The Bystander

I was standing in line at the farmers' market waiting to buy a chicken, when suddenly, on the sidewalk two dogs started fighting. Or rather, it wasn’t a fight. It was a large brown dog biting the back of a smaller black dog. The brown dog had clamped down on the smaller dog and was tugging. The smaller dog yelped and cried. 

It was only a few seconds, but it felt like forever, and then it was over, and the owner of the bigger dog shuffled away with him, and people gathered around her and comforted her and her dog, who looked completely fine. Meanwhile, the smaller dog was still yelping and crying. 

I was next in line for the chicken, and my head spun. I felt like I had missed something important. It didn’t help that it was 90 million degrees outside and the sun blasted down on me and sweat dribbled into my eyes. I had a weird flashback. I was seventeen and waiting for my ride outside the Ponderosa Steakhouse where I worked as a cashier, my stinky uniform, my grease-streaked arms. 

A screech of tires and a scream, and everything slowed down as a motorcycle skidded in front of me, and a woman flew off and landed in the grass like a doll flung and dropped, the man on the motorcycle crumpled on the pavement, shouting for her and wailing. But there were only soft groans coming from the woman. I moved in slow motion toward her and knelt down, everything fuzzy and murky like I was underwater. 

All I could think to do was touch her hand, say, I’m here. 

But who was I? A silly girl in my polyester uniform. People came running and someone had called an ambulance and I was still on my knees when they arrived. Later, I learned that the accident was the motorcycle guy’s fault. He was going too fast and hit another car head on. 

It was the smaller dog’s fault is where I'm going with this. Apparently, he’d lunged at the bigger dog first, so tough luck for him, I guess. Even so, after I bought the chicken, I walked over to the owners, an elderly couple who set up a booth every week at the farmers’ market to sell houseplants. There was blood on the sidewalk and pieces of fur and the dog was whimpering and the couple was alone in the heat and no one was comforting them. 

I want to say I helped the elderly couple and their dog, brought them water, hustled them out of the heat, or at the very least, bought one of their houseplants. But I did none of those things. I asked if their dog was all right (yes?) and I sweated home with my chicken. Forty years later and what have I learned. 

I am here, standing by, bearing witness, telling you a story. For whatever that is worth.

A Good Walk

The dog is having trouble walking. She’s thirteen and I know what’s coming for her and I don’t want to think about it. The other day she stumbled trotting up the stairs. Later, her back leg slipped when she was trying to lick herself and she toppled over. My husband and I brought her to the vet, and the diagnosis is basically, Old Age. 

Let her rest, the vet said, but when we got home, the dog didn’t want to rest. She wanted to go for a walk. I sat with her on the couch. I was reading a stupid book that I couldn’t put down. The premise of the book was silly and the characters were ridiculous and the writing was bad, but somehow, it was compulsively readable. 

The dog fell asleep, loopy from the drugs the vet prescribed that we had to trick her into eating by burying them inside cheese cubes. I was jittery. A combination of the dumb book and the disgustingly hot weather and whatever new horror's in the news and the sick feeling that I am losing my dog. 

I talk about this with my therapist, the sense of dread I have and how familiar it is. For several years she has been working with me to break old patterns, and I thought I was making progress, but now it’s back to square one. I’m trapped. 

What’s the opposite of trapped? she says.

I try to play along. I’m free? 

How about, You have options. 

I have options, I repeat. It sounds absurd. Sometimes, in my head, I am still a child and there are no options. Except in reality, I am not a child, and I actually do have some options. 

I finish reading the dumb book, laughing at the nuttiness of it, but also, impressed, that it kept me reading, that it took me away for a few hours from real life. There might be a lesson here. If things get too crazy, take a rest. 

The dog wakes up and she still wants to go for a walk, so I take her. We move slowly in the heat, poking around the flowers in the front yards, sniffing the trees. When she loses her step, my heart breaks, but then, she rights herself, and we keep going, a different walk from our usual, but a good one.  

Surprised by Cookie Butter

The week had all the makings of a bad one, but then I tried a spoonful of cookie butter. 

I had never heard of this product before, but I was game to try it, and oh my lord it was good. Imagine the creaminess of butter all blended up with cookie dough. What are you supposed to do with it, a friend asked when I told her about it. Smear it on toast? 

I don't know, I said. I ate it straight out of the jar. The next day, my husband and I went to the pride parade downtown. I admit I was a little afraid to go this year. The protests erupting in cities all over the country. The general crappiness of a certain kind of person who hates the kind of people who march in a pride parade. What if that someone drove a car into the crowd? 

