Stretched on her grave

The lives of celebrities can be intoxicating. Their deaths, perhaps even more so. An unknowable person who has influenced us from afar.

That’s what I was thinking when I heard the news that Sinead O’Connor had died at the age of 56. 

I’m not going to lie: I was angry. Just the mention of her name brought me back to 1987 and the moment I heard her beautiful voice howling out “Troy,” her anti-love song with its inspiration grounded in Yeats’ poem, No Second Troy.

I searched through my old cassette collection and found what I was looking for:

“I'd kill a dragon for you

I'll die

But I will rise 

And I will return

The Phoenix from the flame

I have learned

I will rise

And you'll see me return

Being what I am

There is no other Troy

For me to burn”

The lyrics came out of my mouth as if time hadn’t marched on. I had turned up the volume so I could pretend I could hold a tune. 

She had been an inspiration. A songbird filled with longing and rage. Her haunting beauty matched her evocative voice. 

I had missed it.

This also brought me back to the turning point in her career after she ripped up a photograph of the pope and the world turned against her. The subsequent banishment was nothing short of vicious. Blue chip stars voiced rage and mused about their willingness to commit violence against her. And even when that rhetoric receded the mockery did not. In short order, she had become a punchline. 

Honestly, for a very long time, her disappearance from the center stage felt like a gut punch. 

Black Sabbath had written a song in the 70s that asked the listener to imagine if they’d like to see “the pope at the end of a rope” with little uproar and certainly no real jeopardy to their careers. But it was an opinionated woman we just couldn’t abide.

But in so many ways I was wrong.

She hadn’t been silenced. She couldn’t be silenced. 

I just hadn’t listened closely enough.

I had even discounted her own words on the subject of her career-ending performance as a musical guest on a sketch comedy show.

She had been adamant that the career that ended wasn’t hers, it was the career her agents wanted for her; the one that would have afforded them extravagant estates in tropical places. 

Her immediately recognizable voice had never disappeared.

Throughout her career, which spanned 40 years, she stood against the abuse of children; against racial injustice, she supported the rights of women and LGBTQ communities. She had been open about her struggles with mental health.

She kept working and struggling and collaborating and fighting the good fights.

And while her death is most certainly a tragedy, her life is what will always be a revelation.

Her fans have always been stretched on her grave, and we’ll lie here forever.

Bear necessities

Everyone has been talking about bears. And by everyone, I mean people I know, or barely know, or am related to. Also the people I know of who post “helpful” advice to neighborhood busybody sites such as NextDoor. 

It's a little bit dizzying, frankly, 

For some people, the bear is an unconventionally attractive actor (I'd say Young Frankenstein-esqe) who plays a talented but tortured chef trying to upgrade his family eatery from dingy to destinate, and owing much of the success to the dedication of his beleaguered staff. 

For others - especially in suburbia - the bear we’re all discussing is Ursus americanus americanus: the black bear so nice they named it twice. 

For my husband, the bear is a phantom, a nighttime visitor who sets off the dog in the wee morning hours and leaves behind a multi-textured “gift” center driveway. 

I can't tell you how many people I've met at the coffee shop who have handed over a cell phone to show a disbelieving audience some blurry first-hand evidence.

My husband is one.

Still, I marvel at the population that seems to have ballooned in recent years. 

The bears must have had a few good winters since the virtual pushpins of area sightings keep multiplying on interactive maps. Click on one, and a whole Wikipedia-style entry, complete with pictures and anecdotal notes, pops up. 

“Wow! That's a big one! Did he take down your bird feeder? Crazy!”

A part of me judges, of course. What do wildlife experts have to do? Come to your house personally and impound your feeders?

Honestly, though, I feel slight pangs of jealousy as I scroll through my photos. There's little there to excite the coffee klatch. A dog snoozing on a sunny patch of floor. A meal that looked pretty. A series of selfies I have caught and released. 

There are no bears of any kind, not even of the Teddy variety. Which momentarily makes me sad. 

