Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
It’s Usually Right in Front of Us
I don’t do a lot of interpretive dance anymore but occasionally I take a picture that could generate some earnest group discussion.
If this picture of dear Tempest ready to lead her human down a sunny trail doesn’t speak to you in some way, well, I have a lot of cat pictures.
Nobody knows the meaning of life. That’s the true answer. We’re all just trying to find a trail with a little light. And possibly a blue jay flitting about, reminding us of what’s possible if we just look up once in a while.
The Kitchen Window in the Morning
I’ve found that looking out the kitchen window first thing in the morning and wringing my hands while the coffee is brewing sets just the right mood for my day.
You have to do some preemptive hand wringing so you aren’t tempted to take your hands of the wheel when the urge strikes. If you have some hand wringing stored up, you’re good for hours.
Our daughter is very ill and has been in the hospital for two weeks. Her little girl is living with us. So, we have the almost indescribable joy of being around a crazy happy five-year old all the time along with intense worry and anxiety about the future.
We continue our practice of taking our first cup of coffee on the back porch if the temperature is at least above freezing and there isn’t much wind. Now, our granddaughter joins us eating Golden Grahams out of a coffee mug. She wears one of my winter hats and her bathrobe, sitting in a canvas camp chair tucked in with the blanket from the couch. We talk about the birds and the squirrels and other pressing matters like how all the people have to go to school but animals don’t.
I spend a lot of time in the car driving to and fro. My backseat has erupted into a pile of coloring books, markers, jackets, small bags of animal crackers, and orange peels. The valet parking guys are very nice to us, including the guy who whistles all the time and from a distance sounds like birds recorded in some pristine wild. He whistles while sick and bandaged people wait in wheelchairs and one little girl spins in circles, her arms stretched out and hair flying like this day, this moment is the best one of her life.
I can see the envy on the faces of all the sick and bandaged people. I know that envy, that remembering of a time when we were carefree like this little girl although the feel of it, the breath of it is so distant now.
Maybe it’s enough to know that we had our turn to spin in circles and listen to the man whistle like a bird.
I thought of that looking out the window this morning while wringing my hands.
Soup Keel Magic
It’s not the first time that the major challenge of my day is finding the keel and keeping it even.
This challenge is on top of trying to keep the chewing of my biscotti quiet enough so the four-year-old in the next room doesn’t come roaring in demanding to know what I’m eating. She’s sweet, though, when she inquires, and awfully cute. Still, between becoming such a subject of interest to a child and the wild waves that are pushing my dear keel all over the place, life has had an erratic nature of late.
In the past, my advice to myself and to others with ricocheting emotions is to make soup. So, I’m thinking about rifling through my pantry to see if I have a bag of lentils. Garlic, onions, carrots, maybe a little diced potato – that could be a heck of a soup. A keel of a soup.
You have to do the thing that smells like hope for the future. Pray I have a bag of lentils.
Tales of the Valet Parking Stand
Sometimes if you can’t write about a thing, you can write around the edges of a thing.
Today, while I was waiting outside the hospital for the valet parking guy to get my car, I espied a huge man clad in all white sitting in a wheelchair a few feet away. He had blond hair but was older and had a face that had piles of years, decades, folded every which way. He was enormous, so much so that where his limbs began and his torso ended couldn’t be determined. His feet were bandaged, letting only his long yellow toenails see the light of day.
“I was at the hospital for two hours. The doctor said I’d die if I left but I’m outside waiting for my ride.” He held his cellphone to his voluminous cheek. I imagined that the phone had gotten stuck there, swallowed by the whaleness of his face.
I didn’t know who he was talking to, I didn’t want to listen that carefully, but the man knew I was looking at him and when I wasn’t looking at him, I was thinking about him. I was thinking about how monstrous he was, fierce in his massive weight, scary in the look given from under his thick eyebrow. Who are you to look at me? To listen to what the doctor said?
And then I chastised myself for my unkind revulsion and tried to imagine the man as he might have appeared in his high school yearbook. He would be sitting up straight, maybe with a white shirt and tie, his hair would be parted on the side and combed to one side. His mom would have ironed that shirt for him while the sun was still coming up. Where was his mother now? Was she gone? Would she come fetch him?
