Acceptance (or not)

All week I was fighting a grouchy mood. First, it was the heat and how every time you went outside it was like slogging through a steam bath. And then, out of the blue, my back started hurting, and all the plans I had went out the window, and I ended up lazing on the couch and watching TV and reading a book about Buddhist philosophy, which said stuff like

“Struggling with anything to make it be other than what it is creates suffering.” 

which hit me hard because lately I’ve realized that a key part of my personality is Wanting to Make Things Be Other Than What They Are. 

For example, we have fancy new book shelves at our newly renovated library and I don’t like them. They’re metal and the books slide and fall over and so we have these hook-like contraption things that attach at the back of the shelves to prop the books up, but the problem is it’s hard to maneuver the hook-like contraptions, which might not seem like a big deal, but a substantial part of working at a library is shelving books, and therefore, having to CONSTANTLY MESS AROUND WITH THE HOOK-LIKE CONTRAPTIONS. 

I don’t like this, I tell my manager, and she nods and smiles and tries to make me feel better by agreeing that yes, it is annoying, but hey, it’s here to stay, so what are we going to do? 

(I don’t know CHANGE IT TO A THING THAT WORKS BETTER?!?!) 

But look, I say, it takes longer to shelve now. 

Nod and shrug. 

But listen, I say, did anyone ask us if we wanted these newfangled, hard-to-use bookends? 

Smile and shrug. 

Okay, now I realize that I am getting on my manager’s nerves, so I shut up, but inside, I’m thinking: Why can't we change this thing that doesn’t work? 

But I don’t say this. I finish up with the $&%^# shelving and head downstairs to my new desk in the youth department, which is smaller than the old desk and three-fourths of the way enclosed so that it is comically cage-like, and now I’m wishing I hadn’t blown all of my goodwill complaining about the shelving. 

What is it like, I wonder, as I turn slowly around inside my cage-desk, to be the kind of person 

who accepts things the way things are? 

the kind of person who steps out into the steam bath and smiles, who nonchalantly notices back pain and finds humor in library renovations, who shakes her head and sighs unquestioningly at the outrageous and horrifying news of the world?    

The Buddhist philosophy book has no answers except Don’t be the kind of person that, apparently, I am. Which suddenly makes me think, Wait, shouldn’t I, therefore, accept that THIS is who I am? And wouldn’t it be a type of suffering, too, to wish that I could be a different person?

These questions make my head spin, and spin some more, as I keep turning inside my cage-desk as the patrons spill into the room, the moms and nannies with the baby strollers and the toddlers toddling toward the train table, the school age kids with their summer reading forms and the teenage volunteers. 

For the next few hours, I am too busy to whine or worry or question or complain because someone wants help finding a book and someone asks for a sticker and someone has bumped his head and needs the Mr. Smiley Face ice pack and someone has piddled in the baby garden. 

There is a lesson here, but I don’t know what it is. Accept the things you cannot change. Or don’t. Be the kind of person you are. Or not. In the meantime, find the book and hand out the stickers, soothe the bonked head and clean up all the piddle.

Disturbance

No one felt like celebrating the 4th of July, so we walked the dogs and watched the Tour de France on and off, and later we went over to the community garden and weeded and mulched, until I inadvertently scooped up an ants nest in the mulch and got stung by a million ants. Oh no, Mom! my daughter said. Are you okay? 

I'm fine, I said. It was her community garden plot in her neighborhood where she lives in DC, and I’d been sharing gardening tips about weeding and mulching, and feeling proud of myself that I have a kid who might like gardening as much as I do, two kids, in fact—my son is working on his first garden this year too—but here I was, stung by ants, and now could add a new gardening tip about scooping up mulch, where you check the pile first for an ants nest. 

The ants were scurrying up my arms and legs, not painfully stinging me exactly, but more like pinches, hundreds of distressed ants in chorus, yelling at me to stop, I am destroying their home, scattering their children. I set the mulch-nest back and we cleaned up and watched more Tour de France until everyone nodded off except for my son-in-law, who was whipping up his famous turkey burgers in the kitchen.

A word about the turkey burgers. They were better than last year’s turkey burgers, and that is saying something. Also, I don’t even think of myself as a person who likes turkey burgers. But this is my son-in-law, *brag alert* who is a chef, and everything he makes instantly becomes my favorite version of that thing. (See pimento cheese dip). We ate the turkey burgers reverently and listened to the not so far away fireworks and remembered that it was the 4th of July and we were in DC, where you’d think you’d feel more patriotic, but mostly, it was distress. 

The day before we’d gone to the African American History Museum and walked through exhibits on slavery and Jim Crow and lynchings, and you could see history folding over itself and repeating, but then, on the highest floor we spilled off the elevator and there was the Lincoln Memorial framed in the window and joyful music playing in the rooms behind us, Ragtime and Jazz and Hip Hop, and something delicious-smelling wafting from the museum café. 

We watched water dance in a fountain and read the lines from the Declaration of Independence on the wall, the part that says whenever any form of government becomes destructive, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and we walked out into the sun and crowds, many of them tourists from other countries with their guidebooks and maps, and what in the world do they think of America these days? 

Later, it was back to the community garden to water and admire our hard work. No sign of the ants, but there was a rabbit hopping along the fence, a blood red sunflower pasted against the sky. 

 

The Bystander

I was standing in line at the farmers' market waiting to buy a chicken, when suddenly, on the sidewalk two dogs started fighting. Or rather, it wasn’t a fight. It was a large brown dog biting the back of a smaller black dog. The brown dog had clamped down on the smaller dog and was tugging. The smaller dog yelped and cried. 

It was only a few seconds, but it felt like forever, and then it was over, and the owner of the bigger dog shuffled away with him, and people gathered around her and comforted her and her dog, who looked completely fine. Meanwhile, the smaller dog was still yelping and crying. 

