Get Back

It's weirdly fascinating watching the new Beatles documentary, all of the hours they spent fooling around, chatting and bickering, trying out new songs, drinking tea, mumbling potential lyrics, sometimes walking out on each other and then walking back in. The creative process, if you're not familiar with it, 

is many parts blather and grinding out the work, with an occasional burst of a perfectly pre-formed melody, and who knows where that magic comes from. Who was it who said, "Invention is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation and 2% butterscotch ripple"? 

Of course, when you're a writer, unlike, apparently, when you are a Beatle, you're entirely alone, and only the blank page or laptop screen in front of you. Willy Wonka, by the way, is the one who said the thing about perspiration and butterscotch ripple. He was so right about those percentages. The other day when I was working the desk at the library, 

a woman circled around the Christmas tree we've set up. She'd just come from our weekly English as a Second Language Conversation Class and seemed curious about the gift tags hanging on the tree, pulling one off and holding it up to me. What is this? she said. 

I explained that every year the library works with a social services agency in town to invite our patrons to purchase something from a child's wish list. A needy child? I said, wondering if I was making sense. For families who can't afford presents? 

Oh, she said. She looked at the tag, and said, What is this? 

Onesie for a 12 month old was written on the tag. 

I started to describe what a onesie is and then did a quick search on the computer and showed the woman the examples on the screen, which immediately made me think of my own children when they were babies, those middle of the night cries on the baby monitor, the bleary-eyed unsnappings and snappings and fumbling for the clean diaper, and thank God 

we could afford to buy baby clothes. But back to the woman, who was nodding seriously at the computer screen. I understand, she said. Thank you. I got teary-eyed watching the Beatles,

Paul McCartney strumming the guitar, muttering nonsense, the music of a familiar song slowly and then all at once taking shape, while the other Beatles yawn and look on and then just as suddenly begin to strum and clap, Get back to where you once belonged, as if they had been there with Paul all along, as if the song was there too and just waiting for all of them to find it. The next day, the woman marched up to the desk, 

holding the onesie still on the store hanger. This? she said to me, and I said, Yes, that's great, perfect, exactly right, thank you so much. She nodded again, that same serious expression on her face that seemed to say I understand. And only later did I wonder what it was that she understood. Who was it who said, "So shines a good deed in a weary world"? 

Oh right. That was Willy Wonka too. Which has nothing to do with the Beatles or bleary-eyed midnight diaper changes or even the creative process really, and look

my page is filled with words now and probably only a fraction of butterscotch ripple, but good enough, I think, for today. 

Fall Gifts

My son sent me a picture of the sky outside his apartment. Smoky white and a small orange sun. Another picture of his girlfriend sitting out on their balcony. She’s wearing a purple flowered mask, the sky behind her orange. I am thinking about the end of the world, 

or what feels like the end of the world. 

How we keep going, even during plague and fire. Only a few months ago we browsed in stores and sat together in darkened movie theaters and ate in crowded restaurants. Now we order what we need online and stream movies and pick up takeout. 

I’ve been sending books to friends. Stories I liked that I think they might too. Sort of a Pay-It-Forward Amazon book club. The other day someone sent me a book and it made me absurdly happy. The book is about the restorative power of nature. I believe in this. 

Six months ago we had an overgrown patch of ragged ornamental grass in our backyard. I spent most of the early part of lockdown yanking it out. Another week literally jumping up and down on a shovel digging up the matted root clumps. The dirt left behind was rocky and probably not right for a vegetable garden, but I planted one anyway. Lettuce. Spinach. Beets. A few weeks later, tomato plants and zucchini. My daughter, who’d fled London and quarantined in our house for two weeks, ventured outside and planted marigold seeds. 

Now the marigolds are thigh high, the garden still producing so many tomatoes and zucchini that we are giving them away. 

Ruth Bader Ginsberg died, and I didn’t cry. Distraught friends reached out and my daughter cried on and off all day. But I had used up my tears four years ago after Trump won the election and then surprised myself by crying again two years later during the Kavanaugh hearings, both times a stark reminder that there are some men who see women as lesser, who give no thought at all about hurting us. 

An old self has resurfaced, the eight-year-old who figured out fast that the people in charge either don’t know what they are doing or don’t care or are actively trying to harm me. If I want to survive, that is on me.  