But the news said there were 700,000 people in town for Pride. I was defiant and happy to be one of them. All of the rainbow flags and colorful balloons. The music and exuberant dancing. It made me tear up. Why would anyone be afraid of people because they're different? I wanted to hug each and every one of them. The drag queens and the waving polar bears. The children snapping their rainbow fans and the churchy moms with their t-shirts reminding us that Love Is Love and All Are Welcome. 

Meanwhile, my daughter was in DC, staying far away from the squeaky-wheeled tank parade that was going down on the Mall. Her dog was sick with some kind of stomach bug, and she had to keep feeding him special food and something called Probiotic Flora. 

Probiotic Flora? I have never heard of this. 

My daughter laughed.  

To prove that I was in the know about something, I asked her if she had ever tried cookie butter.

Of course, she said. 

I felt myself deflate. Am I the only one still learning new things? I read an article that says there are three ways of coping in a dying world. Hope, resilience, and reconciliation. I didn't understand what the article was getting at. Hope, that we find something buried in the ashes? Resilience, that we can keep ourselves going while we look for it? 

But what is the reconciliation? My son tells me the answer to everything is connecting with people in real life. This can be as small as the interaction you have at the checkout counter when you buy your first jar of cookie butter. 

At the pride parade, I had to go to the bathroom. I found a row of rainbow-colored Porta Potties behind a restaurant, but I wasn’t sure if they were letting the parade-goers use them. I struck up a conversation with the woman who was cleaning one, and she said, I've got it all ready for you. 

It was the cleanest restroom I have ever experienced. And I say that as a person with a pea-sized bladder and a long, well-documented history with public restrooms. I relayed this to the woman, and she told me she was the owner of the Porta Potties. Would I mind leaving a review? 

Not at all! 

Home from the parade, and I was a mixture of sad at the state of the world, and yet, weirdly happy. I ate another spoonful of cookie butter. How have I gone a whole lifetime without knowing of its existence?

 

Old Things

Lately, I have been enjoying giving things away.

The kids’ old violas. The absurd amount of lettuce growing in the garden, which I’ve taken to bagging up and leaving on coworkers' desks or dropping on neighbors’ doorsteps. An old watch.

Here is the story of the watch. It goes back to teenager me, the poor kid at the wealthy high school who wears a uniform and has no clue what’s in style. Cut to: the poor kid at the wealthy college, studying the rich girls like I’m an anthropologist. Their blue jean mini-skirts and perfect hair. A watch on the wrist, a string of pearls, an LL Bean backpack casually thrown over one shoulder. 

Forget the expensive backpack and pearls—they’re totally out of my reach—but a wristwatch, maybe that’s something I can manage? Summer after Sophomore year I temp at a law office and splurge a chunk of my paycheck on one. I am so excited about this watch, I can’t properly explain it. 

And get this: at the end of the summer, the attorney I work for gives me a going away present. An LL Bean backpack. How did he know it was exactly what I’d coveted? But then, back at school, the air is punctured out of me. My sociology professor is leading a discussion about social class. What are the markers of it and how do we know who’s upper and who’s… not? 

I hold my breath. It’s my secret fear. That I don’t belong at this school. That people can tell just by looking at me. Someone throws out watches as an example, and the teacher agrees, mentioning a particular watch brand as a sure sign of wealth, and another, (the one I’m wearing) as the opposite. I break out in a sweat and hide my wrist under my desk. Take off the watch. Head back to my dorm room and toss it in the trash.  

A couple of years later, I buy the other watch. It’s stupidly expensive and I can’t afford it, but I do have a credit card. (Take that snooty professor.) (Although, Ha ha, joke’s on me. I’ll be paying that watch off for months.) I wear it proudly, never examining my feelings about class, about money, about wanting to be in style, whatever that means, my underlying worry that it’s all for nothing because the rich people, the popular people will always have some new standard that I can’t reach, never mind have a clue about. 

Flash forward to a few weeks ago, the death of my smartwatch, and I am in need of the old-fashioned kind. Turns out I have two. The status symbol watch, which is cute but a little banged up, and a nice, newish one (if fifteen years ago is newish), an anniversary gift from my husband. My daughter’s in town, and I offer one to her.  

She chooses the old watch, and I admit I am surprised. I thought she’d want the sleeker, modern one. But this is middle-aged me, still clueless about what’s in style. Vintage, apparently, according to my daughter. I tell her the story behind the watch, and for a moment the long forgotten humiliation burbles up, along with a stab of embarrassment that I used to care so much about what other people thought of me.   

