A Fun Night Out

The only reason I did it was for the shampoo. 

I have a confession to make about this shampoo. It's expensive. I mean, it's embarrassingly absurd how much it costs, and I can only buy it from the salon where I get my hair cut. In my defense it smells really nice. Hints of rosemary and thyme that make me feel like I’m out digging around in my garden on a sunny day. Also, if you buy the big bottle, it lasts for a year, and every once in a while, the salon has a sale, and the big bottles are 25% off. So, practically a bargain.

Anyway, my big bottle was running out, and when I went to get my hair cut, I asked about buying another discounted bottle, and the hair stylist said there was a special sale coming up as part of their upcoming “Gal’s Night Out” party. Bring your friends, she said. We’re having champagne and snacks and eye treatments and hand massages. 

She gave me a flyer which promised that my “inner glam girl would thank me.”

I don’t have an inner glam girl, and I didn’t have a friend that I could imagine wanting to go with me to a thing like this, but I really wanted the 25% off shampoo. I shared the flyer with my daughter, and she urged me to go. Pamper yourself, she said. And look, they’re doing tattoos. And permanent jewelry! 

What’s permanent jewelry? I said. 

They put it on you and it’s permanent. I want one! You should get one, Mom. Oh! What if I fly into Columbus this weekend? I’ll be your gal friend! She started looking up flights. The flights were five hundred dollars, and I was seriously considering it. 

But then, my daughter laughed. Wait, she said. This is turning out to be a very expensive bottle of shampoo.

Good point. I decided to go alone. 

The next thing I know I am heading out into the night even though I don’t like to drive at night, and it’s snowing and I don’t like to drive in snow. But the salon is only fifteen minutes away and I am committed. At my daughter’s urging, I’m doing it all. Champagne and snacks and eye treatment and a hand massage. Maybe I’ll get the permanent jewelry. Maybe I’ll get another tattoo. This is me, pushing out of my comfort zone, releasing my inner glam girl, going out on a Saturday night at 7pm like a normal person and not an old fuddy duddy. 

Maybe I’ll run into someone I know! Maybe I’ll make a new friend! I’m sort of dressed up in my swingy jeans and a crisp white shirt. I’m wearing earrings. Will that interfere with my eye treatment? Let’s find out! 

I stride inside. The place is crowded, mostly people chatting it up with their gal pals, but that’s okay. I can do this! Someone offers me a glass of champagne or mock champagne, and I take the mock version because I’m thinking about driving home in the snow. The hostess waves tongs at me. Would you like me to add some cotton candy balls to your drink? she says. 

(Cotton candy balls? is this a thing? What is this thing?) Sure! 

She drops what looks like colorful cotton balls into my cup, and I move around the room looking for where I can get my eye treatment or my hand massage. Come to find out there is no eye treatment or hand massage. What you get is a free tube of eye treatment or hand massage cream. I take the tube of eye treatment. 

I sip my cotton ball drink and chat it up with the people standing in line for a tattoo (Me: Are you getting a tattoo? Person: I don’t know, you? Me: Probably not.) And then I chat it up with the people standing in line to get the permanent jewelry. (Me: What is permanent jewelry? Person: It doesn’t have a clasp. Me: And it stays on forever? Person: Probably not.)

I take another stroll around the room. I nod and sip my poofball drink and realize I’ve dribbled some of it on my white shirt. It’s 7:15 pm. I buy a bottle of 25% off shampoo and I burst out alone into the cold snowy night. 

What's the moral of this story? Nothing. But it was a fun night out. 

Glimmers

In the middle of the night the dog toppled off the bed. Her body thunked on the floor, and I sprang out of bed and tried to pick her up. It’s the pain meds she’s on. They make her wobbly and confused. She scrambled away from me and headed toward the stairs, tumbling two or three steps down before I could stop her. 

We groped together down the remaining stairs and into the living room where I settled her on the couch. But I could not settle myself on the couch. It was three o’clock in the morning, and I was full-blown awake, heart banging, mind racing, spinning through future fears, 

the dog growing older and I’m growing older and what does that mean for both of us, never mind the world and its daily insanity. And what if I couldn’t fall back to sleep? What if the dog broke a bone? What if she lost the ability to climb stairs and we’d have to sleep down here every night for the rest of our lives? The room was dark,

and only a hint of streetlight coming in between the blinds, the glint of grubby snow outside that will never melt. The cold, and the only blanket down here smells like dog. It was three-fifteen. It was three-thirty. I tried my four-count breathing trick but kept losing track of the counts. It was three-forty-five. 

It was four o’clock. My anxiety spiral kept spiraling. 

