This Isn't Working for Me

I said this to my friends at 10 pm on New Years Eve. Our quarter-of-a-century-long tradition is to stay up until midnight, watch the ball drop, and make a toast with champagne. But I was half nodding off at 9:30. I didn’t particularly want a glass of champagne. My body was saying go to sleep. 

My head, when it tipped and drooped and bonked against my shoulder, was saying it too. In the past, I might’ve fought it. Who wants to be a party pooper? Why not buck up and press through? On the other hand, maybe it’s okay to go to sleep when you want to go to sleep. This isn’t working for me, I said, and I laughed. 

I laughed because it made it easier to say, and (I hoped) it made it easier for my friends to hear. I have been trying an experiment. Being honest with myself. You would think this would be a thing that wouldn’t be hard. I used to think that too. But then, I was lying. 

Here’s what happens when you lie: Your eyes twitch. You get stomach cramps and migraines. One time, you break out in a rash. Another time, you throw up on a plane. The biggest lie of all is saying you are completely fine. You can handle this. You don’t need help. 

Anyway, I got help, and now, most days, I feel okay. The next night we were soaking in a hot tub.  

I was amazingly well-rested. The house where we were staying to celebrate New Years was on a lake. The lake was right there, only yards away from the hot tub, and I was in love with the view. This was an Airbnb and the owners had mentioned in the guestbook that we would see the sunset over the lake. The sunset (and I quote the owners) “will make you cry.” 

Every night while we were there, we rushed out as the sun was setting, and every night we just missed it. I don’t know how this kept happening. It was the trees in the way. It was the sun slipping behind them too fast. If you blinked, it was over. But now, in the hot tub, we had renewed hope. We were talking about the past year. The lows, which were very low. Serious illnesses and surgeries and estrangements and all of that set against the crazy backdrop of the world. 

But then, there were the highs. A wedding and fun travels and good times spent with family and friends. This quarter of a century long friendship, too, ranks right up there. Forget the sunset. When I think about these people, it’s love and gratitude for them that makes me cry. The conversation moved onto other things. 

What we would have for dinner. A funny game we wanted to play. Our favorite books and TV shows. Our kids. Our jobs. Our pets. My fingers were pleasantly pruny. The sky went orange and then pink. I lost myself for a moment in the lake, the sun, the steam. This is working for me, is what I was thinking. 

I wish I had said it. 

No Escape (but that's okay)

Every year the day after Christmas, my family goes to an escape room. If you haven’t been to one of these, imagine being locked in a room for an hour with a bunch of puzzles to solve. The puzzles are logic and word games and math. Also, there are secret doors and boxes and keys. You can ask for clues. 

But my family doesn’t like to ask for clues. We pride ourselves on being able to figure our way out with no help, and we ALWAYS win the game. 

Okay, except for one year, which we call The Year of the Zombie. What happened was the escape room was the usual, but on top of having to solve the puzzles, there was a zombie chained to the wall. If he touched you, you were out of the game, and every ten minutes, his chain would extend by a foot. By the end, we were all screaming and huddling in one corner. And, I forgot my reading glasses. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was some of the puzzles were broken! There was no way any of us could’ve solved them! (We don’t count that year.) 

This year the twist was we were the ones chained up. At the beginning of the game, the attendant handcuffed each of us to a bed frame in the center of the room. The hour clock started ticking, and if we wanted to solve any of the puzzles or try to unlock anything, we had to shuffle around all together dragging the bed along with us. To make things even more difficult, the room was dark and there was only one small lamp, and it was hard to reach with our handcuffed hands. 

Finally, like thirty minutes in, our son-in-law noticed a key hanging on the wall, and we all carted the bed across the room to get it. It was the key to unlock the handcuffs, but it took a while to free ourselves, and the time was winding down, and we knew if we wanted to get out, we’d have to ask for help. 

Clue after clue after clue, and it wasn’t enough. We lost. This is clearly a metaphor. 

Everyone stuck together and no way out unless you admit you need help, and even then, you still run out of time. We had fun though. 

We went home and played more games. Then I worked a shift at the library, and this has nothing to do with anything, but one of our regular patrons came in to read the newspaper how he does every day. This guy and I have a history with each other. A few years ago he made a complaint that I was “very loud.” I had been helping another patron who was hard of hearing, and admittedly, I was shouting. 

This annoyed the guy who wanted to read the newspaper. After the incident, I didn’t want to deal with him, and I can’t speak for the guy, but I think he had a similar feeling about me. He would rush into the library and scuttle along the edge of the room to avoid the information desk where I was sitting, and I wouldn’t say good morning to him how I usually had. 

