The Unraveling

There is something about the modern age that makes me feel as if the old adage, Children should be seen and not heard, is more than just the words of some curmudgeonly aunt historically lamenting the annoyance of her visiting nieces and nephews. 

It's an old saw that pretty accurately describes adolescence.

Between electronics and earbuds, the house often feels like someone accidentally hit the mute button.

The only time we even notice the quiet is when some sudden noise shatters the silence. And even then we tend to ignore it: footsteps on the stairs. Water flowing from the tap. The rustling of bags and a dry cascade of chips into a bowl. Footsteps back on the stairs. 

Midnight mice.

They sleep well past the morning. And sometimes there is a noise that jolts us awake. A dog barking. A cat hissing. An expletive that wakes up the snoring.

It was some blue utterance followed by a slamming sound that jolted me into awareness. 

I knock on the door … and wait.

As I stand in the hallway I can't hear anything coming from the other side. Wireless headphones, I assume. The kind that seems to blend in with the structures of their ears and block out the background so they can focus on a distraction.

This is one boundary I try to respect.

I knock again before I turn the knob and send my voice into the room alone.

“Yes?”

“Is everything ok?”

I look into the room, seeking out her reflection rather than finding her directly. The room is tidy and warm. It smells faintly of cinnamon and vanilla. I can barely make out her shape from the corner of my eye … wrapped in a blanket and still tucked into bed. 

I can tell from her mirror image she is looking at me as if I have crash-landed on her planet. I am intruding.

She sighed but didn't slam the door. 

“Everything is a mess.”

Like most of us who are obsessively checking the news these days, she has little knowledge of foreign affairs and no expertise. Yet somehow the distance from such understanding feels like a lens bringing our failings as a society into sharp focus.

"War? Why is that still a thing?"

My daughter has awoken from the sheltered, childhood part of her youth and embarked on the portion of the journey through adulthood where one tries to keep whatever is left of the insulating chrysalis intact. 

"Why?"

She's not looking for answers. 

She knows I don't have them. And that I never really do.

I don't remember the world ever having more than small pockets of peace. 

But I remember reaching the age of so-called reason and breathing a small sigh of relief.

The things that had worried me had involved scenarios that with time and distance seemed to become rather remote:

Quicksand.

Nuclear war. 

The Handmaid's Tale. 

These seemed quaint in comparison to the true terrors that presented themselves to our kids: passive aggression, active shooters, and an increasingly apparent apartheid state. 

I've been watching what is happening in Ukraine. I've been seeing the news from Texas and Missouri and Florida and Idaho. My level of outrage feels like catatonia. 

We think we have been watching insanity unfold, but this feels like the part where insanity entirely unravels. And a new hope takes hold: That her generation won't try to piece it back together. They will make better, fairer, more humane choices.

And the peace the follows won't seem as quiet.

Smart daughter, Stupid Watch

The watch on my wrist vibrated. "You seem stressed," it informed me. "Why don't you take a breather?"

Of course, I hadn't felt stressed.

Sure, I'd been pretty busy: I'd gone for a run, cleaned the kitchen, argued with the cat, fed our family's entire winter wardrobe to the laundry machines, and stretched my shoulders to prepare for the moment when the dog would double dare me hold on to the loop end of her leash during her late afternoon squirrel hunt.

I wasn't stressed …

At least I wasn't until it told me I was.

I tapped the glass face to demand further explanation:

Pulse? Normal.

Respirations? Normal.

SpO2? Normal.

It all seems normal. Why does it think I'm stressed?

“Hey, dummy. Did you look at the STRESS widget next to the VO2 reading I keep trying to explain to you?”

I hate this watch.

A bright orange number appears. Like VO2 this number means nothing to me. 

But the watch won't give up. A line graph scrolls past with a spectrum of orange-hued spikes stabbing into all hours of the day. "You have not had enough restful moments throughout the day to balance your stress levels. Why don't you try a meditation break?"

Three wavy lines appeared and instructed me to tap them. More magic:

Breathe in ...

Hold your breath ...

Breathe out ...

Hold your breath.

Each prompt was accompanied by a long vibration and the understanding that for the next fifteen minutes I would have to focus if I wanted any peace from my timepiece.

"Close your eyes."

In

Hold

Out

Hold

In ... Hold ... Out ... Hold ... In ... Out, Hold, In, Out Hold, Out, In, Fidget, Twist, Shout.

The watch shouted back: "Your meaningless orange number went even higher! How did you manage to relax into more stress?"

I wanted to throttle this watch. I wanted to remind it of the time it tried to alert the authorities that I had fallen and might be bleeding out on the side of the road … when no such accident had occurred.

I hadn't tripped. Hadn't shifted weight. Hadn't moved. I hadn't even thrown the maniacal timepiece across the room out of sheer frustration. 

Can you imagine? Me standing there yelling 'YOU DON'T KNOW EVERYTHING,' into my wrist?

But I didn't. Truth is the watch … and all its proprietary technology … makes me believe we're all just one update away from wearing our primary care providers on our sleeves. And if people ever saw me talking to my watch there'd be no chance they would assume I was secret service.

“Want to go to the mall?"

I know what you're thinking. … But I hadn't lost my grip on reality, my daughter had.

She had seen me practice hyperventilating and decided what I really needed was a little retail therapy.

I think about the traffic. The parking lot. The strange vibrations you feel when you finally stand still on the second floor of the wide-open space.

How can I say no? 

“Who's car are we gonna take?”

“Let's take yours, then you can relax.”

My smart daughter is so much better at helping me relax than my stupid watch.

Full of beans

 It's not a secret. 

 My daughter hopes to live in Boston next year. A city she's been to six times in her life, not counting parts of holidays spent on its outskirts.

As she plans for this monumental move to Beantown (mainly by putting dorm-room "essentials" into her Amazon shopping basket and taking them out again) she had the idea that what we really needed - as a family - was an immersive experience in the neighborhood to which she'd soon belong.

Midweek. During a rainstorm. Dragging us around like wet teabags, our thrifty brains thinking we could have at least one more use.

I'm not judging the wisdom of this trip if that's what you're asking.

She managed our limited time with a fair amount of decisiveness and good humor; even when we all seemed so out of place.

Especially when the four of us duck-walked our way down Huntington, and she realized being a college student with parents in tow wasn't exactly the vibe she was going for.

Her father missed the forest for the trees, too, as she whisked us off to the remarkable landscape she had discovered inside ... the Prudential Center … Where she pointed this way and that … to chain stores with which we thought we were all too familiar.

"We're going to a mall? Oh, wait! This is the 'crappy coffee' part of the date, right?"

I laughed a little too loudly, which I immediately regret.

The last thing I wanted to do was rain on her parade. I whisper, reminding him – and myself – that we are tourists in her city now. 

The Boston I remembered was ancient and romanticized. Quincey Market lived in my mind as a place my parents would take us after visiting the penguins. There we could buy cut flowers, or fish with the heads still on, or an armload of crusty baguettes. Not that we ever purchased any of those provisions. Our hotel didn't have a kitchenette in the 1970s either.

Even back in the olden days, we bought our food pre-made, too. 

It was just a long weekend in a nearby city where we'd perused toy shops and kitchenware boutiques along a wheel of quaint cobblestone streets. 

I remembered the harbor seal who did tricks behind glass near the Aquarium ticket counter. I did not remember how dark and dank his small tank seemed. 