I was next in line for the chicken, and my head spun. I felt like I had missed something important. It didn’t help that it was 90 million degrees outside and the sun blasted down on me and sweat dribbled into my eyes. I had a weird flashback. I was seventeen and waiting for my ride outside the Ponderosa Steakhouse where I worked as a cashier, my stinky uniform, my grease-streaked arms. 

A screech of tires and a scream, and everything slowed down as a motorcycle skidded in front of me, and a woman flew off and landed in the grass like a doll flung and dropped, the man on the motorcycle crumpled on the pavement, shouting for her and wailing. But there were only soft groans coming from the woman. I moved in slow motion toward her and knelt down, everything fuzzy and murky like I was underwater. 

All I could think to do was touch her hand, say, I’m here. 

But who was I? A silly girl in my polyester uniform. People came running and someone had called an ambulance and I was still on my knees when they arrived. Later, I learned that the accident was the motorcycle guy’s fault. He was going too fast and hit another car head on. 

It was the smaller dog’s fault is where I'm going with this. Apparently, he’d lunged at the bigger dog first, so tough luck for him, I guess. Even so, after I bought the chicken, I walked over to the owners, an elderly couple who set up a booth every week at the farmers’ market to sell houseplants. There was blood on the sidewalk and pieces of fur and the dog was whimpering and the couple was alone in the heat and no one was comforting them. 

I want to say I helped the elderly couple and their dog, brought them water, hustled them out of the heat, or at the very least, bought one of their houseplants. But I did none of those things. I asked if their dog was all right (yes?) and I sweated home with my chicken. Forty years later and what have I learned. 

I am here, standing by, bearing witness, telling you a story. For whatever that is worth.

A Good Walk

The dog is having trouble walking. She’s thirteen and I know what’s coming for her and I don’t want to think about it. The other day she stumbled trotting up the stairs. Later, her back leg slipped when she was trying to lick herself and she toppled over. My husband and I brought her to the vet, and the diagnosis is basically, Old Age. 

Let her rest, the vet said, but when we got home, the dog didn’t want to rest. She wanted to go for a walk. I sat with her on the couch. I was reading a stupid book that I couldn’t put down. The premise of the book was silly and the characters were ridiculous and the writing was bad, but somehow, it was compulsively readable. 

The dog fell asleep, loopy from the drugs the vet prescribed that we had to trick her into eating by burying them inside cheese cubes. I was jittery. A combination of the dumb book and the disgustingly hot weather and whatever new horror's in the news and the sick feeling that I am losing my dog. 

I talk about this with my therapist, the sense of dread I have and how familiar it is. For several years she has been working with me to break old patterns, and I thought I was making progress, but now it’s back to square one. I’m trapped. 

What’s the opposite of trapped? she says.

I try to play along. I’m free? 

How about, You have options. 

I have options, I repeat. It sounds absurd. Sometimes, in my head, I am still a child and there are no options. Except in reality, I am not a child, and I actually do have some options. 

I finish reading the dumb book, laughing at the nuttiness of it, but also, impressed, that it kept me reading, that it took me away for a few hours from real life. There might be a lesson here. If things get too crazy, take a rest. 

The dog wakes up and she still wants to go for a walk, so I take her. We move slowly in the heat, poking around the flowers in the front yards, sniffing the trees. When she loses her step, my heart breaks, but then, she rights herself, and we keep going, a different walk from our usual, but a good one.  

Surprised by Cookie Butter

The week had all the makings of a bad one, but then I tried a spoonful of cookie butter. 

I had never heard of this product before, but I was game to try it, and oh my lord it was good. Imagine the creaminess of butter all blended up with cookie dough. What are you supposed to do with it, a friend asked when I told her about it. Smear it on toast? 

I don't know, I said. I ate it straight out of the jar. The next day, my husband and I went to the pride parade downtown. I admit I was a little afraid to go this year. The protests erupting in cities all over the country. The general crappiness of a certain kind of person who hates the kind of people who march in a pride parade. What if that someone drove a car into the crowd? 

But the news said there were 700,000 people in town for Pride. I was defiant and happy to be one of them. All of the rainbow flags and colorful balloons. The music and exuberant dancing. It made me tear up. Why would anyone be afraid of people because they're different? I wanted to hug each and every one of them. The drag queens and the waving polar bears. The children snapping their rainbow fans and the churchy moms with their t-shirts reminding us that Love Is Love and All Are Welcome. 

Meanwhile, my daughter was in DC, staying far away from the squeaky-wheeled tank parade that was going down on the Mall. Her dog was sick with some kind of stomach bug, and she had to keep feeding him special food and something called Probiotic Flora. 

Probiotic Flora? I have never heard of this. 

My daughter laughed.  

To prove that I was in the know about something, I asked her if she had ever tried cookie butter.

Of course, she said. 

I felt myself deflate. Am I the only one still learning new things? I read an article that says there are three ways of coping in a dying world. Hope, resilience, and reconciliation. I didn't understand what the article was getting at. Hope, that we find something buried in the ashes? Resilience, that we can keep ourselves going while we look for it? 

But what is the reconciliation? My son tells me the answer to everything is connecting with people in real life. This can be as small as the interaction you have at the checkout counter when you buy your first jar of cookie butter. 

At the pride parade, I had to go to the bathroom. I found a row of rainbow-colored Porta Potties behind a restaurant, but I wasn’t sure if they were letting the parade-goers use them. I struck up a conversation with the woman who was cleaning one, and she said, I've got it all ready for you. 

It was the cleanest restroom I have ever experienced. And I say that as a person with a pea-sized bladder and a long, well-documented history with public restrooms. I relayed this to the woman, and she told me she was the owner of the Porta Potties. Would I mind leaving a review? 