A few days of that, and I let it go and started saying good morning again even as he was scuttling along the wall. We did this for a year. Another year went by when the library was closed for renovations. When we reopened, the guy walked through the door normally and passed the desk. I said good morning, and he nodded, but I still felt a twinge of tenseness between us. Six more months passed. 

The other day, when I was shelving, I saw him out of the corner of my eye, and truthfully, I was relieved I wasn’t at the desk, and we wouldn’t have to go through our awkward Good-morning/nod dance, but then, the guy surprised the heck out of me by walking straight toward me. He stopped a few feet away and smiled. 

Happy New Year, he said. 

I smiled back and said, Happy New Year to you. 

He walked off to the newspapers, and I blinked at the bookshelves. I don’t know why, but I was tearing up. There is a metaphor in here too, but I will leave you to puzzle it out. 

In the meantime, I wish you too, dear Reader, a happy new year, whoever you are and where, however you celebrate, or don't. I suspect the world for many of us may feel stressful this year, and never mind the potential for zombies and crochety patrons. We're stuck with them, but we have each other too, and that is not a small thing. 

It's everything, actually.  

On the Shortest Day of the Year

On the longest day of the year, we had a party, and randomly, everyone brought pink wine. Someone made an elaborate Stonehenge sculpture out of Rice Krispie treats and it almost seemed a shame to eat it, but we did. We lit the paper lantern lights and lounged out on the patio and told each other stories. It was 9 pm and the sun was still up, and I quoted a line from The Great Gatsby that is forever stuck in my head: 

“Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.” 

We were having the party because we didn’t want to miss it. To keep the conversation going, I asked a question. The question came from a friend who had been hiking the Appalachian Trail. She said one topic that none of the hikers ever get tired of talking about is food. The question is: What’s the best meal you ever had? 

My best meal took place in Memphis, Tennessee thirty-five years ago. My husband and I were invited out to a fancy restaurant by one of his work clients. This was the kind of place that serves multiple courses and there is no rush to eat them. We had never been to a place like this, and we were trying to play it cool. We were young and silly and wide-eyed and took it for granted that we had all the time in the world.  

When we were just settling in, the waiter took our drink order and said he knew we weren’t thinking about dessert yet, but he wanted to tell us about one of the items on the menu because it would take at least an hour to prepare. He went on to describe an enormous piece of chocolate cake. Nestled inside was a ball of chocolate, and throughout the meal, the pastry chef would slowly warm the cake in the oven, and when he brought it to our table, and we slid our forks into it, the perfectly melted chocolate would swirl out onto our plates. 

Everyone at the table ordered the cake. But by the time we finished the meal, course after course after course, we’d forgotten about it. When the waiter carried it to the table, even though we were all stuffed from dinner, we gasped with delight. It was exactly how he described. That fork slide, that swirl of melted chocolate. 

The funny thing is I don’t remember if it tasted good. I mean, it must have, right? But it’s the story I love. The detailed set up, the slow build, and everything turning out exactly how you hope.   

On the shortest day of the year, I am not throwing a party. We won’t lounge outside and we won’t drink pink wine. I don’t have a quote stuck in my head about it, but if I did, it would be something along the lines of: We are here, now, all of us together. Let’s not waste a moment. 

I’ll make you a cup of tea and we’ll cozy up inside and watch the sun slip down at 5:10 pm. I’ll ask you to tell me a story about what you love about today. 

And you will.

Hurtling through the Holidays

...and my to-do list was spooling out in my head, all the million little things to do. The presents to buy, the meals to plan, the Christmas cards to send out, the house to clean in preparation for guests. But the usual urgency wasn’t there. I was nursing a cold on top of a cold, and then I gifted that to my husband, and we were both trudging around the house cradling our Kleenex boxes. 

We joked about not putting up the tree. I mean, why? In a few weeks we’d be taking it down. But then I don’t know what happened. We hauled the Christmas stuff up from the basement. We watched Diehard. (Yes, it is a Christmas movie.) We bought presents for the family we sponsor at our local community center. Both kids needed winter coats and it was killing me how cute the little coats were. I played the Charlie Brown Christmas music and set the pot on the stove with the orange peels and cinnamon sticks. 

This is one of the ideas in the Hygge book that my daughter gave me a few Christmases ago. Hygge is a Danish thing where, instead of fighting the winter season, you go All In on it. You can do this by either hunkering down cozily with blankets and books and warm beverages and fragrant scents wafting from a pot on the stove, or else, you can bundle up and go cross country skiing. Needless to say, I lean more toward the hunkering down option. 

I crossed Christmas cards off the to-do list. How I accomplished this task was I decided not to do it. I read a book. I listened to a podcast about the history of Santa. I lost myself for an hour, scrolling through pictures from Christmases past. Most of the Christmases past are a blur. I wasn’t a person who lived in the present. I was planning and whirling and out of breath. Sometimes I hid in the bathroom. 

