Bill adjusted his feathers. “The thing is,” he said, “I am usually pretty good at this game. I tend to win when I play.”
Francis tried to nod while he slurped some of his root beer float, but the two activities were at odds with each other.
”I’m a strategy guy,” Bill continued. “I love thinking through a challenge, three, four — even five — steps down the line. Not everyone can do that. Not everyone WANTS to do that.”
Francis sighed. “Be that as it may,” he said, “I think we have a draw.”
Bill nodded. “I am afraid you’re right. Well, of course, you are also a very skilled chess player.”
”I do enjoy it,” Francis said. “What is wonderful about chess is that when you are playing, it seems like the most important thing in the world. Which makes it so, at least for a time. At least for me. One of the secrets of life is finding something that you love to do and which has very little practical value, and completely dedicating yourself to it.”
Bill shrugged. “I suppose so,” he said. “How are you at backgammon? I’m quite good at backgammon.”
Francis smiled. “I have no doubt. No doubt at all.”
First rule of envy: Don't poison your rival
Last summer, the cover of one of my favorite weekly magazines featured an illustration I instantly recognized as the work of a young artist I have met and admired. The drawing was so beautifully conceived and rendered that I'd have lingered over it even had I not known the artist. It was luscious. I wanted to own it, to eat it, to study the marks with a magnifying glass.
I also wanted to tear it to pieces.
It murdered my soul. Somehow the drawing had managed to be created without me. It had been drawn, truthfully, by someone with better chops than mine.
At times like these, my mind flies into melodramatic overdrive. Why do I even exist in this world if someone else gets to make beautiful work like that for a publication like this? Who is THAT ARTIST to be living MY DREAM? That's MY magazine!
Eeesh.
Envy.
I want to talk about envy.
I want to talk about envy because it matters in work, in family, in romance, and absolutely in politics. Have we any doubt that wars are perpetrated by powerful men feeling supremely envious and entitled, and having the means to act on those feelings?
Mostly, though, I want to talk about envy because it's the herpes virus of the human soul; it's almost impossible to kill but pretty simple to drive into remission if we can summon the will to do it. Over and over again, I need that reminder about the terrible Fourth Deadly Sin. Maybe you do, too. It's fraught and monstrous and hard to confess to, but sunshine is the disinfectant, right?
So let's start by admitting that envy is unseemly. Pride, greed, lust, gluttony, anger and sloth: Popular culture has neutralized those sins to the point where admitting to them can almost make us seem virtuous. We commonly regard these deficits as part of normal, human experience for which we are obligated to feel a little shame, but, you know — not too much. Have a little therapy, do a little 12-step, and get on with life.
Envy, though — oof. That one is still taboo. It's gross. Getting caught feeling envious is like being seen drunk-crying on the ladies room floor or berating a child in the frozen foods. It's classless and embarrassing. People who nod with empathy when you talk about your little problem with slot machines will flee like bats from a cave if you start spilling your soul about how YOU were the person who deserved that promotion and the company car, not that terrible Gen Z upstart who hits reply-all on every email.
Kudos, then, to Rick Springfield for tackling envy in "Jesse's Girl," for facing down the ugly and setting it to an up-tempo melody in D major. It hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, by the way, and some of you still have it on your play lists — don't lie.
Plenty of tunes have been written about romantic jealousy — losing one's love to another, or feeling fearful of that happening. But envy per se goes less remarked upon. It's an important distinction that the protagonist in "Jesse's Girl" never HAD Jesse's girl; he just wants her and thinks he deserves her. Springfield nailed that noxious brew of covetousness, entitlement and obsession that distinguishes envy from its bunny-boiling cousin, jealousy. (All right, all right — Glenn Close was probably both jealous AND envious in "Fatal Attraction.")
As someone who has spent an entire career doing more or less creative work, I suspect that envy might be a little more viral and transmissible among my people than in the general population. The arts are transcendental, but they supply many opportunities for artists to feel bad, starting with the Great Unfairness — the presence of others' superior gifts and technical skills and je ne sais quoi. That alone can nearly kill you, and especially so if you have good taste.
On top of that, add the harmful brooding some of us do about the opportunities afforded to other artists in the form of money, critical acclaim, security, fame and even the promise of being remembered after death.
All of this was exquisitely expressed in "Amadeus," the Peter Shaffer play and film that is nominally about Mozart but critically about the composer and teacher Antonio Salieri (1750-1825). A long-held myth asserted that Mozart died from being poisoned by Salieri — a theory based on facts not in evidence. Regardless, the idea made for a worthwhile exploration of envy run amok.
We witness Salieri admiring Mozart's music. He feels loving toward the work and fascinated by his rival even as he is tormented by anguish that he himself has not been the vessel for such music.
This is made all the worse because Salieri is reverent and devoted to God, while Mozart is crass and impulsive. That such sublime compositions should be made by that person is, to our fictionalized Salieri, an insufferable injustice. Masterfully portrayed by F. Murray Abraham, our film version of Salieri gives voice to the unfathomable mystery: "Why would God choose an obscene child to be His instrument?"
Because He just wasn't that into us? We will never know. Worse yet, it's none of our beeswax.
As an occasional tourist in the dystopia of envy, I love "Amadeus" for its exquisite articulation of these feelings. In his misery, our fictionalized Salieri leaps off the deep end, which allows us as the audience to sit in judgment of his bad acts even as we recognize his emotions in ourselves.
Have I simultaneously loved and loathed in the name of envy? I have, but have always stopped well short of ordering strychnine on Amazon. No, I brood alone, taking occasional breaks to hate myself for my own feelings.
Yet there's no virtue in wallowing in our wretchedness. When envy taps us on the shoulder, the point is to recognize it, then make a beeline for the antidotes.
As far as I have figured, the antidotes number only two.
The first is to practice radical gratitude. It won't be enough to quickly mutter "I'm grateful for my dog.” We really have to spend some time reflecting on the astonishing bounty of gifts we've been given, until thought becomes feeling. The emotion matters, because it is impossible to feel envious and grateful at the same time. We must crowd out the ugly with the beautiful.
The second antidote is to do the work. The work is whatever we do that brings our life value. If we're envious of other writers because we wish we had their skill or vision or accolades, the cure is to dig in and write what only we can write. Write more, write fiercely, write at unreasonable hours and hold ourselves to unreasonable standards of quality. If there's some skill another writer has that we covet, sure, figure it out, but don't dwell. Crack the how-did-she-do-that code (or not), then decide if it has a place in our toolbox.
The work makes envy slink into the wings.
If we're envious of others' money or lifestyle, then maybe the work is around shoring up our own financial wellbeing. Or maybe it's something else, I don't know. I just know that the presence of envy means there's stuff we need to be doing. We figure out what that stuff is, then do it.
The mischievous universe never runs out of ways to test our progress with these trials. Even before our little gratitude exercises and revamped work routines start to take hold, another magazine with someone else's beautiful drawing will be on its way to keep us humbly in touch with our envious side. We will, once again, feel outrage. Probably extra outrage. Whatever it is will seem worse than whatever we were asked to suffer the last time. It cannot be borne!
The strategy remains the same.