Not at all! 

Home from the parade, and I was a mixture of sad at the state of the world, and yet, weirdly happy. I ate another spoonful of cookie butter. How have I gone a whole lifetime without knowing of its existence?

 

Old Things

Lately, I have been enjoying giving things away.

The kids’ old violas. The absurd amount of lettuce growing in the garden, which I’ve taken to bagging up and leaving on coworkers' desks or dropping on neighbors’ doorsteps. An old watch.

Here is the story of the watch. It goes back to teenager me, the poor kid at the wealthy high school who wears a uniform and has no clue what’s in style. Cut to: the poor kid at the wealthy college, studying the rich girls like I’m an anthropologist. Their blue jean mini-skirts and perfect hair. A watch on the wrist, a string of pearls, an LL Bean backpack casually thrown over one shoulder. 

Forget the expensive backpack and pearls—they’re totally out of my reach—but a wristwatch, maybe that’s something I can manage? Summer after Sophomore year I temp at a law office and splurge a chunk of my paycheck on one. I am so excited about this watch, I can’t properly explain it. 

And get this: at the end of the summer, the attorney I work for gives me a going away present. An LL Bean backpack. How did he know it was exactly what I’d coveted? But then, back at school, the air is punctured out of me. My sociology professor is leading a discussion about social class. What are the markers of it and how do we know who’s upper and who’s… not? 

I hold my breath. It’s my secret fear. That I don’t belong at this school. That people can tell just by looking at me. Someone throws out watches as an example, and the teacher agrees, mentioning a particular watch brand as a sure sign of wealth, and another, (the one I’m wearing) as the opposite. I break out in a sweat and hide my wrist under my desk. Take off the watch. Head back to my dorm room and toss it in the trash.  

A couple of years later, I buy the other watch. It’s stupidly expensive and I can’t afford it, but I do have a credit card. (Take that snooty professor.) (Although, Ha ha, joke’s on me. I’ll be paying that watch off for months.) I wear it proudly, never examining my feelings about class, about money, about wanting to be in style, whatever that means, my underlying worry that it’s all for nothing because the rich people, the popular people will always have some new standard that I can’t reach, never mind have a clue about. 

Flash forward to a few weeks ago, the death of my smartwatch, and I am in need of the old-fashioned kind. Turns out I have two. The status symbol watch, which is cute but a little banged up, and a nice, newish one (if fifteen years ago is newish), an anniversary gift from my husband. My daughter’s in town, and I offer one to her.  

She chooses the old watch, and I admit I am surprised. I thought she’d want the sleeker, modern one. But this is middle-aged me, still clueless about what’s in style. Vintage, apparently, according to my daughter. I tell her the story behind the watch, and for a moment the long forgotten humiliation burbles up, along with a stab of embarrassment that I used to care so much about what other people thought of me.   

The watch is lovely, though, on my daughter’s wrist. And so much better than gathering dust in a dresser drawer. A week later my son and daughter-in-law breeze through. Someone needs a backpack, and my husband rifles through a closet and digs out the old LL Bean. I didn’t even know we still owned it. My daughter-in-law slips it over both shoulders, and she looks great. 

I tell her the story too and realize I have no idea what the moral is. Our things, like us, have complicated pasts. We obsess over them, hate them, treasure them, bury them. The random few, we share a memory and joyfully let them go.   

Note Taking

I take notes when someone is talking. It’s a compulsion, a nervous tic, a thing to keep my worried fingers moving, scribbling on the backs of receipts or on the junk mail I’ve stuffed in my purse. I rarely do anything with this writing. It ends up back in my purse, and then, every few weeks I empty out my purse and chuck the crumpled notes in the recycling bin. 

I used to carry around a little notebook because I’d read somewhere that all writers should carry around a little notebook. In it I would write snippets of potential story scenes and oddball thoughts that popped into my head and conversations I shamelessly eavesdropped on. 

For example, in March 2008, I was sitting at the Panera Bread in Columbus, Ohio, and I overheard a woman at a nearby table say to another: “Dad said some magic words to me. And the magic words were: What are you going to do with your luggage?” 

[What does this mean? I wondered in March 2008, and I wonder, again, now.]

The other day someone was talking at a meeting, and I was taking notes furiously—furiously in the sense that I was trying to keep up with what the person was saying, but also, because I was furious about what she was saying, which basically boiled down to Things Are Really Bad Right Now. 

After the meeting I scrunched up the paper I’d been taking notes on and drove home in tears. If I don’t write things down, I will forget them. If I write things down, but don’t read what I’ve written, I can also forget. It’s a nifty trick. Too bad I can’t always manage to remember it. 

I have so many questions about what I hear, what I write. The woman at the Panera Bread. I mean, what the hell was she going to do with her luggage? And at the meeting the other day. Instead of telling us how crappy things are, why can’t someone help us figure out what to do about it? 

Maybe I am asking for too much. Maybe there are no magic words. Still, I find myself writing it all down. Friday at the library, a toddler shows me her coloring page. It’s covered in crayon scribbles and I love it. When she offers it to me, I take it. 

One writer to another. No words, but I know exactly what she means. 

 

Peonies

Until a few years ago I didn’t know the names of most flowers. 

Roses, okay, sure. Daisies, tulips, but that’s about it. I would see flowers and like them, but didn’t feel any particular curiosity about what they were called. It worked the other way too. If I came upon a type of flower in a book or poem, Wordsworth’s daffodils, for example, or D. H. Lawrence’s Bavarian Gentians, I could only hold a vague, flowerish picture in my head.  

This all changed six years ago when we moved into our new-old house. The yard was overrun with plants we couldn’t identify. Also, the house was overrun with stuff we couldn’t identify. Wooden sculptures nailed to the walls. Glitter mixed with the orange ceiling paint. The giant Gatsby-like eyeball decals pasted to the dining room wall. But this is another story. That summer we focused on the house and left the yard for later. 

