. I stand in line at the farmers market and wait to buy an almond croissant. Let me tell you about these almond croissants. 

They are buttery and fluffily layered and studded with the perfect ratio of almonds to sugar. When you bite into one of these croissants, it is still warm from the oven. The woman who bakes these luscious treats looks how you would imagine. She has strong arms from rolling out the dough, pink cheeks, and wears a kerchief on her head like she’s just climbed out of an old painting. Every Saturday hers is the booth you must go to first. 

She sells out within an hour. The problem: she’s late every week, so it’s difficult to know when you should join the line. Go too early, and you’re standing around in the sun watching the baker and her partner unload their truck and carefully set up their booth. Go too late, and you risk getting nothing. 

What is this line for? People who are new to the farmers’ market say. 

Or, 

Whoa, those pastries must be good!

Those of us in line nod smugly at our secret knowledge. It drives my husband crazy. Are the croissants that great? He says to me every week when I make him join me in the line. (He isn’t a big croissant fan. He’s more into the carrot cake at the booth down the street.) While we wait together, he calculates how much it costs, in time, to stand here. 

Seven bucks for the croissant plus a good twenty minutes. What is our twenty minutes worth? he asks me. I don’t know how to answer him. 

What is anything worth? A freshly baked croissant, a painting, a novel. The water supply. The electric grid. Dignity. The creative process. Our brains. What makes us human. What rolls out dough. What pulls the tray out of the oven. What feeds us. What fills us. 

What's real. 

 

Beans

Two springs ago a friend gave me a handful of black beans and for the past two years, I planted a few and marveled at the vines taking over half the garden, wrapping around the stakes I hastily set up, nearly too late because the beans were already threatening to twine around the tomato plants and topple the peppers. 

Stand out there for two minutes—I’m not lying—and a tendril will sway and dip and reach for your arm. You can watch it in real time, capturing, looping your wrist. 

But would that be such a bad way to go, bound to the garden, your body muffled by a bean plant? These are the weird things I think about in the middle of the night, a new medication interrupting my sleep, so I am wide awake at one, at two, at three, blinking in the dark, the dog curled against my feet, every now and then, shuddering through a nightmare until I nudge her out of it. 

Why do I assume it’s a nightmare? Maybe she’s battling the mailman and winning. What is that poem that says the world is fifty percent terrible, but let’s not forget the other fifty percent? (I’m paraphrasing.) I want to believe it, but here I am, cataloguing the terrible. 

For example, a friend’s son who was adopted as a baby from another country, and now he’s grown up and afraid of being snatched by ICE and won’t leave home without his identification papers. And how did I get so lucky, never once thinking about what papers to bring with me when I step out of my house. 

Stop reading the news, my husband says. This isn’t the news, I tell him. This is me, talking to a friend. What if the poem is wrong and the world is way more than fifty percent terrible? 

I forgot to tell you something about the bean plants, how all of the tendrils have lovely purple flowers and each pod starts green, turns purple, turns brown, until it is paper-thin, the crackle when you run your thumbnail along the edge, the splitting apart, the reveal: 

Five shiny black beans, 

each specked with a white dot, as if some kind person carefully lifted them, one by one, and dabbed them with paint. Why have I never noticed this before and what does it mean? Nothing. Everything. If fifty-fifty is all we get, please help me remember this. 

Tipping Point

Yesterday at the farmers’ market my husband and I had a dumb argument about blueberries. He said he didn’t want to buy them anymore. They’re too expensive. 

I said, Everything is more expensive at the farmers’ market. At that moment we were in line to buy a block of seven-dollar cheese, and we’d just paid twelve dollars for a bag of coffee. But don’t we want to support local businesses? I said. Don’t we want to eat organic? 

Well, yeah, he said. But this is crazy. He was hurt because he thought I was judging him. I was hurt because I thought he was judging me. 

We went to the grocery store, and he bought cheaper blueberries (which were probably picked months ago and trucked over from Canada. I’m kinda judging. I admit this. I’m kinda judging!), but I kept my mouth shut. I was suddenly remembering the time I had a nervous breakdown about pepperoni pizza. 

It was a million years ago on a school night and one of the kids had just sprung that they needed some expensive must-have thing for school the next day, and my husband was driving around trying to find it, and it ended up being even more expensive than we’d imagined, and on the way home he called and said he was picking up pepperoni pizza, and I lost my mind and started screaming at him. 

Every once in a while, we still joke about this, how I could handle the pricey school thing, but the two for twenty-buck pepperoni pizza special put me over the edge. We all have our tipping points. 

The day went on and it was too hot outside to walk for very long and some animal is taking bites out of the tomatoes and a small bag of chocolate chips at the grocery store costs six dollars and Ohio is sending the National Guard to DC to help the president scare people, and at the restaurant where a friend is a chef, one of the workers was crying because she was afraid of being arrested by ICE, and he told her, Don’t worry, we know how to protect you if it comes to that. 

What does that mean? we asked him. Hide the lady in the walk-in freezer?

Well, yeah, he said. Because ICE can’t go into private spaces.

But what’s to stop them? I said. I was imagining all of our families at the library, the people from Somalia and Pakistan and Albania and India and China and Mexico and how I don’t have a clue what their immigration status is, 

but I do know that the little girl loves Dog Man books and the little boy likes to make pretend toast in the pretend toaster and carry it over to me to pretend-taste, and what are the private spaces in the library where we can hide these children if it comes to that? And now I understand why it’s so much easier and more comfortable—and Jesus, the privilege, the over-the-top, absurd amount of privilege I have—

to get snippy about blueberries and pepperoni pizza and animal teeth marks on my tomatoes. But what am I going to do about it. 

