A silent salute

For decades, he’s been a daily part of our Maine vacations. A tall man wearing a hat, smiling broadly as his stout dog bumped along behind him in the sand.

Always quick with a smile and small talk.

We’ve come to regard him as the most Magnanimous man on the beach. 

Sometime around 2016 his hat turned a bright red even though his outward demeanor stayed the same.

Besides the words “Make America Great Again” embroidered on his ball cap, he never said anything political. 

He just gave compliments about the Goodness of your dog as it crossed his path. 

During the race in 2020, I noticed our magnanimous friend had changed some of his swag. In addition to his red hat, he had planted a flag on the tailgate of his vehicle that proselytized a second presidential term. 

Now he’d become MAGAnimus. 

His smile never wavered even when his flag turned blue and he cheered on “Brandon” with a cheeky wink and nod. But I’d noticed by this point that he’d stopped walking the length of the beach and planted himself in a low-slung chair within eyesight of his flashy slogan mobile. 

To my dismay, beachgoers have always gravitated toward him — a king, so to speak, holding court. 

Always a steady stream of them keeping up affable banter, all while seemingly ignoring the man’s increasingly blistering slogans: the latest of which unfurled a six-foot sentiment  -  “F🇺🇸K Biden” - into our consciousness with the help of the ocean breeze.

Relief is a feeling I didn’t expect to have as I deciphered the sentiment. He has been waging this war so long, he can’t stop fighting.

I know after all these years, the better part of valor was to resist being the fish who ran with that bait. 

Instead of wearing a response on my sleeve or a picket sign, I have tended to seethe quietly, keeping my distance as best I can at least as far as the tides will allow. I have let my expression smooth over whenever I have to enter his kingdom … to access the stairs …or collect a specimen my dog may have deposited nearby.

But I can tell you it’s been impossible not to wonder what Thanksgiving dinner sounds like where he breaks bread. Is he surrounded by kindred spirits? Does it devolve into arguments and hard feelings? Or is it filled with people who talk about the weather in passing, and keep their distance the rest of the year?

It helps a little to feel sad for him since I can only picture a gathering not unlike the one on the beach - one in which dogs and pleasantries can’t obscure the rage and discomfort. 

I don’t think he’s a sad character, though. 

Truth be told, I’ve looked forward to seeing MAGA man camped out there more than I care to admit. The power of his insults is not all, but not entirely unconsuming.

Not that my vexation kept me from admiring the power of the waves, or the magic of sandcastles, or the joy of my kids taking off head first into the surf. Even the faint smell of funk in the air reminds me that not everything has to smell of roses. Maybe one day I should thank him since he reaffirmed for me that polite conversation can almost completely obscure any middle fingers thrust your way.

I'm sure of it

Another moving day. The fourth time in two years. 

Dorm life, she has been warned, would be somewhat nomadic.

She had taken to heart administrative advice: pack light. Be ready, with less than a semester’s notice, to pack everything you own into a bin not much larger than a shopping cart and wheel it clear across campus if need be. 

During freshman year she had changed rooms three times, from a triple in Boston to a hotel room in Greece; and back to a campus high-rise for a few weeks that summer. Sophomore year she had stayed put: living her best life in a fifth-floor studio with two roommates, their own kitchen, and a balcony (big enough for a flower box) overlooking the campus.

She loved that place.

Not that she didn’t gush about the next move: to an upper-class dorm suite that would rival any upper-class neighborhood’s three-bedroom apartments. And looking at the photos she sent on moving day, I could see the place had a modern vibe, with walls of windows and an open-concept living space. The new apartment would surely be the best city dwelling she might ever live in for the comparatively “bargain” rate of college room and board.

But she didn’t seem in any rush to get her belongings packed up and moved over there. The day before her ID tag would cease working at one address and fling open another, she hadn’t packed up even one thing.

I imagined she would miss the old place. It’s tall ceilings, hardwood floors, and burnished woodwork. It was the place that sealed her as an adult. Not only because she had to clean a toilet of her own, but more because she learned how to cook on a gas stove and laughed long into the night at the dinners she and her roommates had hosted.

