Heavy hand, heavy head

 This week, the New York Times published a disturbing  investigative report about police use of force in Texas schools. The newspaper went through thousands of incidents where school-based police departments had employed “heavy-handed” tactics – violent physical takedowns, chemical irritants, and electric tasers – and found many that were in response to minor misbehaviors, often stemming from things such as dress code violations, student beefs, and not showing respect for elders and authority.  

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Multiple studies spanning the last decade often found that while police presence in schools correlates with a reduction in some crimes, there is also a marked increase in harsher punishments, many of them disproportionately meted out to minority students. Cases that would have been handled aptly in a principal’s office have a much greater chance of winding up in a court of law.

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The Times reporting also included a handful of nauseating videos that showed exceptionally egregious displays of physical abuse, some of which led to students’ – visibly a fraction of the size of the police in the scenes – suffering serious injuries, such as broken bones and concussions.

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Officials responding to the findings pointed to the need to keep schools safe; parents and school staff often praised police for intervening in violent fights, confiscating weapons, and  preventing would-be attacks.

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But what if our kids aren’t safer with police departments taking up residence in schools? Do we really think that disrespectful children will be anything other than harmed by being arrested for poor judgment? Should mouthing off be punishable by jail time? Do we truly want to accept a society that doesn’t want children to be bullies but has few qualms about them being beaten by police?

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A part of me doesn’t really want an answer to any of those questions because I know the sentiments of many from reading the comments sections. Too many of my neighbors believe other people’s kids deserve harsh treatment. Or, perhaps, only theirs are entitled to grace.

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Obviously, I don’t have an answer that will fix our ills. We can’t prevent every bad thing from befalling us. Regardless, there are things we can do that will give our kids a better experience.

It doesn’t mean we will be reading riot acts until we’re blue in the face. But it will be hard work just the same: It might even mean lecturing less and listening more. Building connections with individuals rather than drawing conclusions from intuition.

​We could start with modest changes in mindset. Instead of treating schools as if they were crime-ridden microcosms or major incubators of criminal potential, we set our sights on delivering on education.  

It means justice has to apply to all mistakes, not just our teens. And consequences for the tormentors should be equally applied, especially when those doing harm are elders and authorities.

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At the very least, we should be demanding more transparency. Schools with police presence should have community and civilian oversight. These incidents of brutality should be part of the public record, open to inspection, and every instance should be investigated independently.

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We should not lose sight of the value of justice, oversight, and the role education can play in creating a healthier society. Maybe we can lean more heavily on our humanity so we don’t feel as dependent on the heavy hand.

Do the opposite

 It’s easy to become maudlin these days. If we keep our eyes laser-focused, we can’t help but get overwhelmed by the never-ending stream of information that is as noxious as toxic sludge.

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It’s enough to make us ill.

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We have tune it out to some degree if we hope to stay sane; how could we get up in the morning and go to work or school, and work toward a future if we can’t imagine  there will be one?

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Yet, if we glaze over, or look away for too long, we run the risk of losing touch with our humanity and becoming numb just the same.

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Summer will be upon us soon, surrounding us in a dismal soup that might feel like the inside of a pressure cooker … without an escape valve for steam, we will have to deal with an explosion rather than a delightful stew.

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Of course, it can feel calming to scroll from reel to reel … watching whatever it is we’ve mindlessly ordered from the algorithm that seems to “float our boats,” as our parents might have scoffed. But by the time you realize you are watching a woman who lives alone in a big city — with no friends, and no social life — coming through the door wearing a new outfit, but doing the same things: hugging her cat, making dinner for one, and settling in for a quiet night. .. you have frittered away the better part of an hour or worse. You’ve wasted the best part of a good night’s rest.

Finding the right balance can feel as steady as a roller coaster.

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What other choice is there?

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Might as well practice joy.

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Find it out of thin air if you need to; take a deep breath when there is a gentle breeze, let it relax you just a titch. Smile when you feel the sun on your face, close your eyes and let your shoulders drop away from where they’ve been tensing around your ears.

