Everything/Nothing Feels Normal

The morning coffee and the Wordle, the nudge of the dog wanting to be let out, the mourning dove on the nest, eyeing me when I open the back door, and then it’s on to work at the library, the checking in and checking out of books, the pleasant banter with the patrons. Isn’t it a beautiful day? Have you read this book? Would you like a sticker?—

but then, a phone call from a patron who sounds panicky about the procedure for getting a passport (the library is a passport agency). She’s read the news and realizes her name on her driver’s license doesn’t match her birth certificate. She’s married. She took her husband’s name. Are they going to take away her right to vote? I don’t know, I tell her, feeling panicky now myself. I check the library calendar for appointments and nothing’s open until the end of April. 

April? Will that be too late? 

I don’t know, I say again. But maybe you could try the post office?

The post office!

I can hear the relief in the woman’s voice, and I tell her good luck and have a good rest of her day, not thinking until after I’ve hung up that the present administration wants to defund the post office and anyway, after all of the firings, who knows who’ll be left to process the passport applications. 

I go back to checking in books and passing out stickers, except my head won’t stop spinning. How do other people do this, act like everything is normal? Drink your morning coffee, punch out guesses on the Wordle, pat the dog’s head when you let her out. Oh, that mourning dove, how glassy and black her eyes are when she blinks at you. 

Another day, another day. 

At the library the books pass through your fingers, the comforting hum of silence, and into the Youth Department, quiet now because most of the little patrons have gone home for naps, for lunch, and only one family remaining over by the chalkboard wall, the mother cross-legged on the ABC rug, reading to the kids, the father drawing, swoops of color across the board, chalk dust on his hands. 

(Artwork graciously shared by Terrence Hinkle Jr.) 

Weekend Trip

Yesterday I went zip-lining. 

My husband and I had met up with good friends over the weekend to celebrate a milestone birthday. The friends had a day planned at a wilderness park that featured activities like rope climbing and Walking on Rickety Bridges and Dropping 100 Feet from a Tower. Doesn’t that sound like fun? said the friends. 

Not really, was what I was thinking. But what I said was, Yes! Let’s do it! The park was in its off season and we had the place mostly to ourselves, which was good, because each activity took a lot of gearing up—physically, with actual gear that had to be put on and looped and belted and tightened, and mentally, with internal pep-talks and mindful breathing and additional pep-talks, where I literally had to talk myself off a ledge. 

The ledge. Picture a very slim platform twenty feet in the air. The thinnest of thin wires shooting across. A wall of mesh on one side. On the other side: the air, the forest, an earnest park worker named Frank, who is looking up at me and telling me I can do it. “It” is walk across the wire. But how, Frank? I call down. I study the wire. It’s impossible. I know this with every fiber of my being. Meanwhile, the rest of the group is bunching up behind me on the platform. We’re all clamped in on the same rope, so if I chicken out, everyone has to turn back. 

I examine the wire again. I imagine myself swinging one leg around and setting a foot on it. I imagine myself falling and crushing Frank. You’re not going to fall, Frank says, reading my mind. You can do it, my husband says. But I can’t, I tell him. And then I don’t know what comes over me, but I do it. I inch across the wire. I make it to the other side, adrenaline surging through me so hard that I complete the remainder of the course in record time, the swingy bridges, the floating steps, some kind of vertical mesh thing? Until I’m on the ground, heart banging, breathless, laughing, laughing louder when Frank tells me that this was the easy course. Good Lord, Frank, what is the difficult course? 

And then it was on to zip-lining, which, let me tell you, was an absolute piece of cake after the insane wire walking. Before each activity Frank or one of the other earnest darling safety conscious workers takes us through the checklist, the harness tightening, the clamping of clamps, a reminder to tilt your head to the side when you reach the brake at the end of the zip-line. I nod along obediently, but then, the last time on the zip-line, flying, yoo-hoo-ing, enjoying the blur of the trees, the sky, and BAM 

my helmet hits the rope, but there’s Frank pulling me in, telling me I did great, despite the helmet-rim-sized indentation on my forehead. (Ah ha, so this is why you’re supposed to tilt your head.)

Confession: I hadn’t wanted to go on this trip. I don’t know why. Something to do with my usual anxiety, the dread before any trip, and new worries (what if the airplane flips over?), the packing and rearranging of schedules, the securing of the dog sitter. Add to that my general despair over the world, a dose of guilt about my good fortune—that I can go on a trip like this, that I can step away for a minute from the craziness. Maybe there’s a part of me too that feels I don’t deserve a break, that it’s wrong somehow to have joy, fun. Love. Friendship. 

But this can’t be true. Can this be true?  