The salad days were evolving into souffle nights.

I could understand other reasons for her hesitation, as well.

She would be the first to arrive and would have to practice living single for almost a month before she’d have a whole new slate of housemates.

Still, I had offered to help get her things from one street to another. I volunteered to expend significant amounts of elbow grease on floors or windows or whatever dust had been overlooked by past occupants.

I knew the terrain. I could help lug things up and down stairs. I could disassemble and reassemble as if I were fluent in the language of IKEA Directions. 

I set the tone of my voice to "unnaturally exuberant" and delivered the message:  “Not only will I happily drive five hours in the rain and darkness just to see your new place, I will scrub the stalagmites out of your oven if necessary.”

But she had declined. 

She had all the help she needed from her college friends. 

Which is why I was surprised when my phone started lighting up with texts. 

“How do you work a dishwasher?”

“There are 235 people who live in this building and guess how many washing machines work? THREE! I’ve filed my first request for a work order …. WE!”

“WHY ARE THERE MOUSETRAPS HERE? EWWWW”

"And oh man … there’s a light post outside my bedroom window THAT. NEVER. GOES. OUT! I didn’t get to sleep until 2 a.m.”

“Guess what time I woke up this morning? 5 a.m. Guess why? That garage door under my apartment is where they store the garbage. And Thursday is garbage day.”

“At least I hope it’s just on Thursdays. I don’t know, but a girl can dream.”

As she took a breath, I laughed. It felt like I was with her in more than spirit.

“I think I’m going to love it there.”

I was sure of it.

His story lessons

 The conversation in the car was lively. 

With his father driving and me in the backseat, my son rode shotgun as we drove four hours west. 

“Can you imagine getting to Buffalo before the interstate system? How about the canal system? Major trade center of the whole #%*€€?!> world. The canal system was made so merchants from the South could bring goods up North without traveling along the coast. The steam-powered boats traveled relatively fast up the canal -- a straight line to where they wanted to go: up the Mississippi, all the way to the Great Lakes, and over. 

"Yeah, yeah," I said, but he wasn't finished.

"Tobacco and indigo and cotton was the cargo ... they were the most profitable, in that order, probably because they only thought this special cotton produced in a small area of North Carolina was lucrative. Mainly they sold indigo and tobacco back to the British. 

"Meh. Mercantilism." But my mind was swimming. 

The last time I made this trip my mother and I got caught in a spring blizzard. The year was 1987 and I was visiting the school to which my transfer was a foregone conclusion. Of course, as I steered my parents’ brand new Accord into the fourth skid of the journey, I was having doubts.

It was a good trip, though, and one I remember fondly. My mother was charmed by all the things that went sideways: the white-out snow, a packed and peppy Peter’s Pub, a campus tour that featured a coed dorm where a flood of frat boys filed into the hall at just the moment our group passed wearing nothing but towels. 

A part of me thinks she was disappointed I went elsewhere. 

I suppose I was, too, when my son said the university was on his “list.”

We’d passed two or three locks before my husband started to explain how they work and how many they number.  

"See that over there? It looks like a couple of guard houses in the water? Those go down into the canal to keep the water high so boats can float on through. They can also aid in flood control, backing off some of the water.”

“What used to be commercial is now recreation.”

As the conversation started to get a little heated, traffic in front of us slowed down to a crawl. The husband took it as a sign to try his car’s autopilot feature. He readily admits he’s robot overlord curious, but only to a point. 

With his hands hovering at five and seven, the car inched forward on its own. An alarm dinged loudly whenever the steering wheel felt neglected. 

“I guess it doesn’t trust itself much either,” the boy sneers. 

“What is that,” he points at the map on the dashboard screen. “Is that … a poop emoji?”

Well, it’s pretty sh*tty.

When the traffic clears, my husband returns to analog steering and my son returns to DJing and lecturing on his understanding of Drake and Kentrick Lamar’s discography of diss tracks. It is a history lesson in its own right. 

Pretty soon we’ve made it to the finger lakes. 

"The fingers are pointing down, but they can seriously hold wine," quipps my husband. 

The boy is not amused.