I did. 

And then I went with my daughter to a candlelight vigil in front of the Ohio Supreme Court for Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Mostly women there, of course, moms with their daughters, a little masked three-year-old dancing around the fountain. A woman offered my daughter candles, and we lit them and walked over to where people were signing their names and writing about Justice Ginsberg and what her work and her life had meant to them. We are Ruth-less, one of the signs said. Today we mourn, tomorrow we fight for your legacy. 

My son told me the smoke is better out where he lives. The heat broke so he and his girlfriend can open the windows. This week we passed 200,000 Americans dead from Covid 19 and the Republicans are gleefully rushing to confirm a justice to fill Ginsberg’s seat, a person who will likely work to overturn everything she fought for. 

Do the people at the end of the world know they are living at the end of the world? Or do they just keep going 

one gift of a candle 

one tomato

one book at a time? 

Best Gifts

There was the typewriter, of course, the Christmas, I was thirteen.

This was a manual one, with ribbon you had to change and keys that stuck together if you typed too fast, but I loved it immediately, typing out stories and books and even my daily diary, two-fingered, until I took a typing class in high school and learned the proper method.

A stereo and albums I had my heart set on. Don't tell anyone but I was a huge Van Halen fan, once skipping school with a friend to stand out all night in line outside the Hartford, Connecticut Civic Center, a night so cold the radio DJs over the radio were making fun of us and joking about sending us hot chocolate so we wouldn't freeze to death. Side note: the concert was awesome, although I was mostly slack-jawed, watching the lead singer prance around in leather pants with the butt cheeks cut out. (google "David Lee Roth butt cheek pants" if you want a good laugh)

But I digress.

Mostly, I can't remember gifts, things I once longed for, the packages I tore into. What I always liked when I was a kid was the lead-up to Christmas, the anticipation, when time seemed to crawl and practically freeze, those first steps down the stairs and the peek into the room with the tree, the floor bare the night before, now magically piled with presents,

and then a seemingly endless day playing and eating and visiting relatives while Sing-Along-with-Mitch blasted from the record player.

This year my husband has been converting old home movies--the ones originally on videotape cassettes and then converted to dvds-- to computer files. A good 25 hours+ of movies, some we have never watched before, many of Christmases past,

our own children stepping downstairs and peeking into the room with the tree, the first surprised glimpse of the mound of presents. And then the obligatory million shots of unwrapping packages, the holding up of new clothes, the demonstration of longed for toys. A parade of Legoes and American girl dolls, motorized cars and Barbies, plastic food kitchens and sports equipment.

Here's something funny: my husband and I have been fast-forwarding through those bits and instead have found ourselves lingering over the smaller moments

our four-year-old son dancing through the kitchen while I baste the turkey, his baby sister toddling around eating cheerios. They were so little and darling and I want to believe that we saw it, we knew it at the time, but there I am in the videos, a blur at the edge of the screen, scooping up crumpled tossed wrapping paper because I was annoyed by the mess, my husband not shown at all (he was holding the video camera)

while our very best gifts were growing up fast right in front of us.

Three Wishes

It's usually fun to buy these gifts. 

We shop with the lists we are given by the charity. The child's name. The age and gender. Her hobbies. His favorite show. The Wish-- something like: a doll or Legos or an arts and crafts kit.

The trick is you have to keep it under forty dollars. 

Which makes it hard if the wish is a bike or an expensive computer game, but my husband and I take this directive as a challenge. For example, one year a child wanted a winter coat, and decent coats under 40 bucks aren't easy to find, but damn it, we found one. And last year, a little girl wanted a specific brand of doll and none of the Targets and Walmarts we visited had the doll for an African American child. We had to rush deliver it from the company website. 

Also, we don't want to buy only one item for these children we shop for. We always buy what they wish, of course, but we try to tuck in a few other odds and ends. Stickers. Mittens. A book. 

We like to imagine the kids at the holiday party, lining up when Santa comes, waiting for their names to be called, the packages and bags given out, the moment of anticipation before they tear past the tissue paper, hoping they will open what they wished for.  

This year one child will be disappointed. I already know this and I have no idea how to keep it from happening. 