Later, turned out to be the first scary, bewildering months of the pandemic. Project one was to pull out the jungle of bamboo. Bamboo, I could recognize. Next, came the mass of wild grass. One day I crawled through it and had the shock of my life: a crazy woman on hands and knees coming straight at me. 

Ha ha no, that was a mirror and the crazy woman was me. Why was there a large mirror propped up in the center of a thicket of wild grass? Who knows. But then, why had the doorknobs on all the doors been replaced with water faucets and why was there a prison door on the patio and why were we in the middle of a global pandemic, the president advising us to drink bleach? But back to the flowers. 

After the bamboo came out and the wild grass, I was starting to get somewhere with my flower identification. This was summer 2020, and I was aiming the plant app on my phone at everything remaining. Those orange things were day lilies. The yellow stuff was Black-eyed Susan. The purple was coneflower. A delicate blue with spokes shooting out of it was called Love in the Mist.   

When the library opened its curbside delivery service, I ordered a bunch of plant books and painstakingly mapped out the yard on graph paper. The yarrow. The blazing star. The crocosmia with its feathery petals that looked like flames. And the peonies.

Let me tell you about the peonies. It’s a spring flower so I missed it completely in 2020, but the next year I noticed the big blooms behind the garage. This is a part of the yard that I didn’t know was our property so I had never seen the flowers back there. By the time I found them, they were flopped over, smushed on the neighbor’s driveway. I dug up part of the plant and replanted it in a place where we could see it, and now every spring, it’s my favorite flower to watch bloom.

First, a tight pink bud, and then an unfurling, a poof, and it’s a full-blown flower, too heavy to stay upright. There’s the inevitable flop over and a shedding of all of the petals, this entire process only taking a week? two weeks at most, and then it’s back to being an ordinary bush until next spring. Which is such a shame, the quickness of it, the loss. 

This year I decided to do what I could to slow things down. Can you slow things down? Maybe not, but I’ve been clipping several of the stems at the tight pink bud stage and putting them in jars around the house. I wish you could smell how sweet it is as the buds open, see the loveliness of the blooms. I put a vase in the guest room for our daughter, who is visiting for the weekend. 

Oh! she said, when she saw it. What is this? A peony, I told her. And like magic, we keep seeing them. A farmer selling bouquets at the farmers market and on our walks with the dog. Bushes on the edges of front lawns, the flowers brushing the sidewalk. 

We've been talking about other times she’s visited, when we first bought this wacky old house (that she begged us not to buy because it needed so much work) and later, during the pandemic, when she was in our bubble, the days we jumped on shovels together, tugging out bamboo roots. It feels like yesterday, it feels like today. The time with her, 

it goes too fast. But right this moment, she is here and I am taking her in. This morning before she wakes up, I tuck a fresh peony into the vase for one more day of frothiness and delight.  

Unwatched

On Friday my smartwatch broke. The face must’ve snapped off at some point when I was unrolling the baby yoga mats for our weekly tummy time program at the library, and it took me a minute to register that it had broken. To say that I am attached to this watch is an understatement. I've been wearing it pretty much non-stop for five years. 

It’s the first thing I look at in the morning, to check the time and analyze my sleep. Was my heart rate up or down? Did I fall into the recommended minutes of deep sleep? Did I wake too much to toss and turn? Later, I’d check my steps, noting with satisfaction when I crossed 5000, when I crossed ten, and braggy alert: when I crossed 15. 

For the rest of my work shift, I wandered around feeling the ghost weight of the watch on my wrist. I was already calculating how fast I could buy another and have it sent to me, because really, how else would I know when I completed the requisite standing-for-one-minute-per-hour? And what else was going to give me a digital badge for doing twenty minutes of outdoor exercise?

Home, though, and I had a wild thought: What if I DON’T buy another watch? 

This question came up courtesy of the three books I’ve read recently about the emptiness and dangers of over-consumerism and how we might all be happier with less. (For the record the books are: The Year of Less by Cait Flanders, The Art of Frugal Hedonism by Annie Raser-Rowland, and The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer.) 

On fire with my new awareness, I told my husband we should stop buying so much online and try to purge ten items from our house each week. I made a list of things to purge and promptly did not purge them. 

For example, a bike we never ride that has flat tires. Do we fix it? Stick it out on the curb in its flat-tired state? Haul it to the junkyard? Or, my ancient wedding dress which I had never stored properly, and frankly, who would want it now, with the Lady Diana-inspired poofy sleeves and fiddly beaded bodice? 

I did have one moment of purge-y success. A few days before the watch broke, I noticed a sign at my library that they were collecting gently-used musical instruments for the city schools, and I remembered that I have two violas gathering dust in a closet. When I toted them into the building and set them in the collection box, a wave of nostalgia splashed over me. 

This was the end of an era. The kids playing viola in their school orchestras. The music lessons. The concerts. But the funny thing is that it was the end of the era twelve years ago. For whatever reason I kept hanging on to the violas. I took a picture of the dusty cases and walked away, and immediately felt lighter. 

Wait, my husband says when I tell him about my plan to NOT buy another smartwatch. How will you know how you slept? How will you keep track of your steps? 

I don't know, I say. Do I have to keep track of these things? 

We were out to dinner with friends, and this morning I woke up groggy and tired, and I knew it, without the watch, that the one cocktail and delicious deep-fried barbecued chicken sandwich I ate the night before had really affected my sleep. But, oh well!   

Later, I went for a long walk with the dog, keenly aware of my bare wrist. I ambled along the usual route, but it felt like unmapped territory, a new path unfurling before me, my heartbeats unmeasured, my footsteps, for now, uncounted. 