"Seneca Falls is where women’s suffrage started," he retorts. "You know they had to get a man to rent out the hall - the Wesleyan Chapel -  where they held the convention because women weren’t allowed to.”

That’s when the conversation takes a left, careering into his own family’s feminist history. 

“Remember that time we went to Grandma’s house and we all thought she had gotten a Dodge Charger, but it was just a muscle-bound looking Prius? 

We pass the next hour reading roadsides aloud with snarky commentary.

“Oh look; the greatest exporter of American Freedom, Lockheed Martin!”

“Rome? 

“Liverpool… Can we not think up our own names?”

Maybe we should change the subject, our driver suggests.

"Don’t you think bucket lists are creepy?" his co-pilot obliges.

“No. It’s not like people do them on their deathbeds. It’s something you do when you're young enough to enjoy it.”

“Let’s ask Mom: Hey what’s on your bucket list?”

“Nothing. Bucket lists are creepy."

“Thank you!”

"I just enjoy spending time with you weirdos."

Breathing a little easier

I had been driving around Sunday afternoon with only my thoughts for company. This isn’t an unusual occurrence, especially on brief trips and local errands. It’s a holdover from many years of owning a car with a blank space where the sound system should be. But just before I reached my final destination at 1:47 p.m., I had the impulse to switch on the radio. What I’d hoped would be music was instead a tangle of words as regular broadcasting had been interrupted by a special report that was already in progress.

I drove past my house to circle the block to catch up on the context I had missed: President Biden had officially ended his bid for reelection.

It was done.

By the time I’d parked and gone in the house, the president had given his running mate, Kamala Harris, his endorsement for the Democratic nomination.

You might recall a few weeks ago in this space I advocated for unity around President Biden. I had held out hope that the polls would shift and the electorate would sway back into some semblance of comfort. I held firmly to the belief that one more unprecedented occurrence in this journey could sink the ship.

The candidate’s “Age,” I opined at the top of my voice (while waving my arms at all the other Trump-rages that went under-scrutinized) is just another baseless spin akin to “Her Emails.”

In my daily life, as my husband can attest, I could not ignore what had become an increasingly common belief in my circle of friends: That Biden was too old and had to go.

My Pavlovian response amounted to a minutes-long rant about primary voters and the built-in backup president who was already on the ticket. In my estimation, this was a knee-jerk reaction to a non-issue with a simultaneous attempt to erase Kamala Harris from the line of succession.

If people were beginning to avoid me, I can assure them, I have no hard feelings.

Now that it was over and Biden was out, I felt remarkably calm.

I stood silently watching a steady stream of television analysts breathlessly reporting what they knew and guessing about what they didn’t. All of the things that were still possible at that moment were the worst and the best thing possible at the same time: Schrodinger’s Election.

What came next – a smooth cascade of support for a Harris ascendence as the presumptive nominee – surprised and delighted me. Watching it happen over the course of 24 hours seemed like a bit of luck if not strategic brilliance or outright magic.

Yet the gravity of the place we find ourselves as a country, with individual rights across vast demographics in jeopardy, may have guided more than strategic sleight-of-hand.

In his address to the American people on Wendsday, Biden told us he was passing the torch but that his fire wasn’t extinguished. He reminded us that we have the power within us to meet this moment when our choices matter the most.

I truly believe that we have witnessed our democracy in action in all its messy glory during these last few weeks. And with Aaron-Sorkin-like hindsight, I hope it will see how our job in all of this is to use our votes to choose hope over hate.

In doing so we may come to understand that two things can be true of the Democrat’s 11th-hour substitution: that Joe Biden is still a sharp and masterful leader and that we are ready for a change.

Mission Impossible

 It’s 11:30 on a Thursday morning when I knock once and open his bedroom door. I have been awake since dawn flitting between duties of home and office. Drumming my fingers. Waiting and watching for his door to open. For water to pulse through drains. For his car to leave its parking space.

I am here now because there has been no movement whatsoever. My texts go unanswered and unread. He’s had all week to do nothing.

The temperature has reached 80 degrees outside and the relative humidity feels like a hundred and eighty percent, but my son’s room is frosty. I open the door wider and fan into the swampy air of the hallway.