We spend the entire day at the park, culminating in all of us watching the friend with the milestone birthday climb the 100-foot tower. We watch him step off. We cheer as he flies. 

What's Real

I read something about how when a country is slipping into authoritarianism, it’s hard to know what’s real. Things move fast and it’s too much to take in. For example, the federal workers all getting fired and what will happen next to schools and healthcare and food safety and human rights and the national parks. But before you can respond to that, 

there’s some new drummed up outrage about the Super Bowl halftime show or what we’re supposed to call the Gulf of Mexico or what if we conquer Greenland and rename it Red White and Blue Land. It's nutty, 

and they want us to be confused and turn on each other like in that old Twilight Zone episode where something crashes on Maple Street and the lights flicker and all the neighbors rush out, afraid, and next thing you know, everyone’s ready to kill the quiet guy who owns a telescope and likes listening to the radio. The last shot in the show is a space ship hidden at the edge of the town, the aliens joking about how dumb people are. 

But this is me, turning on others. 

I took a long walk even though it was raining and went out to lunch with a friend. I ordered a cake to celebrate the last day of a beloved coworker who’s served the library for eleven years, and I gave out Valentine stickers to little patrons at the checkout counter and noticed an older woman eyeing me, and I offered her a sticker, and she said, Me? You’re giving me a sticker? 

And I said, sure, why not? and she took one and stuck it on the back of her hand. Another patron was watching all of this, so I offered one to him too, and he said, I don’t want a sticker. But then he said, okay, I’ll take one for my grandchild. He ended up taking three. 

I went home and read a memoir by Ina Garten who is the Barefoot Contessa cookbook writer. I had never read any of her books or seen her cooking show, and honestly, I thought the book looked silly and not like something I would ever read, but I got caught up in her story about her crappy childhood and how she went camping for six months in Europe with her husband and they were broke and could only spend five dollars a day but that was enough to eat good bread and fancy cheese, and years later she was able to buy an apartment in Paris, and I was so happy for her. 

I was smiling like a goofball when I finished the book, and now I want to give a copy to all of my friends. Something about the fantasy of it, the following of your dream, when we still believed that we lived in a world like that. 

Maybe we do still live in a world like that. Or maybe we could. It was real once, why can’t it be real again?  

(a picture of a loved one climbing a mountain in a national park, in the time when people dreamed of climbing mountains in national parks and cared about the people working in these beautiful places) 

The Wrong Week

All week, each week, since the start of the new year, I was trying to write, and all week, each week, I could barely manage to sit down at my desk. I was not reading the news, but the news broke in and ground me down. I’d write a few sentences and delete them. I’d push a paragraph around. How could I write at a time like this? I should be making phone calls and marching in the streets. 

I wrote a paragraph. It took me an entire afternoon. It was like trekking up a mountain. I vowed to start earlier the next day, but the next day, I couldn’t even open my computer. I joked to my writing partner: Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. She didn’t get the reference. It’s from the movie Airplane, I said. 

A guy in the control tower is anxious about a plane that’s going to crash, and every time we see him, he’s more worried. Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop smoking, he says. And the next time, Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop drinking. This all culminates with him admitting he probably shouldn’t have recently quit sniffing glue. 

I don’t know how this applies to me. I don’t smoke and I rarely drink. I have never sniffed glue. Something about the look on the guy’s face, though. It’s a look that says This is too much. I can’t take it. But also, this is so awful and absurd, I have to laugh. (And then he flings himself out the control tower window.) Maybe you have to watch the movie to get the joke.  

Anyway, I went back into my writing project and almost immediately shut it down. The problem, my writing friend told me, is that what you’re writing is too dark. You can’t write about dark things and live with dark things at the same time. 

Okay, I said, but what am I going to write about? Meanwhile, I was living my life, 

working at the library and going for walks with my deaf dog whose elderly body is now splotted with fat-deposit-y bumps. I went to the doctor because I have a lump on my back and I was thinking (cancer?) but it turns out it’s a lipoma, which is a fancy way of saying “fat deposit.” 

And then, I went to a hearing place to have my hearing tested because I’m always saying, WHAT? to my husband or to the toddler patron at the library who’s trying to tell me why he likes shark books with actual photos in them rather than drawings, and also, he wants to show me the bandaid on his thumb, 

and it turns out I have minor hearing damage, but it’s nothing too serious. "For your age," the absurdly young doctor adds. 

I realize that my dog and I are merging together. 

So, now I don’t know what’s next for me. Chasing squirrels? Compulsively licking my leg? I almost wrote, butt, but I didn’t want to gross you out. Although, maybe I should write it because it makes me laugh. 