Mother's Day

Today is the day I plant seeds. First, I set out all of my planting containers and fill them with potting soil, and then, I gather the seeds. 

The seeds are stored in envelopes and paper bags and plastic baggies, collected back in the fall or given to me, the dried-up marigold heads and zinnia, the basil and cleomes (which are big blobby brightly colored Dr. Suess-like flowers), the lettuce that bolted in summer, the red beans and black. All of the seeds have a story and the stories are all about gifts. 

The beans, for example, came from a farmer in New York near where my son and daughter-in-law live. Last year we helped the farmer dig holes in his field and he served us dinner, and as we were leaving, he handed me five black beans and five red. The cleome seeds were given to me by a neighbor after I told her how much I loved her “Dr. Seuss plants.” The marigolds are a gift from myself, several falls ago when I realized I didn’t need to buy these seeds, they were there all along, hundreds of them, in each cluster of blooms. 

Drop the seeds in the containers, add a bit more dirt. Water. Label, so I will remember. (I am big on remembering.) The process takes me all morning, and I am so grateful for this kind of meditative, lose-yourself-in-the-moment kind of activity. The second Sunday in May is always the day I plant my seeds. In central Ohio, it’s officially the start of the growing season—no more freezes or frosts (we hope!) 

It also happens to coincide with Mother’s Day. To put it mildly, I have mixed feelings about this day. I am a mother and I love being a mother. I am a daughter and this is where it gets tricky. For most of my life the daughter part of me took up an absurdly outsized portion of my brain. I don’t know how to explain it. 

Some of us grow where we are planted. Some of us are like the seeds dropped by birds and watered by kindly strangers. 

It’s warm outside while I work and lovely. When I’m finished planting, I have many more seeds left than I have containers to put them in. This happens every year and I am grateful for this too, a gift for those who have gifted me. 

A story. 

The Binge

Yesterday it was raining and unseasonably cold and dreary, and my husband and I sat down to watch one episode of a show we’d started the night before, a medical drama called The Pitt, which takes place in an ER and is weirdly mesmerizing. The one episode turned into three, turned into five, turned into nine, 

and the afternoon slipped away, the two of us parked on the couch, only breaking for meals and shuffling the dog in and out in the rain. When was the last time we did something like this, my husband asked me. Never, I said, but then I remembered the pandemic, 

our daughter and her boyfriend, now her husband, the four of us binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy, another medical drama (what is it about medical dramas?). Something about the intensity, the life-or-death moments, the glimpses of humans in crisis and all the ways we save each other. 

The Pitt covers a single day in a trauma center, each episode one hour in the twelve-hour shift. Slowly you get to know these people, the doctors, the medical students, nurses and orderlies, the head doctor doing his best to lead the place, but grappling with PTSD. Turns out, four years ago, during the pandemic, he was unable to save his mentor and now he’s flashing back, struggling to forget because who wants to remember that chaotic, terrifying time? Not me, but,

once, early on in the pandemic, in between Grey’s Anatomy episodes, I sneaked out of the house and drove across town to meet up with a friend I hadn't seen in weeks. The drive was eerie, the highways crisscrossing the city empty except for my car, a sign flashing over a bridge, reminding me to Flatten the Curve! Stay Home! 

and one man on the side of the road, peeing into a clump of bushes. This is the end of the world, I was thinking, and it was. Except it wasn’t. My friend and I wore masks and spent an hour together doing a socially-distant walk, and then I drove away on the vacant streets, 

home, where my family had moved on to binge-watching The Great British Bake-off, a marathon session of multiple episodes, punctuated only by stopping to bake a cake or whip up an elaborate French pastry. My son-in-law who had dreams of becoming a chef, made me a grilled cheese. The grilled cheese took hours and many episodes of The Great British Bake-Off because first he had to make the bread. 

When he delivered the sandwich, it came on one of my fancy plates, the thick homemade bread toasted, the cheese gooey and topped with thinly sliced pear and slivers of red onion. Nearly five years later, it’s still the best sandwich I have ever eaten in my life. Maybe I shouldn’t have broken the rules to visit my friend. 

I don’t know what spurred me on. The way everything had shifted out from under us, the library where I worked, closed for who knows how long, the claustrophobia of the house in lockdown, the binge-watching and binge-eating, the intensity of the love I had for my family, the terror that any of us might get sick, and suddenly, I thought I might lose my mind if I couldn’t do one ordinary thing. 

My friend and stayed on opposite sides of the street as we walked. When it was time to say goodbye, we held out our hands, pretending we could touch.  

Fun Times in the Financial Advisor's Office

A few days ago, my husband and I had a meeting with our financial advisor and it was fun. Maybe fun is the wrong word. My husband was fixated on all of the money we’d saved for retirement and how a scary chunk of it basically went up in flames over the past few weeks. I was fixated on how the financial advisor kept saying “the Markets.”

“The Markets don’t like chaos,” for example. 

Or

“The Markets like stability.” 

I was sitting in a comfy chair and doodling on a notepad with the snazzy pink pen the financial advisor had given me, and I was thinking, Good luck with that, Markets! Also, who are these Markets because I can totally relate to them. 

Then I went back to ruminating over the squirrel that’s been messing with my spinach. What happened was I planted spinach seeds in the small bed near the herb garden, and this squirrel (I think it’s the same one?) has been continually digging it all up. My suspicion is that he sees the disturbed dirt, and it makes him wonder if there’s something good buried under it, a long-forgotten nut or whatever. 

Every time I catch him at it, I chase him out and salvage what I can, but this was starting to seem pointless, more and more spinach seedlings flung and trampled. So, I got out the big guns. I’m talking, of course, about mesh fencing. 