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Might as well practice service.

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Start a conversation with an elder in the grocery store; make it your mission to notice when someone else is struggling, and to tell them how you plan to help, and let them accept. It can be as insignificant as reach for a can on the top shelf or striking up a conversation that isn’t about the price of chicken.  

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Might as well change your mind and let those new thoughts change your mindset.

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Approach something you’ve been struggling with from a different angle. Maybe even from the polar opposite view.

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We don’t have to convince others of our righteousness, we just have to confirm that what we “know to be true” has veracity to back it up.

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Remind ourselves that an understanding can change into a misunderstanding quietly as new facts emerge. We need to be ready to expand our thoughts, and not just retract the words.

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The heat is coming back, but we can survive it by making good use of breathing room.

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Be ready to inhale fire and exhale the chill. 

Enduring

 I had arrived early for a late lunch at the diner.

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As I sat at the table, waiting for my friend – a woman, like me, whose children were all of a sudden grown – I exhaled.  It was a spur-of-the-moment meal. The kind of thing we usually say we will do, but never schedule. Until one day, in some unspoken alignment brought together by random texts bearing silly jokes, we set a date and see it through.

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My stomach growled as I looked over the menu.  

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I would order the same thing I always order: Swiss cheese omelet with rye toast. No jam. Hot sauce, please. She has no usual. When my friend arrives, I know she will make a game-day decision.

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The server brings me coffee.

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When she walks in a few minutes later, the room will come to life. Her voice carries, as mine does, but unlike mine, she has a clear tone that has a distinct melody. No one would ever accuse her of being monotonous.

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I smile, thinking about all the ways her voice changes. Our conversations meander and overlap, the way good advice discourages. “Don’t answer their story with a similar story of your own,” the inconvenient narrator in my head tries to interject as I push forward with my response.

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The history of our friendship could be put into words and follow a chronology stemming from our children’s early education, but it wouldn’t be able to describe the things that make the friendship seem effortless that don’t also align with happenstance.

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We would talk, and laugh, and yell, and say things that make the neighboring tables blush. We swapped stories of how the kids are moving on, how the husbands are still the same, but somehow we are getting grumpier.

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We avoid talking about the things that are heavy or create anxiety because we have accepted these as problems beyond our control, so we commence in complaining about the things in our lives that we could change … even though the likelihood of us changing them is less than one iota.

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Time gets away from us, but not the same way it transformed our kids. We blinked here at the table, and it was nearing late afternoon; we blinked with our kids at a kindergarten assembly, and somehow they’d graduated from college.

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When the check comes, she reaches for it, over my objections. “A belated birthday gift,” she says matter-of-factly as she holds the curl of paper over her head, where I couldn’t reach if I jumped.

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I love her for that kind of mischief. And I vow that we shall meet again in a fortnight to celebrate hers.

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Being of the same “vibe” feels like an inadequate explanation as to why friendships like ours endure.  Perhaps the word “enduring” is the key since it could mean “long-lasting” or it could mean “long suffering.”

It is not lost on either of us that, regardless of how long we stretch between meetings, we are in the struggle together. And the conversation will continue as if it never ended the next time. Whenever that is.

A little motherly advice

However it is that we understand Mother’s Day … whether we celebrate, mourn, or bridle at the notion of yet another day commandeered by marketers to sell us things we probably don’t need and don’t want; it is once again upon us.

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And with it, my inbox overflows with classic gift suggestions like chocolate and flowers, perfect for delivery mere hours before day’s end, if you happen to be the offspring of the last-minute variety.

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Not that I’m complaining. Were they to ask — and they have despite an experiential clairvoyance that has had them preface all fact-finding queries with “and don’t tell me … —  “that I just want my children to be happy.”

“Might as well ask for world peace,” they retort … 

Which makes me wonder, again, if a good mother would just give a suggestion, something readily attainable. Or whether they would acknowledge the uncertainty?

The media constantly reminds us how unhappy our kids might be. How unhappy we are, too, as we dwell in the discord.  But can we block it out? 