We take a deep breath. Play a little "Jesse's Girl." Dip into the gratitude well once more.
Then we put shoulder to grindstone and get back to work.
In hot pursuit of passion
Carl Bernstein was a teenage copy boy at The Washington Star when he was assigned to attend President John F. Kennedy's inaugural parade and supply "color" details for the newspaper's coverage of the event. With snow and freezing temperatures on the menu, Bernstein made sure to scout the parade route for the best vantage points. He thought through the potential challenges of getting from his home in Maryland to the parade on time the next day, and decided to camp out with his grandparents, who lived closer.
Then, the next day, this kid, who was an unenthusiastic student and occasional truant, made sure to show up on time and do his job for the Star like one of the pros.
Bernstein relates that experience in his engaging new memoir, Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom. As a former journalist who entered the field while newspapering was still slightly aglow from the memory of the glory of Watergate, I have loved tagging along on Bernstein's trip back into an old-style newsroom. More than the nostalgia, however, I feel drawn to Bernstein's descriptions of the passion he almost instantly felt when he stepped into the Star newsroom. It seems nothing short of magical.
Passion is so mysterious. Every so often, we're lucky enough to trip into an intellectual or creative pursuit and find ourselves unexpectedly consumed and ready to do that thing whenever possible. Sometimes it even becomes an obsession. I have lived a few years now, some of which were devoid of passion and many that have been filled to the brim with it, and I am still transfixed by the mystery of what makes certain people, places and activities exponentially more magnetic to us than others.
How, exactly, do these things take root and grow? Can you set out with purpose to find a passion or must it find you? Can you live a happy life if you don't have something that lights you up inside and takes you out of your own skin?
A while ago, I put a question about it on Facebook, and people were eager to write about the things they love to do. As you might expect, creativity made a fine showing. Many people get into the zone when they paint, write, sew, cook, stitch. My friend Ellen says she experiences an endorphin rush whenever she's about to start a new knitting project. My illustrator friend Jackie describes being swept away by the opera at age 12.
Many people profess a passion for music, and it was heartening to read that some are especially drawn to choral music. What they can't get enough of is, specifically, being part of the experience of many voices becoming one.
A few people identified their hobbies in a way that made me unsure these all were true passions, which I roughly define as "things for which we will eagerly forfeit sleep." But of course not all pleasurable endeavors own us the way a true passion does. Is the concept of "pastime" still a thing? Are there people who take up, say, golf simply to occupy hours not spent working?
Of special interest to me were comments from those who either hadn't yet found a passion or who had so many interests that they couldn't focus on a single thing. These experiences are common and, if memory serves, pretty distressing. As I mentioned on the Facebook thread, during my teen years, I witnessed my cousin's passion for horses and knew I wanted what she had. She took riding lessons, collected Breyer toy horses, and eventually got a horse of her own. I can still cringe at the memory of telling her, "You'll make me a horse nut yet!" — not because being a "horse nut" is terrible, but because the statement reeked of weird, desperate envy.
It is uncomfortable to want a passionate life -- to know that the possibility exists for a delicious relationship with a consuming endeavor, and yet not have that in our life.
So how do we get it?
Luck almost certainly plays a part, but we can help luck along, can't we? We can adopt the right attitude, I think, and make choices that invite the gods of passion to show face once in a while.
And, God help us, as in finding passionate romance, I think we need to try, yet not try too hard. Yearning is OK, but desperate yearning gets in the way. We need to look without staring. Or, in the immortal words of .38 Special, hold on loosely but don't let go.
Maybe we notice something that lights up our brains and hearts, so we give it a go. Lightly. If it catches our interest, we give it a little more. We do that for a while, long enough to let something small take root. Long enough to get past the honeymoon stage and have our first fight, because anything worth doing will inevitably become harder to do as we get into it and there will come a time when we think we hate it. That's when we know the chemistry is there. A little anger or frustration — my drawings look like they were made by drunk wombats — are not enough to keep us from returning to something that has sunk roots in our souls.
And if the chemistry isn't there, no sweat. Cut it loose. Sometimes the value of trying Italian or counted cross-stitch or even hunting (yikes!) is that we learn a bit about what we don't like. Fine. Mission accomplished. Something better awaits, we just have to look around again.
By the way, I believe it's also fine not to fret about any of this EVER, but especially if you are in the midst of raising young kids or battling illness.
Passion, like everything else, has its seasons, but it is content to wait on the sidelines while we are in the thick of something. It is neither predictable about its visits nor tethered to youth. It is willing to surprise us after we think we are no longer surprisable.
One of my favorite kinds of stories is Human Finds Love in Old Age. Who can resist two lonely widowed people who charge into a wild December romance? Who can turn away from the woman who starts deadlifting decades after menopause, or the nonagenarian who endeavors to climb 120 steps in his garden every day to raise money for charity, or even the former president who takes up portrait painting in his 60s?
We need not be all in all the time on everything (quite the contrary), but life feels wide open when we wake up eager to grab onto something beyond that first a cup of joe. Our hearts and minds deserve a thrill, don't you think?
For many of us, it is too late to start a youthful romance with a career, as Carl Bernstein did back in the Kennedy era. But I am almost certain that it's never too late to find a passion, or to be found by one — however it works. This is why we must keep digging in, diving deep and grooving on.
In praise of letting it go
Just before New Year's, a woman we will call Annette decided to respond to a letter of apology she received from a once-close friend, whose name was Not Darla. It seemed like a good time. Not-especially-great 2021 was ending and the please-let-it-be-better 2022 was about to start. Why not begin the year with clear air?
Annette took Not Darla's apology out of her briefcase, where it had been for a little while.
OK, for two years. Annette had been carrying around Not Darla's apology for two years, occasionally thinking about what to say in response, and then just allowing the letter to sit there, responded to many times in her mind but never on paper.
At any rate, Annette finally reread Not Darla's letter and spent a few days cogitating on what to say in return. Then she crafted a kind and heartfelt response and dropped it in the mail.
The incident that started all this took place many years before, and the gist was this: Not Darla experienced some terrible losses — the kind that can really unmoor a person and open the door for serious mental health symptoms.
Annette really loved Not Darla. She was the kind of anchor friend we expect will be there forever and always. But Not Darla had been saying some concerning things, and Annette woke up one day deeply worried that Not Darla might harm herself. When she drove to her home to try to check on her and persuade her to get help, Not Darla experienced the visit as an outrageous intrusion and betrayal. With a few sudden, harsh words, Not Darla brought the guillotine down on the friendship. It happened so fast. And it seemed so permanent.
Annette wrestled with the predictable emotions. There are usually feelings of anger and grief, then periods of I-don't-care-anymore. Sometimes the messier stuff just gives way to "I miss my friend" before swinging back to self-righteousness. How could someone we love suddenly decide we are unnecessary? This experience can be as hurtful within platonic friendships as it is in romantic relationships, and that describes Annette's feelings during the years after Not Darla slammed the door shut.
But then, years later, came Not Darla's letter of apology and deep regret. She did not ask for anything — certainly not a rekindling of the friendship — but she wanted Annette to know that she was truly sorry.