But for all the things I had misremembered, this trip I saw the city anew. 

The way the houses curve, rows and rows of them undulating along the streets like ribbons on a breeze. The way low stone buildings with manicured lawns anchored to sparkling glass towers. 

I can't imagine any of us will soon forget standing inside a globe of the world, our whispers echoing around its familiar curves. We four made up two-thirds of the 10:20 tour.

Hope springs anew under the other celestial and terrestrial curiosities in the lobby. It feels like the city told us a secret.

Word

Green, yellow, and gray curved-edged boxes stacked in rows five wide and six high, started to appear on social media feeds about a month ago. That's when I took notice of them, anyway.

It looked like Tetris got tetanus. 

I had no idea what any of it meant, but I tried to ignore it anyway.

The world around me is so full of noise. The clamoring of all that's wrong within it and still, no hero galloping up from the horizon to save it.

Who needs another fad to figure out? Who has time for another thing to download, perhaps; to fiddle with, maybe even to fret over? It's just another distraction we don't have time to address.

But the silence around this puzzle eventually sucked me in. 

It brought me back to the 90s' and the last time I'd experienced the watercooler set trapped in silence. Back then it was the HBO series Sopranos that kept us all quiet. Owing to the fact that so few people subscribed we had to wait for that week's recorded episode to circulate through the office. It could be weeks before we could have any sort of post mortem.

This time, it didn't take long to figure out what no one was talking about.

Just a website that posts one game per day. Everyone who visits gets the same challenge. That's it.

The premise is simple enough: You enter a word and see how many letters are correctly placed, incorrectly placed, or not found in the word at all.

And what many people have found as they play along is that there is usually only four or five degrees of separation between the wrong answer and the right one.

Nobody's talking about it, because no one wants to burst the bubble that has formed around the word of the day. A word that has literally no connection to our larger predicament. A word that is so ordinary it shouldn't make us feel so magical when we solve it. But it does.

But we do. When the six squares turn green our hearts celebrate and we bask in a glistening, rainbow-colored soap bubble of happiness.

No one wants it to burst.

I don't understand how it works. I really know how I went from RANCH to MOURN to find WRUNG ... but it feels like it has to be prophetic. A miracle no more apparent than from DOLES to LAUGH to RURAL and finally ULTRA.

Which wasn't even a word that can stand on its own.

I don't want to quibble about it though. I'm afraid that the shine would tarnish in the harsh light of understanding. I don't want to see the truth behind the magic trick. I don't even want to tempt the fates with overexposure.

Perhaps this I why I never send my non-specific picture denoting my score to my friends and family on the World Wide Web, yet I seek out those who do to congratulate them.

It's the nod between us that acknowledges the shadowy particular we both recognize.

It is a simple, wholesome pleasure we all have in common.

I'll Fly, You Fry

The chef frowned.

She took the paper bags from my arms and carried them into the kitchen.

"Forgot the totes again. Huh?"

It wasn't a question so much as an indictment.

The reusable bags were right where I had left them: folded neatly and packed in another reusable tote, a nesting set that was waiting near the door to be brought to the car, where they would have stayed – stuffed in the trunk -- even as I tooled around the store with the one wonky-wheeled cart I'd managed to select from a line of perfectly functioning options.

I could tell her that a human being who has swum around in my gene pool it is more than likely she would rather pitch in five cents per bag than run out to the car to get them once she's in the store. …But that would have been cruel.

And risky.

Especially after she had so graciously volunteered to make dinner - a two-entree feast fit for a Super Bowl - and I had fumbled the ball. Again.

One by one, as she extracted the goods, she found enough evidence to convict.

"What's this nonsense? Chicken? From a can?"

She could not believe her eyes.

Her mother had taken the list she'd written by hand to the grocery store - and replaced each carefully curated ingredient with an imposter.

Canned chicken wasn't even the worst offender. Store brand hot sauce? Generic corn chips? What's next? Elbow macaroni in place of the twirly, whirly cavatappi? Gouda instead of Gruyère? 

Gru-where? Oh, rats! I knew I forgot something. 

She pulled out the box of elbows. “I even spelled C-A-V-A-T-A-P-P-I for you.”

“Honestly, I thought you had just mistakenly named some imaginary Franken-Pasta.” 

She had caught me. 

For a moment, I thought about pulling out the old supply-chain excuse. The pandemic-induced store-shelf gaps have made the old “They ran out” totally believable in almost all circumstances.

But I couldn't bring myself to lie.

The cat food aisle may have been sparse, but the pasta products were totally tubular.

"I'll be right back," I said with a sigh as I jammed my arms into my coat sleeves and search the pockets for car keys. "It's only the third time I've been to that store today, but I'm sure no one else is counting."

She tells me not to bother. She's already improvised her recipe from recollection and a cookbook framework once. She can improvise again.

But it's not really a bother.

I'd rather circle the globe in search of fancy cheese for an eternity than spend one more minute soaking up the silence brought forth by the nightly question: what do folks want for dinner?

"One of these days, I swear to dog, I will feed you crickets."

“Well if you're going back anyway, could you get real chicken this time? The kind I can cook myself? I feel like this canned stuff we should maybe feed to the cat.”

It really tied the room together

We had just pulled into a parking space at the big bullseye box store when her phone started to jangle.

We were on a mission (that my daughter had chosen to accept): I was redecorating my office and needed her help in finding a rug that really tied the room together. We were happy. Mother and daughter, out at the store, doing mother and daughter things.

But something wasn't right.

Her face, illuminated by the blue glow of the screen, twisted in an expression somewhere between agony and excitement.

"Duuuuuuuude."

“Duuuuuuuuuuuuude.”

“Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude.”

I turned off the car and asked quite bluntly what was going on. She just flapped her hands and started to say words that mostly sounded aloft on a jet stream of hyperventilation and escalating screams.

“The! College! Decision! IsInMy INNNNNNNNNNNNBOX!”

And though she had applied to eleventy-billion institutions of higher education, I didn't have to ask her which decision had been finalized.

ONLY one mattered.

The only application she fussed over, wrung her hands over, and rewrote until the words sang to her in four-party harmony. The only application she paid for with her own money. The only one that's acceptance rate made her feel as if her chances were worse than a camel's trying to thread itself through the eye of a needle.

There we sat, wordlessly staring at each other, as the winter chill started to creep into the car.

“Well?”

“I'm not going to look at it now,” she said turning off the phone and opening her seatbelt with simultaneous clicks. “Let's you that rug!”

We almost made it … 

We had gone past the spring-coming Fashion; taken a right and Lingerie and a left at Bedding, and found ourselves smack in the middle of … Frames? 

Honestly, I'm not sure how we found floor coverings but we did, finally, and we had two whole aisles to choose from. Of course, I didn't know what I was doing, but I expected this trip would not only tie the room together it would join us more closely in her expertise in retail therapy.

I started the opening salvo: “Do we want natural fibers or manmade? Should I go with neutral colors? What about pulling in a color that contrasts with the couch? Would it be too loud? What do you think?”

She didn't answer.

When I looked, she was wistfully staring down into her phone.

“I have to know.”

And then I knew: This was a make-or-break moment-of-truth time. And no matter what happened – whether she broke down in tears in (I'm suddenly realizing) a painfully-well-lit department store aisle teeming with shoppers, or started jumping up and down for joy – my chances were dwindling for leaving the store with a rug. Or, it turns out, my dignity.