It was not my place to wonder about his life, nor to look at the giant man a single more time. When the valet pulled up in my car, I gave him $5 and told him I’d see him tomorrow. I never looked back. I don’t know if the man was looking at me. He might have been.
I Can’t Peel an Egg while I’m Driving and Other Things I Thought I’d Never Have to Say Again
Through some strange turn of events which I might explain later or maybe never at all, we are taking care of our four-year-old granddaughter, for a while or for longer than a while, we don’t know.
We did a variation of this several years ago so we know the drill of suddenly turning one’s life upside down to accommodate Play-Doh and Barbies. Another grandchild spent a lot of time growing up here, that one is now twenty and, I hope, willing to help out with the new one.
It makes my head spin.
Today, at the playground, our granddaughter quickly made friends with a little girl and her brother who had just been given a bubble gun. (Is that what they call them? Sounds so fierce.) There were bubbles and glee everywhere. Chasing and so much happiness. So, then, the process of telling her we had to leave the park to pick up Grandpa became tricky. She came along. Unhappily. But still compliant until she realized that she’d left her Barbie under the swing. And then when I fetched the Barbie it seemed like she’d lost her pants or her skirt or something so then the mom of the bubble kids started to look for the tiny clothing which was not to be found because it wasn’t missing after all which is the run-on nonsensical sentence that is the entire gist of being with children, if you ask me.
I’m not a natural but I try.
I wouldn’t say this situation has been foisted on us, but it feels larger than expected. I can do all the things I need to do. Unwrap the Barbie, cut the tiny threads of plastic around her neck with a key, spread out a paper bag for Play-Doh, find the Christmas cookie cutters and the rolling pin to play with, pour a bowl of cereal, find paper and the good brush. Flush the toilet.
But it seems harder than when I did it before. Like I’ve been sitting in a La-Z-Boy for a couple of hours and then got up to run around the block five times. Strenuous.
Oh well. Time to tone up those weak muscles and haul out all the old phrases. It’s so true. You can’t peel an egg when you’re driving unless you’re a way better grandparent than I am.
Durant Diary: Entry #11
Durant has died.
This happened four days ago but I still can’t believe it. If I think about it for more than a second, my eyes fill up with tears. Out for a walk yesterday with Tempest, our surviving dog, I burst into tears while sitting on a park bench watching people sail. It was their first sail of the season, you could tell, because they were weaving one way and then another, full of the happiness of it all, the brightness.
In the morning when I wake up, I forget that Durant has died. And then I remember.
I loved this dog an extraordinary amount and I can’t begin to tell you why, what made him different from all the other dogs I’ve loved and there have been many.
Durant’s kidneys failed in a fast and catastrophic way. We took him to our vet and then a specialty vet on Monday, had all the tests done, said yes to IV fluids and antibiotics which he got for two days, figuring that that such a strong, hardy dog would recover. But no. The vet said he had gotten worse despite the treatment and recommended that we wait no more than a day to euthanize him to avoid him suffering. It was crushing news.
We brought him home for his final day. We sat on the back porch watching Durant and Tempest lay in the sun. I took a nap with him on the dining room floor, holding his paws like I might a sick child’s hands. Then we loaded him up in our camper van and drove to his favorite dog park where he took his last short trot. He stopped a lot, looking back at me, something he rarely did when he was well, but his tail was up the whole time, his happy stance. Back in the van, he climbed on to the bed and curled up on the old red comforter.
We took the long way back from the dog park, but at 3:00 on Wednesday afternoon, we kept our appointment and Durant sailed off without us.
This morning when I let Tempest out the back door, I could see in my mind’s eye, Durant leaping from the top step of the porch on to the yard, especially that moment when he appeared to take flight, the most improbable sight ever, this large powerful dog sailing through the air. It reminded me of the happiness of it all, the brightness. It was spectacular and fleeting.
Ten Little Mysteries Lined Up in a Row
There are so many unsolved mysteries in my little life.
How cats know to use a litter box.
How my dad could make a living playing in dance bands without knowing how to read music.
Why my sister-in-law ratted me out about smoking marijuana once in college.
Why I got fired from the billboard company in 1967.
Who hit the frame of the neighbor’s bay window going down our joint driveway.
What caused our beach house to burn down in 1999.