After, I would remember with an ache in my heart all the lovely moments I’d only been half paying attention to. 

The years whirred by, but something nice: the lovely moments added up. I have thousands of them now that I can revisit whenever I want to. But what I want is to make more lovely moments. And I want to be there, fully present, for each one. 

Yesterday it snowed again, and all of the plans we had for the weekend flew out the window. We took a walk during the height of the storm. There’s a small, newly planted tree at the end of our street by the Starbucks. Last summer a truck plowed through and tore up the sidewalk. There were weeks of construction, but somehow the new sidewalk got torn up again, and the whole thing had to be redone. When it was finally finished, someone planted the small tree. 

It looks like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, my husband said, when we clomped by it in the snow. We should decorate it. 

I laughed because I was thinking of the mysterious Yarn Bomber lady who lives in our neighborhood and sometimes, overnight, she will decorate a light pole with a colorful, knitted sleeve. 

What if there was a Christmas Bulb Bomber, I said.

What if it was us, my husband said. 

Why not? 

How you stay present is you stop thinking for a second and take the world in through your senses. Cold wet snow pelting your cheeks. Flakes on your tongue. The crunch of boots. The smell of coffee drifting out of the Starbucks drive thru window. 

Silver bulbs dangling on the branches of a tree. 

    

Shoveling Out

It snowed hard one night, and in the morning, I had to dig my car out. This was a heavy wet snow, a good five inches, and not expected (by me. I think other people expected it) so, first, I had to figure out where my winter boots were and where had I thrown my hat and gloves? I half slipped down the back steps in pursuit of the snow shovel, which was somewhere in the garage. 

We can’t park our cars in the garage. We have a single car driveway that takes a sharp turn, and parking back there would be a constant struggle (for me), but also, it’s where my husband has set up his woodworking shop. Anyway, there was a lot of snow to clear, car-wise and driveway-wise, and forty-five minutes flinging snow around was not how I had envisioned spending my morning.  

What I had imagined myself doing was writing. What I’m writing about is the past. In the past it is sunny and warm. I am five years old and living at a campground. I am not a person who romanticizes the past. But spending several days back as my five-year-old self, roaming around the campground where we lived for a summer, has been a nice break from reality. 

There’s a pond to splash in and woods to explore. A playground and camp store where you can buy fudgesicles for a quarter a piece. We live in a tent, but it’s a big tent. Enough space for all of our sleeping bags, plus my baby brother’s playpen. 

What’s I’m trying to do is unwind time, trace it all backwards to some perfect point before things went wrong. I call my aunt who lived with us at the campground to ask her what she remembers. My aunt is like me. She remembers everything. 

I used to think this was a gift, but now I’m starting to wonder if it’s a curse. My aunt tells me stories about who she bought the tent from and the time a skunk wandered into the campsite and how she liked to read her book in the afternoons while my baby brother napped and my mother took my other brother and me to the pond to swim. 

I have a clear memory of the two of us running down a hill with our towels flapping behind us. Another memory of sitting at the picnic table, coloring in our coloring books while it rained on the blue tarp that stretched over the campsite. I turned six that summer and celebrated my birthday under that tarp. Someone gave me a Barbie camper, and I drove it around and around the picnic table. I don’t know what any of this adds up to. 

I was happy at the campground, therefore, happiness is possible. Happiness is possible even though my family had been kicked out of our rental and had nowhere to live for the summer. Five-going-on-six-year-olds only know so much about the world. But in other ways, they know things adults have forgotten. This all made more sense in my head while I was shoveling the walks and scraping off my car. 

The driveway went clean, and not really thinking about it, I started shoveling out into the street. A foot on my shovel, a jab of the blade through crust, another clump added to the pile, layer upon layer of snow. 

Not entirely dug out. Maybe it will never be entirely dug out. But cleared enough to move past. 

Swimming in the Library

This week is my week to do the craft in the youth department. This is a thing we do at our library, fun art projects for kids to work on and take home. My coworkers have set a very high bar, coming up with clever designs and prepping all the components, the easy-to-follow directions and samples and materials. 

My turn, and I’m floundering. It takes me a good month to find a craft that looks simple enough to do. Not for the kids. For me. 

I am not a craftsy person. I say this about myself, and then I wonder if saying it makes it so. Why can’t I be a craftsy person? How hard can it be to make stencils, cut paper, glue a bunch of thingamabobs together? 

Not hard, but somehow, hard. Whipping out my reading glasses at the desk to do the careful tracing and cutting, I have to stop every two minutes to help a child find a book or clean up a baby toy that’s been spittled on or take note of the train table where a little boy is making a high-pitched choo choo sound over and over again, so many times that it’s become the soundtrack of the youth department and I don’t notice it anymore until it stops, the absence of choo-choooing nearly as loud as the noise itself, an echo of it still ringing in my ears. But in a nice way. 