I unwrapped the mesh roll and cut it to size, quickly realizing that this was not the easy process I’d envisioned. The mesh stuck to itself. It snagged on my hair, my necklace, my fingernails. The one place it would not stick was to the posts I’d fitted around the spinach bed. Did I mention that I’d chosen an eighty-two-degree day to do this? But finally, after spending a good sweaty couple of hours, I managed to construct a fortress around what was left of the spinach. 

Take that, squirrel. 

Meanwhile, in the financial advisor meeting, the financial advisor was saying, “The Markets will come back,” and I was admiring her faith and longing to believe her as the pink pen she had given me doodled its way across my notebook page, trying to tie all of my random thoughts together,

the Markets and the nutty afternoon I spent keeping one squirrel out of a two-foot by four-feet long garden bed, and maybe in this analogy the chaos is the squirrel? or the people in charge are the squirrel? greedily scrabbling for treasure, not giving a crap about the destruction of the garden. 

And maybe I am the Markets? craving stability and fully grown spinach, the mesh fluttering around me like the tattered fragments of the institutions I used to believe in.  

Or maybe the answer lies in the doodling itself? This really is a nice pen! Smooth and lovely and perfect for scribbling my new favorite word.

Mourning

The nest on the back porch has two eggs and no bird sitting on them, and I don’t know why. I don’t know why about a lot of things. 

What happened is the mother mourning dove had one brood—after sitting patiently for weeks, the two eggs hatching, the baby birds teetering out, flying down to the herb garden, everyone seemingly safe and well and off to live their lives. And then, 

maybe two days later, the mother was back on the nest and going through the whole process again. I wasn’t sure my heart could take it, the cold nights, the unplanned storms, the uncertainty of it all. I mean, come on, lady bird, give yourself--give ME a break! 

It was a bad week for a variety of reasons. My anger had seeped into a mild depression. I was having a hard time focusing, making plans and breaking them, and too much reading of the news, worries about my library losing state funding and my big fear: what if they make us take children's books off the shelves, everything spinning out, and not helped by the book I was reading

At Work in the Ruins, which is about how to live our lives after the world as we know it collapses (oddly, I found this book strangely comforting. I am so tired of people lying to my face) but also, it’s hard to think about the world as we know it collapsing. Take the cocoa powder I use in the banana, almond-butter smoothie I drink each morning. Did you know there is a cocoa powder shortage? 

It’s pretty much impossible to find now and has been for months. And just wait until we lose the almonds and bananas. A few days ago, a mother I used to know lost her son to a rare, aggressive and fast moving form of cancer. He was thirty-one years old and left behind a young wife and baby daughter and who gives a crap about cocoa powder. The world has ended, is always ending, will always be ending.

This morning, I found one of the mourning dove eggs broken on the steps, the yolk spilling out on the concrete, a sliver of shell tipped into the garden, a snail glistening in the sun, head bent over the bowl, drinking the remains, while a dove perched on a wire looked down at us, glass-eyed.  

I understand nothing. And we who are left go on. 

Through

Yesterday I was mad. 

I had a plan for the day, and I was all set to get the ball rolling. The plan was: first, unload my groceries. But before I even unloaded half of them, something happened and it all went to hell. 

I walked back into the house in a daze, and my husband said, Are you okay? I said, No. I made lunch and choked it down. My head wouldn't stop spinning with the thing that had just happened. I was angry, but I didn't know what to do with the anger. Anger is a difficult emotion for me in general. Most of my life I held it in, smoothed it over, walled it off. I was pretty good at pretending I didn't care. Sometimes I was pretty bad at pretending. 

Fifty million sessions of therapy later, and I've learned that the healthy way to deal with difficult feelings is: You feel them. 

The first time my therapist told me this, I said. Ah, it's like the line from Robert Frost, "The best way out is always through." Okay, sure, she said. 

But what if you don't want to feel the feelings? I forgot to ask her this. Or, if I did ask her, I forgot the answer. I cleaned up my lunch dishes and realized I was enraged. I said to my husband. I’m mad. He said, I can see that. What can I do to help? Can I hug you? 

Before I met him, I didn't know this was a question a person could ask another person. I didn't know you could say no. 

I said, Yes, and when he hugged me, I burst into tears. It was amazing how hard I cried. When I stopped, I said, I think I want to go for a walk. I took the dog and tried to lose myself in a funny podcast, but it didn't work. I was still jittery. I reached out to two friends, but they were both busy. I felt like I might crawl out of my skin. 

I ate an over-sized chocolate bar. That was glorious for like, two minutes, but then I felt sick. Now I was angrier, and all of the anger was directed at myself. My day, which had started out so promising, was going down the tubes. I went for another walk and tried to do a trick my therapist told me about where you look at five things and touch four things and listen to three things and smell two things and taste one thing. 

All I could look at was the sky. All I could listen to was the same song over and over. Under Pressure by David Bowie and Queen. 

The song is about love and it made me feel terrible because what if there are limits to love? And also, what if deep down, you hate yourself? I kept walking. Why can't we give love one more chance, says Freddy Mercury. And then David Bowie says, in so many words, Yeah, why not? 

It hit me that the love they're talking about includes yourself. It only took one hundred repeats of the song and 18,341 steps to come to this conclusion. My feet were burning by that time, but the anger was gone. 

I had found my way through, apparently. 

It only took a day. It only took a lifetime. 

Be Honest. Use Humor.

Last week I attended a zoom meet-up with a group of writers who are struggling to write these days. The writer who organized the meet-up invited us to go around the zoom room and share something we felt excited about. Someone said, French soup. Someone said, the art she’s making out of found objects. I said, lettuce.

Someone said she’s retiring, and we all said, Yay! Good for you! But then she went on to talk about how she works at a university, and it’s been wearing her down, trying to respond to all of the directives from the federal government to dismantle diversity and equity and inclusion in her department. We all said, oh. 