Annette tucked the letter in her briefcase, fully intending to write back, and as we know, eventually she did.
And now I have to stop to say that my entire interest in these events lies in the detail of Annette holding onto that letter for two years before answering it. She neither shoved it in a drawer to be forgotten nor tore it to shreds, nor even did what I am sure I'd have done: responded immediately, like a wanderer in the desert who finally happens on a jug of water. Annette carried Not Darla’s apology around for exactly the amount of time it needed to be carried. Until the world shifted. Until it became easier to respond than to bear the burden of silence.
Annett’s two-year wait might look like epic procrastination, but to me it's a master class in effective self-preservation.
We all have baggage. Every one of us has been injured. We are haunted by damage done to us and by the guilt from damage we've inflicted on others. We carry it and carry it and carry it until we're numb. We carry injury long after it would be simpler to say, "This is how I got hurt."
Or worse — we adopt the pain as our identity. Grief has delusions of grandeur. However large or small it is when it starts out, it wants to be everything. Grief wins when it turns into our favorite story about ourselves.
We know those people. I've been that person.
Anyway, what I loved about Annette in this incident was that she carried around Not Darla's letter until the moment she didn't want to carry it any longer. Then she wrote back to Not Darla, and set down her burden for good.
By the way, Not Darla wrote back again right away. Even after a two-year delay, she was happy to hear from Annette. Warmth and kindness were exchanged. Who knows, maybe the groundwork was laid for a renewal of the friendship. That isn't appropriate for every situation, but in this case it could be just right.
Life is a short trip across an ever-changing landscape. People can perpetrate injuries that seem, in the moment, absolutely unforgivable, the final straw, etceteraetcetera. Then, weirdly, time goes by and those so-called unforgivable transgressions grow smaller, and seem dumb and vague.
I've been known to nurse a grudge or two in my day. I'm trying to be better. At the very least, I want to remember that I am the one who decides how long to carry around a grievance. At any moment, I can loosen my grip and just let it drop.
Good News V. Good News Anxiety
One recent evening, I was bent over a big canvas in our dining room, which I have hijacked as a temporary art studio. A river of classic rock tumbled through my headphones. Occasionally, I’d get hit with an irresistibly funkalicious song — say, Stevie Wonder's Superstition — and I'd put down my brush and dare to dance, ever-so-briefly becoming a terrible spunky senior citizen from a psoriasis commercial. Then I'd take a swig of lukewarm instant decaf, return to the canvas, and resume the almost physically pleasurable act of turning color into story.
When my husband walked through the room, I told him, "This is it. This is my happy place."
And there it was, I'd gone and said it out loud: I'm happy.
Who does that? Who displays emotional red meat like that for the universe to sniff out and destroy? But I'll say it again.
I.
Am.
Happy.
I'll take it a step farther here, too, and explain that the painting is a project I've been working on for many, many months for the children's section of a public library. I've designed a mural-like image that stretches over multiple canvases, and — yes, I'm writing this out loud — it is going to be very cool (*brushes fake lint off shoulder). This is a dream commission.
Witness my risky behavior: talking about a good thing as if confident that it will continue to go well. Even Eeyore knew better than that.
The hosts of one of my favorite true-crime podcasts conclude each episode by instructing listeners, "Don't be an irony." Meaning, be careful. Don't be a true-crime enthusiast who becomes a true-crime victim. But long before I ever heard The Murder Squad, I was hip to the dangers of becoming an irony. Imagining the potential ironic turn in almost any suspiciously positive situation was as easy as breathing. This is part and parcel of what I call Good News Anxiety: the crippling nervousness that accompanies a sudden wonderful turn of events, preventing one from actually enjoying the moment. (Turns out I am not the only weirdo to experience Good News Anxiety.)
When I first learned of the traditional Jewish tendency not to have a baby shower before the baby was born, my fearful little rabbit heart felt vindicated. Here was a wise approach to almost any positive situation in progress. To mitigate the possibility of inviting an ironically negative turn, Step One is always "don't talk about the good thing."
And yet here I am, tempting the gods, flagrantly chirping my happiness and telling you that I am pregnant with paintings. Who knows, perhaps two years of watching the world catch fire have eroded good sense.
I'm tired of hauling around my big suitcases filled with scary stories. Perhaps it's possible to reach a point in life where superstition is just a song with an insanely danceable riff. Maybe we should just actually, ebulliently meet happy news with happiness.
Boogie on, friends.
The owls are getting ready
New year, first day, and -- uh-oh, here it comes. Time to box up all that magic we conjured for the holidays. Our dreams for the coming year stand in sharp relief, but it's time to square our shoulders to face the lesser enchantments: taxes, temperance, stacks of bills.
In January in my home state of Ohio, we shudder beneath thousand-pound cinderblock skies. The sun enters a period of mere myth. We can only imagine that it blazes somewhere over meadows of leaping unicorns. Perhaps it does not love us anymore.
This dullness takes place at exactly the time when there doesn't seem like a single thing to look forward to on the calendar, unless you care about the Super Bowl. I forget, which kind of comfort is that -- cold or none?
Back when our kids were young, my husband would helpfully haul out a German saying on the night before they returned to school after vacation. Carlo's immigrant parents had chirped the words to him when he was a boy: "Morgen fängt das strenge leben an." Tomorrow the strict life begins.
Oh, hooray.
We haven't yet had our first life-interrupting blizzard of the winter, but it's just a matter of time, and there is always more than one. Come the weeks and months of street slush spattered black by exhaust. Comes the dog trembling on her haunches as she does her shivery business in the snow. Comes the groaning furnace.
Let us not even discuss the virus. For once.
A good Buddhist might advise us simply to be with the gray, to sit with the blah, and there is merit in that approach. Those of us in regions that experience four distinct seasons ought to come to terms with the quiet purpose of winter, during which our work can feel dreary and nature's rewards can seem scant. Winter is for slumber. Hibernation. A necessary rest that enables spring's crazy, jubilant return.
But since I am not a Buddhist, good or otherwise, I can't help but consider a few morsels of hope from the natural world. I like to think about these on days when I am convinced that winter -- as both a season and a mindset -- will last for all time.
First, the light.
In Cleveland, sunlight will increase by about 46 minutes between now and the end of this month, and that holds for most places. It's a miracle. Most of the extra light will be added at day's end. True, in cloud-covered regions such as ours, extra sunlight in winter feels a tad theoretical. We move from slag heap to old hubcap. Still, 7pm will stop feeling like midnight, and I call that progress.
Second, consider sunlight on snow.
Years ago, our friend Spike instigated a group hike around Holden Arboretum on a frigid winter day when the sun paid an uncharacteristic visit and turned the blanketing snow into to a twinkle-lit fairyland. All seasons can be showoffs. Sunlight on snow is winter's response to summer's perfect beach day, and we are meant to luxuriate in the magic, because it will be as fleeting as 82-degrees-and-low-humidity.
Third, the Great Horned Owls are planning babies.
Right now, while you are perhaps sipping a hot beverage and weighing the pros and cons of discarding the cookies, a pair of Great Horned Owls is finding some other birds' old nests, or rehabbing a tree hollow, and getting ready to welcome the first bird babies of the year by February or early March.