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Sandwiched in between are other ideas I probably NEVER would have considered prior:

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For instance, late in April, my spam mail asked me if I wanted to opt out of their barrage, acknowledging, no doubt out of market research, that the idea of motherhood is fraught.

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Relatedly, a few weeks later, a law firm pitched their expertise for any timely stories being written on … the legal ramifications of motherhood in the modern age, where women are embarking on their path to parenthood later in life and perhaps with more intention than ever … two things conservative America has been somewhat successful in thwarting through more onerous policy and the curtailment of certain standards of medical care.

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You know … the romantic notion that your custody battles could be intense in this “brave” new world.

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And your children will cut you off because you told them “NO” too often … or not enough, or because you were suffocating or you were stoic and unhelpful. Because you never listen or didn’t hear what they were saying. 

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Your best wasn’t enough. And it wasn’t the mistakes you made as much as it was the mistakes you wouldn’t admit or acknowledge. The things you can’t talk about without feeling hurt or defensive.

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Our actions or lack thereof may have been imminently defensible, but we never discussed them like coherent human beings. Perhaps we never even considered they were up for debate.  

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Many of us were raised to “do as you are told,” and we fully expected our kids would, too. Although many of us made good-faith attempts to be friends with our children, perhaps hoping we would be trusted confidants, always in the know.

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And while that may be the case, we were never just friends. Our job was always to give them building blocks and structure, and their job was to break those guidelines into pieces from which they could build something new. Something that is mostly their own. A life that one day, won’t include us.

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Once our parents are gone … and our children grown, mothering can feel lonely. We might feel like ghosts of past selves.

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So on this Mother’s Day, I want to urge that we give ourselves some extra careful mothering. We might just listen. We might apologize. Our memories will live on for at least a generation.

Because if we are here now, we have an onus to meet the moment. 

Hidden Gems

In the four years our daughter navigated university life in Boston and a course load I could barely pronounce, let alone wrap my head around, I had spent about a month of days trying to navigate its streets.

I spent many mornings piecing small runs through the parks that connect the city’s famed Emerald Necklace. Often getting lost, alternately confused by construction and the city’s natural complexity. 

While we visited during family weekends, we tried to be available but unobtrusive. It is natural, even if painfully so, that our very presence elicits conflicting aspects of wary and welcome. 

The first time we visited, she took advantage of the safe-haven familiarity offered in our hotel suite. This time, it was clear she was home in the world. All along, she had to push against our pull. 

A tightrope walk, for sure, but also, in truth, a feat of spectacular proportion.

We are constantly reminded of that delicate balance as we sit as guests waiting for the pomp and circumstance to begin. 

Speeches are filled with commendations about the graduates’ drive and resilience. Speakers gave generous praise to the parents who helped make it all possible. We are reminded about their fortitude in the face of struggle. How success and failure are intertwined. And how experience is at the heart of all education, which, ideally, is never-ending. 

It is our story, as parents, too.

We made small talk with the parents around us in a line that stretched around the block, past a celebrity burger joint she never tried, and the bullseye department store she mused was always cleaned out of stock by the density of college-aged consumers it triangulated. 

I got unexpectedly emotional as we shuffled slowly past. Camera in hand, but in an ocean of people … Like I had missed a silly photo opportunity to come full circle. “We should have come here … I had forgotten we were in Target when she got her acceptance letter!”

“Yesterday, we did a photo shoot at Dunkin’s,” said the lady next to me, and the line reverberated with stories of following their cap and gowned grads into their favorite bodegas and random spots on and off campus. 

We had followed our daughter through a fancy shopping center, down an escalator into an underground burrow where she had found her own hidden gem - a little closet where a cobbler offered instant shoe repair. It was a tiny moment that felt momentous.

As we file into the storied stadium and sit in seats we’d envy during a ballgame, the bigness of all hits me in a way that it hadn’t during two other ceremonies we’d already attended in as many days.

We all experience moments like this, and we interpret them in different ways. Sometimes we marvel, and sometimes we take for granted. We often experience excitement with anxiety. We even filter out the shine and focus on the little spots of tarnish. 

