Cold

It’s cold and I walk out into it. Four degrees, but it feels like negative twelve. What does negative twelve feel like? Cold is cold. Okay, I am wrong. This is colder than cold. I bundle myself up. Leggings under pants. Boots. A T-shirt, sweatshirt, my long coat. A scarf wrapped around and around my hood so that only my eyes touch the air. 

The air hurts my eyes.  

Head lowered, I march up the street. Videos play in my head. Executions. A blond woman smiling through her car window. A thin bearded man holding a phone. The woman could be my daughter. The man could be my son. A little boy weighted down by a backpack, the darling ears knitted on his cap. He could be any of the little boys who play around the train table at my library. I am imagining scooping him up and running away with him. But where would we go? 

Let me tell you a story. 

Once, when I was a little girl, I went with my stepfather to an old barn. It was a hot day and the barn smelled like rotting wood and dust and maybe there used to be cows here, but now it was overstuffed with junk and broken machinery and old-fashioned furniture. I made my way over to an old desk, the kind with a top that rolled back and many drawers and secret-looking compartments. I opened one of the drawers, and something squealed inside. 

It was a nest of mice. Babies squirming in dust and bits of paper. Their twitching paws and twirly tails. Their teeny eyes flickering open. Disturbed. Afraid. Afraid of me, probably, for opening their drawer. But they had nothing to be afraid of. I was a little girl, and instantly in love. How small these baby mice were. How adorable. I cooed at them. I smiled. I wanted to take them home with me. Dress them in my doll clothes. Arrange them on the little beds in my dollhouse. Look! 

Mice! I said to my stepfather. 

And he yanked out the drawer and snatched up the mice in one fist and threw them against the barn wall. I learned everything I needed to know about evil people when I was eight years old. 

The rest of it, the part about the good people, would take me longer to learn. Sometimes, you close your eyes and hear the mouse bodies hitting the wall, and it's easy to forget. But I am here to tell you, don’t forget. 

We are cold today, even in all of our many layers, but we will keep walking. 

Healing

A few days ago, I had surgery on my hand. My right ring finger had what is called a trigger finger. What happens is when you try to bend your finger, it clicks down and snaps up. It didn’t hurt, but it was annoying, and for a year I couldn’t properly hold a pencil. 

I did all the things you’re supposed to do to fix it—an injection, physical therapy, and wearing an adorable little brace, but none of that worked and it was time for surgery. The surgeon explained the entire procedure to me, and I instantly forgot everything he said. 

Something about clipping cartilage. Or maybe it was a tendon. The guy seemed to know what he was talking about, so I agreed to let him cut into me. Before they wheeled me into surgery, he came in to see how I was doing. He was wearing an oversized coat. I said, Are you cold? He said, I’m freezing. This made me laugh. It was the last thing I was thinking about before I went under.

When I woke up, I felt like I had a brick strapped to my arm. My fingers were swollen and orange. It’s the antiseptic soap they clean you with before surgery, my husband told me. It was his birthday. We were celebrating by having him serve me meals and tie my shoes and wash my hair. Also, he learned my skin care routine. 

Later, we took the dog for a walk, and he scooped up the poop. I don’t know if I can adequately express how much I am in love with this man. For three days now, he has brewed me tea and parked next to me on the couch while I marinate in pain pills. 

A side effect of the pain medicine is extreme gratitude and whatever the opposite is of nostalgia. What I keep thinking about is the time I broke my arm when I was twelve. Breaking my arm was only one of the many crappy things that happened to me that year. How I did it was I fell off a skateboard. 

I was not a skateboarder. I literally had never stepped on one before, but for some reason, we had a skateboard in our basement, and I raised my foot and thought: I want to try this. The next thing I knew I was falling backward. When I landed on my hand, I felt my wrist bone snap. 

The pain was crazy-making, but it was hard to convey this to the people in authority. You had to use precise language and not be overly emotional. If you were wrong, well, you would’ve wasted everyone’s time and money. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to find out my arm was broken. 

I liked wearing a cast because all of my friends signed it, and I didn’t have to do my school assignments. But that was a downside too because even when I was twelve, I was a writer, and the cast was slowing me down. There was so much language to learn. So many emotions to bury and unbury. 

I scrawled out my journal entries with my left hand and then gave up and used my typewriter, tapping on the keys with the fingers of my unbroken hand, one letter at a time. One word. 

It is how I am writing to you now. The keyboard is smoother than a typewriter and my fingers are more practiced. Still, it takes time. I drift off. I drift back. Sometimes lost in the past, then like a miracle, safe in the present. 

A warm house. A cup of hot tea. 

 

I Went to a Protest

The protest was in my neighborhood, a three-minute walk from where I live. It was raining. I knew the protest was going on, and I didn’t want to go, but then I did. I don’t know how many of these I’ve been to over the past ten years. 

