The Art of Confusion

 The captain’s soothing voice came over the public address system. He’d already broken through the calming lull of the free entertainment portion of our travels — which, for me, meant a newly released movie in which I’d been delightedly engrossed — several times to apologize for the minor turbulence the cabin had been experiencing.

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I’d expected another update on the gentle bumps he charmingly begged for our pardon. …

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“Chicken dentist …. “

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I accepted the strange announcement with barely a blink. Must have heard it wrong.

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This trip had already gotten off to a weird start when two burly men showed up at the airport restaurant we’d chosen to wait out our early arrival, looked at my husband, and said my name.

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“Not to worry, ma’am, we need to sort out some things back at security, it seems there’s been a bit of a switcheroo. You’ll come right back.”

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Turns out my husband had handed me the wrong laptop as we collected the things arriving in bins fresh from the X-ray machine after we’d cleared security.

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I followed them back to the “scene of the crime,” my husband would later joke, to collect the correct computer and extend my sincerest apologies to the rightful owner of the one in my possession.

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And as promised, I returned in short order to my “short order” that carried a very long price tag.

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Not that I would complain … at least not with the panache nor effrontery of the former great, David Brooks.

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But I digress.

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I find the minor headaches and hardships of travel to be the things I come to love most, no matter how much I angst ahead of time about their probabilities.

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Eventually, we would buy the wrong train ticket and have to pay a fine, suffering more from the stern admonition for not having checked the itinerary more thoroughly than from the extra charge tacked on.

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We would ask for something potentially obscene because we had learned absolutely nothing from our efforts with the train billets kiosks that we could apply to translation apps, besides the silly notion that “it would be different this time.”

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Of course, one of us — not saying who — would forget where he’d hidden his passport just as we reached a surprise border checkpoint midway through a tram ride.

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And another of us would pack her bags like she packs a dishwasher: half as many tops and twice as many bottoms. Nothing matches or even makes sense.

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Neither of us would be able to find our way back to the hotel on the first try.

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My husband, poor guy, isn’t used to feeling turned around. He seemed to suffer a disorienting amount of navigational error made under the apparent duress of being jet-laggy in an unfamiliar place.

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For once, I wasn’t worried. As he glared at his map, I took in the sight of people all around us, settling into the river’s terraced edge. As the sun lowered, they toasted each other and the end of another workday with cans of ale they retrieved from their convenience-store bags.  

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I convinced him to have a grocery-shopped picnic by the water.

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There would be time enough to find our hotel. We might even find the secrets of happiness as we nosh on soft cheese and take sips of hard cider. I hope it has something to do with Chicken Dentists.

International incidents

I woke up as if by premonition.

Four A.M.

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The room was dark and soundless except for the steady blinking clockface of an unset video player and the buzz-saw of my husband’s snoring.

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Because I was awake, I checked my phone for changes since the last time I let myself distractedly doom scroll …  sometime before turning in for the night and actually falling asleep. Of course, there was news and emails I could ignore, but there was also a text message from my daughter who was traveling for spring break.

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At first, I was a little nervous. Not about the hour (she was in a different time zone, afterall) but about the volume. Although I hadn’t read any of them yet, there seemed to be too many words to be a “happy” communique.

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But I took a breath and began digesting, immediately understanding from the first sentence that she was miserable, and enjoying it.

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As I continued thumbing through the missive, she ranted in glorious detail about the hardships of traveling – the confusion of not being able to find your hotel lobby because it looks like a fancy cafe; or missing one train, and then another, and finding out you’ve gotten on the wrong one anyway. She tucks expletives between every third word describing how she had gone from a flawless experience during her arrival to a disaster spiral upon departure.

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“Ok, perfect. Great. Wonderful! Like ha-ha, everyone else here knows what they are doing. But the terminal is not the terminal, and the stop is not the stop. There are no train numbers, and nothing makes sense to me. … and a lady with a fancy scarf is asking me why I’m looking at the app instead of the board … which doesn’t look like a board at all. So now I am forced to hate EVERYONE because it appears I might have to live here now.”

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Three dots appear before there is more:

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She recounts that she and her traveling companion woke up later than they had planned to and missed breakfast. Then, the first tourist destination they arrived at was unexpectedly closed. They selected a familiar coffee chain to get a quick infusion of caffeine, but forgot to place the order “To Go.”

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So they sat at a table with glassware and tried to “cannonball” iced teas.

They stopped in shops and bought presents. She includes photos of a set of pottery bowls she’s bringing back.

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I can picture her flailing her arms and spinning on her heel once or twice as she exhales her tension in the torrent of contrary words. She is having a blast.

I am smiling in the dark and wondering if I should nudge my husband to share his morsel of news from abroad.

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Instead, I press her last word bubble until the phone lets me respond with a “Ha ha” emoji.

