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.

  

The Car Ride

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

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

I know what you’re thinking: Buckle up. 

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

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

Or, I walk home. 

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

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

The Argument

It was a long, hard week with snowy days and the dreary weather, and my husband and I were struggling with the same head cold, me with a sore throat and him with a runny nose, and then it flip-flopped, and I had the runny nose and he had the sore throat, and one morning I slid 

and fell on the sidewalk on my way into work. We'd had an argument earlier and I cried when I fell and cried more in the car as I backed out of the driveway, but then my husband called me and we talked it through and it was painful 

but I knew I would survive the painful feelings, and anyway, it was better than the alternative, what I would've done in the past, which is pretend I didn't care and simmer about how I was right and that was the important thing, which side was right. Maybe the fall jarred some sense into me. There are no sides.

It's only us living our lives together in the dark and silly world, blowing our noses and making each other tea. Later, we forgot what had set us off in the first place, maybe being a human who's sick with a stupid head cold, but whatever it was, no argument between us ever means the end. We got better 

and bundled up and drove in the snow to the grocery store. On the way the traffic stopped in both directions and who knew what was happening ahead. My husband slowed, stopped, and we craned our necks, looking. Suddenly, a dog came trotting down the center of the street, weaving between the cars, and I gasped, bracing myself for a hit, but there was no hit. 

People were pulling over and stepping out of their cars, someone carrying a leash, someone waving a treat, all of them moving cautiously toward the dog, circling, corralling him away from the busy road and onto a side street. When the traffic started moving again, we drove past slowly, watched the dog bend toward the treat, the kind strangers leaning in, 

and I was thinking about random things, like why did I assume the dog would be hit and who were these people driving around carrying spare leashes and dog treats? And wait, why do I keep forgetting that no argument between us has ever meant the end?

The Type of Person

I am the type of person who wears necklaces. Which is interesting, because up to about a week ago, I was not that type of person. I do not wear any jewelry, except earrings, occasionally, and my wedding rings. But during covid, I stopped wearing those. Too germy, I thought. And no more make-up (the masks), and I stopped coloring my hair. And this is probably too much information, but I quit wearing a bra. I mean, who cares. I wasn't going anywhere. 

Every morning, I would wake up at whenever time, and maybe or maybe not change out of my pajama pants and into an old pair of sweats. I rotated between two T-shirts, toss offs from my daughter, that were over-sized and had been washed so many times they were soft and holey and I loved them. 

Just the other day I was cleaning out my closet, brutally purging everything I hadn't worn in a few years and came to those two t-shirts, and a wave of dread and terror and comfort and nostalgia washed over me. I left the T-shirts hanging where they were. But back to being the type of person who wears necklaces--

this was over New Years, and my husband and I were visiting with long-time friends, a tradition we've had for twenty-five years (except 2020 when we set up a Zoom, which was fine, but also, it sucked, and we vowed never to do that again). 

When we first met, the mom and I had little boys who went to the same preschool, and while we'd wait to pick them up, our toddler daughters would parallel play with each other. Flash forward to now, and my friend's daughter is getting married in the fall and had a wedding dress appointment at a fancy shop, and while we were waiting for the appointment, we were browsing the racks, and I was wearing a necklace. 

The necklace was one I'd made several months ago (Was that several months ago?! I do not understand how time works anymore.) My daughter made one too, and then, over Christmas, I noticed she was wearing hers every day, whereas I had only worn mine once. 

I like this necklace, I told my friend, while we were browsing at the fancy shop, but I'm not the type of person who wears necklaces. 

Why can't you be that type of person, said my friend. She was holding an absurd-looking orange purse that was covered in sequins and beads, and she said, Wouldn't it be funny if I bought this purse and used it as my lunch bag for work? I could put my tangerines in it. She looked at the price, and said, HA HA, No!

But I said, Who cares, you should buy it. Every day when you go to work with your tangerines, it will give you joy, and then I told her a story about the time a mutual friend and I were shopping at a make-up counter at a department store a million years ago, and the salesperson showed us a battery-operated mascara wand that you could turn on and it would make a buzzing sound, which struck me as so ridiculous, I couldn't stop laughing. When the salesperson said it cost 85 dollars, I almost peed my pants. My friend said, You have to buy it. Look how happy you are. 

But of course, I said, HA HA No! A few months later the friend sent me the mascara out of the blue. I laughed every time I used it, and now that I think about it, it's probably one of the top five gifts anyone has ever given me. 

Good question, I said to my friend who was still holding the silly orange sequined purse. Why can't I be the type of person who wears a necklace? 

You can, said my friend. Just wear the necklace and wah lah, you're a necklace-wearer. Her daughter was over by the wedding dress section, and my daughter and the daughter of the friend who'd bought me the mascara a trillion years ago had joined her, and I was having a hard time making sense of it, the little girls grown up and here together, and where had the time and mascara gone, and what if everything could be so simple, where you say something and do something and wah lah

it comes true.

My friend put the purse down, and when she wasn't looking, I scooped it up and bought it for her.