He is tangled in a blanket, still asleep, one foot and one arm hanging akimbo from the bed.

I am playing the Good Cop today since his father strained his voice reading the riot act last night. But at the sight of him, I sense my good nature slipping.

I rap on the wall to rouse him.

“What’s the plan, Stan?”

“Huuuuh,” he answers slowly, lifting his head and raising himself on his elbows, causing me to repeat myself, louder, so he can hear me over the the roar of his ancient air conditioning unit.

WHAT. ARE. YOUR. PLANS. FOR. TODAY!?

“Same thing I do every day, Pinkie: Taking over the world ….”

But he recounts his list … he will fulfill the requirements of his college-level course for the day, he will apply for a job somewhere, and he will pull some weeds from the garden and mow the lawn if I ask him at least twice. 

It feels like the best deal I will get. And maybe it’s for the best.

I had read that the summer job – a right of passage for American teens – has been on a steady decline for decades. 

I know what you’re thinking: “Kid’s today!”  My husband, who is particularly prone to reciting all of the hardships of his not-so-misspent youth, is also particularly sensitive to the fears that without a summer job, our kids will never be able to learn responsibility, the importance of having a good work ethic or how to make change?

And so it happens that we join all of our ancestors in wringing hands and declaring the youth of today in their demographic’s entirety as being uniquely problematic.

We remember the summer jobs we had “in our day” – working in hot kitchens washing dishes, scraping and painting exterior walls – with some sense of nostalgia. Perhaps merely because it was the one time in our lives we had money that wasn’t already spent on living.

 However, perhaps we don’t realize that the teen workforce has been declining since our so-called salad days began. 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that figure has dropped from a rate of 60 percent in 1970 to 35 percent in 2016. And while it may seem dismal, it can be explained by the steady push toward expanding education. The summer job had essentially turned into summer learning, with many students even getting a jump on college credits before they even graduate high school. Privilege kids may have kept their jobs scooping ice cream at their local parlors but less advantaged ones found respite in increased access to school programs.

The shift has meant graduation rates rose to 90 percent in 2019 from where they were in 1975 hovering around 65 percent.

 Teen labor numbers are increasing, however. In recent years the rate has risen to nearly 38 percent of teens ages 16-19 engaged in paid summer employment. This year is on track to increase again, according to Pew Research. Economists surmise the increase has to do with stronger wages and the costs of higher education. 

Still, unemployment among teens is higher than for other demographics, potentially the result of teens competing with adults for the same entry-level jobs. This is something my son is happy to tell me as he rummages through the refrigerator for his brunch.

 “Your assignment should you choose to accept it, is written on the To Do List on the refrigerator door. 

And as he leans back with a mouthful of fruit to grab the list, I realize it’s probably going to work out for the best.

Sweating the small stuff

Why is everything such a chore? I ask myself this at least twice a day usually while I’m doing something exasperating like  … a chore. 

“How many half-lives does this thin line of dog hair and sand have?” I wonder aloud each time I pull the dustpan away from my successive and futile attempts at a clean sweep. 

Occasionally I consider all the labor-intensive solutions I might employ – a lint roller, a microfiber towel, luring the dog over and crossing my fingers that something will appeal to her discerning taste buds mixed within its granular composition.

I shrug my shoulders, figuring that even if I am successful, she’d turn my dust bowl into a mud puddle and then I’d have another task: to fill up a bucket and find the mop. 

A shine forms on my upper lip as I lean more heavily on the brush, flinging the finicky particles in the opposite direction of the pan toward the great outdoors, where they stubbornly catch on a threshold.

Droplets of perspiration reach their tipping points as I reach for the vacuum to end this battle once and for all. When I slip in my own sweaty puddles I realize I’d lost any economy I’d tried to endeavor through one simple task. 

As I fill the bucket with warm sudsy water, I wonder about how many steps I add each time I try to pare them down.

Like … after I’d dragged our luggage to the porch and tidied the kitchen

of our “summer rental,” my brain ticked off the box near the words “IDIOT CHECK” at the bottom of my “To Do” list. 