I remembered another trick. A thing I just read in a book about anxiety where you list what the author calls glimmers. It’s like triggers, except the opposite. Glimmers are all the things around you that give you a little charge of happiness. I read this and immediately thought it was stupid and would never work. It was four-thirty. I sat up on the couch. 

The dog was curled next to me, and I could hear her soft breathing in and out. The dog, I listed. This blanket. It smells like dog, but I love the dog, so that’s okay. My fuzzy socks and how soft they are. That plant over by the window, a gift from my father in-law and how he told me that it will flower one day when I least expect it, and that hasn’t happened yet, but I believe him. 

I slid onto my side on the couch, twisting around the dog, and went on with my list. The pile of library books near my head. The other plant by the window that I nurtured from seeds and now it’s so perky and glossy and always stretching toward the light. My orange purse. A cloth napkin I bought at a shop in France that will forever remind me of strolling through Monet’s garden. 

Somewhere along the way I fell asleep. 

In the morning, I wasn’t as bleary-eyed as I’d feared. The room was bright from sun and the sparkle of all that snow. And wedged up beside me, the snoozing dog. Fine for now, but for now is all we have, and I am grateful for it. 

Touch the Grass

The news is a firehose, and I was drowning in it. I tried to turn it off, but it kept gushing at me. I paced around the house like the dog. I was thinking about how I’d just watched a video of an ICE officer kicking a little dog. The kick broke the dog’s ribs. How do I go back in time and not watch this video? I promise I wasn’t searching for it. IT PLAYED AT ME. It made me want to crawl out of my own skin. It made me hate the world. 

There’s a thing I read, online, that says when you feel like you’re too much online, you should go outside and touch the grass. But I couldn’t go outside and touch the grass because there’s a foot of snow piled on top of it. 

More snow came on Friday. My husband had taken the day off from work, and he drove me in to the library. A side note about the library: it is my happy place. First, there is the daily, meditative checking-in of books, the gentle shushing of the shelving and straightening. Also, I love my co-workers. It was my turn to bring the donuts, and we ate the donuts and told funny stories about the things patrons leave inside books. 

Macaroni noodles, for example. Or the time someone returned a book with one thousand post-it notes sticking out of it. And then, we opened the doors, and the kids toddled in. It was a slow day because of the icy roads, but I got to see some of my favorites. The little girl who wears the sparkly boots. The little boy and his mom who do the scavenger hunt together, and when I say, Do you want a clue? They say, No, we’re doing it clean. 

Clean?

The mom tells me it’s how she does the New York Times Spelling Bee. No clues until you get to the Genius level. She says she and her friends call it “doing it clean.” 

I don't know why but I love this. I watched the mom and her son wander past one of the pictures they were trying to find. (Shhh! It’s on the ceiling!) They walked under it several times before the little boy looked up and pointed. I gave them both a sticker. By the time my husband picked me up, I was feeling much better. Let’s go on a date, he said. 

The date started in a strip mall for lunch, a new restaurant he’d read about and wanted to try. I opened the menu and everything was unfamiliar, but unfamiliar in a good way. Cheesy yuca fries? Sure. Arepas, why not? What’s an arepa? A type of bread, the waitress explained. Like a sandwich. I ordered one layered with a slab of cheese and hunks of steak. And oh my god, the yuca fries. They tasted like potato fries, but even better, when you dipped them in the sour-creamy, cheese-chunk sauce that came with the dish.  

How had we never eaten at this amazing place before? The date could’ve ended there, but we kept going. Browsed a used bookshop, poked around a thrift store, headed over to the big international market so my husband could buy the chili sauce he likes. 

The store wasn’t hopping how it usually is. ICE is trolling around Columbus, and the international markets are a target. I can so easily slip back into hating the world. 

But I won’t this time. 

This time I roam with my husband through the aisles in the international market, marveling at all the food we haven’t tried yet, the mound of yucas piled in a bin. We buy one to cook at home. 

It really does help, you know, to touch something real. 

In place of grass, try yucas or bread, books and stickers. 

Buy the Boots

The dog doesn’t like the weather. The foot of snow. The freezing cold, most days barely above zero. Each day she gives us a stunned glance back when we open the door. We bundle her up, of course, in her black jacket with the popped collar that gives her a vampire vibe. 

But it’s her bare paws that are killing her. I know. There is such a thing as boots for dogs. But she’s not the type of dog who would wear them. Several years ago, she had a sore on her chest near one of her front legs, and the vet gave us an ointment for it. Home, we dabbed the ointment on, and she immediately licked it off. We put a cone on her head, but we couldn’t bear the pained, humiliated expression on her face. 