We may even look back and see something we missed the first time. Hidden in plain sight. Hope.

Family business

 “Hey … can you check to see if the artwork in my room is covered?”

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I’m not sure why the thought crossed her mind at that moment – ten minutes to noon on a Wednesday, three days before the first of three commencement ceremonies she would walk in to culminate her bachelor’s degree – but as I was on my way to the home office to make a sandwich anyway, I concluded popping my head into her room for a condition check wasn’t an imposition.

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Of course, I knew that the “artwork” in question was a gift her father and I had given to her for her birthday, a favorite print that we’d had framed. It was just waiting, leaning against a bookcase in her childhood bedroom, temporary storage for when she has a house of her own … not just a dorm that only allows featherweight posters to be hung with the non-marring properties of a sticky putty.

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What I didn’t know was what she was really after through the seemingly random ask.

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“What do you mean covered?”

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I could have assumed that she wanted to ensure the piece was enclosed in some protective packaging, something to keep it off the dust and the unwanted attention of a cat intent on sharpening her claws. But she could also have meant some kind of indemnification, where the work would have been protected should there be a cataclysm in these increasingly uncertain times.

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It was the former, although my confusion gave her pause to consider the latter, if only momentarily.

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I smiled as I imagined her thought process.

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A tree could give up, or a storm could make it give in; either way, the roof could be next in line for destruction. That she worried about the things in her room that she coveted most was the framed art poster – not even a print – that wouldn’t break the bank to replace.

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Was she really worried about the sun bleaching the paperboard through the tiny, eyebrow windows, or was it a safe-enough worry to distract her from all the other worries that fire at us randomly whenever we mark a transition?

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Not that she’ll be going anywhere just yet. She’ll stay on the same campus - maybe in another suite with different roommates and similar pristine walls - for one more year while she adds another degree.

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When I get to the top of the stairs and open the door to her room, I see what I expected. The frame is leaning against the bookcase. It is exposed, and the print is facing the windows. It was fine. The colors were still intense. There were no imperfections. In the room, the light seemed to naturally filter elsewhere. It occurred to me that the glass is likely the kind that protects from UV damage. I just hope the protection is the product of manufacturing science and not a combination of marketing and wishful thinking.

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I’m not worried. But i don’t want her to worry either.

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I turn the frame’s face toward the windowless wall and wrap it in a clean sheet from the linen closet. I take a photo of its protected state and send it off with my condition report.

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She sends me a smiley face emoji wearing sunglasses.

Al not Ai

 The mission, should I choose to accept it, was to find out where The Boss purchased the expensive tool - now a heap of junk sitting unceremoniously on top of my desk –  and return it.

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Preferably for a full refund. Or an exchange for a factory-tested working model. Basically, your holy grail of customer service … followed all the way back to the manufacturer. Maybe there’s hope.

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The additional pieces of information that he didn’t know included when he bought the item and whether he had ever filled out the small card that validated the so-called warranty.

I know I didn’t.

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So, in effect, the task ahead of me was looking for a minor miracle.

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Which, after a few minutes of scrounging around through credit card statements and the drawer where our library of operating manuals is filed in no apparent order, I am on the verge of giving up.

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Another expensive piece of equipment bites the dust.

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I understand this mission, which I’ve embarked on so many times before, is a performative circling of the wagons in hopes of finding that the answer is as easy as finding a pocket of the known universe where costs aren’t relative and durable goods are still durable. A pocket time hasn’t changed.

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I was ruminating on these intrusive thoughts as I began to search the interwebs for a reasonable replacement.

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Surprisingly, I couldn’t find one.

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Typing in the trademarked name didn’t help. All the hits looked similar, but, upon closer inspection, it was clear the options were only look-alikes with rhyming names, devoid of important letters.

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And under other circumstances, I may not have noticed the switcheroo..

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Honestly, my fingers drummed away on the keyboard, and I found myself in a vaguely familiar place, looking incredulously at an item description that was almost exactly what I needed.