I would have surely noticed any personal items left there, such as pill bottles, toothbrushes, and charging cords as I was giving the countertop one last scrub. Certainly, I would have ferried them off to the porch to await their connecting passage to the car. 

This is why my brain told me as I dropped the last bag of trash into the receptacle on the curb and dusted my hands.

“Done! We are ready to go!”

Of course, I didn’t think about my historical failures of multitasking until the day after we’d arrived home and the watch on my wrist started to vibrate with its semi-weekly plea for recharging. 

As I pawed through the bags I had yet to unpack, I could only retrieve the memory of unplugging, coiling, and packing one charging cord, not two.

Ugggggh. 

“Do you want me to call and see if it’s there? Maybe they could mail it to us,” my husband said, trying to be helpful. 

He even threw himself under the “final checks” bus, assuring me HE had been the last one to leave, having dragged his eagle eyes over every surface looking for any absentminded abandonments. 

But I don’t want to put anyone out. 

I briefly consider using this as an excuse to purchase a new watch when the brain I couldn’t rely on to do the idiot check regains its senses.

“Search for a replacement cord, you dolt. Use the power Amazon gave you.”

So, just a few mouse clicks later I had purchased a replacement cord listed for less than it would have cost to ship the original to me by post, (and free at that because of the sleight of hand known as credit card points). 

But I also have the same feeling of perplexity of this chore. Why does this

seem too easy?

Out on our ice floes

There was no denying it; President Biden’s debate performance was less than ideal. He looked haggard and sounded flustered. His age was on full display.

His voice lacked the forceful clarity of his opponent, who, evidently, had unhinged his mouth and rambled off a whitewater-rapids’ force stream of lies capable of capsizing rational thought.

Faced with Trump’s tirade of

untruths, Biden came across as a boat adrift. This is understandable, but also frightening to those of us who remain “popular” voters worried about clean air, potable water, equality, and the ability to access any level of justice now that the Supreme Court has ruled our president is officially above the law.

The faces in the room with me that evening registered a gamut of reactions from confusion to horror. I nodded in what I thought was commiseration. 

I thought we understood the assignment. The threats we face as a nation are coming from within our own borders and perpetrated by people who call themselves patriots. People who want to see the chaos that ensues as they strip away basic human rights one by one. 

In recent years, a Supreme Court built by minority gamesmanship has wrested an unimaginable amount of power from the people and taken it for itself. This week it proved its supreme illegitimacy by officially rendering itself unto a Caesar.

Yet as the understanding that nothing we want for our children or our children’s children will survive a nation that splinters into hateful factions, we propose instead to sink the ship that is keeping us afloat. 

But I did not see equal rivals. 

I saw a good man with trouble extracting words become speechless after his opponent built a wall of lies out of thin air. 

And when it was over, I wasn’t prepared for the family to erupt into a figurative fistfight: a virtual blow-by-blow, slamming the only candidate standing between a convicted felon and the democracy he is hellbent on destroying. 

A man who, we all seem to discount, is currently employed in that exact role, and has enlisted a deep bench of qualified cabinet and staff members to serve in his administration: People who will be accountable to the nation rather than loyal to sycophants and grifters. 

It pains me to listen as the people I love turn on a good man who has dedicated his entire career to public service, for so little while a lying scoundrel remains protected and able to continue his deceit and treachery, turning the office of the presidency into a dangerous dictatorship.

We have to make some hard choices including reeling back power that has gone unchecked. But choosing Biden and the norms he represents shouldn’t be one of them. Standing up to authoritarians is the job at hand if we are to retrieve any of the ideals we set forth for ourselves as a nation. 

The cost of kindness certainly has risen in this new economy, but the cost of not standing together in this moment will morally bankrupt us all if it hasn’t already. 

It's never on the BINGO card

The three of us were about to head to Maine. It is a trip we’d taken so many times over the last seventeen years that I imagined, the kids, now that they could share the driving, would be able to find their way to the old homestead just as if they were hatchling turtles making their way to the sea - seemingly by instinct.  

Not that I would wager any serious money since the route has recently diverted through Boston for the collection of my firstborn. 

