The part where the world is beautiful

He called us a few weeks ago to tell us his secret. He had a ring. He’d bought it a year ago and he’d been hiding it all this time, waiting for just the right moment. He was living in Germany. His girlfriend was living in London. Maybe he thought the summer would be the right moment. There were plans when she finished up her school work to travel together. Maybe Paris? But then the pandemic happened and the plans were put on hold. 

I told them later it was like a scary movie. She was locking down in London, alone, afraid. Her father and I couldn’t get to her and how could she make it home? But what if he took the train from Germany and locked down with her? He had to go soon. There were rumors the borders would close any moment. The day he was traveling, she gave us updates. He’s out of the country. He’s crossing into England. He made it into London. He’s here!

She sent us a funny video. First day of Lockdown, the two of them dancing, singing out, Day One!   

He worked from her apartment and she finished her schooling. He braved the grocery stores. They took daily walks in the park. When she did make it home several months later, he followed soon after, quarantining in our basement. She made the place up nice for him. One night he played his guitar and sang to her from the bottom of the basement stairs while she sat at the top of the stairs, teary-eyed. 

We let him out of the basement and he was in our bubble. We walked the dogs and binge-watched TV shows and one day our daughter bought us all matching llama pajamas and none of us protested. Did I tell you he grew up in France? Did I tell you he is a gourmet cook? Oh my God, the meals we ate! 

We risked our lives moving them into their new apartment and we were back to our quiet house and fending for ourselves with the meals and the llama pajamas. 

And then there was the call about the ring. 

Sometimes, okay, a lot of times, I write about how broken the world is. Maybe I slip in some happy moments about giving children stickers. Also, there are always flowers. But the other day I watched them walking up a sunlit street, hand in hand, smiling so widely at each other, and when she saw her father and me, she skipped toward us before breaking into a run. 

The ring on her finger is beautiful. The world, my dear friends, is too. 

 

Brunching while pandemic-ing

A few weeks ago friends invited my husband and me out to brunch. This would be outdoor patio dining, of course, they assured us. 

We're all aware that Covid cases are rising so alarmingly in our area that the mayor had to issue another indoor mask mandate. The hospitals are at capacity again, and everyone I know worries they might become one of the vaccinated breakthrough cases, even though this is supposed to be fairly rare. 

Still, we can almost pretend the world is normal when we're brunching on an outdoor patio. An engagement party at one table. At another, they're celebrating someone's birthday. While I sip my mimosa and eat my eggs benedict, I tell the story of the Starbucks at the end of my street and how I want to go on record that there's going to be a Showdown there any moment. 

The place is a freaking powder keg. 

Every day you can hear the car horns honking. An occasional shout from a rolled down window. It's the poorly designed drive-thru lane, how the cars back up onto my street and into the intersection. This was a major topic of conversation on our neighborhood facebook page even before the pandemic. How could they put a Starbucks there??!! Why do people want to buy overpriced coffee anyway??!! Why don't we support our local coffee shops??!! 

But mid-pandemic the irritation has turned into rage. The perfect storm of bad traffic and the fraying of society's last nerve. Add the caffeine addicts who NEED THEIR COFFEE NOW, and I'm surprised there hasn't already been a serious altercation. 

It occurs to me that this Starbucks has been my way of measuring the real time collapse and adaptation of the world over the past year and a half. During the initial lockdown, the drive-thru stayed open, a beacon of normalcy in the first scary days. But then, in winter, at the height of the crisis, the store was closed. Too many workers sick to keep things running. 

Which brings us to now, where it's very much open and popular, and yet... possibly about to capture the moment we all tip over the edge into some new kind of dystopian nightmare? 

I finished drinking my mimosa and ordered a cup of coffee. I have to tell you that this brunch was the best brunch I have ever experienced in my life. Not the food (although it was tasty) and not the company (although it was lovely) but the exquisite ordinary-ness of it, the kind of thing I lived most of my adult life totally taking for granted.  