Because suddenly expletives were flying over the carpets into curtains. Happy, excited, celebratory curse words. She even called her dad so she could curse with him on speaker. 

Eventually, we found a rug and loaded it into the cart. We wheeled it to the checkout thinking of all the people in our lives that we couldn't tell even with full-sized words. But when we unloaded that rug from the car and unrolled it in the room it will live in, it became abundantly clear. 

This rug really tied the room together.

Quick, quick, slow

Finally. It's lunchtime. My stomach had spent the entire morning splashing around in lukewarm coffee, preparing for this moment: when I would open the refrigerator and extract something delicious to fill its growling hollow.

This has been our habit since as far back as I remember … so far back, perhaps, that the phrase intermittent fasting might have been known as the less celebratory phenomena of binge eating. 

No matter. Time and repetition have convinced my body to feel ravenously hungry at noons and threes. 

Alas! My stomach turns as I fling the door wide and stare blankly into the harsh light of the Frigidaire. The leftovers have been leftover too long.

I open containers one by one and dump their contents into the trash. There is formality if not ceremony to this weekly ritual.

"Goodbye Thursday of last week. Pasta usually gets better with age, but not spaghetti so old its angel hair grows coarse and green.

So-long, Friday. Fish that smells like it's gone long past the time to cut bait.

Farewell, plastic-wrapped thing that I don't have the gumption to unravel. It may still be good, but the chance that it's gross has better odds. I won't take that wager.

The dog looks at me with Puss in Boots' eyes: big and round and saucer-y ... ready to spill liquid emotion all over the floor.

How could I, in good conscience, feed all this slightly furry food to the bin when she's right there … salivating to recycle our food waste?

I do not waiver. In as much as I won't bet the farm on how far my iron stomach has oxidized, I would likely win the gamble were I to give in, the subsequent liquid spilling forth on the carpet wouldn't be emotive as much as an emetic. 

I slip her a biscuit or five. Atoning for the lack of equality we humans have with our resident canines. How patently unfair it must be to watch your hoooomans casually stuff their faces at will. Even the felines have figured out how to thwart the hinged lids on the food bins and gorge on the kibble inside. They are not afraid to tip the thing over and eat to their heart's content. Dogo cares what I think of her. If the cats have any cares about feelings, they are looking inward. 

My stomach still mewls. 

There must be something I can eat: a slice of bread toasted and slathered in butter; a bowl of doughnut-shaped oats swimming in milk; a banana, still firm and unspotted. 

Why does the food not make itself?

Maybe I'll just have some crackers and cheese ... that is if the little mice children haven't already eaten through them. I'll know by the empty saltines sleeve hanging from the weightless package in the cupboard, and the tell-tale discoloration on the block of cheddar left in the drawer, unwrapped. 

We do not live by crumbs alone.

No. On days like these, we live on ice cream.

Gummy-edge, freezer-burned vanilla … and a tiny ribbon of chocolate lining the seam of the carton where it had once known the touch of strawberry.

I hope there's still antibacterial cream left for when I require unguents for the knuckle graze I get from planning (unwisely) to lift a full box.

Whiling away the kilowatt hours

"Are you sure?"

I was.

"I can't talk you out of it?"

He couldn't.

There was nothing he could do but hover anyway. He'd offer scads of well-meant advice that I would tiptoe around like the proverbial bull in a china shop. Things might break.

One collision away from catastrophe.

It wouldn't end well for either of us if he stayed. This was just one of those times misery doesn't love company.

So I kicked him out of the house. I watched him pack a bag with all of his cold-weather gear, his skis, and helmet and told him "Don't let the door hit you on the way out," with all the warmth and concern I could muster.

The annual ski weekend with the guys was finally happening, nearly three years after its pandemic-forced hiatus, and l didn't want him to miss it again.

Especially if missing it meant he'd have to bob along as I weathered the irregular waves of grief.

I've got lots of experience with sadness. It's like watching the ocean roll in on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday in summer. Even if I turn my back on the sea I know it's unlikely to overwhelm me.

You can only steady yourself. Focus on the sand escaping beneath the soles of your feet and dig in.

I would just breathe. And sleep. And do all the things I'd written down on my list as slowly as I could force myself to go.

I would take all the time I needed starting the moment his car left the driveway.

Which, as luck would have it, was the exact moment my daughter emerged from her room to declare that not only was the temperature sub-arctic but the water coming from the showerhead was only slightly more fluid than icicles.

I checked the thermostat and realized something had to be wrong: the digits claimed the living room was 57 degrees.

So I ran downstairs to the furnace to see what it had to say.

The readout said nothing but the water streaming out from the seams of its casing spoke volumes.

I called his cell phone.

"Hey there. Everything ok?"

In the four minutes he'd been gone he'd somehow made it all the way to Massachusetts, and was currently a rest stop or two away from his destination in Maine.

"Yeah. It's just the heat isn't working and the furnace is leaking. I think I'm going to have to call for a repair."

I knew I'd have to humor him: I'd follow the pipes and turn valves off and on before he'd agree that there wasn't much more I could do.

And three visits from the repair dude between Thursday and Friday nights convinced him there wasn't much he could have done either, besides calling in favors, which he managed to arrange via voice text as his car cruised along 495. By midnight he had friends deliver up all their space heaters, which they line up in the garage nearest the woodpile.

The kids and I would keep the home fires burning (literally) until the furnace part could be procured in three or four business days.

It was surprisingly simple. The woodstove worked some whole house magic, while the tiny little space heaters took the edge of the chill near the plumbing.

We awoke each morning to a warm house. Warmer, in fact, than when its furnace was functional.

And each night the kids and I snuggled into the couch watching movie marathons. It seemed like the most comfortable camping trip ever. We roasted hotdogs and told stories until we couldn't keep our eyes open any longer. Contentment washed over me like a little flash of gold as I banked the fire in preparation for another night's sleep.

Turns out there's quite a bit of solace in knowing there's only so much you can do. And sometimes that's plenty.

You come too

In a darkened room, with Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" playing softly, my father took his last breaths. My sister and I were there, stroking his hands, kissing his forehead ... just the way he had once comforted us when we had nightmares or couldn't settle ourselves to sleep.

We knew he couldn't stay. We knew his body couldn't take much more of the fight his lungs had picked with his heart. Still, the end came as a surprise.

Two days before he died, we sat and talked for hours. He told all the stories that had played like the background music of my life. He talked about growing up in the 'Burgh with the Oakwood as his playground.

He brought me along just like he always had.

But for the first time, the Troy of his youth flickered before me like a movie on a screen. I saw Great Aunt Agnes as she steered big Buick onto their street, beeping all the way from 1st Avenue until she pulled up to the big, yellow house to pick up her young helper who would buy her pizza and quarts of beer at Gallow's store so she wouldn't have to get out of her car.

I pictured the old man in charge of the crematorium who let my dad watch him work. I heard the metal door in front of the furnace slide open and saw my dad's face – seventy years younger -- cringe as a ball of fire burst from the skull inside.

I could taste the wine Carmel Bell's grandfather gave him to drink with dinner when he was seven years old and how exotic that seemed to him -- the skinny little Irish boy down the street -- whom the neighbors always wanted to feed.