But generally, we know all there is to know about the extended family vacation to the point that we have created a game of BINGO from the possibilities:

How far past the expiration date is this cottage cheese?

DOH! The dog got skunked!

Has anyone seen Uncle Erik?

Will Dad wake himself with his snoring?

Most grocery store trips in one day!

DOH! Someone goes to the ER!

Who hid the loudest YATZEE cup?

Who’s turn to wash dishes?

Who’ll be the first to storm off?

Does anyone want to split a beer?

She’s probably clutching her hastily printed card as she waits on the stoop of her dorm for our arrival. She’s looking in the opposite direction as we pull up. She still doesn't see us as I ease the car into a prime space while traffic jockeys around us.

Her face lights up when she sees us and realizes she won’t have to schlepp her bags and an oversized pillow through the bus lane into the street and try to toss them and herself into the car as it's still moving.

I bet she didn’t have this on her BINGO card. 

“There’s an old myth that claims Boston streets were designed by the paths taken by cows and wild game,” the girl said as she hugged me at the curb. “Might have been a toddler flinging spaghetti at the walls as their mother made train sounds with the fork. … But good on you for finding a parking space. Mind if I drive?”

That was on my BINGO card.

She needed the practice. When she returns in two weeks, she will drive herself and keep the car for the commute to an internship inconveniently located at the tail end of one of the pasta strands outside of public transit range. 

Traffic had stopped on Storrow Drive and my daughter was delighted. “I know if Dad were here he’d be climbing the walls, but inching along like snails will only help my city-driving confidence. I feel like I won’t be so white-knuckly (and neither will you) if everyone has to drive slow on the Toobin Bridge.”

She wasn’t wrong … I hadn’t hit the imaginary brake on the passenger side once since she eased out from the curb (where we would later come to believe her brother’s wallet must have landed having slipped from his pocket as he obliged his sister’s request to move to the backseat and let me ride “shotgun.” 

He didn't have that on his BINGO card, and neither did I, even though his losing of wallets wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence. I had made sure all of his shorts had zippered pockets in hopes of breaking the pattern.

Which, I suppose happens naturally once you make the BINGO game official.

Because as much as we can guess the familiar quirks of our families, Maine itself seems to toss in the wildcards:

Someone mistakes Mom for “Mrs. Bush”

You will never guess which famous Scottish comedian moved in next door.

Hey? Is this car door handle yours?

And finally: 

“Sure, I’d love to split a beer!”

 

Maine wins again!

Heat wags

The first day of summer coincided with a heat wave that had undulated between the low 70s and the high 90s for three days. 

I hate this weather. I’ve made no secret of it. I wear long pants and long sleeves. I wear a hat and slather any exposed skin in sunscreen I call “liquid” clothes. If only someone made SPF 3000 … I’d buy it even though I know it would have the truth-in-advertizing veracity of the wide-legged pants I bought just because they fit AND they claimed to be a Size 2. 

I tried to put it out of my mind. I felt I was so successful in this endeavor – thanks to the miracle of the elderly, barely-functioning window units my husband has dutifully schlepped up and down the stairs, and in and out of windows, twice annually – that the wall of air that roared in startled me.

The dog, I believe, shares my ability to suspend disbelief. At least, that’s what I thought as she hopped up and down, barking at the door until I opened it and the stifling air rushed inside. 

For an instant, she froze. If the air was this hot, how hot would the patio stones be? Maybe her bladder could wait a little while longer. 

She waits for me to roll out the red beach towel - the one that has been hanging on the fence since last year. Its terry nap flattened and faded from being out in the elements all that time. Once unfurled, she trots across it to the grass underneath the yard’s only shade tree. I close the door behind her, but she watches me through the window. Staring me down the way she does when other people pet her … reminding me with her eyes this is how she likes it and maybe I should learn a little something. 

She doesn’t break our gaze as she relieves herself. This is not a walk. It doesn’t absolve me of the routine she’s come to expect under normal circumstances. The one in which she can take an inventory of the varmints multiplying between the property no matter the season.  Who am I to hinder her from chasing away the birds I’ve tried to identify through the songs they sing with the magic of Merlin.