We drew the names of three children and we wandered around Target the other day, scooping up wishes for two of the kids. A slime kit. A tablet. This year the challenge-- to keep it under 40 bucks -- was upsetting instead of motivational. The girl who wanted the slime kit also wished for clothes and shoes, but the people who run this particular charity didn't list what size the little girl is. How do you buy clothes and shoes for a kid when you don't know her size? 

We bought her a pair of slippers, in addition to the slime kit. The kid who wished for a tablet was pushing the 40 buck limit big time, but we found a doorbuster sale at Microcenter, leaving us with a small cushion to buy a cute winter hat for her too. 

We bought a cute hat for the third kid too. The information sheet we've been given has been stuffed in my purse for a few weeks. I am hoping for inspiration, but I know I am not going to get it wandering around Target or at some store's doorbuster sale. 

The child is an eleven year old African American girl. Her favorite movie is Beauty and the Beast. She likes to dance. Her favorite cartoon character is Hello Kitty. 

She has three wishes:

A safe Christmas

Feed the Homeless

A house

Tell me, please, someone, how we do we make her wish come true. 

The Gift of an Aloe Plant

The other day someone gave me an aloe plant.

How it happened was this: Back in June, I wrote a blog post about a creepy Aloe Juice salesman guy, and a woman named Shari, a writer who had attended one of my workshops, commented on the post that she knew something about aloe plants, and we started corresponding, and Cut To:

she offered to grow me an aloe plant.

It took several months, with Shari updating me occasionally, to report on the plant's progress. One plant died and she had to start all over again. But eventually, she had a plant and she messaged me that it was ready for the hand off.

We agreed to meet for coffee. Shari chose a place that was five minutes away from me but quite a bit of a trek for her, and I realized as I rode over that I didn't really know this woman and what a nice thing it was that she was driving down to give me an aloe plant.

In the parking lot of the coffee place, she lifted the plant out of her car carefully. It was bigger and more gangly than I had envisioned. I was afraid to handle it. Was it okay to put it in my car while we had coffee? How would I take care of this thing? I know nothing about aloe plants.

But Shari gave me instructions and assured me that it would be fine, and if it died, she would grow me another. Shari has been doing this thing on Facebook called 20 Good Deeds in 20 Days x 2, a way to stand against hate, and I have been following her good deeds. I asked her if she was going to count giving me an aloe plant as her good deed for the day.

She said, she hadn't even thought of it as a good deed.

On September 11, I listened to an interview on Fresh Air with 9/11 first responder, John Feal, a man who was working on the pile a few days after the towers fell when an 8000 pound steel beam dropped on his foot. Feal almost died and in the months that followed, he realized that he did not have adequate healthcare to pay for his medical bills, and later he discovered that most of the first responders were in the same boat. Many of them died from injuries. many more (2000 people) began to die from illnesses traced back to their 9/11 work, leaving behind astronomical medical bills.

Feal began to advocate on behalf of the first responders, meeting with nearly every congressperson and basically being blown off by many of them. But eventually he prevailed, and a law was passed to protect him and others in the same situation. In the years since he lost his foot, John Feal has been to nearly 200 funerals. He's held hands with men on their deathbeds and promised to take care of their families. He donated a kidney to a stranger.

When the interviewer asked him why he did the things he did, he said: "I will never understand how we can be in a position to help someone, and not do it."

At the coffee place my new friend Shari and I drank our coffee and talked about writing. As I drove my five minutes home, my gangly new aloe plant sitting beside me in the passenger seat, and weirdly looking more like a new pet than a plant, it hit me again what a gift it was.

The idea. The long process of nurturing and raising. The drive down to meet me. And all of that for someone who was basically a stranger.

Like many people over the past year, I have come to realize that our country has become so divided. Maybe those divisions were always there, but now they are laid bare. 

We demonize each other. We scream at each other on social media. We don't take the time to listen. Even friends and family members have cut each other off. I have done this too, believing that the divisions are too great to bridge. And maybe they are.

I don't want this to be true.

Maybe I am not the kind of person who will donate a kidney to a stranger. Or maybe I am. I don't know! But can I stop screaming on social media? Can I take the time to listen? Can I water my aloe plant.Take a cutting and grow another plant.

Give it to a stranger.