Still, we had to do something about the sore. One of us got the idea to try fitting her with an old, oversized T-shirt. That was almost worse than the cone. She stopped speaking to us. Most days she wouldn’t even look at us. 

It was weirdly warm that week, and we were outside cleaning up the yard, the dog moping around us in her T-shirt. This was early March 2020, and soon the pandemic was going to shut it all down, but we didn’t know that yet. Our biggest worry was our dog’s armpit wound and whether or not she’d ever forgive us for forcing her into a T-shirt. 

I wish we could explain it to her, I kept saying to my husband. But this would be like explaining a global pandemic when we learned that if push comes to shove, many of us don't want to do hard things. Or why right this moment, the federal government is about to descend on Springfield, Ohio, forty-five minutes from where we live, to round up Haitian refugees, people who are here legally, but now, suddenly, they’re not here legally, because our country can do that, change a law to fit whatever they want it to be. 

So many things are not explainable. 

Anyway, the dog is hard of hearing, so I can’t explain the existence of dog boots to her even if I wanted to. And she wouldn't wear them. I promise you. It would be a battle and I don't have the energy to fight it! Instead, I head outside with her and pray she will do her business fast. 

But first there are sniffs to sniff and other dogs’ pee painted on the snowdrifts to investigate. A squirrel to chase off. The neighbor's yard to explore. By the time she’s done with all that, the cold has caught up with her, and her legs give way, her body slipping, her paws painfully angled to keep them off the ice. 

I huddle over her, trying to lift her, trying to warm her frozen paws, but I’m struggling too, my bulky coat, my hat falling over my eyes, my still-recovering hand throbbing under my mitten. We can do this, I tell her, and I half carry/half heave her home. 

When we make it, I am in tears, knowing I am complicit. 

Ashamed, finally, I do the right thing. 

I buy the boots. 

If you would like to help the people of Springfield, Ohio, here are some options:

Write a letter to Governor Mike DeWine.

Donate to the United Way Springfield Unity Fund. 

Give to the Central Christian Church in Springfield and select G92 from the option list (donations to G92 support refugees in the area). 

Donate to the Haitian Support Center. 

Thank you. 

Cold

It’s cold and I walk out into it. Four degrees, but it feels like negative twelve. What does negative twelve feel like? Cold is cold. Okay, I am wrong. This is colder than cold. I bundle myself up. Leggings under pants. Boots. A T-shirt, sweatshirt, my long coat. A scarf wrapped around and around my hood so that only my eyes touch the air. 

The air hurts my eyes.  

Head lowered, I march up the street. Videos play in my head. Executions. A blond woman smiling through her car window. A thin bearded man holding a phone. The woman could be my daughter. The man could be my son. A little boy weighted down by a backpack, the darling ears knitted on his cap. He could be any of the little boys who play around the train table at my library. I am imagining scooping him up and running away with him. But where would we go? 

Let me tell you a story. 

Once, when I was a little girl, I went with my stepfather to an old barn. It was a hot day and the barn smelled like rotting wood and dust and maybe there used to be cows here, but now it was overstuffed with junk and broken machinery and old-fashioned furniture. I made my way over to an old desk, the kind with a top that rolled back and many drawers and secret-looking compartments. I opened one of the drawers, and something squealed inside. 

It was a nest of mice. Babies squirming in dust and bits of paper. Their twitching paws and twirly tails. Their teeny eyes flickering open. Disturbed. Afraid. Afraid of me, probably, for opening their drawer. But they had nothing to be afraid of. I was a little girl, and instantly in love. How small these baby mice were. How adorable. I cooed at them. I smiled. I wanted to take them home with me. Dress them in my doll clothes. Arrange them on the little beds in my dollhouse. Look! 

Mice! I said to my stepfather. 

And he yanked out the drawer and snatched up the mice in one fist and threw them against the barn wall. I learned everything I needed to know about evil people when I was eight years old. 

The rest of it, the part about the good people, would take me longer to learn. Sometimes, you close your eyes and hear the mouse bodies hitting the wall, and it's easy to forget. But I am here to tell you, don’t forget. 

We are cold today, even in all of our many layers, but we will keep walking. 

Healing

A few days ago, I had surgery on my hand. My right ring finger had what is called a trigger finger. What happens is when you try to bend your finger, it clicks down and snaps up. It didn’t hurt, but it was annoying, and for a year I couldn’t properly hold a pencil. 

I did all the things you’re supposed to do to fix it—an injection, physical therapy, and wearing an adorable little brace, but none of that worked and it was time for surgery. The surgeon explained the entire procedure to me, and I instantly forgot everything he said. 