The watch is lovely, though, on my daughter’s wrist. And so much better than gathering dust in a dresser drawer. A week later my son and daughter-in-law breeze through. Someone needs a backpack, and my husband rifles through a closet and digs out the old LL Bean. I didn’t even know we still owned it. My daughter-in-law slips it over both shoulders, and she looks great. 

I tell her the story too and realize I have no idea what the moral is. Our things, like us, have complicated pasts. We obsess over them, hate them, treasure them, bury them. The random few, we share a memory and joyfully let them go.   

Note Taking

I take notes when someone is talking. It’s a compulsion, a nervous tic, a thing to keep my worried fingers moving, scribbling on the backs of receipts or on the junk mail I’ve stuffed in my purse. I rarely do anything with this writing. It ends up back in my purse, and then, every few weeks I empty out my purse and chuck the crumpled notes in the recycling bin. 

I used to carry around a little notebook because I’d read somewhere that all writers should carry around a little notebook. In it I would write snippets of potential story scenes and oddball thoughts that popped into my head and conversations I shamelessly eavesdropped on. 

For example, in March 2008, I was sitting at the Panera Bread in Columbus, Ohio, and I overheard a woman at a nearby table say to another: “Dad said some magic words to me. And the magic words were: What are you going to do with your luggage?” 

[What does this mean? I wondered in March 2008, and I wonder, again, now.]

The other day someone was talking at a meeting, and I was taking notes furiously—furiously in the sense that I was trying to keep up with what the person was saying, but also, because I was furious about what she was saying, which basically boiled down to Things Are Really Bad Right Now. 

After the meeting I scrunched up the paper I’d been taking notes on and drove home in tears. If I don’t write things down, I will forget them. If I write things down, but don’t read what I’ve written, I can also forget. It’s a nifty trick. Too bad I can’t always manage to remember it. 

I have so many questions about what I hear, what I write. The woman at the Panera Bread. I mean, what the hell was she going to do with her luggage? And at the meeting the other day. Instead of telling us how crappy things are, why can’t someone help us figure out what to do about it? 

Maybe I am asking for too much. Maybe there are no magic words. Still, I find myself writing it all down. Friday at the library, a toddler shows me her coloring page. It’s covered in crayon scribbles and I love it. When she offers it to me, I take it. 

One writer to another. No words, but I know exactly what she means. 

 

Peonies

Until a few years ago I didn’t know the names of most flowers. 

Roses, okay, sure. Daisies, tulips, but that’s about it. I would see flowers and like them, but didn’t feel any particular curiosity about what they were called. It worked the other way too. If I came upon a type of flower in a book or poem, Wordsworth’s daffodils, for example, or D. H. Lawrence’s Bavarian Gentians, I could only hold a vague, flowerish picture in my head.  

This all changed six years ago when we moved into our new-old house. The yard was overrun with plants we couldn’t identify. Also, the house was overrun with stuff we couldn’t identify. Wooden sculptures nailed to the walls. Glitter mixed with the orange ceiling paint. The giant Gatsby-like eyeball decals pasted to the dining room wall. But this is another story. That summer we focused on the house and left the yard for later. 

Later, turned out to be the first scary, bewildering months of the pandemic. Project one was to pull out the jungle of bamboo. Bamboo, I could recognize. Next, came the mass of wild grass. One day I crawled through it and had the shock of my life: a crazy woman on hands and knees coming straight at me. 

Ha ha no, that was a mirror and the crazy woman was me. Why was there a large mirror propped up in the center of a thicket of wild grass? Who knows. But then, why had the doorknobs on all the doors been replaced with water faucets and why was there a prison door on the patio and why were we in the middle of a global pandemic, the president advising us to drink bleach? But back to the flowers. 

After the bamboo came out and the wild grass, I was starting to get somewhere with my flower identification. This was summer 2020, and I was aiming the plant app on my phone at everything remaining. Those orange things were day lilies. The yellow stuff was Black-eyed Susan. The purple was coneflower. A delicate blue with spokes shooting out of it was called Love in the Mist.   

When the library opened its curbside delivery service, I ordered a bunch of plant books and painstakingly mapped out the yard on graph paper. The yarrow. The blazing star. The crocosmia with its feathery petals that looked like flames. And the peonies.