Where our cat Kitty went and why we were fooled into thinking another cat, with a very telltale antagonistic attitude, who we reclaimed from the humane society was actually our beloved Kitty.
Why adopted kids seem like your left arm some of the time and other times seem like people you accidentally bumped with your cart in Walmart.
How to decide on window ‘treatments.’
Who trimmed our front bushes without telling us, straight across like the butch haircut my big brother used to get, yep, straight across with some kind of powerful trimmer, the kind we don’t own because we never trim the bushes because they are actually what some might call our ‘window treatments’ so people can’t see us lounging with our bourbon and ginger watching cable news every night.
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Photo by Mike Castro Demaria on Unsplash
Living in the Death Wish
I can tell you the exact moment.
It is August, late afternoon. The sun is shining but it’s heading to the horizon. After an afternoon of rolling waves, Lake Superior has evened out. The water is blue, the bluest blue, so blue that the lake and the sky could be drawn by a child with a single blue crayon. Cerulean, blue.
I am swimming a breaststroke. My head is out of the water so I can see the dunes of Pictured Rocks and the Au Sable Lighthouse at the end of a curl of land reaching out to passing freighters like a long green ribbon. The water is cold, so cold that it takes me fifteen minutes of wading and waiting and debating to bring my whole self into the water. When I splash lake water on my face, it feels like a drunk’s effort to forget the night before.
Everything about this moment is perfect and remarkable and precious. And if I died tomorrow, no, if I knew I was to die tomorrow, say I am lying in a hospital bed with teary-eyed people all about, I’d close my eyes and swim in the freezing water toward the setting sun, my arms stretched out like wings.
The Searing Comfort of Layla
I spent the summer of 1973 sitting on a blanket atop the scorched brown grass behind our Flint townhouse, yards of black cord connected my bagel-size headphones to our stereo inside. I watched my eight-month old baby girl sit and crawl and eat the brown grass while Eric Clapton’s Layla, the screaming, wild, knife in the heart, electric version, roared in my head.
Sometimes, after the seven-minute song ended, I would take off my headphones and go in the house to reset the record needle to the beginning instead of waiting for the rest of the songs to play. I loved Layla that much.
And I doubted my life just as much.
I’d wanted to be a mother, so much so that it had been all I thought about for years, convincing myself that one bad decision or another in my earlier, single days, would make getting pregnant impossible. But when motherhood came, I was at a loss. It was so constant. And it felt so diminishing. While my husband was at work, dressed in a suit and managing people and things, I was in charge of the backyard, too thick around the waist to button my shorts, not his fault, this is just how it was then.
But Layla.
The deafening sounds of Clapton’s guitar, the slide and screech, the gut of his voice, lifted me out of the backyard into the wild place of desire and longing and loss and passion that I’d forgotten I’d ever felt. And that made me feel like freedom was still out there, still possible, that my feeling stuck and anchored and imprisoned was momentary, not permanent.
So I would listen to Layla with the volume turned to the highest our old stereo allowed and I’d hold my baby girl’s tiny hands while she walked across the blanket, the afternoon sun blocked by our townhouse so the backyard was cool and shady.
Layla, you’ve got me on my knees
Layla, I’m begging, darling please
Layla, darling won’t you ease my worried mind.
-Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon, 1970-
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Originally published in 2020.
Today (May 3, 2026), on my way home from an event, Layla came on the radio. I thought for a moment that listening to that single song at maximum volume for hours on end might be responsible for my profound deafness. But then I thought about those afternoons in our backyard in Flint when Layla helped me figure myself out after becoming a mom. We each find our own way to an even keel. That was mine.
Brevity is Beautiful
My answer to the question is yes.
Love is a place.
Yes is a world.
Two lines from a very short poem by E. E. Cummings.
The words are engraved on the underside of the silver bracelet I wear almost every day. I would have done the topside, but I didn’t want people leaning over to see what was written. Better it be my secret. I’m the one the words speak to, after all.
It’s good to have special words, though. Very anchoring. And the more they’re your own find or maybe your own original words, the better. It’s like a lucky rock you keep in your pocket because you found it on a beautiful beach and the rock feels perfect in your hand.
Anyway, these eight words are the rock in my pocket.
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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