As I wait, a survey of the birds of the northeast appear: American Robin, House Wren, Chimney Swift, Goldfinch, Red Tailed Hawk. Canada Goose? I marvel as they twitter away, seemingly unperturbed by the stickiness of the air. 

A cardinal lands near the terry carpet, she dips her head and drinks from a puddle I was beginning to think was a mirage. I don’t remember the last time it rained.

The dog stays right where she is. She doesn’t give chase.

It occurs to me that maybe she hasn’t seen the bird. She hasn’t taken her eyes off of me where I’m standing near the door.

She is not taking any chances. And I don’t test her. It wouldn’t be nice to hide from her as if she’d have to stay outside in this furnace of a world until I got my coffee.

Why are you drinking coffee in this heat, human? Are you crazy?

I am. But she is not. When she trots back inside she heads straight for her water bowl and, finding it wanting for something, trots over to the refrigerator and looks at me and the ice dispenser.

She takes two cubes and wags her tail.

Hail Mary, full of rage

Every time the phone rings, I say a little prayer. Not a literal prayer with words for gods or saints who may be listening from the heavens. But an earnest hope in the fleeting moment before I answer that whoever is calling has merely fair to middling news. 

It’s not as if I cross myself or genuflect, though it does feel like a brief encounter with the superstition that is the last remaining trace of my Catholic school faith. 

And while I believe that none of our problems are new, time and pressure have a way of making us feel as if they are not only novel but also daunting.

It also doesn’t help that the bombardment of news chickens falling from the media sky has us feeling like it’s all just too hard.

Of course, we know we have to do the hard things. We know there may even be some satisfaction with accomplishing the difficult tasks we procrastinate. But there seems to be no end to the hard things that could be easier.

Maybe we always felt this way, too: anxiety and self-doubt can lead us over the bridge to anger, setting a fire that will burn it behind us.

I was thinking about all of this recently as I held on the line for the next available representative, not entirely reassured that my call was, in fact, important to them.

Nor did I believe that if I left my number, and without losing my place, a customer service support staff would call me back.

Still … I had enough to do in the meantime that I left the call to faith.

Not long before this line, I stood in another line at the DMV, having already made a second trip to the location because I didn’t have the right signatures, slowly realizing I may have to make a third pilgrimage for another third-party affirmation buried in the small print.

 And as the pent-up air exited my mouth in an audible sigh, the most amazing thing happened. Someone else in that very same room lost their composure and started a tirade of screaming and swearing that was nowhere near as funny as The Dad in “A Christmas Story” shaking a wrench in the air after he walked into the kitchen – from trying to fix the “clunker” in the basement – to find at the Bumpus’s Turkey-stealing dogs – made it look.

This rage wasn’t a laughing matter. 

Yet, from the look on the face of the agent assisting me in my registration conundrum, it was something that happened all the time. Moreover, it was something she could readily expect from just about anyone, including me.

I suddenly regretted the sound of my body’s depressurization. 

I regretted not keeping a closer leash on my feelings, but I quickly hushed my instinct to bark and growl.

In that moment I could see the bigger picture and my small, privileged place in it. Eventually, this will all be solved one way or another, and fighting the person helping me wasn’t going to help either of us.

It is our lot in life, sometimes, to be inconvenienced. The only thing we can control is how we react when hardship, or customer service, calls back.

Grass is always greener

As a kid, I remember begging my father to let me mow the lawn. 

It was a chore that girl children didn’t usually pull from the roster of odd jobs via the blind selection of various length straws. 

My father initially resisted, not because he had any hardwired thoughts about women doing men’s work but because I was small and the machine was heavy and cumbersome. He didn’t want to risk an accident.

A part of me also suspected he enjoyed his weekly routine of swearing at the mower until it started; following it around the yard for the better part of an hour before the sunset on Friday evenings; and finally, celebrating his achievement with the silent company of our dog as he relaxed in a folding chair, drinking in a beer along with the fresh scent of cut grass. 

The year he finally dragged the old Montgomery Ward mower to the curb and ponied up for a cherry red Craftsman self-propelled model was the year he finally let me give lawn mowing a spin.