Have I ever told you how much I love this place? I don’t know what it is. The books. The kids. The book-kid combo. The love sneaked up on me, and now I am full-blown swimming in it. Speaking of swimming, that’s what my watch thinks I’m doing every day when I’m at work. Yes, I know. I had been trying to go Un-Smart with the watches, but I finally gave in on it and got a new fitbit. 

The fitbit has a screen that is so tiny, I can’t see it without my reading glasses. Fortunately, there’s a synched-up phone app where I can learn fun facts about my heart rate and sleep stages and steps. This is how I realized that my watch has been logging swimming sessions every morning. The swimming sessions coincide with the times when I’m shelving books. I think it must be calculating the arm movement, the reaching, the stretching, and all of that bending and dipping around the book cart. 

(By the way, I love shelving too. The gentle shushing when a book slides into its place. The surge of satisfaction when I empty a cart. Plus, I’m always getting new book suggestions. Here’s one: How Can I Help You by Laura Sims. It’s about a killer nurse who’s on the run and working in a library VS the failed novelist recently hired as a research librarian who is growing more and more suspicious of the nurse. I picked the book up because I wanted to see how accurately it portrayed working at a library. It did a decent job… sorta, capturing the array of services we provide, the sometimes weirdo questions we get at the desk, but something was missing: Neither of these characters wanted to help anyone. And that’s what we do at the library.) 

Anyway, after my intense swimming activity, I took a rest and worked on my silly craft. I call it “Cocoa with Polar Bear.” The website where I found the idea says to glue real mini marshmallows on top of the cocoa cup, but I nixed that and decided on a smushed cotton ball. Over the week, I traced and cut out approximately ten thousand parts and pieces, assembled all of the necessary craft supplies—glues, scissors, markers, cotton balls—spent an absurd amount of time putting a sample together and writing up the easy-to-follow instructions. 

Stop by the library this week, if you’d like to make one. You’ll find me down in the Youth Department swimming. 

Breakthrough

I’m back to writing this week, a project that I’ve been working on for several years now, after setting it down and picking it back up multiple times. First, there was a global pandemic and then the world was on fire, 

and someone had surgery, and I had surgery, someone was sick, the dog was sick, we went out of town, we had visitors from out of town. I had a meeting, a doctor’s appointment, a haircut. I had to make dinner, do the Wordle, go to work at the library. The weather was gray. The weather was rainy. And then the time changed, and the time changed back. 

You can see where I’m going with this. It was never the right time to write. I would sit at my desk. I would look at my keyboard. I would look out the window. I would open my phone. I would want to toss it out the window. Instead, I would do the laundry. 

It doesn't help that the project I'm working on is painful. It's a story about the past, and I want to write it, but also, it's hard.  

I used to teach classes about this. Not how to write. But HOW TO WRITE. Meaning, how to sit your butt in the chair and just do it. I had so many good tips and tricks. Somewhere along the way, I forgot them all. It was the slippery subject matter, the pandemic, the world, the Wordle, etc. Anyway, fortunately, there’s always a moment in the process when something hits you, and you let go of the dumb excuses and plunk yourself in the chair. 

What hit me this week was I got kicked in the chest by a mule. 

Not literally. But it felt like it. I was lugging the garbage bin down the driveway and somehow the handle whacked into me so hard that I lost my breath for a few seconds. I stood there, stunned, taking stock of myself, but everything seemed to be in its proper place, and I went on with my day. That night, though, it hurt a little to breathe. It hurt in the morning too. 

I googled it. Worst case scenario: broken ribs or collapsed lung. But that seemed ridiculously overdramatic. The week went on, and I wasn’t feeling any better. I returned to googling. What if I did break a rib or collapse a lung? I have osteoporosis. It’s in the realm of possibility. When I was a child, I fell and hurt my wrist. Did I need to go to the doctor? 

No, my mother told me. If it was broken, you would know. That made sense except, I didn't know. Later, my arm ended up in a cast, and I was grateful to have something to show for it after putting her through the trouble. But back to the garbage bin bashing me in the chest, I finally gave in and had it X-rayed. 

It’s fine. Nothing broken, but good that I had it checked out, the doctor said kindly. 

Still, I can’t help thinking about it, that gray area between knowing and not knowing and why was I so annoyed with myself for feeling pain? Wait. Did I feel guilty for not having a broken rib? What was really going on here? 

Something funny about the past is how it pops up when you least expect it, the things you think are settled, shaking loose, the missing pieces hiding in plain sight.