Presence

The warm weird weather, a walk with the dog, whose health is precarious lately, but for the moment, she’s trotting along, tail wagging, stopping every now and then to sniff a tree. What information is she picking up about the world? Speaking of the world, 

it’s bad. In this moment, though, here, standing with the dog in front of a yard with an inflatable Santa faceplanted on the grass, it’s pretty good. Back home, my visiting daughter is doing a puzzle, and in a few minutes, I’ll join her. My husband will heat up leftovers from the amazing meal our son-in-law made on Christmas. But first, we’ll grab some crackers and scarf down more of his pimento cheese dip. I have to tell you about this pimento cheese dip. 

Our son-in-law is a chef at a gourmet sandwich shop, and last year he created a sandwich that featured pimento cheese, and it was such a hit that the restaurant has started selling it in little tubs. Of course we wanted to try this recipe, thinking he’d bring along a little tub with him, but he did one better. He whipped up a vat in our kitchen, which is good, because we’re all addicted to it. I can’t say enough about this cheese dip. It renews my faith in the world. And I say this as a person, who until five days ago, did not have an opinion one way or another about pimento cheese dip. 

But right now, I'm existing in the moment with the dog as she completes her sniffs, the sun reflecting off the face-planted Santa, the neighborhood kids riding past us on their bikes, shouting back and forth at each other. 

They’re wearing shorts, which I know has got to be a sign of something bad, but the kids look happy. Maybe this is it. The end of the world, but with happy kids in shorts and a trotting dog, 

family and cheese dip waiting for me at home.    

 

On Darkness, On Light

I have been using the light all wrong. 

The winter. The cold. The gray-dark. I have that Seasonal Affective Disorder thing where the energy leaks out of me, despite all my best efforts—the walks outside (no matter what the weather), the daily yoga, the cozying up of the house. A few years ago, my daughter introduced me to Danish Hygge, where you burn candles and toss cushy throw pillows around the room and sip hot tea and set a pot of steaming orange peels and cinnamon sticks on the stove until it turns to mush. It helps. It doesn’t help. 

My husband got me one of those light therapy lamps, and I blast it in the afternoons after I get home from work at the library, what feels like the peak grayness of the day. Under the glare, I sit at my desk and try to write, but mostly I’m blinking at the window, the gloomy backyard, the flopped over brown flowers, the frozen birdbath, the clutter of dead leaves on the dead lawn. My thoughts are muddled 

a story I read in the news about a young woman who lives in a homeless camp and how she went into labor and a police officer ticketed her for sitting under an overpass, and now I can’t get the picture out of my mind, her sprawled legs, her flip flops, one hand lifted helplessly, 

and the other day at the library, the old man who wandered into the youth department, lost, and I cheerfully led him out, chattering about how confusing the library layout is, the large space and all of the various hallways, and who wouldn’t get lost. But now I’m thinking of him out in the parking lot, shuffling between the cars. Should I have followed him out there? Asked him if he needed help? What do we owe one another and why doesn’t this stupid light work?

Because you’ve been using it wrong, says a friend. 

We’re at a Winter Solstice Party, and the talk has turned to the weather (the clouds, the dreariness, the GRAAAAAYYYYY), commiserating about our mutual SAD-ness. The trick, he tells me, is to turn the light on first thing in the morning to mimic the sun rising. 

Huh, I say. Can it be this easy? 

I vow to try it the next morning, but the next morning I forget, a quiet, bleary-eyed moment with my coffee, the dog curled beside me, the orange peels and cinnamon sticks simmering on the stove. The sun surprises me before I can mimic it, the pinkening sky

the growing blue, so real and bright you can almost believe the young woman was given a blanket and lifted gently into an ambulance, 

and the lost man made it home. 

A Conversation

Driving up a busy street in our neighborhood, my husband and I are accosted at each intersection by people asking for money. It’s an annual charity thing, not sure which one, but basically, it seems to involve groups of volunteers, everyone wearing white and holding money buckets and weaving between cars. It is causing my husband immense anxiety.

Someone is going to get run over, he says, as we roll through the first intersection, narrowly skimming past one of the white-wearing, money-bucket-holders. 

Who thought this was a good idea? he says, at the next intersection, a volunteer darting out in front of us to accept a gift from a nearby car. 

I try to change the subject. It’s a story I just heard on the Family Secrets podcast about a woman living in India in the early 2000s, and how every few months violence would flare up, but mostly, she could sort of forget about it and go on with her life until the next flare-up would remind her again how much danger she was in. 

If someone gets run over, my husband says, wouldn’t that bankrupt the charity? 

Yeah, I say. But I can see it, though, how you could forget about it. I mean, look at us during Covid, how fast we got used to working from home and not going out to restaurants and flinching every time you heard a person cough. 