What are any of us going to do. 

 

Afternoon Protest

The protest is at the end of our street, so my husband and I walk down and join the group. The group is eight miles of people stretching from the northern suburbs and down to the Statehouse downtown. Our neighbors brought an extra sign they made. Mine says, No Kings Since 1776. On the back it says Columbus Arborfest, which is a big festival coming up in two weeks at our neighborhood park.

Cars go by honking in solidarity at our signs. The signs are the usual. All are Welcome and No Human is Illegal and the word Fascism with an X over it and something about the president and tacos, which I don’t understand until my husband explains it to me. A helicopter flies overhead and circles back around and flies by again, and we all raise our signs, and I have the funny thought: 

What if I turn mine the other way, so it promotes the tree festival, and what if everyone standing in our eight-mile line has some kind of fun community event on the back of their signs too, and what if we are in an alternate reality, and instead of being despondent about the state of the country and having to protest against injustice and corruption and the dismantling of social services, we all wave signs about art festivals and upcoming concerts and the Columbus Zoo? 

More cars honk. People wave at us out their windows. We’re standing in front of the firehouse and a firefighter sets up a lawn chair and sits behind us, smiling like he’s watching a parade. The protest is scheduled from 2 pm to 3:30. Halfway through we’re all supposed to drop our signs, hold hands, and link our eight-mile chain together (except for going across intersections and the driveway in front of the firehouse.) 

We all do that for a few minutes. I’m thinking about the first time I went to a protest to call attention to cuts to school programming and I got thrown out of a government building and later, gave a speech through a bullhorn about how a librarian saved my life.  

And the last protest I went to, a few weeks ago, which was a rally for public library funding and protecting the freedom to read, where I met up with some of my co-workers in our library union, and one of my librarian friends held her little girl who held a little sign which said Let the Kids Read. 

And the Black Lives Matter protests during the pandemic where we all wore masks and stood six feet apart and some nice guy went across the street to the Kroger and bought a bunch of bottled water and piled it in a wagon and rolled it up and down the sidewalk offering it to everyone. 

And the Women’s March in DC in 2017 when the massive crowd lifted me off my feet and I waved my stop sign, which had one word on it, NO, and I shouted along with everyone else, "This is what democracy looks like!" and felt chills for a moment, my heart banging in my chest, my eyes burning with tears, because this IS what democracy looks like. 

Okay. It didn’t totally work. 

The state cut many of the school librarians, and the library funding and freedom to read in Ohio are still up in the air, and we all know how the other things turned out. So, I don’t know why, really, I’m parked out here in ninety billion degree weather, burning the backs of my legs off because I forgot to apply sunscreen. 

Cars keep driving by, honking, some of the honks continuing past us down the street and new honks joining those, until all you can hear is one long, blaring whir of honk-sound, and I remember

back in DC when the crowd lifted me off my feet and I looked up at the sky and saw that my NO signed had flipped upside down and said ON, and who knows how long I’d been waving it around like that, and I fixed it, but I couldn’t stop grinning like a fool, all of these beautiful people and their funny and clever and defiant signs, and I was one of them. 

I am one of them. 

Making Peace in the Garden

Because what else can you do but make peace with it? Otherwise, you’ll find yourself cursing out the beans that twined themselves around the tomato plants and tried to strangle them, and the two cucumber plants that took over the other half of the garden, shooting out so many cucumbers you ran out of pickle jars to cram them in. 

Meanwhile, all the flower seeds you planted and so carefully nurtured for weeks, the bright pink zinnias, the marigolds and the sweet purple basil, came to nothing but a handful of raggedy sprouts. Which makes no sense, when over there, in the sidewalk crack, some bird’s dropped a seed, and wah lah, up came a five-foot high Dr. Suess flower. 

Two decades of gardening, and I still don’t understand how it works. But then, I don’t understand much these days. Everyone I know is walking around shellshocked, each hour’s news a fresh horror. Why is this happening? we say to each other. 

But we may as well be yelling at the dirt, the sun, the weirdo bug that lays its eggs on the base of the strawberry plant and sucks the whole thing dry. 

Do something, a friend urges me when I confess my despair to her. But that’s the problem, I say. Everything I do feels pointless. 

She tells me to ask myself three questions: What brings me joy? What am I good at? How can I help? 

The place where all three overlap is supposedly the “sweet spot for action.” 

I like this, but I don’t think it works in my case. What brings me joy, what I’m good at, is writing. But what good does writing do? Especially now, when any two-bit AI can spit out words on gardening and hopelessness in less than thirty seconds, (another cause of despair!) while here I am, squinting at my computer screen, two hours into it, and still not sure how to tie it all together.

Okay. It has something to do with letting go. 

Forget what the plan was (I wanted more than three tomatoes! I didn’t want ten thousand cucumbers!) and accept what I have been given. Beans. Multiple jars of pickles. 

Or, it’s about making peace with what I can’t control, in general. But that's the easy response. 

Yesterday, I spent the day in the garden, picking cucumbers, untwining bean tendrils from the tomatoes, flicking bugs off the strawberries. And then I watered the raggedy flower sprouts and set them more fully in the sun. 

I am not ready to give up on them yet.