GHOs are the first in our area to breed. Sure, this is an Ohio-centric fact, but something like it is true wherever you are. Animals understand that there is no such thing as the never-ending winter. When you lose your faith, just remember that something with feathers is nearby, and it is preparing for spring with a vengeance -- as if warmer, brighter days will be here in the blink of an eye.
Because they will.
So that’s what I’ve got from nature right now, but I’m certain it holds other hints of optimism for us. I plan to find more and report back, because the Super Bowl — well, it just isn’t enough.
Happy New Year, friends. It might seem too extravagant to hope that 2022 will be blessed and bright, but let's be brave and hope so anyway.
Christmas Enough
A physical therapist I'd never met dug her fingers into the ultra-stiff tissue of my upper back last week and asked "So, are you done with your Christmas shopping?"
I said no and elected not to mention that I hadn't started.
Didn't really matter, though. She lit into a breathless soliloquy about her own progress: the electronics she had and had not purchased for her kids, the workbench she had wanted her husband to make for their son but that hadn't yet materialized, the gift for her mother-in-law ("She likes Kohl's"), and so on. Hers was gale-force list making, an unbidden, virtuoso performance of Christmas anxiety. I could practically taste the torn paper and lost scissors.
This elicited a few emotions for me. First was annoyance, because I would have preferred silence. Second came sympathy, because I remember the weeks of high blood pressure that attended the performance of holidays when my kids were young. I wouldn't suggest that this is the sole purview of mothers, but in general I believe we traditionally take on much of the burden.
I felt revulsion, too, at the therapist's lack of self-awareness. She was bathing naked in rabid consumerism in front of a total stranger. What can I say? The mirror can be a cruel critic. Anyway, I was relieved when it was finally time to stand up and fail at raising my muscle-withered left arm.
This all happened on the heels of a conversation with one of my grown daughters, in which we laughed over the neurotic holiday ritual we share to this day. After all the gifts have supposedly been purchased, we each start to worry that we have failed in our selections. Will she like the cologne? Will he be disappointed by the book? We sneak out for just a few more items -- the "hedge" gifts, if you will, there to mitigate disappointment in case we didn't hit a homerun.
In the absence of perfection, perhaps quantity will help. Or so suggests the Christmas brain.
Good grief. Isn't it Let's-Stop-Making-Ourselves-Crazy O'Clock yet?
Decades ago, I read an interview in which actress Candace Bergen explained that she and her husband gave their daughter Chloe but a single Christmas gift each year. This was one of the methods they used to rein in the excesses of their lives of wealth and privilege.
I longed to replicate the elegance of that solution.
Think of it: One well-chosen gift per person. No hedges or apologies. Just a token of appreciation, a nod toward one's love for the recipient. Didn't quite dazzle them this time? Oh well. With luck, there's another birthday or holiday around the corner. Meanwhile, every day we ought to be finding deeper ways to let them know we love them.
For many of us, making Christmas small is nothing short of a radical act. It may ask us to violate our traditions and our fantasies of the ideal holiday. It demands that we put up a fence between ourselves and the river of images and jingles urging us to buy. It requires us to acknowledge that wanting to delight our loved ones with the modern equivalent of frankincense and myrrh is separate from achieving that goal.
Yet life and gifts and love go on.
This year, I'm trying to pare things back. I'll likely never achieve the Full Candace, and who knows -- maybe even Candace herself doesn't live by that rule anymore. But I think I'm on course for crazy-free moderation. I am trying to be peaceful and thoughtful in gift selection, obviously. The thought still counts.
But presents or no presents, I am choosing to believe that my loved ones understand that we are all gifts to each other. And I trust that this will be Christmas enough.
Joy Sneaked In
Sometime during the first act of Brecksville Theater's fall staging of "The Sound of Music," the performer playing Maria broke into "The Lonely Goatherd," a tune that always hits my ear as aggressively playful. It's unlistenable, really. But this singer's version was different. Her voice was so clear, each yodeling note so perfectly formed and pitched, that for the first time ever, I was sad for the song to end.
We had gone to the show to see our friend Jackie in her impish performance as Sister Margaretta, and while we had expected the evening to be pleasant, what we got was an almost indescribable delight. It wasn't just the familiar von Trapp Family story, or the warm spirit of singing nuns. It was the gathering -- the convening of actors and their audience of parents and toddlers, as well as folks whose hips and eyesight had long ago begun The Great Betrayal.
It was such a reaffirmation of community, such a pact among us. Here, say the performers: We offer you our best version of a piece of musical theater you know so well. Here, say the theater goers: Have our ears and our eyes and irreplaceable time. We trust you'll use them well.
Everyone agreed to have a good time together in this exchange of story and music, and so we did. It made me weepy. Midway through, it dawned on me that this emotion has been showing up more often these days -- and that it has been largely absent since March 2020.
By now, most of us know a few people who say, almost guiltily, that their personal experience of the pandemic has been fine. Their lives have proceeded pretty much on track or even gotten better in unexpected ways.
More common, I think, is an experience of COVID-induced ennui or "languishing," as it's been called. You can find a number of definitions of the feeling, but COVID ennui reminds me of the ocular migraines I used to get, which partially impaired my sight. My field of vision would be shot through with blank spots. They weren't dark nor light nor blurry. They were simply absent.
That's how much of COVID has felt to me, especially in the months before the vaccines became available. Not depressing, exactly. Just benumbed. When I think back on 2020, what I remember most are endless days on the couch, working on COVID-related communications for my job, followed by infinite evenings on another couch, watching news reports that tracked the unfolding disaster. Occasionally, I'd be hit by a meteor of panic or an adrenalin surge of anxiety. The morning often brought a few moments of despair, when my brain reminded its waking self that -- Oh, pandemic -- the world was still cloaked in gray.
I am lucky to be one of those people who, it turns out, likes being with the person I live with. Still, the general social isolation was soul-killing. So much waiting for the return of ordinary pleasures. So much worry, deep down, that they might be gone for good.
But joy sneaks back.
The night before "The Sound of Music," we visited an art gallery and saw astonishing new paintings by a friend in the Cleveland scene. Food for the soul. We saw lots of masks and (this was before news of the COVID variant Omicron) quite a few naked smiles. People swapped vaccine booster-status reports. We caught up on puppies, babies and creative projects. Anxiety lingered in the corners -- should we be out? Can we stay healthy? This feels so warmly familiar, but is it safe?
But reclamation was about, too. Each of us had calculated the odds and decided that gathering in the name of art and community, as safely as we could manage, was finally a risk worth taking.
All along during the pandemic, the artists have been there. The writers and painters and singers have been making their work and doing their best to help us to escape the languishing. They have been like guardian angels -- or like doctors and nurses, come to think of it. Yes, I Believe in Science, but also I Believe in Art.
Whatever you've gone through, and however you're doing, I hope things are starting to feel easier. I hope that, like me, you are reclaiming paused social connections in whatever way you need and to whatever degree feels safe for you.
And if you have felt disconnected from joy, I hope it starts to sneak back soon.