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Her immediate response makes me laugh harder: “What the heck!? Why aren’t you in bed?”

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“Motherly instinct, perhaps: I had to make sure you were having a blast and not causing an international incident. I can go back to sleep now.” 

Legend among us

 If you are an amateur runner like me you’ve probably heard of John Franks Galloway, who died this week at the age of 80 following complications from a stroke.

Better known as “Jeff,”  he was an inspiration to generations of runners and a democratizing force within the field of competition.

He was himself an elite runner. An All-American collegiate athlete and a 1972 US Olympic Team member who competed in the 10,000 meters.

In high school, Galloway recorded bests of 4:28 in the mile and 9:48 in the two-mile, becoming Georgia State Champion in the latter event.

Running for Wesleyan University, he developed as a competitor, earning All-American honors in track and cross-country, clocking 4:12 in the mile. He was on the 1966 Wesleyan cross-country team along with Amby Burfoot and later Bill Rodgers.

In 1970, Galloway became the first winner of the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta, Georgia, a race he directed for many years.

But it was perhaps his mid-70s training alteration — emphasizing more rest and fewer miles per week, coupled with a long run every other week — that made him a legend. It was a strategy that proved successful in extending his competitive career through his 70s and would have likely kept him running marathons well into his 80s. And it was a method that could be replicated by amateurs and newcomers to long-distance running.

The Galloway method consists of short bursts of running paired with planned intervals of walking – sometimes as little as 30 seconds of running paired with 30 seconds of walking for the entire duration of the race. The method reduces fatigue, boosts endurance, and prevents injury.

Not only did Galloway’s method encourage casual runners, it also proved that competitive athletes could preserve their health without compromising their overall pace. Not to mention that it helped all athletes preserve their ability to run even at advanced ages.

The Galloway Method gave us back-of-the-packers an elegant and trusted way to make it to the finish line, and it also gave us the steel we sometimes needed to feel like “real athletes.”

Walking wasn’t a weakness; it was a measurable strength.

We Galloway aficionados know from the miles of history contained in our GPS watches that we often come in close to our no-walk averages and sometimes beat our personal bests on race day when we take walk breaks.

With Galloway’s coaching, we didn’t have to defend ourselves with any of the few loud-mouthed braggards we might overhear professing that “real runners don’t walk.” We didn’t even feel bad.

When I spoke to some of my friends about the news of Galloway’s life and influence, so many of them credited him with keeping them in the race for the long haul.

We had made a choice to run in a way that supported our future as runners.

And not only did that feel good, it felt like a secret weapon that one day they would benefit from, too.

My only sadness is that Mr. Galloway didn’t get to complete the 80th-year marathon he would have aced.

One for All

It’s not that I hate surprises, it’s just that I tend to feel better when they aren’t … you know … around.

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Surprises that so “lurk” are usually not in the form of a few dollars you may have left in a pocket before the wash, or the delight of an adult-presenting child who comes back from college on a random weekend just to bask in the refrigerator light of “home.”

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Surprises shouldn’t be skulking about in the form of some new horror interrupting our lives randomly as Breaking News.

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They shouldn’t be accompanied by a video of a shirtless Secretary of Health and Human Services swimming around a plunge pool, wearing jeans, while his workout buddy - a scraggly-haired rocker who performed a segregated half-time show in dishonor of the Super Bowl, gives the camera his middle finger.  

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Nor should there be actual footage of the person who leads the agency tasked with protecting the health and safety of the nation, bragging to a podcaster about having no fear of infectious disease because he “used to snort cocaine off toilet seats.”

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But here we are.

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Turning on our televisions, watching as paramilitary forces hide their faces as they cause chaos across the country: swarming people as they try to do their jobs, or fulfill the requirements of their requests for remaining in this land. We’ve seen anonymous forces use chemical weapons at point-blank range on people who were brutalized, pulled out of cars, tackled and shackled, sometimes in front of their children.

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We are enraged that these federal forces, often multiplied by our local police, don’t even take care to know when they are trampling on the rights of citizens.

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Human rights and due process should be for all who inhabit this land. We might forget that the Constitution does not differentiate between how people are treated under the law, whether they were born here or just visiting. Without it, no one will ever be safe, let alone free.

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At what point will we allow ourselves to imagine what could be possible if we reprioritize our needs? If we consider the alternative, what truly makes us safe does not include rounding up our neighbors and locking them away in a concentration camp.

The New York For All Act, legislation aimed at protecting immigrant communities by prohibiting state and local resources, including law enforcement and government agencies, from assisting in federal civil immigration enforcement, would be a start in the right direction toward allowing our neighbors to live as the Constitution demands, as well as ensuring our police are truly protecting and serving the community.