Let me tell you about the peonies. It’s a spring flower so I missed it completely in 2020, but the next year I noticed the big blooms behind the garage. This is a part of the yard that I didn’t know was our property so I had never seen the flowers back there. By the time I found them, they were flopped over, smushed on the neighbor’s driveway. I dug up part of the plant and replanted it in a place where we could see it, and now every spring, it’s my favorite flower to watch bloom.

First, a tight pink bud, and then an unfurling, a poof, and it’s a full-blown flower, too heavy to stay upright. There’s the inevitable flop over and a shedding of all of the petals, this entire process only taking a week? two weeks at most, and then it’s back to being an ordinary bush until next spring. Which is such a shame, the quickness of it, the loss. 

This year I decided to do what I could to slow things down. Can you slow things down? Maybe not, but I’ve been clipping several of the stems at the tight pink bud stage and putting them in jars around the house. I wish you could smell how sweet it is as the buds open, see the loveliness of the blooms. I put a vase in the guest room for our daughter, who is visiting for the weekend. 

Oh! she said, when she saw it. What is this? A peony, I told her. And like magic, we keep seeing them. A farmer selling bouquets at the farmers market and on our walks with the dog. Bushes on the edges of front lawns, the flowers brushing the sidewalk. 

We've been talking about other times she’s visited, when we first bought this wacky old house (that she begged us not to buy because it needed so much work) and later, during the pandemic, when she was in our bubble, the days we jumped on shovels together, tugging out bamboo roots. It feels like yesterday, it feels like today. The time with her, 

it goes too fast. But right this moment, she is here and I am taking her in. This morning before she wakes up, I tuck a fresh peony into the vase for one more day of frothiness and delight.  

Unwatched

On Friday my smartwatch broke. The face must’ve snapped off at some point when I was unrolling the baby yoga mats for our weekly tummy time program at the library, and it took me a minute to register that it had broken. To say that I am attached to this watch is an understatement. I've been wearing it pretty much non-stop for five years. 

It’s the first thing I look at in the morning, to check the time and analyze my sleep. Was my heart rate up or down? Did I fall into the recommended minutes of deep sleep? Did I wake too much to toss and turn? Later, I’d check my steps, noting with satisfaction when I crossed 5000, when I crossed ten, and braggy alert: when I crossed 15. 

For the rest of my work shift, I wandered around feeling the ghost weight of the watch on my wrist. I was already calculating how fast I could buy another and have it sent to me, because really, how else would I know when I completed the requisite standing-for-one-minute-per-hour? And what else was going to give me a digital badge for doing twenty minutes of outdoor exercise?

Home, though, and I had a wild thought: What if I DON’T buy another watch? 

This question came up courtesy of the three books I’ve read recently about the emptiness and dangers of over-consumerism and how we might all be happier with less. (For the record the books are: The Year of Less by Cait Flanders, The Art of Frugal Hedonism by Annie Raser-Rowland, and The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer.) 

On fire with my new awareness, I told my husband we should stop buying so much online and try to purge ten items from our house each week. I made a list of things to purge and promptly did not purge them. 

For example, a bike we never ride that has flat tires. Do we fix it? Stick it out on the curb in its flat-tired state? Haul it to the junkyard? Or, my ancient wedding dress which I had never stored properly, and frankly, who would want it now, with the Lady Diana-inspired poofy sleeves and fiddly beaded bodice? 

I did have one moment of purge-y success. A few days before the watch broke, I noticed a sign at my library that they were collecting gently-used musical instruments for the city schools, and I remembered that I have two violas gathering dust in a closet. When I toted them into the building and set them in the collection box, a wave of nostalgia splashed over me. 

This was the end of an era. The kids playing viola in their school orchestras. The music lessons. The concerts. But the funny thing is that it was the end of the era twelve years ago. For whatever reason I kept hanging on to the violas. I took a picture of the dusty cases and walked away, and immediately felt lighter. 

Wait, my husband says when I tell him about my plan to NOT buy another smartwatch. How will you know how you slept? How will you keep track of your steps? 

I don't know, I say. Do I have to keep track of these things? 

We were out to dinner with friends, and this morning I woke up groggy and tired, and I knew it, without the watch, that the one cocktail and delicious deep-fried barbecued chicken sandwich I ate the night before had really affected my sleep. But, oh well!   

Later, I went for a long walk with the dog, keenly aware of my bare wrist. I ambled along the usual route, but it felt like unmapped territory, a new path unfurling before me, my heartbeats unmeasured, my footsteps, for now, uncounted.