There was Huey Morgan at the gas station working magic on cars while Fix Fasoli talked smack. Sal Speciale, on a break from his vegetable truck, was taking his helpers to fill up on breakfast before spending the rest of the day delivering greens.

I patted the mane of Sam Jordan's ride. He was the route man for Freihoffer's, and his truck had literal horsepower. An automatic, that clip-clopped through the neighborhood following his man from one house to the next. Can you smell the fruitcake? It's still warm.

Oh, there's grandpa! He's out on rounds with his post bag and his pipe pointing toward home, smiling as he goes. He always identifies the people he's talking about by name and address. Sure, it was late at night, but Mr. Rothenhaber, 343 10th Avenue, had been waiting on this letter. It would be unkind not to take it to him directly. Mrs. Rothenhaber repaid the kindness with paper-sackfuls of vegetables she grew in her garden.

We won't have to wait much longer.

Oh, dad! There's Tommy holding your hand by the rail station downtown.

I can feel his hand slipping away.

Look, there's mom. Pushing you out the door when you showed up nervous for the first date, Christmas Eve, smelling all brined from the AOH. “You can't come in here. I don't understand it: My mother likes you and we should keep it that way.”

I can see where he's going. The lake.

He waves me on: Come into this memory. It's just a story to keep for the next time we meet ... perhaps lined up for one of Dennis' footraces. Den will give us a headstart but he always wins. 

My adrenaline is pumping as his fades. 

I see it so clearly. 

Look! Everyone's here ... I tell him. You come too.

Mission Improv-able

Time was of the essence.

My neighbor had found herself in a bit of a pickle. Having nearly reached her destination two states away, she realized she had left something of vital importance on her kitchen counter. She also realized she had left all of her extra house keys in the bottom of her handbag, which was on the passenger seat next to her.

To have to turn around now and come home, just to fulfill this necessary task, would totally submarine her plans for the remainder of the week.

Which is where I come in ... or so explains her voice on speakerphone in my car ... making me an offer I couldn't refuse.

"The mission, should you choose to accept it," said this neighbor in no-way-near-any-similar-verbiage, "involves breaking into my house .... and you might need a ladder.”

“Who's ladder a'we gonna take?” I wonder in my head.

"You know these transmissions are probably being recorded," said my son, who was also likely wishing he didn't have to go to the sports-ball practice I was carting him to so he could witness my comedic attempts at sanctioned felony instead.

"It's not a crime if the homeowner ASKS you to break in.”

"You know what I mean," he says as he grabs his gear and pulls himself out of the car. "I could help."

Of course, I know what such "help" entails.

He wants to "spot" me as I attempt to scale the exterior wall using an outdoor gate valve and an empty garden hose holder. He wants to "cheerlead" as I struggle to balance while using a piece of lumber that I've found in the garage as a rude tool to pry open the window. He will "commiserate" when the shim proves to be too wide to get between the upper and lower sashes.

He will "suggest" I try a stick of kindling from our carport, calling it a better fit, without lowering his phone camera or offering to find one for me.

Really, he just wants to record this caper - to preserve my posterior for posterity - as I slither through a window of a house that's not mine if I somehow, miraculously manage to find a way in. And then, he'd like to account for everything I might literally break that requires skilled labor to repair. 

"I don't need that kind of help," I yelled through the now-closed car door as he loped away. 

But ... I did need exactly that kind of help.

The window, it turns out, was locked.

As luck (and texting) would have it, a mutual friend turned up to lend a hand.

We circled the house, looking for other ways in. Finding none, we nearly gave up. Even calling our friend with the disappointing news. Walking across the lawn toward my house, though, I noticed a tiny gap between the sash and sill of a living room window. A little pressure from the tips of my fingers was all it took to slide the thing up. 

I screamed and ran around the front hoping to stop our mutual friend before she drove off. "We're in!”

A leg up and a plant stand on wheels were all that stood between us and the task at hand. 

Mutual friend, smiling, appeared at the now unlocked door holding up the rescued item and handing it off for the next step in the mission.

"When does the post office close?”

"Google says you have 17 minutes to complete this mission or the entire plot self-destructs!”

I know this is the easiest part. The agents at our local P.O. have mad skills for the delivery of special packages, even in a last-minute pinch. The self-destruct part happens when I have to debrief the boy after I collect him, a little late, from sports-ball.

Mind over matter

The world is pretty scary right now. The news of emerging and enduring threats surrounds us wherever we turn. Just thinking about it pins my shoulders to my ears most of the time. It's hard to turn off the noise.

I wish I could time travel. I'd go back to almost anywhere. Even the ghosts of past uncertainties seem quaintly comforting compared to the threat of current events.

 Opening my phone usually opens the floodgates to more heartbreak. It's hard to and tune out. So I force myself to scroll past the doom until I land on the last page on the screen.

I select my game.

Backgammon.

Somehow it manages to bring me back. ...

Back to a smoke-filled living room where I, and a half-dozen 20-something friends, killed time before venturing out for a night on the town. Back when we had part-time jobs and full-time plans.

I don't know what made me think of it or what made me search for digital versions of a game I hadn't played since college. Maybe it seemed familiar and safe, something that would test my brain but not tax it. 

But instead of snapping open a leatherette briefcase and lining up rows of black and white disks on alternating white- and brown-colored triangular flags, the computer did it for me.

Memory, it turns out, didn't serve.

Were it not for the automated array the setup would continue to elude me.

I must have lost a dozen games against the programmed opponent before any semblance of my former strategy returned.

I was grateful to be alone with such stunning defeats.

It was weeks before any urgent need to listen for the ringing of phone calls introduced me to the sounds of the game.

The music playing in the background sounded like a light Jazz riff going out for a little stroll. It made me feel as if Charlie Brown and Snoopy were standing behind me, watching as I planned my attack.

I was surprised by the gentle "click" of the tiles and not so jazzed by the horn that blows upon defeat.

The combinations feel familiar but I am rusty. A roll of five, two moves one piece from the top corner and covers the "six" slot in my home turf. Six, five moves one piece on top, halfway from right to left, but leaves another piece vulnerable to attack.

I prevail in fewer than half the games I play. But the matches are quick and certain. Skill and luck working with and against each other. 

I can't figure out a formula for my wins, but it doesn't stop me from picking myself back up after each losing streak.

The machine litters its backfield with uncovered pogs, then rolls a six and a one and edges steadily toward a lead while I struggle to keep up.

When I roll a six and a one during the next round, I split moves between the two pieces stacked in the farthest quadrant from home. My opponent takes them both and builds a wall of stacked pieces, which will keep me waiting on the rail until my computer nemesis has halfway gammoned off.

There is no way to win this one … but maybe my luck will change for the next one. 

Celebrating in style

I think I miss holiday parties more than I should. 

Not that I miss the dressing up. Conversing with family and friends in the warm glow of festive decorations. Eating and drinking just a tad too much. Any remaining stress from the party preparation melted away with the first hardy laugh. None of that has disappeared. It's still happening, though perhaps in smaller, more subtle ways.

More ornate observances have gone the way of obsolescence. 

Those fancy fetes seemed rare in the before-times anyway. The gatherings I remember best, and miss most, amounted to an awkward pause in the workday when a few of my coworkers would chat about the things they had left on their To-Do lists as they wait in a line at the break room for a slice of pizza and a handful of sugar cookies. The parties would always last for about seven minutes before we'd return to our desks and eat in silence.

