Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
People You Can’t Forget: Jane
I don’t know why but all day I’ve been thinking about Jane. Two memories collide — the pungent, overpowering body odor wafting down the hallway that announced her arrival minutes before she appeared in my office and the matter of fact way she cinched up the tablecloth she would often wear as a skirt as she began to expound on some critical southside neighborhood issue. When she came to Resident Council meetings at the antipoverty agency where I worked, the other members would scoot down to the end of the long table and start lighting matches. It was awful to witness. She seemed not to notice, but she had to.
She sat with pride, in her tablecloth, in her halo of foul smell, representing her neighborhood because, you see, she was elected to be a Resident Council member. She was there to do her job and she almost never missed a meeting. She walked into meetings, the dirt in streaks on her bare legs, wearing slippers sometimes, sometimes shoes, an old sweater or maybe a filthy parka, her grey unwashed hair straight and pulled behind her ears. She never, ever bathed.
She was so ill. She wanted help, but then she didn’t want help. Mostly, she wanted to talk – about why she couldn’t stay in her house. How it was dangerous to stay there. How she had gone to college and was trained to be a scientist. About her parents and how much she missed them. About how people shunned her, how they were rude and cruel.
One day she came to our agency asking for help getting to County Hospital. She told a story about the bus driver not letting her get on the bus. She didn’t say why but we suspected the reason. My boss called a cab and I rode down the elevator with Jane – all the while trying to pretend that trying not to pass out from the smell and talking to a woman wearing a tablecloth with nothing underneath were everyday things.
I never said, “Jane! You need clothes. You need to take a bath. You need to see a doctor. It isn’t healthy to live like this.” I never said that because, I think, I was trying to be respectful of Jane. I thought Jane was entitled to be treated like everyone else. And in my mind, at that time, that meant pretending that her condition was normal.
But was that respect or just my fear? That if I pushed her to accept my help then I would then have to help her. Myself. Not my agency. Not the case manager down the hall. Me.
Looking back, I think I was hiding behind that notion of respect. Because it was safer for me. But it was a fiction. A complete entry into unreality — where my practice of respect somehow prevented me from actually figuring out how to help her and let me give up on the idea of helping her almost instantly for fear of insulting her. Totally nuts.
I’d like to think that if I ran into Jane today, I wouldn’t be afraid of how ill she was, how impossible it seemed to help her. But I’m not so sure. It’s hard to know. Very hard.
______________________
Photo by Harisankar Sahoo on Unsplash
What I Know to be True: Gray is a Color
This is exactly the first thing that came to mind when I opened my eyes this morning.
Gray is a color.
It’s not the memory of a color.
Gray is the color of doves and steel.
Gray is a long life’s memory.
I must have been pondering this in my sleep because when I woke up I thought of putting Gray is a Color on t-shirts. The constant framing of aging as loss feels debilitating to me. The list of things one can no longer do or dream about doing gets longer by the day, that is, if you’re keeping a list. Successful aging becomes about how well one manages loss. I don’t like that.
Gray is a color. It’s not the memory of a color.
This time of life deserves a color that speaks volumes. Gray does that.
Chores Make the World Go Round
New straw new year rake
Birds fed flitting flapping caw
Porch swept for sitting
However Old You Are, It’s Good to Own a Pitchfork Friday Round-Up
Seventy-seven is cool but it’s got nothing on seventy-eight. Tomorrow’s my birthday. I don’t dread it or rue it or pretend it’s not happening. I’m oddly proud of being an old person and feel that, in many ways, I am just coming into my own. I’ll maybe get there by eighty. (I like writing the numbers out. It feels more elegant.)
Last night at a favorite restaurant, I had my first Manhattan. It was a beautiful burgundy color with a perfect cherry on a skewer. Deep and mellow, the Manhattan went perfectly with a gorgeous bowl of French onion soup with melted gruyere cheese. It was possibly the best thing I’ve ever eaten, although I say that a lot.
We have a new water heater. An amazing plumber showed up early this morning, diagnosed our dire situation, arranged to have a new water heater delivered, shoveled mud off our back walk, carried in a package from the front porch, brought the garbage bin up from the street, and had the new water heater installed in three hours. I consider all of these things, especially the water heater after the icy sponge bath this morning, to be extraordinary birthday presents.
I wore my Street Angels Milwaukee Outreach fleece all day. The young man at the pet supply store asked me about it and I told him that I had been on the board for several years. He commented on what good work they do for homeless folks and then gently tapped his chest, saying very softly, I know that life.