If not a little confusing.

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The company would exchange my defective item with a factory-authorized refurbished tool for only a small fee and the cost of shipping. All I had to do was submit an inquiry form, complete with the number of tools I would be sending them and a return address.

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Another human (and I wouldn’t blame them) would see this as just another chapter in the book of Too Good To Be True. Best just to skip it.

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The more I searched for the normal solution, the more I realized that the trophy I sought might have been discontinued. I was embarking on a journey to find a holy grail.

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Since I couldn’t find the interactive form the website alluded to, I called the phone number at the bottom of the page and waited for someone to answer as the cinematic scope of this idea filled my head.

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“Hold on … you need to talk with Al.”

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And after a few missed connections from hold (thanks to a new phone system), Al called back.

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And, to my complete amazement, Al was a real person, with one small part of his job being the repair and replacement of a particular make of tool. It was also his job to make the company website function efficiently, which he was dismayed to find it wasn’t smooth enough for a rube like me. (He plans on rectifying that, too.)

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Honestly, it was a breath of fresh air to talk to a real person who had an easy answer to my problem that still felt so old-world impossible.

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I mailed the package that day, and two business days later, he mailed it back.

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All fixed. With a little sack of hard candy and a note thanking me for my business.

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Who needs AI … When there’s AL.

Freedumb rings

 I felt unsettled as I opened “the paper” and saw the expressionless face of a young girl standing behind a tall man reaching into what I presumed was her backpack.

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The photo illustrated a news item that heralded a new security system and accompanying procedures at Cohoes High School.

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Metal detectors and bag searches are now a hand-in-glove partner with education. In 2022, the most recent year data was published by the National Center for Educational Statistics, only about two percent of schools employed daily use of metal detectors.

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This was merely a photo op documenting the depressing reality of our circumstances: Danger lurks where we least expect it, so we need to prepare ourselves for the intrusion of inspection. All shoes are off. And no matter how sweet and diminutive that child looks, we have accepted that they could be one failing grade and one firing pin away from causing mayhem.

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All the people interviewed for the story seemed resigned, if not happy, about the development. The expense, in the fifties of thousands, is to be written off as the price of our “better-safe-than-sorry,” insistence.

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I understand that doing “something” feels important. And I understand that the “somethings” we can do are not failsafe. They are plastic bandages, and humps of cement, and fortifications. They are all our fears re-packaged as limited protections.

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We all kind of know the limitations: The screenings create a bottleneck at school entrances, which often results in significant delay; the machines also have a high rate of detecting things that are not harmful, such as binder rings and calculators. And all of this aids in the creation of a prison-like atmosphere, where students bear the brunt of scrutiny and suspicion.

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And perhaps worst of all, according to numerous reports, as well as an inflated sense of peril, the reliance on such technology in schools leads to a false sense of security. It provides a quick fix to a problem that needs something more comprehensive than mere mortals like us can comprehend.

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This will become painfully clear the moment a newspaper like this one finds itself reporting the aftermath of a school shooting where the suspect printed a series of 3-D gun parts inside of shop class and assembled the weapon at study hall. Allegedly.

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We have accepted that life in America is dangerous. Yet we are never going to give up guns. We are never going back to a time when fear isn’t foisted upon us. We are going to grin and bear it.

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We can get used to weapons of war, militarized police, and a president who blurts out descriptions of war crimes that he emboldens our country’s leaders to commit. And we are willing to give up our privacy and the presumption of innocence if it might mean one fewer crime is committed.

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When I say this is not the right move, I’ll hear vehement disagreement coming from inside my own house. I have raised people who trust the technology, even as it requires them to take off their shoes, throw out their filled water bottles, and jettison the 6-ounce tube of toothpaste some scanner detected as contraband at the airport.

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“This is how it works now,” they will tell me. The old woman tilting at windmills. “Hope for the best and plan for the worst. We can buy another tube of toothpaste at a drugstore.”

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“We should be planning for better and expecting the best.”