Is it weird to miss such an office holiday party?

The kind of forced frivolity at which we all used to scoff, they seemed to be just tinseled up coffee breaks designed by the very folks who may have already been working on our last, frazzled nerve. Nothing says holiday spirit like dunking on Dave from accounting.

Especially since there was always someone reminding you (usually Dave) as they filled their plates, that, in some past iteration, these parties used to be something grand. They'd be the highlight of the entire year, held in some grand hotel with catering and a cash bar. We'd go for scandal and intrigue. It would produce a story so salacious that it would be woven into the office lore and spread by successive generations of employees as if they were there.

Suffice it to say we were not our best selves.

It's a shame people don't remember how nice it was that Danielle made buckeyes every year. I hope we thanked her.

Sometimes I think when all this is over -- when we can lower our masks and truly embrace -- we may end up keeping our distance.

Eventually, we may even give up on the graduation of "normals" from new normal, to newer, to newest as we come to accept that some of the workarounds may suit us better than the old normal ever did.

I was thinking about this as I planned our running club's unofficial holiday party for the second year in a row. Unlike pre-pandemic years, where a panel of club officers voted on venues and menus and budgets, this time it was just me, plotting a course around the neighborhood for a winter evening tour of the local holiday lights. I would throw caution to the wind by bringing along a carafe of cocoa and a sleeve of paper cups. 

I hope this kind of celebration – a simple pleasure - will stick once the pall of this pandemic lifts. Because wearing a set of jingle bells from my running belt so the sound carries through the course as other like-minded friends follow along with their elf hats and Santa beards and blinking safety lights, will be a memory I cherish forever.

So you can bet when we can finally celebrate in style, I'll be there with bells on. 

All good-good

The news reached out and hit me like a fist:

bell hooks, the author, poet, professor, activist, and social critic who helped push feminism away from its white, middle-class worldview toward a more inclusive movement, died this past week. She was only 69.

The loss felt especially poignant to me as I steeled myself to celebrate the 18th birthday of my firstborn, who, on the eve of her coming of age, will come of age in a new, more unsettling time for women. She will be "Ittybit" no longer.

It seems like only a blink since this soon-to-woman joined our world. We remember how she came into it standing up. Asserting herself. How I didn't know her the way I thought I would just from having her swimming around in me for so long.

I'm not sure why, but the notion came as a surprise. As if such a thing weren't possible. That, somehow, this baby of mine wouldn't be a person separate from me starting on Day One. Or that intuition could only take me so far.  I didn't quite understand that the work of getting to know this new person would be the most laborious part of parenthood, but also the most gratifying.   

So we turned to books to help guide us on this journey. We thumbed through Spock and Sears as if they contain the perfect recipe for child-rearing. Indexed alphabetically for convenience. 

It was about this time that a gift arrived containing some of the most instructive examples of the kind of parents we wanted to be:

hooks' lyrical children's book "Homemade Love," introduced us to "Girlpie," and the trust parents can build around their families with unconditional love and forgiveness. With love, there was no hurt that could not be healed. It turned out to be one of the most comforting book we owned. The way her words came off the page and into the room helped soften the hard edges of our day. It soothed tears, lulled her to sleep, and invited pondering.


We read that book so often the pages became raggedly at the edges and the paper thinned where I'd traced the words. I knew all of them by heart. "Homemade Love" turned out to be my first and best field guide to parenthood. It was also an introduction to hooks' extensive work on the radical possibilities of feminism, race, and self-determinism and how it all interconnects through love.

For sure, her words comforted me in their artful and gentle reminders that transformation isn't all of a sudden like a bolt of lightning. It isn't delineated by things at all. It is a process of doing. A good life, while not free of suffering, has its basis in love.

"To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending."

"True resistance begins with people confronting pain ... and wanting to do something to change it."

All these years later, it occurs to me that “Homemade Love” was the parenting lesson that stuck with me best and made me seek out more. Though hooks' passing is most certainly a terrible loss, it is also a reminder that her life's work is an enduring treasure … one we can take with us wherever we go. One that new mothers will find and pass on to their children through the act of love.

She will always make you understand that it's never too late.

Elevation

Hah hah hah uhhha uhha haaaaaah.

The sound spells like laughter but it rakes through the old man's throat like cold air through a crack in the window. 

I listen for that sound the way I used to listen for silence when my kids were teacup-sized: Instinctively, hoping to avert trouble.

"Breathe through your nose."

If my voice sounds harsh, it's because I've said these four words at least forty times today and the knowledge that I will lose count of future repetitions is heavy.

Catching myself, I stop and try to practice a little of what I've been preaching. Letting a long stream of air soften my frustration, I start again:

"Dad, take long, slow, deep breaths through your nose. The machine is making the good oxygen you need. The room air isn't enough."

My father is attached to a machine that concentrates the oxygen from the air and feeds it to him from a lasso of translucent tubing. It irritates his nose and goes against every instinct he has to open a window and take long drinks of fast-moving air.

This is the new normal.

He doesn't live with me, but he's staying here while he ... convalesces.

We have no reason to believe there is a different word we should be using.

Still, it is not where any of us want to be. Complicated medical situations tend to send you on an unpleasant rollercoaster of emotions, going up and down, taking corners at jarring speed. It can be disorienting.

Everyone dies, of course. But we don't really get to choose the hill, let alone how close we'll get to the summit when that time comes. 

We don't know ... or even care to know ... how long that will be. Of course, we hope he stays for as long as necessary, but we will take as long as possible and count ourselves fortunate.

We have been fortunate.

"I'm the luckiest guy in the world," Dad tells his doctors as they help him struggle through the permanent effects of surviving lung cancer. "They found it when they could still cure it."

We knew that "cure" would come with caveats and complications that malinger: muddled thoughts, neuropathy, organ damage ... and other things that seem to come out of nowhere. 

I feel especially blessed he's so good-natured about the situation. Amazed, quite frankly, about how the darkest places make him focus harder on the tiny flickers of light. 

He's not angry at my frustration, nor is he deflated by the predicament of his child speaking to him in a parental tone. He just complies until his oxygen saturation returns and he is breathing more easily.

I relax when the panic in his voice is replaced by a story I've already heard a million times followed by a random question.

He's not a child, and my haranguing doesn't make me his parent. If anything feels familiar between caring for an elderly parent and caring for a child it's how little confidence you have in either pursuit when you're just starting out.

"Don't get old," he tells me.

"I'd much rather that than the alternative," I sass back.

"Hey, do you have a rubber band anywhere?"

Letter to Santa

Dear Santa,

It's been eighteen years since my last confession.

Wait ... I have the wrong etherial bearded guy. Let me try this again:

Dear Santa,

I still believe. But I must confess to feeling awkward about penning an inquiry of this sort so close to your proverbial game day. But here goes:

During the last score years, I have acted as secretary and scribe on your behalf with the express goal of indoctrinating the children in my household (as well as some in the extended familial orbit) toward adopting, in their own lives, some of the essential goodness of your legendary spirit.

Sadly, a majority of my accomplishments seem to have accumulated some degree of malcontent, especially when it materializes in those I've disappointed staring into the mouths of equines.

So by way of correction, if ever so slight, I would like to highlight some free and heartfelt desires of my own this holiday season.