I don’t want to think about it, my husband says, but I can’t help thinking about it. A car slamming into someone, the guy flying up in the air.  

And then there’s now, I say. Like, what’s going to happen in January when they start rounding up immigrant families and outlaw polio vaccines and get rid of the Affordable Care Act? 

There’s gotta be a better way to ask for money, my husband says. 

Maybe this is what people want? I say. 

We’re at a red light, and the white-suited bucket-swingers surround our car, but, realizing we are a dead end, quickly disperse. 

I don’t know why it bothers me so much, my husband says. 

Because you care, I tell him. And we continue our drive up the street, our dueling conversations, our disparate anxieties, each inside our own head, each with our eyes worriedly on the road ahead.  

Musings on HROBs

My husband is reading a book about retirement, and it's got me thinking a lot about retirement. Mostly, I'm thinking about how I'm not old enough to retire. But apparently, I am, because I'm married to someone who is the same age, and he's been working at the same company for thirty-five years, and lately, he's been pondering the eventual, inevitable future, peppering our conversation with things like

HROBs (Happiest Retirees on the Block) 

and 

What are your Core Pursuits? 

which are topics that come up in the book he's been reading, What the Happiest Retirees Know: 10 Habits for a Healthy, Secure, and Joyful Life by Wes Moss. In the book Wes Moss did a survey of 2000 retirees and distilled their answers down to a specific formula for what makes an HROB, such as You should be married and have 2.5 kids and live close to 50% of them. Also, make sure you have two to six Close Connections (friends) and 3.6 Core Pursuits (hobbies). 

Side note: Your average HROB is in good health and has a lot of money, but Wes sorta glosses over this part.

Meanwhile, my husband has gotten fixated on the hobbies, worrying that because he only has one, woodworking, he needs to up his game and find 2.6 more.  

Maybe one is enough, I tell him, pointing out that woodworking is a time-consuming hobby. I mean, he singlehandedly remodeled our kitchen and has a list of orders from friends who'd like him to build something for them (his specialties are bookcases, tables and Little Free Libraries) and anyway, without having read the book, I think Wes would agree that it's not the number of hobbies you have, but that they are enjoyable and interesting and meaningful. 

Like, gardening is for me. And reading. And working at the library. But is that a hobby if I'm getting paid? (Side note #2: I don't get paid a living wage, and I just recently learned that over 70% of my co-workers, some of whom work full-time and would NOT call their job at the library a hobby, also do not get paid a living wage.)

And where does writing fit in? It's not a job (very little pay; and regardless, I would never retire from it.) And yet, it's not a hobby, because it's just something I do, like brushing my teeth or breathing. It's how I make sense of the world, or rather, how I make my peace with the senselessness of it. How I work through what puzzles me, like why we don't value our public servants enough to pay them a living wage. Or how I grapple with the reality that my husband is reading books about retirement, when once upon a time

we were just starting out, consumed each moment by the stuff of the future, all of it tomorrow or some day or next year, until suddenly, everything we'd planned for and saved for, the future, 

is here. Or, almost here. We're not Rs yet. But we do live on a B, and most of the time, we're H. And for today, that is E. (enough)

Beautiful Things

After the election my friend and I said we would share a picture with each other each day of one beautiful thing. 

The first day, all I could find was a tree with yellow leaves, and my friend, who was on vacation in Utah, sent me a picture of her hotel breakfast. I was walking

the dog around the block, and the sky was gray, and everything was misty like the world had sunk into a dark cloud. A woman was out raking leaves, and I had the suspicious feeling that she was a stranger, and maybe she was one of the people who glossed over injustice for the sake of cheaper groceries. Hi, she said, and I said, Hi, how are you? and she said, Well, not great, and I said, Me neither,

and we both let out the kind of long, relieved sigh you feel when you recognize a friend. Maybe we are going to be okay, or okay-ish. Either that, or fall into despair. The next day I saw a bald eagle flying in front of my house, 

and my friend hiked a trail in Utah, and my daughter and her friend finished crocheting a blanket, and my son climbed a mountain and watched the sun coming up, and in the picture he shared, you could see his little house down below, a patchwork of fields, the lake, the distant mountains.  

A few miles away from my neighborhood a group of men waved nazi flags and marched down the street yelling slurs and I had to turn off the news because I couldn't bear to hear anymore about the incoming administration’s cabinet picks, the sexual abusers, the criminals, the crackpots. The sun didn’t come out most days, 

but my husband set out bird seed in front of the bird camera and it caught the most amazing-looking bird, mid-flight, and later, I found a frilly white iris growing randomly near the garage. 

I don't know why everything feels different, why, at the same time, it feels the same. And how is it that every day I wake up in surprise to the brokenness and the beauty?