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Don’t our children deserve that effort?

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“Sure. That’s why you’ll be buying fat, felt-tipped markers and posterboards when we get there.”

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We grow up, but we don't stop learning

 The headline grabbed my attention: How do you teach kids to be responsible?​

Oh, here we go.

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My hackles raised as I read through the vertical text from the anonymous writer who was complaining about their adolescent son’s repetitive forgetfulness in packing necessary sports equipment ahead of time, requiring (at least in the teen’s estimation) an abrupt delivery of gear as an emergency. With each unexpected delivery, however, it seemed apparent that the pair’s tolerance of each other’s patience grew increasingly tense.

Naturally, the advisor assumed the parent was the mother and that the teen was a boy-child, and as such spent some dozen or so words explaining how it would not be fair to the teen’s future wife if he expected her to be his sherpa.

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The writer then spent a few hundred more words describing all the snarky ways a response would teach the kid a lesson, such as charging a fee for the delivery that would be refunded if the kid could figure out a solution that didn’t require parental involvement.

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The writer also helpfully imagined the person’s selfish child yelling, crying, and screaming over the phone and hanging up.

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I don’t know why I tend to bristle at such advice.

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I recall, at the dawn of the cell phone age, before I became a parent, I passed a similar judgment. I was shopping in a department store when the purse of a woman across the rack from me started ringing. There was a momentary silence after she picked up the phone until she blurted out a complete story of parenthood immemorial in one simple question: “How am I supposed to know where your soccer cleats are in that mess you call a room?”

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Back then, I wasn’t judging her or her parenting.

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I wasn’t judging the kid, whose voice I hadn’t heard and whose gender I did not guess.

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I just wondered: “For this, we need to be reachable at all times? This is progress?”

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Today, my phone rang.

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It was a child who hadn’t “needed me” to do, or bring, or help with anything in a long time.

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This child just wanted to say hello. Hear my voice. Check in.

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I should say this is an adult. … Because this adult was once a child who forgot things. This was a child who requested last-minute interventions that I was sure would continue needing my attention forever, and the forgetfulness would persist despite my stern face and evident displeasure as I dutifully delivered whenever humanly possible.

The calls stopped coming.

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It didn’t happen overnight, but it certainly seems like it now.

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How fast time flies may be a cliché, but it is also an incontrovertible truth.

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A part of me thinks my “teachings” were my kids simply figuring out how to deal with their parents, or their friends, or all the other people and things in their lives they couldn’t entirely control.

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We tilt at windmills, and cell phones, and adolescent brains. and our mid-life malaise. It doesn’t always work out the way we hoped, but it happens.

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Our children grow up.

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Time keeps changing us, too.

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Experience is the actual teacher. And we are never too old to learn.

The stories of our demise are greatly dimished

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“I could have lived forever …”  my mother used to say. It would be her standard response whenever I had divulged some morsel of information that, to her, seemed over the top: Something excessive, extravagant, outside of norms … or something entirely too personal.

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Not that she was squeamish. She was keen to see all skinned knees, infected cuts, or random swelling that seemed to come out of nowhere.

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But gossip, or taking some unnecessary risk, as she thought of it – especially if it was delivered in the form of news and information – she felt better off just not knowing.

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I knew her better, though.

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Her mind thirsted for information she could parse.

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Her mind could sift truth from fiction as efficiently as she could discern her daughter’s true intentions from her insistence I had none.

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I think of the sparkle in her eye and her mischievous half-grin whenever I open my computer to the news of the day.

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My inbox is filled with stories about health and wellness; each one extolling the virtues of what I try to assume, when forwarded by friends and loved ones, these are well-meant suggestions sealed with love and, often, care-animated emojis.

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Sometimes they include links to lengthy articles written in a scholarly style that purport some recent finding extrapolated from science and translated into easily digestible prose.  

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Often their messages conflict.

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Why, just this week, I gleaned through missives that trumpeted THE key to longevity as not only being busy and feeling useful as we age, but also remaining optimistic, or more pointedly, resilient.