But before I clear the air, let me first clear the dishes. There are so many of them. 

No matter how much you are tempted, I do not wish to find a new phone, souped-up computer, or a gimmicky gadget underneath the tree. My jewelry box is already filled with gems, though I wouldn't turn my nose up at polymer clay beads or a strand of macaroni for old times' sake.

Most of us don't need things. I'm sure you would readily agree with this statement if you didn't have such binding ties with all major retailers of American brands.

Not that I blame you. Someone had to keep the lights on in Santaland.

It's not all bad. The giving and receiving of things reminds us of the ongoing need to be grateful, kind, and forgiving. To remember and be remembered.

This is exactly what I'm thinking as I unpeel the paper accordion-wrap protecting some fragile object that has arrived, anonymously, by mail.

An eerie delight.

"Cloudberry Preserves," reads the jar's label. An illustration of a dimpled, peach-colored fruit reminded me of the dogwood berries that ferment in my yard and make the squirrels act drunk as they gather mouthfuls and run off.

I can guess who sent me this sweet delicacy and relax into the charm of its name. Hovering over the words that curve elegantly around the drawing. Smiling.

Until I picture the toast crumbs and jam-slicked knives, which I can foretell will adhere to the countertops or wherever else utensils become abandoned. If there is a plate, perhaps it will turn up before spring. Likely far from the kitchen sink. Hopefully, I'll find it before it goes through the wash in a tangle of bedsheets and comes out in a thousand pieces.

I know these aren't really the things you tally to make your final determinations. I don't tend to keep track of them either, despite the fact that they tend to stack up, especially during the holidays.

But maybe you can convince the elves that we don't really need their magic as much as we'd like them to rinse a plate, empty the dishwasher or wipe up a spill now and again.

This benefits you, too. I'll have clean plates for cookies.

Running in circles

 I had dropped my son at practice and was on my way to the track nearby. While I waited for him, I had planned to run in circles.

The sound in my head wasn't music. Instead, I listed to an accounting of time: specifically, the 12 minutes it took three men to hunt and kill a human being last year in Georgia.

Twelve minutes to snuff out a life and 72 days to convince authorities to make arrests in the case.

I had already heard the news: that a jury had convicted three white men - Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Roddy Bryan - of the brutal murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who had been jogging through their neighborhood.

Few people call it what the men's act of barbarism was on that February day in 2020: a lynching. But we all know that's what the jarring video, recorded by one of the murderous trio as they cornered their victim, had captured.

The nation learned of Arbery's killing only after pressure from family and the public forced the release of a video, put forward by those who hoped the footage would exonerate the perpetrators. It did just the opposite. Since then I have followed this case as if I knew Arbery personally. 

We had some things in common: He was a runner; his birthday coincided every so often with Mother's Day, and, as the news reported, he was curious about houses under construction. I find myself equally enthralled with the bones of a house and have walked around sites and peered through windows on runs myself.

Just the loose threads of human existence we rarely draw together to their logical conclusion. Such as the unlikelihood a gang of vigilantes would shoot a middle-aged white lady for looking around a construction site or jogging through a neighborhood on a midday afternoon

The true scandal is why this is a privilege not afforded to all.

It's tempting to think that the system worked in the case of Arbery's murderers. But it didn't really. It served the obvious. Anything less would have been a perversion like the legal circus in Wisconsin, which delivered a total acquittal for two homicides by a teenage vigilante. 

We can't keep running around in circles.

I listened to the verdict commentary as I ran in the outermost lane. I told myself I would stop when I got to his number. 

When I had run eight times around the track, I slowed to watch the distance on my watch. As the number ticked past 2:22 I slowed; waiting for 2:23 – the number that has come to memorialize Arbery. 

I have run that distance so many times; in four seasons of weather; carved it into the shape of a heart through my neighborhood. 

Today will be the last time, I think. 

My son will be done with practice soon. Together we will be home safe and sound. 

The wind sliced at me as I ran around in circles. I had forgotten my hat and gloves. 

I think about Ahmaud's mother a lot. I think about how tragic it is to lose a son so tragically; and then to have to watch as his life and death get co-opted by people like me. She didn't give him to the world. A hate crime did that. 

Race day

The alarm was set for 5:30 a.m.

I had a plan. I would wake up, stretch and shake the rust off of my barely rested muscles, and then get back into bed after having made the first of several cups of black coffee. 

If it worked correctly, there would be plenty of time to gather the gear I'd packed the night before and warm up the car. 

Of course, this hurry-up-and-wait approach works a little too well. Often I will look at my watch and realize I have lost track of time. 

When I check now ... 

It's three a.m., three-0-one, now ... and soon to be three-0-two. I'm still awake, with the imaginary screenplay of the events to follow playing on my mind in a loop. 

Why can't I sleep? Race-day anxiety, I suppose. 

Seems wasted on a person like me. 

Fast is relative. I usually finish so far from the front runners that the light from said front runners is not likely to shine anywhere near me. 

I don't even keep pace with the sweepers -those caution-cone-colored volunteers who circle on bikes with the look of concern creasing their faces. 

I read their faces: Will I be the person they need to steer toward a medical tent? "Gosh I hope not," I reply wordlessly with a smile and thumbs- up as I continue to jog along, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. 

Three-forty-five. I finally sleep. When I wake again there is only a single minute ticking down until the alarm is set to ring. 

I turn it off before the rousing clang begins. I don't want to risk waking the house unnecessarily. Not that my herd-of-elephants tip-toeing won't do just that anyway. 

As I stand and stretch in my darkened room, I run through the plan for the rest of the morning: The drive to Schenectady, the finding of parking, the warming up in place behind the start line. 

I wonder why I do this to myself. Heading off before the sun rises to run more than nine miles, alone ... in a crowd of more than a thousand.

I could sleep in and run my own race later. 

The small part of me that lacks the compulsive impulse wishes I would crawl back into bed. No one would think any less of me, not even me. I might gain a few points for the wild abandon. 

But coffee calls. 

Downstairs in the kitchen, a note leans on the coffee maker. "Coffee is inside, ready to go. Have a great race."

By the time I park my car and find my place in line, I am truly ready. I start slowly, keeping an easy rhythm through The Stockade. I find my race pace as I approach Union College, tracing my initials from Lennox to Waverly. 

The neighborhoods seem to fly by despite my slow jog. At every corner, there are people waving signs as they cheer on someone they know along with dozens of strangers. 

The city seems as warm as the morning's sun.

I am reminded why I love this course as we dip into Niskayuna before climbing back toward Central Park and into Vale Cemetery through to the eventual finish downtown. 

 It has nothing to do with the realization that I shaved ten minutes off my 15k time. That's just a bonus

The last to know

“Hey, you guys didn't tell me it was school picture time,” I yell over the sound of morning routines: the whirring of hairdryers and the pounding on bathroom doors.

"It was a shock to us, too. I didn't even comb my hair," said the boy's muffled voice.

“Mom! Can you tell him to hurry up?," his sister texted. "I'm going to be late!”

I mumble something about there still being time as I ignore her pleas and click on a link that had blinked into my email: My son's unsmiling face showed up on the screen.

His hair, newly barbered, was pushed up high on top of his forehead but still ever-so-slightly askew. It is a look he had painstakingly preened to seem like he had just rolled out of bed. Everything about it said Too-Cool for School.