The closest I've come to a coveted sighting was a bear behind waddling into the woods over a country road. I almost missed it because my attention was focused on the car ahead that had come to a screeching halt. 

I considered taking a picture of the Adirondack-themed dish towel that seemingly appeared out of nowhere and is slung askew from the handle of the oven door. The only black bear I could document is appliquéd to its front. 

But I know I should be careful what I wish for. 

I've heard the stories from camping enthusiasts in bear country and how these hungry animals eventually thwart our best attempts to keep them from feasting on our provisions. 

And how conventional wisdom has gone from "hang the food in a bag from a tree," to "keep it in a bear box," to "leave it in a locked car," to " leave the vittles at home and just hike on through."

It won't be a good thing for any of us to live with bears. It's one thing to substitute your bird feeder for a bird bath and quite another to take out all the fruit trees and wall your house off with impenetrable cement. 

The bears will find their necessities.

Out of nowhere

The day was finally ending.

It had been a tough one. I was ready to put it behind me.  

The sun was still high in the sky, which was a brilliant blue. The kind of blue that is so rich and beautiful that it doesn’t seem ominous.  

The dog started pacing beside me – all shedding fur and shivery nerves. She weaved back and forth on a carpeted runway, refusing to settle or be comforted. 

Something was coming. 

And as sure as I am confused by the colorful animation of the weather radar, my dog seems naturally centered in the eye of the storm.

Dogs know. She had already been preparing for the worst long before I was startled by the sudden disharmony of sounds: wind beating against the windows and something resembling metal being dragged along pavement, then silence for a moment followed by a deafening crack. I fully expected the trees outside to be clawing their way in through the roof. 

Now my heart felt like it was jumping rope. 

Outside, the rain started coming down in sheets. The sudden deluge turned every surface into a container threatening to overflow. Gusts were turning the sun shades into billowing sails. The wall of windows that helped sell me on the house now seemed terrifying.

Yet, the sky was still smiling at me as the weather conjured its worst.

Meanwhile,I tried my best to regain my resting heart rate and remain as calm as a frequent flier during heavy turbulence. Lead by example, right? 

Right?

Wrong.

It never works. My startle reflex had set this panic in motion. I couldn't make my inner turmoil seem stoic.

So I did the next best thing: distraction. 

I turned on the television to the least terrifying thing I could think of: game shows

of the home improvement variety. 

And for the next four to seventy-seven hours I watched two extremely enthusiastic women organize the homes of their friends, famous people and famous people who are also friends.

So while the winds howled and the dog snoozed (thanks to the miracle of veterinary medicine) I watched a zillion episodes of a team of people color-coordinating possessions and making 10,000 tons of stuff fit neatly into a five-pound pantry. 

I rolled through the seasons like the thunder rolled through the neighborhood. With lightning speed.

Losing myself in watching strangers turn their troubled overflow rooms into tidy, ultra organized architectural masterpieces.

Honestly, it feels good to be in the closet. There’s something deeply satisfying about bringing order to chaos. I feel calm listening to careful enunciation of the show host’s S’s and T’s. I can feel my blood pressure dropping with each click of a space-equalized clothes hanger. 

Even if I have no personal interest in lining up my shoes or organizing my jeans and sweatshirts into an ombré of creams, charcoals and chambre, I feel at the edge of ease. 

And that’s close enough for now.

Especially as the storm rages on.

Summer job

His hair was a masterpiece. Its thick black peaks spiked unevenly in all directions. It was a little too perfect to be the result of bedhead, but his face still had the swelling of sleep.

“We have any breakfast sammiches?” he asked nonchalantly as if I hadn’t asked him several times over the course of the week if there was anything he’d like special from the grocery store, wherein his answer took the form of a series of shrugs.

He needed to have a good breakfast.

We told him he had to work this summer. 

We just couldn’t abide another seven sweaty weeks spent holed up in his room playing video games when he wasn’t sleeping.

The only evidence of him is a pile of dishes materializing overnight in the kitchen sink.

It didn't take much convincing. Even he knew the fresh air would do him good. And the money wouldn’t hurt.