Of course, I had to read and regurgitate his forty-five-hour dissertation on equipment safety as it pertains to preemptive detritus checks, the correct angle to address various lawn elevations, slopes, and pitches, not to mention a 10-point OSHA level decree on the required clothing, footwear, and ear protection necessary for buzzing around our quarter-acre lot.

“Just close the bar on the handle and pull the …,” he said as he demonstrated. The machine drowned out his voice as it roared to life. Just let the bar go and it will stop the blade.”

When it was my turn to let her rip, he insisted I show him the technique no less than seven times before he parked himself in his chair on the lawn to supervise.

I can’t remember if this annoyed me, though I imagine it did. It was forever etched in my memory along with the great model train tutorial of 1975, wherein he had explained, in no small detail, how to operate the beloved Lionel set of his childhood. It astounded him that we had wandered off to watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom when he was finally ready to hand over the transformer.

“I’m ready,” I said as he stepped aside. I pulled the cord and started following the mower trying to match my father’s even lines. Tipping up the front wheels and turning on a dime, as I had seen him do hundreds of times, I plopped it down just shy of the fresh edge each time.

I think of those days often now … as I set out on the riding mower on what seems like the back forty in comparison.

I never matched his lawn barbering skills, though he never mentioned the zigs and zags, or the 

Now that we’ve upgraded our tools, I have taken the job back from my son, who toiled away for tufts of grass I left along the rows like little green orphans. 

years under the electric tether of a non-power assisted push mower (which needed three charges just to get through the front yard.

I never commented on the boy’s wiggly lines, either.

The grass is always a little greener when someone else is mowing.

Safe Places

 Bedtime was near. I could sense it without looking at my watch or considering the color of the sky outside the window. Despite the upbeat music and constant commotion of the movie, drowsiness weighed down on my eyelids and edited whole scenes right out of my consciousness. This is usually the point at which my husband – having sacrificed a movie with car chases and explosions for my wish for complicated characters and a storyline – will ask if I’m falling asleep.  

Which I will deny out of habit.

And next, he will quiz me on what the protagonist just said.

Of course, I will have no memory of what had transpired.

That’s when a barrelling noise rolled down the stairs and into the room.

This time it was my son who was confronting me, though with a sudden and curiously specific memory:

“Hey … remember when you found my silver bracelet in the hotel room last year sometime and you zipped it into one of your suitcases because you thought I would lose it?”

“Uhhhh. …”

“Do you have it?”

 

As my husband switches off the television and starts his nightly security checks, I pull myself off the couch and to my feet.

I am now fully awake. 

A different movie spools through my brain. I can see the flat-link chain in all the places he’s left it … counters, boxes, the edge of the sink. Some places are familiar … the guest bath, the kitchen, even a toolbox he made in Woodshop that lives in the mudroom and is mostly employed with corralling winter hats and gloves through all seasons. 

I remember the thought that went through my mind when I found his one beloved piece of jewelry dangling from the edge of a shelf in a bathroom nine members of our extended family shared on vacation.

“Hey … listen. I’m just going to put this in my *gherghfunklepperdu, OK. I don’t want you to lose it,”

What is a *gherghfunklepperdu you might wonder?

Well, let’s just say at the time I collected the chain, and slipped it into the *gherghfunklepperdu, it had a more precise name and location.

Half a year later, having combed over every inch of the three bags that were photographically proven to have been among my allotted luggage, and the numerous smaller bags that I pretend keep me organized, I can only conclude that a gherghfunklepperdu is what happens with the details our fixed bearings have gone fuzzy.

This isn’t the first time he’s lost this particular piece. Nor is the first time he’s allowed me to be its trustee, only to have it turn up just as missing.

Which doesn’t give him any more hope in having it turn up one day.

Maybe next time instead of putting stuff we don’t want to lose in a “safe place out of the way,” we could just put it in a place that we have to search more often … like something that has a name like The Important Paper File or a Toiletry Kit or Mom’s Wallet.”

“We’ll find it,” I reassure him, more out of hope than confidence.

My son, pragmatic as he is, shrugs his shoulders.

“Don’t lose sleep over it.”