Bryan MacCormack, Co-Executive Director, Columbia County Sanctuary Movement, explains, “There is a long and growing list of documented collusion between New York State and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including a coordinated and grant-funded seat-belt checkpoint with the DMV, State Troopers, Albany County Sheriff’s, and Cohoes police department. Words of indignation will not prevent New York from aiding in the separation of families, deportation of our neighbors, and terrorization of our communities. Only New York for All can do that.”

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The act would not only ban the formal agreements – known as 239 (g) agreements – that enable local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration agents permanently, but it would also prohibit all state and local agencies from sharing information pertaining to civil immigration law; as well as ban information-sharing and custody transfers that funnel New Yorkers into ICE detention; and require a judicial warrant before ICE can access government information or property; and finally, create consistency so protections are uniform statewide.

“When parents are taken at traffic stops, or workers are detained because local agencies share information with ICE, it is not just a policy failure — it is a moral failure,” said Rashida Tyler, Acting Executive Director, New York State Council of Churches. “Our houses of worship see the fear in our communities. Children are afraid to go to school. Survivors hesitate to call for help. Trust in public institutions erodes. New York must not participate in a system that tears families apart. The New York for All Act offers permanent, statewide protections rooted in the simple truth that our government should serve and safeguard all New Yorkers, not act as an arm of mass deportation.”

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Justice is the underpinning of democratic freedom. We need to fix what’s broken to ensure those freedoms don’t slip away.

We shouldn’t endure any more unwanted surprises. We can’t allow it continue and remain surprised at where it leads us.

Making Plans

I often think author and activist Arundhati Roy introduced me to mortality in her novel, The God of Small Things. Since reading her haunting, poetic prose when the volume was published in 1997, I have had her words – Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age – ricocheting around in my psyche ever since.

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It follows me when I travel, even for short distances, and it causes me to be leery of making long-range plans. It reminds me to think (but not speak of) hidden prayers no better than anxious superstition.

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But we have reached that viable die-able age when I have to tell my husband to hold off on booking that pricey vacation he’s been fixating on until after I get the results of the annual mammogram.

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Now that we are well into our viable die-able years, we have to plan accordingly.

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The night before only offers a fitful sleep. Nerves, I think, wake me up, prodding me to reread the same two chapters of a book I’ve been belaboring before exhaustion reclaims my consciousness. In the morning, I will find a half-charged phone on the floor where it had flopped for the last time. The page I was reading is still alive as the screen lights up in my hand.

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I will choose my clothes as if I were fate’s bride. Something old from my daughter; something new from my son; something borrowed from my husband, something blue from someone who has gone before me.

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I pretend this works despite the time a phone rang telling me they needed more pictures … and more tests … and then scans closer together until it was all fine again a year later.

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“It WAS fine,” I think, “but it WON’T BE someday.”

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I wish I were able to tamp down such tensions. I know worry doesn’t prevent bad things from happening any more than it helps good things to flourish. It’s just anxiety sending thoughts in circles.

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I count how many traffic lights I have to stop at along the way to the appointment, but I don’t know what to make of the number.

I find a parking spot right away, which is unusual. I chose it instead of winding my way to the top of the parking structure.

When I take a seat with a receptionist, the place starts to warm in a way I am not used to. The woman informs me that we are birthday twins, although several years apart.

All of the business questions she asks after that seem more personal and pleasant. When I get up to head to a waiting room, she asks me if I have plans for OUR birthday. I tell her my husband has out-of-town business, but that he’s asked me to go with him.

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“If it’s a good place, you should go and enjoy!”

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I thank her and tell her I think I will.

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And then I think of her as I put on the robe, and sit in one waiting room to get squished, and another waiting room to get scanned. I think of her on the way home, and when I park and notice an email has arrived in my inbox, heralding test results that may not have been reviewed by any medical professionals.

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And I think of her when I get the All Clear.

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But I say a silent thanks when I finally start to make plans.

One, two, three

 I had been asleep. But now, it was 12:01 a.m., and I was wide awake.

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As my husband snored, I scrolled through a certain Paper of Record on my phone:

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I had already spent days soaking up the unending stories of mortal wounds the Trump administration is choosing to inflict with vengeance on the inhabitants of this nation.

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I needed to do something more active than just being thoroughly steeped in existential misery.  

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Which is how I started indexing past all the headlines describing the mounting horrors replicating around the country, and landed on a story about how a person can age gracefully with just a few simple tests of basic fitness.

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Which, I noted somewhat arrogantly as I scanned the listings, included the ability to balance on one leg! Which, I surmised, is something I could do because I had read about it several years ago in an article, probably a cut-and-paste clone of this one, and when I wobbled a bit during my initial experimentation. Failed? Failed?!

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So I did what only an obsessive-compulsive would do; I kept testing myself at least three times a day for the last four years until I could confidently stand on one leg and not look like a physical comedian accidentally saving myself from a pratfall while I did it.