When I’m done with this post, I’m going to take a hot shower. I’m going to lotion up, put on my lounging wear (such as it is), and make dinner. It’s thundering out and going to rain more. Tomorrow, to celebrate my birthday, I’m going to clean up the back porch. There is an unfortunate situation with straw for the dog houses that needs to be addressed. It’s all good, though. I have a pitchfork.
The Perfect Gift can be Years in the Making
My son gave me his cat.
But it was more of a desperation thing than a considered gift. There’s a story attached to the giving or loaning or ‘please, can you take Herc for a while’ but the details aren’t important.
The gist of this is that, after five years here, the ungifted cat turned out to be a once in a lifetime gift.
My father insisted that I learn to type so I could always make a living and never be a pauper. He sent me to college, so I’d meet and marry a college man which I eventually did but I met him while I was a secretary making $85 a week. So the combination of those two gifts worked out pretty well except we got divorced, but after we had a beautiful baby girl who is fifty-three now and being a gift to people all over the place.
See how the gifts accumulate if you just hang on for a bit?
It’s magical.
Hiking with Words
I love serendipity as a word because it smells like flowers and butterflies and happenstance, but I love the word solivagant even more.
I’ve never laid eyes on this word – solivagant – until it popped up in a prompt. So, I had to look it up and when I did, I marveled at how it fit my morning at the dog park where it was so wonderfully wet that I had to wear my beloved mud boots.
Solivagant, if you don’t know and you likely don’t, means “to wander alone, a solitary traveler or wanderer.”
It was only a walk along the muddy paths of the dog park but when no one there, the dog park can feel wild like a forest. I can envision hiking on my own, say, traveling the Pacific Crest Trail with a backpack, a sleeping roll, and a walking stick carved from some tree. And maybe a dog.
I will never hike the Pacific Crest Trail but that’s not important. What’s important is the envisioning. I might not be a solivagant in reality, but I can see myself being one. All I have to do is look down at my boots.
I Smell Bees
[The prompt this week for my writing group is “I smell _____, and I am.” This is my go at it.]
I smell bees.
It is August. The grass in our yard is yellow, burned by the sun. Everything is dry, brittle. I would water the lawn but my father says it is a waste of money. He knows about money and there not being enough of it which is why he runs his dime store during the day and sells televisions out of the trunk of his car at night. My mother reminds me that I need to mow the lawn. Mowing seems ridiculous when the grass is so stunted by heat but there are green patches under the trees. That must be what she thinks needs mowing.
I can’t tell if I smell bees or heat or the remnants of yesterday’s oil treatment on the dirt road in front of our house. They oil the road so the dust doesn’t blow around but the oil is foul and messy. It lies in pools near our mailbox. I reach around the wooden post to open the metal door. Inside is a postcard from my sister in California. There is a picture of palm trees and fancy cars. “You should come visit! It’s great here!” But I am twelve and not going anywhere. I have to mow the lawn.
The lawnmower is big and green and filled with clots of grass from the last time I mowed. I try to pull the old clumps of grass off the blades but they’re stuck like glue. I wonder if the blades will still cut the grass or just pat it real hard and leave it all standing. Don’t the blades need to be sharp? Or doesn’t it matter? It doesn’t matter. It’s just the mowing that matters. The roar of the lawnmower has to reach my mom on the davenport. I’m not one hundred percent sure that’s where she is at this moment but I’d bet big money on it. She is in depression mode, lying motionless, her face to the wall. When I asked her if she was okay, well, that was when she reminded me to mow the lawn.
I wind the rope around the lawnmower’s starter and pull. Hard. I wind it again and pull again, this time with two hands. I do this ten more times. The lawnmower sputters but doesn’t turn over. When I try to turn the lawnmower over, the metal burns my hand. I leave the lawnmower lying on its side and go sit in the breezeway. My face is red, I can feel it, and the sweat is dripping in my eyes. I want to go in the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and stand there, maybe get a tray of ice cubes out and dump them in my shirt.
The bee smell gets stronger. Hotter. Thicker. I can hear the sounds of heat but maybe it’s crickets or heat bugs or some other creature. Not bees. Bees don’t say anything, I don’t think. It’s just my imagination or a wish. That I could be a person who could sniff out weather and birds and insects of all kinds. I look at the lawnmower laying on its side on the yellow grass and I decide to climb a tree.
It is my favorite tree. It has a split in the branches about halfway up where I can sit and watch things, like cars going back and forth on the oily road. Not today, but sometimes I take a book up in the tree. Today, I just sit. It is green and shady, and I see the grass below the tree is long and needs mowing.
______________________
Photo by Damien TUPINIER on Unsplash
Not Everyone is Looking: Advice to My Teenage Self
Not everyone is looking at you or judging you or thinking that you are anything other than what you actually are. People have their own lives. They are not spending their time dwelling on your shortcomings.
