What was she wearing?

"It's hard to take a person seriously when they're wearing a pink kitten hat," he scoffed.

It doesn't have to be a "he" stringing these words into a sentence, and sending it out as a mantra into the world wide web. I’ve heard plenty of women spit out pink invective. 

But in this case, it was a member of the male gender putting his weight behind what he thought was a mighty statement.

I didn’t bother to argue.

Maybe to most people, "serious" looks a certain way. It keeps its head level and its countenance formal. Serious wears a suit and never smiles. Not even with its eyes.

Who am I to argue style over substance?

That's not the battle I'd ever pick.

I'm not a protestor, mind you. Not that I think there's anything wrong with joining crowds and waiving signs, I've just always thought of myself as an observer. A journalist. A person just outside of the moment, pressing my face up against the glass, taking pictures for posterity.

Of course, in truth, I have an opinion.

As I weave among the crowd reading signs and committing them to the memory card of my camera, I can’t help but feel a certain amount of solidarity.

I feel safe here. Welcomed, even, as I blend into the crowd.

A face smiles as my shutter flaps. I smile back as I ask for names and what brought them to this place today.

I listened to the speakers who talked about fear and hatred and love.

They talked about women and men and children. About community and compassion. About how equality lifts everyone up.

They spoke of service, and hard work, and change.

They told their stories. Where they had come from and where they hoped to go. They spoke about togetherness.

The scoffing man wasn’t there. It’s not his scene. I could hazard a guess that he’s just an observer, too. But he might be a letter-writer, or a lobbyist, or is working on an algorithm that will ensure human equality in some near future.

He might have the answer to a question no one has asked yet; I don’t know. I'd hate to dismiss whatever contribution he hopes to make.

Likewise, I don’t know what will happen to this movement given time and distance. I have to think change this big is more complicate being able to come up with a slogan that sticks. It's a process that moves so slowly we are unaware that it's happening. 

But “glacial pace” isn’t what it used to be is it?

The thaw seems to be coming faster and fiercer than ever before.

I was standing in a crowd, witnessing people of all types and descriptions, of all genders and ages, and I was moved.

They were protesting sexism, racism, neglect of the poor, the militarization of our communities and greed. They registered voters and inspired folks to run for office; running not as women, but as the competent people they are who will benefit society.

Time is not up. The clock is just being wound up.

And as I type this I can't stop thinking I had to pick this battle. Because it shouldn't be difficult to take women seriously. And it doesn't matter what she is wearing.

Love and misunderstanding

“What’s that face about?”

Not surprisingly, she wouldn’t answer.

Still, I persisted.

“Come on. Tell me. Maybe I can help.”

Also not surprisingly, the result of my insistence on prying into the nature of her downturned mouth and razor-sharp glare was to reinforce her desire to clam up.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did something happen at school?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

“On the bus?”

“Which part of “I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT” isn’t clear to you?”

“Is there something I can do?”

“Yes, you can NOT TALK ABOUT IT.”

Of course, to a parent, this is an impossible request. How could I NOT talk about this elephant she’d walked into the room on a leash woven from her woe-begotten demeanor? How could this beast she named “IT,” but refused to speak of again, not hijack the entirety of my attention? I had no idea what this IT was, but the mystery and not knowing was killing me.

Am I not her mother? Doesn’t she know my sole purpose on this Earth is to help guide her through the trials and tribulations of teenaged angst? Boiling frozen ravioli on demand is just a bonus.

I was once 14. Many, many, many, many, many ... many years ago. 

“Yeah, but you were my age before the Internet, and Snapchat, and Pretty Little Liars.”

“Is it your friends? Middle school can be the worst age of all. You read ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid.’ You know.”

“That’s not at all helpful.”

I realize. 

It’s odd how we sometimes have perfect understanding without really saying a word.

Not that we haven’t had moments of misunderstanding.

Like the time I told her that she could always use me to get out of uncomfortable situations.

“You know ... if your friends pressure you to do something you don’t want to do, just blame me. Tell them I won’t let you date boys … or drive in cars with people I don't know.”

That seemed simple enough. 

... Until she told one of her friends “Sorry, I can't go to your sleepover because my mom doesn't like one of the girls attending the party.”

“Why on earth would you say that?”

“You told me I could use you to get out of peer pressure situations.”

“Yeah, but this is not what I meant. You can blame me for general strictness, not for specific meanness.”

“You could have said 'I'm grounded' or 'my mom doesn't let me sleep over other people's houses' or even 'my mom is making us go to some lecture on the History of Walking as a Sport that day. Sorry'.”

Just as I realize my circular explanations of infuriating human behaviors tend to get tangled in the hairball of my thoughts on how to best address these rocky relationships. 

Including ours.

“You know what I mean right?"

Translation: I’m lost in my own desire to help.

She shakes her head.

“Yeah, I get it.”

Translation: “Let’s not talk about this anymore.”

Universal remote

How does this dumb thing work?

I pointed a black plastic box at the television.

Nothing happened.

Well, not nothing, exactly. 

Eventually, a red screen came up, and then some pictures cascaded past. The effect was frustrating. Nothing I clicked would bring them to a stop. 