Something about clipping cartilage. Or maybe it was a tendon. The guy seemed to know what he was talking about, so I agreed to let him cut into me. Before they wheeled me into surgery, he came in to see how I was doing. He was wearing an oversized coat. I said, Are you cold? He said, I’m freezing. This made me laugh. It was the last thing I was thinking about before I went under.

When I woke up, I felt like I had a brick strapped to my arm. My fingers were swollen and orange. It’s the antiseptic soap they clean you with before surgery, my husband told me. It was his birthday. We were celebrating by having him serve me meals and tie my shoes and wash my hair. Also, he learned my skin care routine. 

Later, we took the dog for a walk, and he scooped up the poop. I don’t know if I can adequately express how much I am in love with this man. For three days now, he has brewed me tea and parked next to me on the couch while I marinate in pain pills. 

A side effect of the pain medicine is extreme gratitude and whatever the opposite is of nostalgia. What I keep thinking about is the time I broke my arm when I was twelve. Breaking my arm was only one of the many crappy things that happened to me that year. How I did it was I fell off a skateboard. 

I was not a skateboarder. I literally had never stepped on one before, but for some reason, we had a skateboard in our basement, and I raised my foot and thought: I want to try this. The next thing I knew I was falling backward. When I landed on my hand, I felt my wrist bone snap. 

The pain was crazy-making, but it was hard to convey this to the people in authority. You had to use precise language and not be overly emotional. If you were wrong, well, you would’ve wasted everyone’s time and money. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to find out my arm was broken. 

I liked wearing a cast because all of my friends signed it, and I didn’t have to do my school assignments. But that was a downside too because even when I was twelve, I was a writer, and the cast was slowing me down. There was so much language to learn. So many emotions to bury and unbury. 

I scrawled out my journal entries with my left hand and then gave up and used my typewriter, tapping on the keys with the fingers of my unbroken hand, one letter at a time. One word. 

It is how I am writing to you now. The keyboard is smoother than a typewriter and my fingers are more practiced. Still, it takes time. I drift off. I drift back. Sometimes lost in the past, then like a miracle, safe in the present. 

A warm house. A cup of hot tea. 

 

I Went to a Protest

The protest was in my neighborhood, a three-minute walk from where I live. It was raining. I knew the protest was going on, and I didn’t want to go, but then I did. I don’t know how many of these I’ve been to over the past ten years. 

The big one, the Women’s March in DC in 2017, the Black Lives Matter protests during the pandemic when we all stood six feet apart and sweated behind our masks. Marches against gun violence and Kings. Rallies in support of women’s rights and LGBTQ and immigrants. A rally for public libraries.  

I used to be gung-ho about protests. I would yell and wave my sign. After a while I stopped yelling. This time I didn’t bother bringing a sign. I am angry, but it’s a diffused kind of anger that is more on the sad side. I don’t have the belief anymore that protesting accomplishes anything by itself. 

I have a body, though, and I can plant myself in a crowd and be one more person if anyone decides to count us. In the crowd you are reminded that you are not alone. You stand side by side with these strangers, and suddenly, they’re not strangers anymore. They’re your neighbors. They’re angry and sad too. Of course, we all feel angry and sad. We witnessed a person’s murder. 

After the protest, I went home and did a frenzy of cleaning and purging, carting boxes of stuff off to Goodwill. Old games no one plays anymore, old suitcases (why do we have so many suitcases?) A tub of stuffed animals, which weirdly had me reminiscing, fondly, about the early weeks of the pandemic, when someone in the neighborhood asked if people would put teddy bears in their windows. 

She said her kids were restless and scared and they were taking a lot of walks, and wouldn’t it be nice if they could go on a kind of teddy bear hunt. I loved this idea and quickly gathered all of our old stuffed animals and set them up in the windows, and then it was like a parade of sorts, the whole neighborhood, it seemed, out and waving at bears.  

People were walking in family groups back then, everyone staying respectfully socially distant. I went for a lot of walks too, crisscrossing the street whenever another group came toward me. You wouldn’t believe how many houses had stuffed animals in their windows. It made me want to cry.

Once I came upon a child’s birthday party, a porch decorated with balloons and streamers, a little girl standing on the front steps, smiling at her friends as they drove by and dropped off presents. Another time I stood with the dog and listened to a man tutor a middle school aged boy. He was sitting in a chair on one side of a front lawn and the boy was sitting in a chair on the other side. They were working through a math problem together.   

I don’t know why I keep forgetting that there is more good in the world than bad. Okay, maybe it’s closer to a fifty-fifty ratio, and the good only beats out the bad by a sliver, but the sliver is what we have to hold onto. 

The people who delight in harming others would like nothing better than for us to join them. But something I learn at every protest is that we are not the ones who are afraid. 

We are the ones who stand with our neighbors.