The world is dark and the plane is coming right at us, but look at me behind the window, entertaining myself with my own silly words. 

Dispatches from the Edge

Last night I saw the moon, a splintery smile, and beside it, a bright star. Venus, my husband said, and I thought, I should take a picture, but I didn’t. It was cold outside and dark, and that morning the mourning dove couple had come back to nest on the back porch, which feels too early, and wrong, like they know something we don’t. Is this the beginning or the end? Each moment I pinball between hope and dread.

Let’s get the dread out of the way first. It’s awful and centered in my stomach, a sick churning that won’t go away with the usuals, the cups of honey chamomile tea, the "let’s escape into the books," and please, for the love of all things holy, don’t tell me to calm down. I am angry 

and I don’t know where to put my anger. Once when I was a teenager, I slammed my bedroom door, opened the door and slammed it again, and again, screaming, raging, until I was spent and collapsed on my bed, folding back into myself, letting it go. That kind of anger scares me. But the glossing over of it scares me more. 

Listen to the hope part. 

Tummy time at the library, the babies on the yoga mats, how they bob their heads and coo. The farmer at the farmer’s market sharing his recipe for carrot greens. (Who knew you could turn them into a pesto?) Friends over for dinner and dinners out with friends. Face-timing with our grown kids, all of them safe and well and how lucky we are. 

And did I tell you about the three-year-old patron at the library who’s read every construction book we own and how I hold the new ones back for him? He comes in every other day with his nanny, but Friday, he visited with his mother. Is that the nice lady? I heard her say to him. The one who finds books for you? The little boy nodded and smiled at me. 

I make these lists, every day I make them, the things that I know are good. I have quit lying to myself. And I won’t lie to you, even though I know it will make both of us feel better. 

We are on the edge, but the edge comes with a smiling moon and mourning doves.  

An Escape

All week it’s arctic-cold, and the dog (no fool) refuses to go for walks, so I bundle up and brave the weather myself, picking my way carefully over black ice, shivering alone with my own thoughts. Why does it feel like the world keeps folding in on itself, 

repeating the same mistakes? I don’t want to know any more terrible things. The list I have in my head is already long enough. Instead of looking at the news, I read a novel. It’s a mystery by Dorothy Sayers called Gaudy Night. Published in 1935, the book is a perfect escape. Clever and funny, it makes the world outside my window disappear. How have I forgotten this trick? 

Open a page, drop in, and I’m in England, where there’s a lunatic on the loose at a women’s college, and our main character Harriet, a well-known mystery writer, has been called in to solve the case. Harriet’s got it all under control, until she doesn’t. She teams up with her detective friend Peter (apparently in the last book, Peter saved Harriet from the gallows, fell in love with her, asked her to marry him, and she refused. The whole thing is maddening for both of them). 

I have no idea where this book is going. Is it a mystery? A romance? Meanwhile, there’s an unsettling situation brewing in Germany, but this is barely mentioned. The characters don’t know what’s coming and I love that for them. They stroll around the college hashing out the case, reciting poetry at each other and earnestly discussing the role of educated women in society. There’s one weird moment where Peter buys Harriet a dog collar because he’s afraid someone wants to strangle her, and the dog collar… will keep that from happening? (I know. WEIRD. But I can’t stop reading.) 

I take breaks to coax the dog out, give up, and walk the block fast, the world of the book filling my head, and for now, keeping the other one at bay.

  

The Car Ride

When I was sixteen, I caught a ride home from work with a psychopath. I was tired and smelly. (I worked at a steakhouse) and all I wanted to do was get home and take a shower. I didn’t know that the guy was a psychopath. But what else do you call it when someone laughs as they speed up to hit a rabbit that’s hopping across the road. (I can still see the dying rabbit flopping in the middle of the street.)  

There was another person in the car and she thought the whole thing was completely fine. No big deal. (She liked the guy), but I was crying in the backseat and wondering if the world is crazy. Spoiler alert: the world is crazy, and somehow, maddeningly, I’ve found myself stuck in the car again. 

I know what you’re thinking: Buckle up. 

Also, someone who doesn’t like the guy should probably grab for the wheel. 

I’m sorry to break it to you, but I am not that person. I’m not strong enough or fast enough, and the truth is I’m tired of buckling up. I want out of the car. Sometimes I imagine myself sixteen again, but this time, I bum a ride from someone who isn’t a psychopath. 

Or, I walk home. 

It’s not that far. Maybe two miles? And only a small dark stretch through the woods. I make up stories in my head to bide the time. I take deep breaths and keep my eyes on the moon above the trees. 

When I come across the rabbit flopping, I scoop her up in my jacket. I can’t always save her, but I try.