He had already earned his driver’s permit and a mandate to practice navigating the local roadways for at least 50 hours under our careful and fully braced tutelage before he could apply for the coveted junior license.

So there was that. If he wanted our help to get to the magic number, he’d have to have some skin in the game, too.

So he got himself a camp counseling job. And in addition to minimum wage, he is bringing home a seemingly endless supply of colorful stories and rubber-band friendship bracelets he makes on the daily.

His day is made by the adoration of a handful of half-pints and a director-paid round of soft drinks on a sweltering day.

And while we were glad he was enjoying his work, his father wasn’t sure the money wouldn’t hurt.

But we don’t necessarily agree on how he should manage his money.

I try to keep a hands-off approach, aside from an occasional thumb on the scale.

The husband wants to lay down some family banking rules geared toward solid returns: Half, he believes, should go into savings while the other half should probably also go into savings because what else are you going to do with it? “I don’t want you to blow it on virtual outfits that dress up your game players.”

It was a suggestion the boy did not take well.

He had planned to use the bulk of the proceeds of his camp counseling gig to buy himself a new gaming computer that he would build from parts. 

And then all eyes were on me: The arbiter of what fiscal responsibility is owed to the joys of life. 

“I'll talk to him,” I promise. The boy will sometimes do for me what he would dig in heels for his dad. 

And when I do have the talk, I find that I do more listening.

I like to think it’s the hearing that makes the difference. It doesn’t take long to understand that my son doesn’t have a clear understanding of how banking works. Even something as simple as how to cash his new paycheck or that he can keep as much or as little of the cash as he wishes. The simple mechanics of filling out a deposit slip is enough to allow the chore to slip his mind as the paychecks pile up.

Mistrust the process

I opened the folder and skimmed its contents. The files inside were arranged by some form of chronology that merged creation and last perusals, but their subject lines were empty. As I drew my cursor down the list, I focused my attention on the window to the right of each draft, which showed the first three lines of the text therein.

I hopscotch across platforms. I was jotting down notes on my phone and shaping them into thoughts on my laptop whenever the time allowed, usually while the television remote was under the control of others.

Often, and usually, well before sunrise on the last day possible, I sit in the dark under the bed covers, rearranging words one last time before I send whatever patchwork of thoughts I have made off toward its final destination.

This has been my writing process since I could say “Gmail.”

When it works, it works.

I find the file I want and double-click.

The treatise opens as if tapped by a magic wand.

When it doesn’t work?

A stopwatch of dashes circled my screen as a notice told me to have patience while some magical process of computation – perhaps ones and zeros inside the machine, or perhaps squirrels – worked together to download my file from a server.

When the watch finally stopped spinning, a new message appeared in an empty window: The server was not responding. Try again at another time.

So, of course, I try again, and again and again with furious speed, until I can feel my stomach inching up into my throat.

I email all the people I know who are at least a decade younger, pleading with them to disclose the one small trick I know they must be gatekeeping: A string of code, perhaps, something like Archive://spin around three times and/VoiLA_Remove@trash, and my lost prose would magically reappear.

 Of course, they cannot help. There is no hidden pocket into which my work has been slipped. My friends quietly listen as I talk myself into the delicate understanding that it only takes one elongated internet disconnection for all those words to fly out of an empty window and be lost forever.

None of them want to venture a guess as to why the gray ghosts of my missing thoughts continue to haunt me after their untimely departure from the nebulous realm that is my drafts folder.

For that, I need to consult a scholar at least two generations removed.

Luckily I didn’t even need to enlist a volunteer since my daughter happened to be home from college and sitting on the other end of the couch creating a cacophony of disharmony by simulcasting tiktok on her phone and Netflix from her laptop.

“I feel like I have to tell you that I’ve discussed this situation with alllllllll of my friends, and we’ve concluded that the old thing that gives away your age is your constant refusal to use Google Docs.

“Here, hand me your laptop; I’m going to start a file for you … You will find it in the docs folder under “MOM NEEDS TO GROW UP AND GET WITH THE PROGRAM.”