Home, and I walked the dog past the Starbucks. There was the usual long line, the cars desperately trying to squeeze their way in, the irritated honks. But also something so comforting and beautiful about the people sitting on the sunny patio. A man tapping away on his laptop. A table of laughing teenagers. A mom pushing by with a baby carriage. The chirpy voice of the Starbucks barista in the drive-thru window saying, 

Have a nice day! 

The book I'm writing is going off the rails

There's a lesson in here about Things Not Going in the Direction You Planned, and how That's Okay, because you're Trusting the Process, and in the end, you'll get a Messy Crappy First Draft, but even if it's messy and crappy, You'll Still Have Something To Work With. 

But I'm a big liar when I say these things. 

What I really want when I write a book is to know where it's going right from the start. Write my words each day and watch the story unfold exactly how I planned it. Make it to the end easily, and all that's left to do is a quick spellcheck before sending it off. 

It never happens this way so I don't know why I'm surprised.

I needed this one to work that way though. The words I write each day feel like the only thing I can control, so when they go off in some weirdo direction I didn't see coming, now what am I supposed to do? 

What I did was I went outside and cut the ivy that was climbing up the house and then I went into the backyard and yanked out weeds. It was a gorgeous day in Columbus Ohio and it was September 11, and I couldn't help thinking about twenty years ago and how gorgeous that day had been at the start of it, driving with my four-year-old daughter to her preschool at 8:45 in the morning, and how later, when I picked her up at noon, all of the moms were standing in an awkward circle, no one chatting with each other how we usually did. 

We swayed awkwardly and looked everywhere but into each other's faces. No phones then, or I'm sure we all would've been pressed to them. Not that it would've been good to have phones, but at least there would have been an excuse for the excruciating silence, the stark and terrifying together-but-aloneness feeling we all were feeling. 

What I was thinking while I weeded the garden was, what if I had reached for the hand of the mom next to me and then she had reached for the hand of the person next to her and we stood in our circle, holding hands, instead of swaying there so painfully alone?

Why did it take me twenty years to think of this idea? I went for a walk. 

And that's when it hit me that maybe my book is not as messed up as I thought. I mean, the world in it is relatively stable and still a place I'd like to visit. The people, the kind of people I like knowing. And when someone wonders if she should reach out and hold another person's hand, I truly believe, this time, she will. 

Dispatches from the Pre Post-Pandemic

The other day I was sitting at the library's information desk with a co-worker and we were talking about: is This the End of the World. 

We had to keep breaking up our conversation to help patrons look for their reserve items and someone who needed to use the fax machine and didn't know how to use the fax machine. Also, the phone kept ringing and every other caller wanted to know if we had free Covid tests. We do, we would say when we answered the phone. But they're at our main library location. And hurry, because we keep running out. 

Maybe every generation thinks it's the end of the world, I was saying to my co-worker. He's twenty years younger than I am and just had his first child and he seemed very resigned to the state of the world and I was trying to make him feel better, but then I would have to stop so I could look up if we had a certain book and he would have to stop so he could help someone who lost their library card. 

But look at how things were in like, 1965, for example, I told him. We had political assassinations and the Vietnam War and battles over Civil Rights and--

a man came in who needed help signing onto a computer and somehow he got to talking about how he was a classically trained French chef but his goal in life was to recreate the perfect Coney dog sauce from his childhood and after twelve years of perfecting his recipe, he realized he had done it and now he wanted to open a Coney dog restaurant in town and could I please help him send an email. 

The phone rang. My co-worker had been in eighth grade on 9/11 and his teacher told the class that the school didn't want them to keep the TVs on in the classroom but he was going to because This Was History happening in real time and all of the students needed to watch it. 

And I understand, my co-worker said, because the teacher was right about history, but at the same time, we were in 8th grade and I still remember those people jumping off the buildings. 