Welcome to your child's high school years. That will be twenty-five dollars for two five-by-sevens and eight, wallet-sized reminders.

Of course, I bought prints of the boy in his berchon expression straight away, even though when they arrive - in six to forty-six weeks - the copies will live in a dining room cabinet, where I store the rest of the official mementos from my kids' school experiences.

His sister's progress reports and quarterly report cards occupy the top shelf. The letters and missives have been extracted from their envelopes and piled in ascending order from kindergarten onward. 

His are filed in about the same order, interleaving between notice of grades with concert programs, playbills, certificate awards, and dozens of stock-white envelopes with younger and younger faces staring out from little windows of transparent glassine.

Oversized serving bowls I've never used (lest they become broken or cracked) act as a bookend, keeping the pages upright and from accordioning out onto the floor at the feet of whoever opens the cabinet.

This is my system.

The organization of opportunity. A box here, a folder there. The common thread between them is an intention to file it for easy retrieval, should the need to access his first-grade third-quarter progress report materialize.

My system makes sense only to me.

Which is what I think, when my husband forwards a similar link for our daughter, who the school has somehow classified in their etched-in-stone recond as belonging to him first and to me as occasional chauffer and forgotten-item delivery person.

I tried to correct that record once after one particularly aggravating game of phone tag.  Failing, it would seem to have them with the order of operations from "DAD" to "MOM" -- at least on the first attempt -- since I am the parent who has the most flexible schedule and the one who isn't likely to be traveling far from home.

Evidently, they thought my acrimony was based soley in matrimony, because after that, all the official correspondence from school included me on a separate line at the same address … as if I were the Ex living with my Husband and his Mrs.

“Well, that's very big of me,” my husband joked.

I didn't know what to do besides laugh with Mr. Husband about how progressive we were as a family. 

“Laugh all you want," the girl tells us wryly as she reaches for her keys. "But this explains why I got called down to the guidance office in the fourth grade and handed an invitation to join the Banana Splits Club," she says before she slams yet another door. 

“I never understood why she didn't go out for that. She loves making desserts.”

“Uhm. ... Because it's for kids whose parents are getting a divorce. She thought they were telling her the bad news.”

That sounds terrible, but it's probably going to get worse when they find out you've been hoarding all these horrible pictures.

I wish us all nine lives

 “What's this now?” I asked my son after I turned off the road and into the schools' driveway. About a dozen people with placards had gathered on the sidewalk where the intersection jammed with cars. It was just after 7 a.m., his usual driver -- his sister -- had taken the day off.

"Anti-factsers," he said with a sigh. “They don't want their kids to wear masks or have to get vaccinated or to discuss American History, I guess if it means talking about the racism parts. But I don't think any of them have kids who actually go to school here.”

“That seems weird.”

It took several minutes to get through the line, let him off, and get back to the road where the protestors stood, waving at traffic with bare-faced, beatific grins. They were joyful in their work professing strongly-held but evidence-free beliefs.

As I waited for my chance to escape, a woman bundled against the cold wave at me, seeking some solidarity. Perhaps a thumbs-up.

I gave her a different finger. 

It happened so suddenly. A knee-jerk reaction to a cheerful wave of a sign that bore a stolen slogan, and my undeniable urge to protest gushed forth. I used the only sign I had on me.

I was angry. Civility be damned.

The face outside my window changed from a smile into a startled scowl and finally rested in a downturned slant. I recognized the person then. I knew her. From a past life. One in which acquaintances seem to go deeper into friendship than they do. 

This knowledge, I suppose, should have caused me to feel remorse for using such a base vulgarity. The telling it like it is becoming less clear when you're telling it to a familiar face.

But I had none of those feelings. I had all of the shocks of recognition and none of the remorse. I didn't feel caught in a weak moment. I felt relieved. 

I rolled down my window and made my silent protest official, albeit with more publicly acceptable words. She conveyed, with equal reserve, that our diametrically opposed disappointments were mutual. I rolled my window up again and sat in silence until a break in the traffic allowed me to merge.

I drove away slowly, letting the distance between our planted flagpoles dilute my animus.

I don't need to know why she and the others have picketed a school none of their children attend using statements of things that aren't happening there anyway. Maybe she's a true believer, or perhaps she's searching for something that's missing from her life.

Aren't we all? Missing something?

I just hope she remains healthy and that she and her family gets through this crisis without a visit from harm. But I don't have to expend any more energy changing hearts or minds.

Consistency can simply become a thing we mold around our broken thoughts, rendering it into a defective weapon or an ineffective defense. 

We may be out in the world glaring at one another, but we still fit in a box with Schroedinger's cat, destined to be right and wrong at once.

Teen spirit

 "I'm going shopping, does anyone want to go with me?"

I was talking to the air around me, fully expecting silence, when the two teenagers within earshot harmonized "Yes."

The girl is usually a coin flip, but the boy rarely obliges.

Shopping isn't his thing. He's fine with shrugging his shoulders when asked if he needs anything from the market, and then nodding or shaking his head as I press him on a list I've made on my own.

Do you need shorts? Underwear? Soap or shampoo?

What would you like for dinner? Soup? Stroganoff? 

It's so rare to hear: "I'll just go with you," now in a voice so low on the vocal register I can barely make out the words that I almost wanted to celebrate.

I even felt a little remorseful as I ousted him from the front seat in deference to his older sister, who could easily suffer the indignity of taking a backseat to her little brother if she didn't also suffer from motion sickness. A malady the boy himself didn't inherit and wasn't conniving enough to feign. 

He didn't even rhyme the words that have been used against him time and again when his slow-motion meandering makes him the rotten egg.

"You snooze, you lose."

For her part, the surprise presence of her brother on this hastily planned procurement excursion didn't phase her. She doesn't even think of him as a Little Bother let alone call him that to his face. 

She doesn't lord her senior status over his first-year lack of standing. And for his part, he doesn't pester her that he actually stands taller.

For my part, I follow them around the store with a basket as they decide on the things they'd like.

She needs shampoo and conditioner. He needs deodorant and body wash.

She opens caps and breathes in the scent as best as she can through her mask, while he tips a package straight from a shelf into the basket. 

She plucks the thing out with two fingers and an arm's length of utter disdain.

"You can't buy just anything! What if you hate it? What if it's entirely offensive? What if it smelled like a muskrat that died in a sewer?"

He takes a whiff, gags, and quickly puts the stick of odorant back on the shelf. 

"Try this one. It just smells clean."

And this is how it goes for the better part of an hour. We wind our way through clothing and accessories to toiletries. They argue the merits of one snack food over another with good humor. 

She enjoys being his personal shopper and he gains confidence through her recommendations. As I push my card into the reader, I wondered if I've ever felt happier to part with money? 

And that's when it occurred to me that we hadn't been in this particular store together in a decade when my daughter rebelled following a particular temper tantrum from her brother that brought her to tears. 

Noting small joys has been essential to me as I use them to plaster over the mounting dings of life's disappointments. It's the sweet jelly that makes the salty peanut butter palatable in my generational sandwich. 

I am particularly grateful that sometimes teen spirit seems so much more resilient.

It's also nice to know that time heals at least one wound. 

Life is too damn short

 A new Siena poll reported the nearly eight hundred or so New Yorkers it surveyed have largely accepted COVID-19, and its protocols, as an enduring part of their daily existence. 