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Truth be told, my skill was merely passable despite the effort and the unearned sense of achievement. I knew I hadn’t worked my way up to proficient.

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This time, the challenge was to sit on the floor and stand up.

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That’s it; sit and stand on a flat surface about two feet lower than a chair. My twenty-year-old-self snorted at the challenge as my forty-year-old self read the passage to the end and found the rubric maturity taught her to seek: “subtract one point if you have to use your hands or knees at any point as you sit or rise.”

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Mid-fifties me threw back the covers and made my way in the dark to a patch of floor that promised a rug for a soft landing. This version of me - still standing in the dark - suddenly realized it had been at least a decade ago when I’d even attempted to sit on the floor without the assistance of at least one limb if not all four.

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Still, I was awake after midnight and out of bed, my mind subtracting points from my fitness score that threatened to subtract years from my life.

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So when I managed to hover close enough over the floor to flop down with only a minor thud, I was pleasantly surprised.

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It wasn’t the smooth transition I swore I used to be able to manage, but I claimed the full ten points. If I could manage to reverse the maneuver, I’d keep the perfect 10.

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Up I go … nope.

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Try again: Criss-cross apple sauce. Nothing.

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I windshield wiper my knees, placing one patella against the floor and using the tips of three fingers, I cantilever myself to standing.

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How many points do I really have to subtract? One? Two?

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That would still put me at 8; a respectable score for a spry … sixty-year-old?!

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I mean, I hadn’t made a sound. Couldn’t I just add two points for managing to sit down and stand up without disturbing  my still-sleeping husband?

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Try again.

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Down, still a flop without hands.

Up? No no no no …

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Hiss into my phone: “Siri, show me how to stand from sitting without using my hands.”

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The woman in the video Siri sends to my rescue rolls back onto the floor, crosses her legs in front, and rocks forward with enough momentum to spring to a mid-way squat. Then pushes all the way up to a standing position.

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Now I try. Miraculously, I manage to replicate the series of moves without pulling any muscles that had up until now remained blissfully unaware of their decrepitude, and just like that, I am standing.

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I award myself 1,000,000 points before I decide go back to bed.

I need to rest up for the rematch.

Sick day

​It was well past bedtime when I noticed.

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It wasn’t exactly an itch, exactly, but there was something off about the way my throat seemed to stick a little when I swallowed. I called it right away; maybe I’m starting a cold.

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It was late, though, I thought, as I hauled myself up from the couch, found my slippers and put them on so I could shuffle, feet protected, through a list of settling-down-for-the-night chores.

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Snap off lights, lock doors, might as well leave the dishes until morning.

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Sleep came, but it wasn’t enduring. The soreness in my throat was joined by congestion and some low-level aches and pains. It felt better to sit upright, even though my eyelids drooped.

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Sleeping in a precarious position, I suspected, would greet me in the morning as I had been in a minor collision. I shouldn’t read too much into it if it happens.

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Which, of course, it does.

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In the morning, my throat on fire, my stomach gone sideways from an over-abundant self-administration of medicated lozenges, I dragged my achy body out of bed.

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I stare into the mirror over the bathroom sink and weigh my resolve to finally take a sick day.

Which, now that I’m older, isn’t nearly as fun as when I was a kid. My mother is no longer around to test the heat of my forehead and reassure me that some rest and a bowl of soup is exactly what a doctor would have ordered.

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I rake my mind trying to remember the old saw … “feed a cold, starve a fever.”

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Memory serves up answers: If you feel like eating, eat. Sadly, the same logic doesn’t apply to thirst. In case of vomiting, try small sips and ice chips.

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Curled up on the couch, wrapped in a warm blanket, enjoying total control of the television’s remote controller.

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Immersing my sneezy self into one episode of some gothic crime series after another until the sun goes down.

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I dream of a piece of dry toast.

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I can see the toaster from my next on the sofa. But I have to muster the will to drag myself the twelve feet distance between us. It’s warm here next to the roaring wood stove.

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I made myself a deal: when the firewood goes from flames to embers, I’ll feed us both.

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Later, as I stand over the stove, feeding dry logs to the fire with one hand while sanding the back of my throat with the toast in the other hand.

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My mother’s advice fills my head: “if the sore throat continues without the appearance of cold symptoms, it could be a strep infection.”

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She didn’t live through the pandemic.

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So, I test for COVID, just so I might stop guessing.

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Negative. Deep sigh.

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Fluids. Rest. Repeat.

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So I was back on the couch, with the TV and a murder mystery, when the returning college student leaves his hibernation to hunt the fridge.

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“You’re not a work …. Are you feeling ok?”

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When a demon’s voice answers instead of his mom’s, he puts two and together.

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“Can I get you something? I can go to the store… get you some soup and crackers and fruit juice  ...”

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“That would be really nice.”

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I’m feeling better already.

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