Alarmed

Friday, we had a bubble party at the library, but first the police came because I accidentally tripped the alarm. I was the first one in that morning and frozen for a moment in the dark, the motion detector lights flicking on one by one, the alarm panel counting down, waiting for me to dismantle it, but I didn’t know how to dismantle it. I don’t have the code. 

Which was funny/not funny because just the other day, a coworker asked me if I wanted the code and I said no. Why would I need the code? I am never the first person there. Cut To: me in the empty vestibule, the alarm blaring. It all turned out fine. My manager disabled the alarm remotely, and when the police guy showed up, he was nice about it, taking my name and writing up his report, 

and all the while I was thinking: he has a gun, which is a thing I always think about when I am interacting with a police officer, not that I have interacted with them that much. Once, a million years ago, one of my husband’s old high school friends, who was a cop, visited our apartment and set his gun down on our coffee table and I couldn’t stop looking at it. 

There’s a gun on our coffee table is what thought over and over in my head and how was I supposed to think about anything else? The next day it was still bugging me, how I had tripped the alarm and got written up in a police guy’s report. I could imagine what the report said. Ding dong old white lady didn’t know the code. My husband and I were driving to the petfood store and had stopped at a light only a few blocks from where we live. 

An unhoused man was asleep on the sidewalk, his back against the bank building. The traffic light stayed red forever, and it was so hot outside. One hundred it said on our dashboard when we first turned on the car, the kind of heat where you can see it shimmering up from the sidewalk. The guy was wearing heavy clothes, pants and a long-sleeved shirt, a jacket. He had a white beard. He was probably the same age as me and my husband. 

The light turned green, and we drove past, and I saw that someone had set a water bottle next to the sleeping man, and I almost started crying. I almost start crying a lot lately, but I can usually reel it back in. I wish there was a code for this, a way to disarm all of the alarms going off. But there isn’t. It’s just us, and oh my God, the least we can do is offer a water bottle. I’m sorry. 

I start off these posts with the best of intentions. Keep it joyful. Look on the bright side. And yet I keep going bleak. A good two hundred people came to the bubble party. They crowded into the youth department because it was way too hot outside to blow bubbles. 

The librarian poured bubble liquid onto trays and handed out wands. For a few hours the room was loud with shrieks and laughing, bubbles floating, popping.  

Floating

I am floating in a swimming pool on a pink flamingo. When I lean back, the sky is a bright blue splotch, the sun peeking out behind the trees. I haven’t been in a swimming pool in years. It feels good. The cool water, the sun on my face. I could do this all day.

I could do this all day, I say to my friends. It’s their pool. Their pink flamingo plastic floaty-thingy. Tonight they're hosting a party for their daughter who is getting married. My husband and I are in town to celebrate. Our son has flown in too. It’s a quick out and back trip. We’ll be here for less than 48 hours. I look up at the sky again, trying not to skip myself forward, the pool time over, the cleaning up and readying for the party, the party ending, the goodbyes, the trip back to the airport.  

How do I do that, float myself in place? The pink flamingo bobbing, friends and my husband and son throwing a ball overhead, someone handing me a coke to fit into a drink holder. There’s a drink holder in the pink flamingo floaty thingy’s arm! Who thought of this? I want to hug this person.  

Let’s swim across the pool, my husband says. See if we can hold our breath. 

Another thing I haven’t done in years. Dunk my head underwater. Swim. I do it. It’s funny how what you’ve learned comes back to you. I can hold my breath. I can swim. What else do I know that I have forgotten? I dip under again. The world is far away and it’s such a relief. 

But I have to stop doing this. Being bothered by the world. Except bother isn’t the right word. Rage is what I mean. Despair. Whatever the word is that means sink underwater and stay there until everything above the surface rights itself. Here though, now, the world is all right. I come up for air.  Pool time is over and now we are at the party. 

It’s English garden-themed because the engaged couple live in England. The invitation said to wear a hat. My friend lends me a silly green hat with a poofy bow. I sip a minty drink and my son tries to teach me how to do a swingy dance. I can’t get the hang out of it, my feet tripping me up and my hat bow boinking my face, but I am laughing. And look at the engaged couple, how radiant they are. I want to stop time. The party has ended. We say our goodbyes. 

Back at the airport and I am writing this. I am writing this and I am on a plane. I am home, writing this. I am floating on a pink flamingo in a swimming pool. I am dancing, feet tripping, laughing. Over and over I tip my head back, blinking at the bright blue sky. 

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.