Permission to Do Cool Things
One day during my early years as a wee, neurotic, overthinker-in-training, I decided to take on the problem of death.
I was about 8.
I was specifically interested in my own death, and when it was likely to arrive. In the absence of a suitable calculator for such an unfathomable problem, I rigged up a theory. I would live until I had accumulated all of life's important lessons, perhaps a few weeks longer.
Then -- poof -- I would die. Peacefully, in my sleep.
This was an immensely satisfying notion. All in one swoop, it suggested purpose for life itself and assured me that the end was far, far away, because the world was so full of confounding mysteries and it would take a very long time to unravel them.
I also figured that by the time I HAD learned everything, I might feel bored by the planet and ready to move on.
Wisdom. Longevity. Then ready-to-go. Perfect.
Today I sit here with a bad shoulder, aware of my overlong hair giving me a kind of hippie-crone cast. I feel grateful for the years I've enjoyed so far. I feel semi-wise and not at all ready to go, even on evenings when TV news does a special report on the melting of the ice cap. Most days I feel like I am a bunch of ages simultaneously, including but not limited to: 8, 15, 25 and 60.
As for accumulated knowledge, well -- it just hasn't worked as I had expected. Sure, if we are even half-sentient, we all gain some skills and street smarts along the way. We get a grip on how we want to spend our time, how to treat each other, and that credit cards are not actually free money.
Yet I am lesson-resistant on some topics, and the one I've been fixating on lately is the idea of permission. All my life, I have watched people I admire (and many I don't) decline to seek permission or approval for what they want to do. On balance it all seems to work out for them. Sometimes, notoriously so. (Please refer to whatever mental list you keep of all the people who should be indicted but are instead grotesquely wealthy.)
To borrow a colleague's line, this has really frosted my flakes for most of my life. On this topic, I have remained the Catholic 8-year-old who, having learned the rules, wants everyone to follow them.
Still, I cannot help but notice that glorious things also happen for good, creative people who decide not to sit at the empty intersection waiting for the light to turn green. And where art is concerned, it's undeniable: the most creative people -- the ones who, regardless of how famous they are, make work with real sticking power -- stopped waiting for permission a long time ago. They don't wait for an agent or publisher to tell them to go. They may hope to be discovered and earn riches or fame, but they concern themselves primarily and fiercely with the creative process.
My husband and I just watched The Sparks Brothers, a documentary about Ron and Russell Mael, the pop duo behind the 70s-born band Sparks. It's a blast for a certain kind of viewer, and I came away with such admiration for the brothers' relentless focus on making their weird work, apart from whether it would ever earn them household name status. (It hasn't.) They have lived purpose-built lives in their pink jackets and dubious mustaches. Along the way, they have spread joy. There seems to have been no permission-seeking component to any of it.
As I face the next 60 years of my mystery-unraveling, wisdom-seeking existence here on Earth, that is the spirit I hope to bring. The Catholic 8-year-old will always live inside me and remain attached to a belief in the need for rules and order. There are times when asking for permission is exactly the right thing to do.
But inside, too, is a grownup who is scanning the crossroads under the red light.
All clear.
I say we gun it.
Doughnuts and your politics are none of my business
It was 78 and sunny when I set out to traverse the winding roads that lead to the arboretum. The familiar drive takes me by an old-time roadside tavern and at least one split-rail fence behind which horses graze. I looked forward to playing in the light of newborn autumn. Such is my idea of a perfect day.
Except.
Except this time, the rural landscapes along my way were littered with campaign signs. The farther I got into the country, the more advertising I saw for the candidate I deem most likely to murder our democracy. (Use your imagination.)
I drove. I stewed. I passed a quaint antiques store I had shopped at decades ago, noticed a sign in the front yard, and muttered two uncharitable syllables. I tried to pull myself back to the blessing of a Saturday unburdened by obligations. Then I'd pass three lots in a row that trumpeted loyalty to a despot, and my mind would slip into wondering: Are these people evil or just stupid?
Then I'd scold myself because I knew better. It is often--maybe even usually--neither of those. It is maddeningly more complex. I'd think briefly about how the other side asks the same questions about OUR signs.
After about five miles, tension gripped my shoulders. I was drunk on bitterness, not just about these property owners' voting intentions, but because they were ruining my perfect autumn drive. I regarded the signs as trash illegally dumped on my personal vistas. Then came the self-recriminations for THAT line of thinking.
It was a relief to arrive at the arboretum. I swished through a field of sparkling wildflowers and got buzzed by dragonflies. I went crazy with a new phone app that uses photo uploads to identify plants. I drew a little forest of mushrooms in my sketchbook, and I figured out a different way to use lines to describe a tree in full leaf.
I forgot all about the campaign signs until three hours later, when I was back on the road and headed for home. But this time, fully chillaxed by nature, I was determined to ignore the red-white-and-blue bluster. There was no way to avoid SEEING the signs if I wanted to drive without crashing, but could I decide not to brood?
For months now, I've been hot on the trail of the secrets to staying sane in crazy times. Spoiler: My list is short and semi-effectual at best.
But good God, remember January 2017?! Weeks of keening and wailing on social media by people devasted about the results of the election. This describes most of my friends. This describes me. We posted an avalanche of reporting and editorials, of women's march photos and ironic memes. We made daily revisions to the hypocrisy report card of the new guy and his enablers until, frankly, it became impossible to keep up.
For a while, hyper-vigilance seemed the obvious answer to what ailed the nation. Many of us deduced that if we were loud enough, we might do a hard reboot on the country. Help our neighbors see the light. Return the place to previous levels of dysfunction, which now looked like heaven.
You can judge whether you think the loud-large-and-obsessive approach has made things better. It sure has been hard on the spirit.
Somewhere along the line, I started to see my Facebook cris de coeur as worse than useless. The minute I would share my outrage, the comments would tumble in, echoing and amplifying my anger. It was intellectually satisfying but emotionally wearing. Every post became the starter dough for chagrin that blew up into a fat loaf of despair.
I've been trying to do better at taking care of my brain these days. I give myself about a C-minus for these efforts, although reading and sharing less about politics has been helpful. Journalists, God love them, are front-line workers for our republic. I'm beyond glad that they're on the job. Yet in the name of self-preservation, I now turn away from much of their good work.
It's useful to know one's limits.
More than two years ago, I dramatically changed the way I eat. The program I follow was built for people whose brains are wired for food dependency. For us, it's easier to eat no sugar than to eat it in moderation, so we don't eat sugar. You might think that, deprived of sweets, I would dwell on, say, all the doughnuts that I am no longer "allowed" to eat. The opposite is true. I never think about doughnuts. If I'm in a space with a box of doughnuts, I dispassionately look away.
I can't do anything about doughnuts. Doughnuts are none of my business.
And neither are the people who put up signs to support the enemy. If they are evil, I can't save them. If they're stupid, I can't educate them. If they are people who simply put the world together differently than I do, then, with four years of my best thinking behind me, I can't understand them—nor do they care. They don't need or want my understanding. This I know.
So on the drive back from the arboretum, I decided those signs can be like doughnuts. Or, maybe more to the point, they can be like roadkill. I might see the poor raccoon, but I don't have to cogitate on why he couldn't drag his sweet striped tail across the street intact. No need to dwell.
