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.