The writer running the group said, This is it. We’re all sad. But we’re also capable of finding joy. How do we acknowledge reality and still remember joy? Be honest, she said, and I dutifully wrote that down. Use humor. I wrote that down too. I was looking at the faces of these strangers arrayed in their zoom boxes, so many of us despondent about the state of the world, 

and feeling grateful that I am not alone, 

A few days later, it was “liberation day” as the news was calling it and the stock market tanked and the state of Ohio decided it’s a good idea to cut library funding. I was sitting on the couch with my husband, and I was déjà vu-ing back to March 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic, when I suddenly realized we only had a couple of rolls of toilet paper in the house. 

My husband tried to order some on Amazon, but everything was out. The next day I braved the supermarket, where it was pandemonium, and managed to make my way to the toilet paper aisle where there were two packages left, and I really really really wanted to grab both, but I only took one. That ranks right up there on the list of hard things I’ve done in my life. The months went by. 

The store put a limit on toilet paper. I bought a pack every week. More months went by. I had a pyramid of toilet paper packs in the basement. I kept buying more. One day out of the blue, we got a box in the mail, and when I opened it, I didn’t understand what I was looking at. It was a very small pack of very small rolls of toilet paper. 

My husband figured out that this must’ve been the order he’d placed back in March. The toilet paper had come from China on a barge and it was just now reaching us. I added it to the pyramid in the basement. But I was starting to have a queasy feeling. 

What the hell was this pyramid anyway, but scarcity and terror. Also, it was absurd. I stopped buying toilet paper. The pile dwindled. Eventually there was only the pack from China left. My husband gave it to our son who was van-life-ing across the country at the time. 

I must’ve memory-holed this whole thing, because there we were back on the couch, and only a few rolls of toilet paper in the house. I could feel the panic rising. I wanted to change out of my pajamas and run right over to Kroger and start building the pyramid again. 

Instead, I went outside and checked on my lettuce, which is growing like crazy. In a few weeks I will be filling up big salad bowls and picking more to give to neighbors and friends. I will be giving away so much lettuce, people will see me coming with my bags of it, and say, please, Jody, we’ve had enough of your lettuce, give it to someone else. 

And I will. 

What If

Every spring I plant lettuce and every spring I worry the lettuce won’t come up. A week goes by from when I first dropped the seeds into the ground, and then it’s ten days, and still no sign of the lettuce. Maybe I didn’t water it enough or maybe the $&$^# squirrels destroyed it with their maniacal hole-digging. 

(A word about the squirrels. A few weeks ago I wrote about the peas I planted, but what I didn’t tell you was that five minutes after I planted them, a squirrel dug them up and scattered the seedlings, and I had to replant everything and block off the garden bed, which was quickly breached by the squirrels with more digging up and more scattering, until I set up a fortress-like fence, which seems to be holding, for now.) 

Meanwhile, the mourning dove mother on her nest on our back porch who has ballooned up to twice her size, patiently plonked over her eggs, keeps blinking at me in mild amusement whenever I tear out the back door to chase off a squirrel. Ten days, two weeks, three, and the bird is still out there and no hatched eggs. Rain, sleet, a freak wind that flipped over the hammock next door, and I am worried

about the mourning dove mother, about the lettuce, about the new law in Ohio that regulates classroom discussion about controversial subjects, controversial apparently referring to talk about “climate change,” “immigration,” and “diversity” among other things, because what in the actual F—

What if the lettuce doesn’t grow this year and what if there are no baby mourning doves? What if the State doesn’t stop at the universities but goes after the public libraries next and who am I kidding, of course, they'll go after the libraries, and what is anyone going to do about it? What am I going to do about it, when I can barely manage the squirrels digging up my pea plants? This is all to say 

that this week, I hit a low point with the whole thing. Still, I wrote every day at the kitchen counter, keeping an eye on the not-growing-lettuce-in-the-garden, the devious squirrels, the dove plopped over her unhatched eggs, 

only half-noticing the orchid plant in its pot on the window ledge, the orchid that hasn’t bloomed in five years and why am I keeping this orchid plant, when it is so obviously played out, long past dormant, fully crossed over into the land of the dead? 

But then yesterday—and I don’t know what it means—nothing, everything, spring, beauty, goodness, love—

the lettuce came up, the eggs hatched, and the orchid plant bloomed. 

A Sign

My husband and I are hooked on this show called Traitors. It's a reality competition where a group of people are sent to a Scottish castle and one by one get booted out, but with a small twist. The first night everyone sits blindfolded around a big table and the host taps three of them on the back, making them the Traitors. Everyone else is called the Faithful. 

The object of the game is for the Faithful to figure out who the Traitors are and vote them out of the Scottish castle. But each night the Traitors meet up and murder someone. (How you murder someone is write one of the Faithful's names on a card and slide it under their bedroom door.)

Anyway, the next morning everyone is paranoid and turning on each other, accusing each other of being Traitors, while the actual Traitors mostly shut up and go along with the mob. What’s funny (actually, it’s not funny) is how easy it is to point the finger at someone. You say something like, Hey, I noticed that you had a weird expression on your face at dinner, and suddenly the spotlight is on that person, and when they try to defend themselves, that's pretty much the end of them because it just makes everyone more suspicious. 

Inevitably, when the person gets voted off and they reveal they were a Faithful all along, everyone is shocked and sad because they just picked off one of their own. Meanwhile, the Traitors keep murdering people and laughing their heads off about it. 

Which has gotten me thinking about the upside-down, funhouse-mirror world we've been living in (I know. What doesn't get me thinking about that? But bear with me). I read the news about how the present administration is crippling the Social Security Department, and it will likely lead to missed payments. 

One of their spokespeople said, basically, Oh well. And then said that anyone who gets mad about missing a check is someone who’s probably defrauding the government, or else, why would they complain? 