So there it is, today's sanity hack, such as it is. My vote in November? That's all of my business. In the meantime, I'm going to do my best to keep my eyes turned to sunny skies.
Otto is dead, but all else is wide awake
The first astonishing things I learned about the common octopus is how smart and social it can be. (Perhaps you’ve seen the video of one opening a lidded jar from the inside.) The next surprise was that it doesn’t live all that long—maybe a year or two.
When I stopped at the Wetlands Institute this year during our annual trip to Stone Harbor, New Jersey, I hoped to see Otto, the small octopus that was part of the organization’s teaching collection when we visited last year. He had danced around the glass for visitors who came to squint into his aquarium. He would contract into a ball, stretch and unfurl his arms, and dart through the water to follow us as we circled the glass. This pod-human interaction was curiously satisfying, like an unsolvable puzzle that I couldn’t keep from trying to work out anyway.
Alas, Otto has since transitioned to another plane, perhaps one where he’ll have 10 appendages instead of eight, or perhaps none.
The Wetlands celebrates the wild Atlantic coast and works to conserve the saltwater marsh and its residents. As a tourist destination, the institute could seem sort of barren if you were hoping for something like a zoo experience. But I go every year, mostly because of the elevated walkway they built out over the marsh—just high enough that the wind blows a little more noisily. High enough to keep the feet dry while I watch kayakers through water flanked by cordgrass.
Marsh, like the sea it holds hands with, is both constant and variable. Terrapin turtles, horseshoe crabs, nesting osprey, and egrets are among its little miracles. Look down into the shallow water and watch a blue crab scuttle sideways. Along the muddy edges of the water, fiddler crabs scurry in and out of their burrows, the males hauling their one oversized front claw like a bowling trophy they can’t put down. Red-winged blackbirds tweet and laughing gulls cackle. The longer you look out over the land and estuaries, the more aware you become of all the life buzzing underfoot, under water, and in the air.
So Otto was dead, but all else was busily alive and pursuing tactics to stay that way. Sometimes I mourn how long it took me to move from the nature-fearing mindset of my suburban youth to this current space of wonder. I’m just a hair wiser, but I feel wide-eyed with curiosity. Look at this place, this planet. Just look at it.
The Chance Mama Cass Never Had
If you ever wondered whether it’s possible to eat a Cobb salad in the car with your hands while you’re driving, rest assured that it is—although I don’t recommend it if there’s dressing on it. Honestly, it’s just generally a bad idea. But if you are the sort of person who can eat a bagel while you’re doing 65 on I-90, the driving salad is within reach.
While we’re on the topic, it is also possible to eat a salad with no dressing. To drink coffee without cream. To consume oatmeal straight up and almost forget that you used to regard it as a vehicle for brown sugar. I don’t necessarily recommend these things, either, but this is what I’ve been doing lately.
Six months ago, I stopped eating anything with added sugar or sweeteners, everything made with any kind of flour, and any food that wasn’t part of a meal. The chase: no honey, no stevia, no aspartame, no whole-wheat muffins, no “gluten-free” bread or whole-grain pasta, no snacks.
I eat a lot of vegetables, a little bit of fruit, a tiny bit of fat, and pretty much any kind of protein, animal or plant-based. Protein is a whole other kind of complicated, so don’t get me started on that one. Suffice it to say that the way I have been eating is the way I should eat forevermore. That is too scary to consider. Tragically, it is also too scary NOT to consider. For six months, I’ve been enjoying being off the queasy Tilt-a-Whirl of food addiction (for lack of a better word), so I don’t see much upside to overthinking the future. For the moment, I am happyish, which is probably as good as it gets for people who never met a quart of ice cream that couldn’t be consumed in one sitting.
It’s pretty bold to presume that anyone cares what I eat, and yet two impulses nudge me to share. One is that I want to apologize for having become One of Those People. Hadn’t you been looking forward to trying out that new crème brulee recipe? And yet only AFTER you invite me to dinner do I mention that oh, by the way, I’m just another snowflake shunning the fun foods.
I know. I’m sorry.
The second reason I’m writing this is that in my months of abstinence, I’ve discovered that many of us actually are secretly but deeply invested in what other people eat. In our family, when one of the hardy, big-appetite women quickly devours dinner, the man of the house (a very thin person and moderate eater) sometimes observes, “Wow! You were HUNGRY!” — not altogether without judgment. This is the American table writ small.
And maybe it’s not even peculiar to Americans. Perhaps it is just human nature to watch each other across the trough and assess, silently or out loud: Wow, you eat A LOT. Or: Gee, you haven’t eaten A THING. Or: Why are you vegan? Or: How can you eat a formerly living animal? Or: Do you know how many calories are in that? I used to attend a big party where the hostess put out a giant spread then stood in the corner being thin. I literally never saw her take a bite. What was up with THAT?
Darwin could explain why we’re wired to judge each other’s food; I’m just here to say it happens. I’d like to be judged based on accurate information.
I was in single digits when I first felt my brain light up at the thought of a cookie. Ten when I knew I was the only kid who just wanted to scramble out of the water for the snack-bar pizza. Thirteen when Mama Cass Elliot suffered the supreme indignity of dying while fat and allowing a sloppy medical examiner to suggest (erroneously) that she choked on a ham sandwich.
I was fourteen when people started to spout observations about my weight and twenty-three when I got very thin for a minute with our helpful friends, coffee and cigarettes. I was everything-years-old when I reserved a solid ten percent of my energy for envying women who seemed effortlessly thin.
Even the nice ones. Even Mary Tyler Moore.
At every possible age, I loathed the brain that couldn’t find the shutoff valve and the body that made my weakness of character so glaringly obvious to the casual observer.
Then I was fiftysomething. I decided to see what happened if I completely ceased consuming certain things that other people can eat without losing their minds. The bad news: It works. The good news: It works. I have located the shutoff valve, and it is, sadly, not in the kitchen.
Nixing trigger foods stops me from craving more trigger foods. It has radically reduced the incidence of food- and weight-based self-criticism, though whole meadows bloom with other types of neurosis. I skip merrily through them all multiple times a week, but I do it in smaller pants and my knees don’t ache as much.
The even-better news is that neuroscience has been making significant strides in our understanding of how food affects the brain—or, more specifically, how different foods affect different brains differently. We understand now how sugar can be like alcohol can be like gambling can be like shopping. We know more about how far willpower can take us and how to avoid wasting it on the wrong things.
In the years preceding Cass Elliot’s death, our best advice for fat women was to stop being sexually repugnant gluttons and drink more Tab. She never had a chance.
One more thing is worth mentioning. There may be an itty-bitty minority of people who are overweight because they’re too lazy to do better for themselves, but fat really does not equal character. This cuts in both directions. In my six-months-to-date experiment of taking my brain off refined carbs, a few friends have kindly complimented my self-discipline. It’s not modesty when I say that I’m not all that self-disciplined. I’m just finally figuring out the chemistry. More to come, I’m sure.
Wish me luck.