Or wondering why your tennis shoes are cheap and your socks off-brand. They aren’t keeping track that you wear your favorite matching teal skirt and sweater once every week or that your rotation of what you consider to be outfits fit for school looks like the discount rack at Arlen’s. They shop there, too. They just don’t tell you.
You really need to stop thinking everybody else is rich. They’re not. And if they were, it wouldn’t matter.
The things that make you so indescribably uncomfortable aren’t things that anyone else notices. You are making these things up in your head and then using them as excuses to hang back.
You could’ve been a cheerleader. You just lost your nerve.
I’m really sorry to heap humiliation on you but, seriously, you need to confront your role in making yourself feel like an outsider in high school. Nobody put that on you. You put it on yourself.
That’s pretty rough, I know. Uncharitable.
But nothing’s gained by deciding that the other kids in high school make you feel self-conscious or any other kind of way. They bustle their way down the hall, carrying too much, and dropping books just like you. They wear the wrong socks and forget their locker combinations. Their best friends ditch them for hipper people, and they can’t climb the rope in gym class.
Lucky you have one teacher who thinks you’re super smart and weird that it would be your typing teacher. After all, what kind of person goes to college to teach typing? And what kind of serious student goes to typing class unless that’s what they’ve planned for themselves – lifetime of typing. It was right of your father to insist that you learn to type, after all, like he said, if you can type you can always earn a living. It turned out to be true.
This is my advice, young Jan. You are the definer of yourself, not other people. You aren’t a reflection of other people’s opinions.
You shine on your own.
____________________
Originally published in 2022
Oh, So Talented, Aren’t We All?
My talent is catastrophizing. For example, every time I go over the Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee, I envision my car flipping over the guard rail into the water and knowing that the power windows probably wouldn’t work under water. I watched a video once that said to just take a crowbar and bang out the rear window. But my crowbar (if I even have one) is in the trunk. Who carries a crowbar in the front seat? And could I even hit the window hard enough to break it? And then what? Cuts, no doubt. A lot of cuts.
Another talent, just now emerging at a later age, is striking up conversations with strangers. The only place I don’t like doing this is the dog park since I’m all about my dogs and calling my reps on 5Calls. Otherwise, being sociable has become my new thing. Chatting and joking and carrying on. It’s wild.
Speaking of talent, the Artemis II crew. Talent, competence, humor, and grace sent to us by some weird happenstance to lift us up at this frightful, fearsome time in our country and on the planet. We’re going to be happy, grateful, and really sad when they splash down tonight. Man, it has been a long time between heroes.
I’m publishing a chapbook of 67 very short stories. It’s called Snippets. I’m doing this to celebrate my upcoming birthday. It’s not so easy to organize a chapbook – there’s a lot of arranging and pagination that I hadn’t thought about which is why it was a gift from above to have my very experienced and quite talented artist friend offer to figure it out for me.
And then, there is the remarkable talent of cats to own whatever space they occupy with authority and complete abandon. Here is Herc in repose after all the hubbub and commentary of the Artemis II splash down, his reclamation of attention and affection complete.
Leeches, Bows, and the Shedding of Drudgery
One of the things I love most about my life right now is that I pay someone else to clean my bathroom.
The toilet. The grout. The shower door. Most of all, the shower door. I’ve stopped doing internet research on new clever, multi-ingredient strategies for cleaning the glass shower door. I boxed up the ten thousand bottles of dangerous cleaning concoctions and hidden them away, for what purpose, I’m not sure. I guess in case I run out of money to pay someone else to clean my bathroom.
This was a long time coming. First, there had to be a decades’ long war between my desperate longing for people to clean not just my bathroom but my whole house and my deep belief that one should be able to tend one’s own house without help. It seemed elitist to have a cleaning service. Frivolous.
It’s not. It’s delicious. I love it so much. Today, I came back after the cleaners had left and one of them had made a bow on the stove door.
So, what’s the point of this post? As we say in our writing group, ‘what is this about?’
Shedding drudgery. Not shedding work. I like work. I even like heavy work – like doing the spring clean-up outside. Drudgery is like Mr. Allnut being covered in leeches and then getting back into the leech-infested water to pull the African Queen through the hideous weeds of the Ulonga River. That’s how it was for me cleaning my shower. I’d have to mentally prepare for days. It was sick.
No more. I have shed that drudgery. Cut it loose. Made it a memory.
And now I have all sorts of free time to write about drudgeries I have lost. Meanwhile, there is the bow on the stove door.
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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