Most of those who responded said they carry a mask with them wherever they go. And while our confidence has ebbed since the feel-good-days of summer, we are showing more comfort in our pre-pandemic chores. A majority even said they felt comfortable shopping in grocery stores despite feeling the pinch of higher prices and supply-side shortfalls. At least the aisles seem wider now that the stores have mostly abandoned their one-way traffic patterns. 

Of course, half of those surveyed cling to the hope that things will steadily improve, despite transmission rates all over the country remaining exceedingly high, and despite some officials sounding new low-level alarms about the likelihood of variants of the variants coming in via elsewhere. 

Nearly three-quarters of us are comfortable eating inside of a restaurant. We're only middling more confident returning to the workplace. 

What are the options? Quit?

Well … another study affirms there is a Great Resignation afoot, with more than 4.3 million Americans -- nearly three percent of the entire workforce - quitting their jobs in August.

Calling in sick just isn't the same as it used to be, I suppose. Neither is juggling a routine that has been anything but routine. What’s behind all these numbers is still up for debate. But life, some economists now think, is just too damn short.

I still check the trackers every day, toggling between the CDC and The New York Times. I compare their figures to those of our county health department ... and the local school district, and no matter how I figure it, none of the numbers ever make sense. 

Seventy-six thousand cases today, 36 where I live, eleven the day before that. Nine for the week at the school. The two-week average is still flat. The county health department closed its building again and the latest school board meeting attracted the twelve loudest people in the county who think masks are the modern symbol of tyranny and will disfigure the faces of their kids, none of whom go to school anyway because of things they don't understand like Critical Race Theory or things they are afraid of like Halloween celebrations not to mention the War on Christmas that's been waged since a few lovely and caring people started saying "Happy Holidays" in an effort to be more inclusive. 

Sometimes I can't believe I ever got angry trying to make this make sense. 

I have done my level best. I have enthusiastically welcomed the vaccine for myself and my family. I have rolled with the punches of sometimes convoluted and always evolving messaging. I have accepted a moderate ability to adapt as my personal savior.  And perhaps most surprisingly of all, I have stopped staring angrily at the barefaced fools.

I have pushed up my sleeves and soldiered on even when I didn't feel entirely capable. I have laced up my shoes and run my fastest race, and I have set limits. I have made more of an effort to enjoy my neighbors. I have turned the other cheek. 

Just as our parents and their parents weathered the storms of their times and were forever changed, so too are we.

Life is too damn short.

Making allowances

 My husband's nose crinkled. He fixed his quizzical stare - that of a man who has either smelled something rancid or doesn't understand the question - on me.

"Why on earth should we pay people to do the right and moral thing?"

We had been talking about the news; in particular incentives (monetary and other compensation) some employers (and government entities) are offering their workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19. 

He thinks it's wrong. That the altruism of obligation should be the only path lauded.

Suffering should be the gift for those who choose unwisely. 

Whereas I don't really see the problem with funding unpopular mandates if it has the potential to corral more of us toward herd immunity. 

For some reason this idea makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. It offends his sense of fairness.

His take doesn't surprise me. I'm the carrot, he's the stick. And fair is the thing at the end of the summer with all the rides.

He shoots me that look again. 

Discussions like these usually end in a stalemate, and have for more than a

decade as we grappled with the mechanics of how home economics

should work.

"Allowances" shouldn't just be handed to the kids, he argued. "They need to learn the value of work!"

He was also of the belief that we shouldn't pay the kids for completing household chores, seeing as how contributing to the family is an obligatory duty that is needed to advance a common goal.

 

This theory has always struck me as somewhat off, seeing as how there is only one person who ever brings the dishes and the laundry and the vacuum cleaner over the finish line. 

And it isn't him. 

"What? That knife, dangling over the edge of the sink hasn't finished it's race yet."

I don't expect miracles, not after entertaining whether it's fair that Santa gets credit for any gifts that don't fit into a stocking. 

One of the reasons our kids don't have "chores" is that we haven't managed to figure out which random household tasks fall into "job category" and which fall into the "ask not what your parents can do for you but what you can do for your parents" rubric. 

But, aside from philosophical angst and a general lack of consistency, the kids can be persuaded  to empty the dishwasher from time to time and mow the lawn once a week. I thank them by picking up their favorite snacks at the store, or springing for a trendy pair of sneakers. The timing of these gifts, often on a whim, never feels transactional. 

I can tell it bothers him sometimes they have to be cajoled or reminded. That the kindness of their hearts isn't reward enough to spur motivation. 

That it seems like it's always carrot or stick. 

Kindlyists

 It's sometimes a pleasant feeling to immerse oneself in the warm, soothing waters of fiction.

To sit in a tub of bubbling intrigue, getting all pruney, while the edges of a pulpy paperback curl in the steamy humidity.

I'm not ashamed to admit to feeling this creature-comfort envelop me as I read a certain piece of long-form journalism about two authors, their short stories, organ donation, and plagiarism. 

Though, perhaps, I should be.

Ashamed.

The tale had all the hallmarks of an impending train wreck, with too many heroes unable to decide which damsel is worthy of saving while a dark chorus is all too happy to oblige an opinion.

The piece, if you haven't read it, is a fairly clear recitation of the string of events that resulted in a years' long battle between the two women, who accuse one another of intellectual theft and public harassment in a murky soup of hard feelings about the art of friendship.

Kindness, it turns out, has many dark sides.

I wish it were purely fiction.

This battle seems to be just another indicator of the current national psyche. And as we steep ourselves in this tea of social media, we tread some dangerous waters. It's not just about physical isolation, the cloying need to be known, or the degree of difficulty we face if we want even minor transgressions to eventually be forgotten. It's also about how minor transgressions can rage into the world and light our own little corner of it on fire.

We put ourselves out there to be judged. Sometimes harshly. Unsurprisingly, no one comes out in the end as a sympathetic character.

This is why, through a series of avoidable lawsuits, a court will decide what monetary compensation should be afforded to the party that most closely adhered to the laws in question: be they concerning intellectual property or harassment. 

It's tempting to scoff at the litigiousness of our society as well as the cruelty of adults, until one realizes how little control we have over other beings and how much time we are willing to devote to revenge. It can certainly seem, despite the means of legal intervention, we often see our choices flail between the sunk costs we must accept as "water under a bridge," or a scorched earth we try our best to demolish with explosives.  
The law will take a side.

But even when a verdict is rendered, the court of public opinion, of course, will always be out.

Wherever we scroll, we'll see a new iteration of this modern-age harm. 

This week, we watched a whistleblower explain the difference between what Facebook knows to be true and what it tells us about harm its very existence causes to virtually everyone and everything ... from teenage girls to the state of our democracy.

We see the usual finger-pointing: The calls for personal accountability in the face of systemic manipulation. The demand for systemic overhaul without toppling the expectation of continued freedom of speech. I wonder if we are ready for the messy battle that will ensue in search of a cure?

A part of me, an idealistic part, hopes that the answer will be to demand MORE of social media by requiring they do LESS for us: at the very least, we should ensure they stop selling our secrets on the side. Maybe, if they aren’t allowed to track where we go and sell it at a premium to those who seek to influence, we will finally face enough of the truth to see ourselves and each other a little more kindly.

But the lesser part of me - can't wait to read the sequel.