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Of course, it sounds good. It sounds like something we should know intuitively. Like common sense, or the proverbial sense God gave goats, but just a few clicks away into the archives of “like-minded articles,” I am confronted with the polar opposite.

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Here are the stories that warn against my desire to drink coffee, or confirm my bias against red wine. Here are the stories that make the case for doing nothing at all. Here are the choice parts of studies that tell not to do what today’s studies are tentatively debunking … in mice.

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My mother always hated these stories the most.

In her mind, these harmless little stories that asked a centenarian to provide the key to their longevity and hearing that it was knocking back a whiskey once a day, or never going to bed angry, or exercising obsessively, or not at all … after all how many studies show how many people visit emergency rooms each year as a result of an accident when they were exercising?!!

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The only thing we know for sure is that we humans don’t live forever. We can do all the right things, and we still might not get to live long enough.

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I knew she was right … but I also knew that keeping busy helped settle anxieties. The occasional glass of wine gave her pleasure, of course, but not nearly as much pleasure as she gleaned from debunking the myths “experts” kept trying to pass off as incontrovertible truth.

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I half-smile as I close the newspaper story, knowing I will not live forever, but I will probably live to see today’s revelations debunked.

Found, in translation

 I slipped the keycard into a pocket and left the hotel just after sunrise. I was groggy, having slept fitfully. I was intent on clocking an easy run through a narrow park we’d strolled past the night before, and I’d spent the majority of the evening retracing the steps we had taken back from dinner.

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Amsterdam is a beautiful city with its tall, narrow buildings, some of them leaning gently over boat-lined canals.

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It looked different in the morning. Red lights surprised me. And I hadn’t noticed the confetti of cigarette ends, until I witnessed shopkeepers sweeping them into grates and the end of the sidewalks.

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The plantings looked a little wild and untended but also fierce and fine.

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Perfectly matching the blur of this morning commute. A young woman with a messy bun and a tailored coat sits tall on her bike as she glides quickly through an intersection and joins the flow of traffic. She is followed by a boy, then a girl; a mother with a child in cargo; a man with a briefcase; an older woman with flowers; two friends holding hands.

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It was mostly quiet except for the occasional ting-ting of a bell.

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The sun was intent on cracking into my skull as I made my way to Vondelpark, a 47 hectare- (about 116 acres) urban oasis with nearly three-miles of soft and hard track meaning through lush scenery.

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The crocuses and daffodils had already made their debut. The early blossoms seemed like a gift to us, having practically shoveled our way out of the driveway a fortnight ago just to get to the airport.

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Honestly, I was surprised but delighted to see the gate at only the five-minute mark on my journey. Perhaps all roads heading west would have led me there eventually.

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I needn’t have worried myself awake, imagining myself a sprung spring in the Amsterdam clockwork … irritating the local folks just trying to get in their workouts, or taking in the fresh air of the new season as they make their way to school and work. And me - the stranger - destined to get in the way.

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Because the flow of the city was apparent from just watching it move around me. I couldn’t even miss the gaps where I should aim to fit into its current.

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On the street, the bikes rode on smooth, red lanes while pedestrians ambled down textured pavers. Where crossings happened, the peddlers slowed and the amblers sped up to accommodate each other. At intersections, each pack waited patiently for their symbols to turn green.

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Bikes crossed where there were arrows painted on the asphalt and walkers crossed where there were parallel stripes.

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In the park, the rules seemed to widen. Runners and bikers shared the main road; bikers stayed centered, navigating smoothly around runners who clung to the edges. Walkers, some with dogs on leashes, and one with a cat, kept to the pebbled pathways and grassy fields.

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Together, we moved clockwise and counterclockwise around the park. The birds singing, bells chiming, the scent of blossoms in the air.

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Before I knew it, and without ever stopping to take a single picture, I had connected my loop. I briefly considered making another circle before admitting there wouldn’t be time. I would still need to fit in a shower and breakfast before trekking out to the museum queue for our advance-ticketed time slot.

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I still have miles to go before I sleep.

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.