Barn owls and art history
"Read something irrelevant every day." So said the late Charles Bergengren, a wild and unforgettable art history teacher experienced by many students of a certain era at the Cleveland Institute of Art. It was one of his best pieces of advice. I try to keep it top of mind, but of course so many of us are maddeningly determined to focus on two things: that which is aggressively useful and that which is Facebook.
Anyway, yesterday I was expecting to present a one-eyed barn owl at a park program. There I was, freshly refreshed on all my cool barn owl facts (including the story of why the owl has just the one eye), when the weather conspired to cancel the program. I had nowhere to go but my sketchbook. Which meant I did yet more research, which included watching a video by a thoroughly pleasant British man who explained how to build a nest box for barn owls. You may be wondering why we would need to build a box for an owl. Are these bird parents so dimwitted that they can't do the first thing for their their children?
Strictly speaking, barn owls can find their own tree cavities and such for nesting, but they love dry, sheltered places, such as barn rafters, near open fields, and—well, there aren't as many of those these days. In Ohio, the department of natural resources teams up with volunteers to install boxes, and monitor chicks, in spaces conducive to barn owl life. This is helping barn owl populations, and also helping us count them. There were 73 known barn owl nests in Ohio in 2017.
As for the boxes: The difference between smart design and poor design can be the difference between life and death for barn owl chicks. About 75 percent of barn owls don't make it to their first birthday, so we want to be mindful of not doing things that will hasten their death, such as building a next box that encourages them to fall out of the box before they can fly.
The point is (yes! There's a point!) I won't be building a barn owl box because I don't live near open farmland or meadow. But I feel better knowing that if the question were to arise, I could at least advise someone on the proper design, and maybe run to Home Depot for supplies. I'd like to think that Charlie would be proud of me.
By the way, the owl has just the one eye because she was injured in the nest by one of her siblings. We can always fix the box design. Family relations are more complicated.
What It Takes to be Seven (Again)
Here’s what it takes to be 7 and 11 and 18 and 25 and 37 and on and on, all at the same time; to be none of those ages and all of them; to be just the soul you were at any age, experiencing the world with senses only and no nonsense; to be curious with no Google: Go outside to a quiet place with trees.
That’s it.
The Church of Showing Up
When I was about eleven, I noticed that my best friend’s mother kneeled in the pew each Sunday instead of queuing up for Holy Communion with the other parishioners. Her first husband had dropped dead years before, leaving her a single mother with four kids. Her second husband was a divorced non-Catholic, so they had been unable to marry in the church. She thus was forbidden from receiving the sacrament of Communion, although she was expected to show up each week. And kneel in shame.
Even as a kid, I understood that church dogma was at odds with its purported raison d’etre. Still, it took three more decades of struggle before I could peacefully relinquish Catholicism. Today, about the nicest thing I can say about the church as an entity is that it is unworthy of its followers.
But now it’s the Christmas season, and, like many former Catholics, I feel nostalgic for a version of the church that never existed. I carry around the indelible imprint of the Apostle’s Creed as well as a longing for a regular, reverent, and ritual-rich place of communion with seekers led by people of wisdom. In addition, my better church would contain:
No petty politics.
No tithing.
No committees.
No proselytizing.
No shaming.
No faith-killing hypocrisy.
Meanwhile, I’m in the wind. My little hothouse flower of a soul is unlikely ever to find what it seeks in organized religion, yet the promise of the first Christmas still resonates with possibility. I’ve given up on the “organized,” but not on faith.
Spiritual homelessness aside, I hold myself accountable for trying to figure out what it means to be good. I believe it’s solid practice to show up somewhere regularly to say “what a beautiful place this is” and “please give me a hand, will you?” and “God, forgive me for being such an ass.”
Sometimes that “somewhere” is on a pedestrian path in the park. Sometimes it’s a red light on Mayfield Road behind a bumper with a hippie “co-exist” sticker.
Then, too, we need to do well by one other. We should see each other more often—truly. Face to face, palm to palm, and with open and curious hearts. The lazy, introverted part of me would vote almost every time to stay home and watch Law & Order reruns. But the clock is ticking, our time together is short, and there may be ways we can feed each other, right? OK. I’m in. (Probably.)
So for now, for me, that's church. The Church of Doing My Best to Show Up.
I’m a newcomer. None of the prayers are automatic, none of the songs are completely familiar. But I'm going to try to sing along just the same.
The 37 Stages of Making a Drawing
1) I have a half-baked idea for a drawing.
2) I will bake it!
3) I am drawing. It has possibilities!
4) Still drawing. Something kind of cool is happening but I will probably ruin it.
5) I think it needs a LOT there, but that might ruin it.
6) Remember the successful artist who reminded me that I'm not practicing brain surgery? What is the consequence of a bad drawing? No one dies!
7) The consequence is I could ruin it; despair.
8) Well, hell, I'm going to make it really dark there anyway. Damn the torpedoes!
9) Hey, that worked. (Flap arms to air out flop sweat.)
10) Keep going, though.
11) I'd be better with better supplies. (Note to self: Trip to the art supplies store this weekend.)
12) Is it done? I think it's done.
13) It is absolutely NOT done, for cryin' out loud. Draw more.
14) NOW is it done?
15) It could be done-ish.
16) Looks pretty good. I'll show spouse.
17) Spouse loves! Says it's done!
18) Hmmn. Spouse is not an artist. Approval does not count.
19) But do I love it?
20) It's literally the best thing I've ever done. Not just drawing. IN. MY. LIFE.
21) I'll post it to social media.
22) (20 minutes later) I wonder how it looks on my phone?
23) Looks pri-tee good! I am a GENIUS! I cannot stand my bad self! I am too sexy for my pencils! Hahahah.
24) (90 minutes later) Wonder how it looks now that I haven't looked at it in 90 minutes?
25) Looks good! Well, looks OK. I probably should have refined that spot.
26) (2.5 hours later) I wonder how it looks now. (Pause to look.) God, it's such a cliche. It's a Me Cliche. It looks like everything else I have every done. Wrong. It looks like everything I have done wrong. Not just in art, but in my life. It looks like a big suitcase filled with mistakes and existential failure.
27) Why does God make us want to create art and then give us limited skills? (Note to self: must re-watch "Amadeus." Was Salieri's existence a waste of a life?)
28) I should delete it so no one else can see it.
29) Don't be stupid.
30) Not stupid. It is the worst thing I have ever drawn.
31) I think I will make a mental inventory of all my terrible work.
32) (three hours later) I am the worst person who ever lived. Except the fascists.
33) But I still want to draw.
34) But I have no ideas.
35) I will think of one
36) I have a half-baked idea.
37) I will bake it.
Book review: NInth Street Women
My book review of Mary Gabriel’s wonderful new history, Ninth Street Women, was published in the Washington Post. You can read it here.
Don't let the grief move in and get comfortable
I used to have this book of matches with a polka dot pattern. The Pennsylvania state police gave it to me in 1985, along with my brother’s wallet, when I went to retrieve his personal effects after he was killed in a crash on the turnpike.
Perhaps you’ve heard this story. I’ve been telling it for 33 years. I’m sorry, I can’t seem to help it.