Maybe that's when things went off the rails, I said. 9/11. I was thinking of that night and how I stood for a while in my kids' bedrooms, one after the other, my little boy and my little girl, both sleeping peacefully, their rooms dark, and how my heart still hadn't stopped racing since 9:15 am that morning and what world was this that I had brought them into. What world would they grow up in? 

Someone wanted a book recommendation for her grandchild and someone had just signed up for a new library card and someone wanted to pay a fine. But we don't have fines anymore, so please don't worry about it. 

And what about Kent State, I said to my co-worker. That was awful. I mean, can you imagine kids walking to class and getting shot at by National Guardsmen? So, don't you think every generation thinks they're living in the end of the world, but they're not, and then we just go on?

I can see your point, he said. But what about Climate Change?

Oh, well, yeah, Climate Change, I said. 

And then, there's the Pandemic, he said. He moved to take a sip of his water and lowered his mask and I suddenly remembered that he had a moustache. 

It hit me that I was wearing a mask too and neither one of us had seen each other's faces in a year and a half and even though I knew that I had not made him feel better and I was not feeling any better myself, I started laughing. Maybe I laughed too hard, to be honest.   

Then the phone rang. A harried mom came up to the desk and I checked her books out and gave each of her kids a sticker. I wish you could see how cute they were, those little kids, and how happy they were about their stickers. 

We were at a wedding and then there was a funeral

but I didn't go to the funeral. I was still replaying the wedding. Something interesting about my extended family is how we can't all be together for very long without falling apart. Maybe every family is like this. Throw everyone together in a room, add the heightened emotions that go along with weddings (and funerals) and there's bound to be some drama. 

I don't want to write about this drama except for how I learned to cope with it. How I had coped with it in the past was the replaying thing, 

going over every detail of whatever happened in my mind, rehashing it with other people, usually the people who were involved, which all just made it worse, and generally making the people closest to me miserable with the ad nauseum rehashing. I knew I was going to have to stop, so I went back into therapy. 

Something nice about therapy is that you can rehash to your heart's content and the person listening to you has to listen to you because you're paying them, and there's a helpful bonus in the fact that they aren't involved in the drama and can see the idiocy of it all and let you rage and cry forever. Except it's not forever, because therapy sessions only last for an hour. 

I learned some useful tips and tricks when I was going to therapy, like how to notice patterns in relationships and break them (the patterns, not the relationships, although sometimes you have to break those occasionally too) and how to set boundaries and how to let things go that you can't control. 

But the summer of the wedding (and the funeral I didn't go to) the tips and tricks weren't working. Or maybe they were sort of working with my extended family but they weren't working with other things. For example, the world. 

This was sixteen years ago and Hurricane Katrina had hit New Orleans and I had been watching the news for days and feeling sick about it, the water rising and the people trapped in the convention center and the dead grandmothers left behind on the street corners with notes pinned to their clothes, the stories of white supremacists with guns on bridges threatening the desperate people trying to flee and the doctors in dark sweltering hospitals helping sick people die, the terrified people cutting their way through their rooftops and the president praising the head of FEMA for doing such a great job, other countries around the world looking on in horror at one of our major cities collapsing and promising to send foreign aid to us, 

and I was rehashing all of this with my therapist, raging about it, crying. Maybe it was the residual feelings about the wedding and the funeral. A person had died and I had loved him and I didn't go to his funeral, but it was something more than that, something I couldn't verbalize about families and dysfunction, 

and the word isn't drama, it's tragedy, 

how people who love each other hurt each other over and over again, my family, our country, the world. I didn't know what the therapist was going to say. He usually had all the answers, or at least some advice, a tool I could use, a mantra. Did you see the people wading through the water, I said. This is our country. How is this happening in our country? 

I don't know, he said. He seemed a little flustered by the question. I was flustered that he didn't have the answer. The session was over and I walked out in a daze. I was on the verge of understanding something but I couldn't quite reach it. I barely understand it now. 