The big one, the Women’s March in DC in 2017, the Black Lives Matter protests during the pandemic when we all stood six feet apart and sweated behind our masks. Marches against gun violence and Kings. Rallies in support of women’s rights and LGBTQ and immigrants. A rally for public libraries.  

I used to be gung-ho about protests. I would yell and wave my sign. After a while I stopped yelling. This time I didn’t bother bringing a sign. I am angry, but it’s a diffused kind of anger that is more on the sad side. I don’t have the belief anymore that protesting accomplishes anything by itself. 

I have a body, though, and I can plant myself in a crowd and be one more person if anyone decides to count us. In the crowd you are reminded that you are not alone. You stand side by side with these strangers, and suddenly, they’re not strangers anymore. They’re your neighbors. They’re angry and sad too. Of course, we all feel angry and sad. We witnessed a person’s murder. 

After the protest, I went home and did a frenzy of cleaning and purging, carting boxes of stuff off to Goodwill. Old games no one plays anymore, old suitcases (why do we have so many suitcases?) A tub of stuffed animals, which weirdly had me reminiscing, fondly, about the early weeks of the pandemic, when someone in the neighborhood asked if people would put teddy bears in their windows. 

She said her kids were restless and scared and they were taking a lot of walks, and wouldn’t it be nice if they could go on a kind of teddy bear hunt. I loved this idea and quickly gathered all of our old stuffed animals and set them up in the windows, and then it was like a parade of sorts, the whole neighborhood, it seemed, out and waving at bears.  

People were walking in family groups back then, everyone staying respectfully socially distant. I went for a lot of walks too, crisscrossing the street whenever another group came toward me. You wouldn’t believe how many houses had stuffed animals in their windows. It made me want to cry.

Once I came upon a child’s birthday party, a porch decorated with balloons and streamers, a little girl standing on the front steps, smiling at her friends as they drove by and dropped off presents. Another time I stood with the dog and listened to a man tutor a middle school aged boy. He was sitting in a chair on one side of a front lawn and the boy was sitting in a chair on the other side. They were working through a math problem together.   

I don’t know why I keep forgetting that there is more good in the world than bad. Okay, maybe it’s closer to a fifty-fifty ratio, and the good only beats out the bad by a sliver, but the sliver is what we have to hold onto. 

The people who delight in harming others would like nothing better than for us to join them. But something I learn at every protest is that we are not the ones who are afraid. 

We are the ones who stand with our neighbors. 

This Isn't Working for Me

I said this to my friends at 10 pm on New Years Eve. Our quarter-of-a-century-long tradition is to stay up until midnight, watch the ball drop, and make a toast with champagne. But I was half nodding off at 9:30. I didn’t particularly want a glass of champagne. My body was saying go to sleep. 

My head, when it tipped and drooped and bonked against my shoulder, was saying it too. In the past, I might’ve fought it. Who wants to be a party pooper? Why not buck up and press through? On the other hand, maybe it’s okay to go to sleep when you want to go to sleep. This isn’t working for me, I said, and I laughed. 

I laughed because it made it easier to say, and (I hoped) it made it easier for my friends to hear. I have been trying an experiment. Being honest with myself. You would think this would be a thing that wouldn’t be hard. I used to think that too. But then, I was lying. 

Here’s what happens when you lie: Your eyes twitch. You get stomach cramps and migraines. One time, you break out in a rash. Another time, you throw up on a plane. The biggest lie of all is saying you are completely fine. You can handle this. You don’t need help. 

Anyway, I got help, and now, most days, I feel okay. The next night we were soaking in a hot tub.  

I was amazingly well-rested. The house where we were staying to celebrate New Years was on a lake. The lake was right there, only yards away from the hot tub, and I was in love with the view. This was an Airbnb and the owners had mentioned in the guestbook that we would see the sunset over the lake. The sunset (and I quote the owners) “will make you cry.” 

Every night while we were there, we rushed out as the sun was setting, and every night we just missed it. I don’t know how this kept happening. It was the trees in the way. It was the sun slipping behind them too fast. If you blinked, it was over. But now, in the hot tub, we had renewed hope. We were talking about the past year. The lows, which were very low. Serious illnesses and surgeries and estrangements and all of that set against the crazy backdrop of the world. 

But then, there were the highs. A wedding and fun travels and good times spent with family and friends. This quarter of a century long friendship, too, ranks right up there. Forget the sunset. When I think about these people, it’s love and gratitude for them that makes me cry. The conversation moved onto other things. 

What we would have for dinner. A funny game we wanted to play. Our favorite books and TV shows. Our kids. Our jobs. Our pets. My fingers were pleasantly pruny. The sky went orange and then pink. I lost myself for a moment in the lake, the sun, the steam. This is working for me, is what I was thinking. 

I wish I had said it.