“Give it to me.”

My daughter. My savior. My technological sherpa.  

She pointed and pressed buttons, and the movie started to play.

The only thing that could make her appearance at that moment any more perfect would be if she stopped jamming her socks in between the couch cushions, where the remote controls, spare change, and granola bar wrappers usually tend to migrate. 

“If we had Alexa or Echo you could probably do this yourself.”

She said “probably,” because she’s never used a smart home device and doesn’t know its full capabilities. Could it feed the cat? 

Do you know how I managed before having children? 

It’s not a rhetorical question. My daughter would like to know. She refuses to believe that I was ever capable of changing channels on my own. 

Maybe it is wishful remembering.

When I try to think back, the only vivid memory that comes is the notebook I carried around like a bible during the early days of personal computing. I could never keep track of all the ways basic commands like “colon, copy, backslash, backslash, alt, shift, command” that combine with individual letters from the alphabet - say “S” - to make computers do things ... like, turn on. 

I like to think times were simpler back in the day, especially once I discovered Apple computers and their intuitive engineering. I must have blocked all those nightmarish memories of trying to start up a mainframe and create a word processing file from scratch.

“Never say ‘back in the day,’” my daughter pleads, shuddering from head to toe as if I had said, “Let’s be 'twinsies' and wear matching clothes.”

That aside, I refuse to admit that I never knew how to work the television. 

The red button turned the set on and off. The Volume and Channel buttons went up or down according to the corresponding arrows. Number buttons existed, too, but with fewer than two dozen channels, no one ever used them. 

And when you lost the remote in the couch you could get up and turn a knob. 

Though no one ever did.

Back then televisions didn’t do fancy things like take note of your “favorite” channels, or record shows when you’re at work. 

Not that I don’t appreciate all the bells and whistles.  I just wish I could go back to the days when my television didn’t “lisp.”

“Oh, I fixed that for you,” said my daughter. She adjusted one of the knobs I had no idea was at odds with another knob on two different machines that work our entertainment hub. 

“When the volume of the TV competes with the volume of the home theater system the actors all sound like they’re lisping or slurring their speech,” she explained.

 I don’t believe I recall seeing a section on remote control detox in the owner’s manual. 

The idea that two different volumes could make a single soundtrack play almost harmonically is a phenomenon I wish could just go in one ear and out the other. 

 The reverberations scrape at my eardrums like an over inserted cotton swab.

“How is it that I mess this up every single time? I used to be good at this stuff.”

My husband, who appeared out of thin air like magic when I uttered those fateful words, laughed:

“Honey, you were never any good at this stuff. You once tried to use a universal remote to turn off an alarm clock.”

Oh man, I almost forgot about universal remotes. “Those dumb things never worked.”

Lovely, brutal

It's brutal out there.

Not just the cold, which is seasonably barbarous as well as inevitable, but also the climate. The air in which we surround ourselves is getting thinner and thinner.

I find it hard to catch my breath.

But you don't need me to tell you that things don't seem to be going well. The news torrent has made sure you understand.

As we welcomed a new year, four souls were savagely murdered in our city, two of them children. A young man in a unicorn hat laughed at a suicide victim and posted it on YouTube while hundreds of thousands of minions pressed a “like” button. And the old man at our helm rattled a nuclear saber as if it were a school-yard taunt.

Each day brings a new opportunity to let our jaws hang wide open.

There's no reason for any of it. Maybe there's just no reason.

To live in this age feels like jousting with Don Quixote. Only in our time, it seems as if the windmills at which we tilt have become truly dangerous.

Every misstep a potential disaster.

As we move from one tragedy to another, we think our skins toughen up or we just become numb. Or maybe it is the same as it ever was: precarious at best.

We live our lives as watershed moments.

Every change seems like a place in a river where water collects for a time before it drains off. Often in a new direction. Sometimes, but not always, with calamitous results.

We live, we die. In between we experience everything … anew. We can't learn history because we haven't experienced it.

We are not unchanged by the current or past events, perhaps, but we must move along. We may keep our heads down, holding our breath. Or we may find exhilaration in the tide and splash along happily.

My mother used to say there is nothing new under this sun. Even its shadows have existed throughout time immemorial.

I miss my mother.

She left this world last year around this time and went back to the earth. She is with her mother now.

But I know I'd miss her more if a part of her didn't live on in me … and in my daughter and son. Reminders of her are in the strangest of places. A song, playing on the radio. A kettle, boiling on the stove. A pencil scratching paper.

Even a look on my boy's face can bring her back: A curled lip that opens into a laugh.

Her laugh. Her smile. Her dark sense of humor filling the air with spice. Its particles floating around with the dust motes, as they glint in the sun and seem to stop time for an instant. Like a hologram.

Memories visit this way. Flashes only I can see that appear suddenly and unexpectedly.

It's not an altogether unpleasant feeling. It's warm and familiar, like finding glimpses of home as you pass through the unfamiliar.

The flashes leave as quietly as they came. An internal hug against the ordinary or mundane.

It's like sound after it snows. Everything blanketed in cold and silence.

It's not brutal out there if you can just listen to the snow and be still. It's beautiful.