It's me, it's you, it's us, each one of us on our own, and at the same time, all of us inextricably connected. What will it take to get us into the room together and keep us there as the world falls apart? 

At night in the fog

Pre-Covid, when I used to teach writing classes, I liked to include inspiring quotes on my powerpoint slides. The burning question aspiring writers always have is How do I get my book published? But the second question (which, really really really should be the first, I know) is How do I write a book?

There is an actual answer to this question: 

You write it.

But I knew that sounded snippy and dismissive and I was trying to be inspiring. Hence, the quotes: 

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. ― E.L. Doctorow 

Just take it bird by bird. ― Anne Lamott 

The fog one is a nice metaphor because you can picture it when you're at that vague What the hell is going to happen next? stage of your novel, (which, honestly, may be the entire time you're writing it). There's the murkiness in front of the car, and how do you even know the road is still there?

But then, just when you feel like you might hurtle off a cliff, the road appears. Maybe you see a flash of a traffic sign or a tree rising out of the murkiness. Every so often, something bright. The lights from a passing car. The moon poking out behind the clouds. 

The bird quote is the one that usually gets a laugh from the audience. It's from Anne Lamott's extremely helpful writing craft book Bird by Bird, which she starts by telling the story of her younger brother who'd put off a school project until the last minute. The project was something overwhelming like, WRITE A DESCRIPTION OF EVERY BIRD IN THE WORLD. The night before the project was due, the little brother was crying at the kitchen table, his head bowed over his stack of blank pages.

The father came by and patted him on the shoulders and said, "Just take it bird by bird, buddy." 

This was the part in the presentation when I would say: The secret to writing a book is BIC. Put your Butt In the Chair. And I would tell them about the importance of daily word count goals or setting a timer.  And then I'd go into the actual mechanics. How to build a scene and how to add conflict and tension and tips on how to revise. 

But then they'd want to go back to what they really needed to know, which is how to find an agent and what's the secret to getting a movie deal. 

Maybe it's human nature to want to skip over the hard parts, the actual work, to speed through the dark and get home safely and find your award-winning, best-selling novel on the library and bookstore shelves. I know I am mixing metaphors mightily, but maybe we have to stop focusing so hard on the end. 

We are here, 

after all, right now, this moment, fires and viruses burning around us, hurricanes bearing down, the world some days, most days, seemingly spinning out of control. How do we write--how do we live--in the face of all of that? 

Robert Frost famously said, The only way out is through. 

But I wish I could ask him, What if there is no way out? What if there is only Through? And through and through and through. Then, where does that leave us? How do we sit with it, the day's words, an individual bird on a page or singing in the trees, hands gripping our steering wheels as we wait for the road to reveal itself. 

Read Watch Grow

This was an awful week. For me. For the country. For the planet. And I don't want to talk about it or think about it or write about it.

Instead, I read a really good book and watched a really good TV show and sat on my front porch a lot and admired the flowers in my hellstrip garden bobbing in the breeze, people strolling past, and occasionally, a dog lifting its leg to pee on the marigolds. I only winced a little. 

What I read: Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

This book caught my interest because it has a weird title and colorful cover and I like John Green books. Green explains in the first chapter that he used to review books for Booklist and then he goes off on a tangent about star ratings and how not-helpful they are. Also, people will rate everything these days. Someone rated a bench in Amsterdam, for example, because it was a prop in the movie The Fault in our Stars. They gave the bench 3 stars and said in the review, "It is a bench." 

Green explains that we're living in the Anthropocene Era, a time that is dominated by humans, and humans lately, aren't doing such a great job. (Green was writing this book at the beginning of the pandemic. He's an anxious person and one of his greatest fears used to be pandemics. At the beginning of the lockdown, which he thought would last a few weeks, he bought 60 cans of Diet Dr Pepper, his favorite drink, and told his brother Hank he was prepared. His brother laughed and said, "For someone who has spent four decades worrying about disease pandemics, you sure don't understand how disease pandemics work.")