Anyway, Greg was 28 when he died in the passenger seat of a car that his friend drove into the back of a semi on the turnpike. They’d been to a concert. Sting. It was late. Maybe his friend drifted off at the wheel, or maybe he was just inattentive.
The impact ripped off the roof of the car. The undertaker did not let us see Greg’s body. His friend went to jail for a few months.
For years, I had the matchbook and my brother’s old ski pass, and I’d take them out and study them until I realized how reliably they hit “play” on the movie in my head—the violent frames about Greg’s last moments. So I kept the ski pass, imprinted with a picture of his handsome face, but eventually I ditched the garish matchbook in hopes that it would stop triggering the movie.
It’s so easy to get stuck. If you can help it, don’t get stuck THERE.
That’s very difficult. The trouble with mastering recovery after the sudden eradication of a young life is that the heart wants to huddle in the wrong corner.
A wise mourner finds a way to redirect, and to focus on the years of life: the sardonic comments, the brotherly advice about boys, the Foghorn Leghorn imitation. “Fortunately, I keep my feathers numbah’d.”
That’s the goal. However tragic the loss, don’t keep that matchbook any longer than you absolutely must.
When my brother died, I was 24, and I suppose that I did the best I could with my improvisational coping efforts. Years later, a shrink would tell me that I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I cocked an eyebrow. That sounded to me like a disservice to soldiers and crime victims, but I couldn’t argue that our family of Catholic introverts had successfully “processed” Greg’s death.
My mother and two living brothers exhibited extraordinary stoicism; my father wept at holiday dinners. I wrote occasional self-indulgent essays that forced readers to bear witness and that tried to make something understandable of it all.
Just like now.
There were, I think, other options. Talking to each other as a family would have helped. We might have discussed the impossible dreadfulness, the worst and most painful parts. But maybe then we could have insisted on embracing the days we all had to share. We might have agreed, out loud, not to be ruined by the ruinous.
I wish I had sought the company of my brother's friends before everyone scattered to their own lives. They had stories I've never heard.
But I was a little too hospitable to the tragedy. The shadow crept in, as it will, but I let it stay, and it shrouded things in gray for years.
The trick is not to do that. The trick is to insist that the aftermath of a sudden, tragic death will—not today or tomorrow, but soon—be a fierce celebration of life.
Smuggle Back Your Soul
Your honey-do list for Tuesday has been handed to you for weeks now by everyone with a social media account and a certain political bent. “VOTE!” they say.
And vote you should. Well, probably. To be honest, before “VOTE!” should come “INFORM YOURSELF!!” Too many people skip that part.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say we all go out on Tuesday and honor the incredible gift that is our flawed democracy by casting informed votes that we hope against hope will actually and honestly be tabulated.
Now what do we do? What happens when we wake up Wednesday and the blue wave hasn’t arrived or wasn’t as impressive as we wished? What if we instead meet further evidence of the unraveling of the republic? This is THE outcome to plan for, because Wednesday will arrive.
I don’t know about you but I’m getting too old to flush an entire day—let alone two more years—in mourning. So I’m wondering: What’s your plan?
Mine is to stay sane and happyish. (It’s always a delicate balance between these ears, so happyish is a reasonable goal.) For me, the means to sanity and happyish are community, service, fierce pursuit of joy, and protecting my own humanity.
Community: I have groups of friends who are writers and artists and thinkers who collectively lift my soul in such a way that they become a distinct geography, a place to which I must return in order to feel like myself. Even with the difficulties that go along with group dynamics, the best communities supply us with sustenance we just can’t get on our own.
Service: I do one officially service-y thing by volunteering at a rescue organization for birds of prey. To call it “service” is a slap in the face to people who work at soup kitchens and reading centers and cancer wards. I volunteer so I can be close to wild animals. That’s pretty selfish. But I DO help get things done when I’m there, and the animals DO benefit, and—more to the point—it’s an exercise in empathy, which is what animates all spiritual practices.
We can also be of service on an hour-by-hour basis, as a holistic approach to life, through how we engage with people and the natural world. I’ll work on that one. It will help if I think of my fellow humans as featherless birds.
Fierce pursuit of joy: We need to remember to regularly fling ourselves hard at what feels good. Ride a horse, if that’s your thing. Walk through woods, listen to the music you slow danced to in high school. Last month at the raptor center, I stuck my hand into a container of mealworms and felt a rush of delight at the wriggling at the bottom of the bag. Such a surprise!
We must smuggle our souls back from the thieves. Hold close to wonder.
And humanity: My new rule is that I’m allowed to demonize the despots, but only occasionally, not as a staple of my thought-diet. And I’m forbidden from demonizing real humans in my personal world unless I see a pitchfork and horns under a tarp in their trunk. This one can take some work.
But after spending years now trying to understand how otherwise good people can support ideas and politicians I find abhorrent, here’s what I know: It’s not understandable. I won’t “win” them. They don’t want to understand me as much as I want to understand them. That’s part of how we’re different.
Still. I love them or not based on how they treat others and me. So, sorry, Don, Mitch, Brett. I might be an asshole, but you won’t turn me into that kind of asshole. I won't discard friends based on politics. I won’t do it.
That’s it. That’s my plan. And I will employ it even if we get a blue wave, because I remember the joy I felt when Barack Obama won in 2008; and I remember eight years of struggle and setbacks that followed.
There is so much work to be done, civically, culturally, and personally. We need to preserve our hearts for the trip ahead.
Why words matter
I wandered into a Facebook argument the other day about the Associated Press Style Book authorities having loosened the long-held prohibition against the word "over" to mean "more than."
Argue among yourselves over whether the more relaxed but less specific "over" should be permitted. I jumped into the Facebook debate at the point where one of the participants asked "Why does anyone even care about this?"
It was a useful moment. It reminded me of the good fortune of having once been an impressionable young journalist lapping up edicts from more experienced writers and editors. These lessons sometimes arrived laden with literalism, but mostly they were useful. I was taught, decades ago, to be wary of adverbs. I still am.
We were advised to think about language. With that thinking came sensitivity; with sensitivity came the ability to take pleasure in nuance and clarity and, most of all, logic. This is why some of us balk when a prevalent bit of linguistic sloppiness carries nonstandard usage across the finish line. As far as I'm concerned, "regardless" and "irregardless" cannot both be correct, nor can "literally" mean "figuratively." Oh well. They're all supposedly acceptable now.
We learned the mechanics of written language and some of us tried for the poetry of it, too. We developed an ear for a well-turned metaphor and came to spot the garishness of a poorly chosen one.
We thought about these things when we were reading and writing, and came to admire those rare smiths who can deliver precision encased in something fresh. I follow an Instagram guy who posts pictures of dogs with accompanying, often hilarious, street-language text. When he wants to say "wait a minute," it's "wayment." That slays me. And when I first came across Bilbo Baggins feeling "like butter scraped over too much bread," all I could do was sigh with delight and recognition.
All of this is to say that concern for dictionaries and thesauri and Associated Press usage pronouncements makes life richer for some of us.
I tend to prefer "more than" to "over" in most cases, but what I really care about is the caring itself.
Over and out.