This is just like Traitors! I said to my husband. Everyone thinks of themselves as good and decent and kind and deserving, but they can’t seem to imagine those same qualities in others. It’s the oldest trick in the book for evil people. Divide and conquer. 

Now we’re halfway through season two and the good guys are making the same stupid mistakes, but whatever. It’s just a dumb show. I do what I always do when things are getting too much for me. I turn off all the screens and go outside. 

Check on the peas I planted last week. Walk around the neighborhood with the dog. Someone has lost a cat named Walter, and they’ve put up signs everywhere. A few kids have jumped in to help, chalking the sidewalk squares with a description of Walter. Other people are spreading the word to their friends, introducing themselves to strangers, all of us on the lookout. 

Three days, four, five, and no sign of the cat, and maybe we’re all imagining the worst, until one night, after work, I see groups of people gathering, wandering the yards, sharing the news that someone may have seen Walter running this way or that.   

The next morning, a happy sign pinned to a tree, a reminder to any of us about to lose faith. 

 

 

Hope Is a Thing with Peas

I planted peas yesterday even though I had no intention of planting peas. What happened was I saw the seedlings for sale at the farmer’s market, four darling sugar snap pea plants all ready to tuck into a garden bed, and I couldn’t resist. Maybe this time, I was thinking, 

immediately forgetting that only a few hours before I’d had a conversation with my daughter and son-in-law about their new garden, giving them advice about easy plants to grow when you are just starting out gardening (the two live in an apartment in DC, and recently, after several years of being on a waiting list, have been given a plot in the very large community garden in their neighborhood), and I said, You can’t go wrong with herbs and lettuce, 

but forget peas. Peas will break your heart.  

An aside about peas: I had never liked them. My experience with peas was the kind in the can, all mushy and floating in the greenish gray pea water, heated up on the stove, and plopped onto a plate. Or the frozen kind, a slab in a box, clumped together, hardened between ice crystal chunks, thawed in the microwave, dumped next to the mashed potatoes. 

But then I ate a pea from a friend’s garden, snapped off a pea pod, peeled it apart, plucked out a single pea, marveling at the heft of it, the sweetness, the crunch. How had the joy of fresh peas been kept from me? How could I recreate this joy for myself? I planted peas the next spring. 

This was seventeen gardens ago, and I had no idea what I was doing. Poked seeds in the ground and up the plants grew, nice solid things with multiple peapods dangling. I ate them right off the vine, digging the peas out or eating the entire pod (you can do that! Who knew? I hadn’t!) congratulating myself on the ease of the process, resolving to grow peas for the rest of my life—

I could never do it again. Each year, I attempted it (was I too early in the season—the mucky dirt, the cold, the too much rain or not enough rain? Or was I too late—the heat, the over watering or drought?) and failed. Maybe I’d manage a few scraggly plants, a handful of shriveled pea pods, the peas inside puckered stones. Last year I said, forget it, vowed that was the last time. 

But this winter was so long, the day-to-day worldly outrages piling up with seemingly no end to them, and how hard it's been to absorb the shocks, the grief, until one day, I find myself mid-March, the season for growing sugar snap peas, a clearing of the weather, momentarily, a hope—silly, probably, but isn’t hope always silly? and since when has that ever stopped me?—

I plant again.  

Time Change

At the library the window behind the train table in the Youth Department frames the gray sky. Someone stabbed a pinwheel into the ground out there and it spins and spins. I gulp down my second cup of coffee. I’ve been up since 4:30 am, and now I’m dragging. Can I have a clue? A preschooler patron asks me. 

He’s doing the Scavenger Hunt and it’s a hard puzzle this month. I point him in the right direction and go back to my coffee, the sky, the pinwheel. I think I figured out the solution to all of our problems, I say to my coworker at the information desk.  

Ooh, what is it, she says. 

It’s called Don’t look at the news. 

She laughs. 

No, I mean it, I say. I refuse to participate anymore. For the past few months, I’ve been vowing to do this, but the world keeps pulling me back in. Every day another round of chaos and absurdity and horror. Nothing makes sense and I NEED IT TO MAKE SENSE, 

but I’m at the point now in the story where I’ve learned that it’s never going to make sense. Or maybe this is me. Did I tell you I’ve been up since four-thirty?

Our preschooler patron is back for another clue, and I send him off toward the early reader corner where the crocodile is hiding. It’s the time change, I say to my co-worker, taking another swig of coffee. I don’t think I ever acclimated to it. When was that, November? And here’s me, still waking up, wide awake before five in the morning and half-conking out on the couch before nine at night. It’s embarrassing. 

Uh oh. Somebody's just peed on the carpet. I’m sorry, says the harried mom. My coworker directs her and the wet child to the restroom while I grab the safety cones, throw down paper towels, stop a nearby toddler from toddling through the puddle. The preschooler patron asks for a final clue. 

It’s the tricky mouse, hiding in plain sight, taped directly on the front of the information desk. There it is, I say brightly. You found it! Now, will you erase your marks on your sheet for the next person? 

Who’s the next person? The preschooler says.  

No one has ever asked me that, and I don’t know how to answer. It’s what we do here, I say, after thinking about it for a minute. So, whoever wants to do the scavenger hunt next has a nice clean sheet, ready to go. 

Okay, he says, erasing his marks, not bothered, apparently, by the idea that other people exist and it’s nice to think about them. I give him a sticker, and he thanks me. The last of my coffee drained, I watch him skip away, avoiding the safety cones and the pee puddle, over toward the train station, the window, 

the whirling pinwheel, the clouds clearing in the sky, a lovely splash of blue, a moment of surprise as I suddenly remember this weekend is the time change, the world catching up with me, finally, 

or am I catching up with it? 

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.