The book is a collection of essays on random topics that Green reviews and rates. Canadian geese, the Indianapolis 500, CNN, Piggly Wiggly, Googling Strangers and Auld Lang Syne are just a few. Each essay is short, funny and sometimes not-so-funny, with Green's observations about people and the strange and awful and beautiful things we do. 

There's footnotes and fun facts. And one essay made me burst into tears and feel great love for humanity. I give John Green's Anthropocene Reviewed 5 stars. 

What I watched: Ted Lasso 

This did not seem like a TV show I would like. My daughter told me about it and she said, I know you're thinking you won't like it, Mom, but you will. She was right on both counts. The show is about an American football coach, Ted Lasso, played by Jason Sudeikis, who gets hired to coach a British football (soccer) team. Ted knows nothing about British football. He's a genuinely nice guy who is in way over his head. Classic fish out of water tale. 

Whenever I read a book or watch a TV show or movie, my brain immediately goes into storytelling mode and I can see the structure behind it. How the characters and plot are set up. What the conflicts are going to be. How the whole thing will probably turn out. Ted Lasso seemed like an easy one. 

But I was wrong on basically everything, and wrong in ways that I love. We know, for example, that there's got to be a reason why Ted was hired to coach a sport he knows nothing about. The answer is clear in episode one. The team owner Rebecca Welton, played by Hannah Waddingham, is recently divorced and bitter. The team was her ex-husband's baby, but now it's hers. What better way to get revenge on the ex than to hire a ding-dong American to destroy what the ex loves? 

My brain immediately imagined the entire series from this point on. Ted would be eager to learn and help and Rebecca would thwart his every move, sabotaging all of his efforts and hurting the team. But this is NOT what happens. Only a few episodes in, I loved Rebecca, who's a much more complicated and multi-layered person than "bitter ex-wife." 

It's the same with all of the characters in this show and all in unexpected ways. Nice guy Ted has some demons, and not the ones you think. There's an arrogant soccer player, the groupie-ish model girlfriend, the old cranky soccer player who should retire but isn't ready to quit playing yet. All of these people turn out to be just as interesting as Ted and Rebecca. 

Now, I've just started watching season two, and have no idea what's going to happen to any of these people but I love it and I love them. I give Ted Lasso 5 stars. 

What I grew: 

Yellow squash and green beans and so many tomatoes that I can't make enough spaghetti sauce and salsas and caprese salads to keep up with them. Basil and ginger (a plant I bought at the farmer's market but now am unclear about when I should harvest it) and ditto, the fennel, which I have never grown before, but it looks so lovely and feathery that I'm not sure I want to pick it at all. 

Black-eyed Susans in the back flower beds and some mystery flower that I planted from seeds my father-in-law gave me, but now it's about to bloom and I had no idea what it was, exactly, that I had planted. A friend took a look and said Datura. Now that I think about it, my father-in-law called them moonflowers, which is one of the common names of Datura. Also, if you want to go down a fun rabbit hole into strange plants, take a look at the Datura entry on Wikipedia. 

(One example: "All species of Datura are poisonous and potentially psychoactive, especially their seeds and flowers, which can cause respiratory depression, arrhythmias, fever, delirium, hallucinations, anticholinergic syndrome, psychosis, and even death if taken internally. Due to their effects and symptoms, they have occasionally been used not only as poisons, but also as hallucinogens by various groups throughout history.") 

Datura. It's gorgeous, but don't smoke it. Unless you want to die. 

Also, cleome and Mexican sunflowers in the hellstrip, the sunflowers now taller than I am and possibly breaking some city ordinance about how high things can grow in front of your house, but I don't care. The people walking by seem to enjoy them and God knows the dogs do.