Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
There was a Sale on Clouds
A friend once told me that the average person thinks about replacing their pillow for seven years before they actually do it. It seemed like a factual thing, something he’d read in a scholarly journal. He wasn’t just wisecracking. Still, seven years equivocating about new pillows seemed excessive to me.
I bought four pillows today. They are so big and puffy that I couldn’t keep them stuffed in the too-small bags the store gave me and so I dropped a pillow first in the parking lot and then on the sidewalk. I was also carrying a giant new comforter at the time.
Anyway, about the lead-up to the pillows. I have been thinking about the deep inadequacy of my pillows for a long time. They are flat and lifeless. I try to bunch them up so they have more heft, but they wilt. My pillows wilt. I’ve endured this situation for a very long time, maybe not seven years but possibly. Time flies when you’re my age.
A few days ago we stayed overnight at a nice hotel. The pillows were extremely pillowy. They were like the clouds you drew as a kid with the whitest crayon in the box right after you drew the sun in the corner of the paper and colored it the best yellow. The hotel pillows were that perfect.
I asked my husband the other morning, “Don’t you think we need new pillows?” as if we had to have a unanimous vote on this major investment. “No,” he said, “My pillows are fine.” He would say this if they were the consistency of a worn sock.
Because he said his own pillows were fine, I could have bought new pillows just for myself. But that seemed mean-spirited, like having him continue to sleep on his worn sock-like pillows was just desserts for his tolerance of inadequate pillows. Besides yesterday was his birthday.
We are very pillowy around here and I have only myself to thank.
Keeping Track is a Super Power
Chaos is a strategy.
It worked for my teenage kids. Everything everywhere all at once. Except back then, we’d say, “There’s always something.” Or “There’s no rest for the wicked.”
So, here we are in Milwaukee. It’s pouring rain. This morning’s news told us that the head of the local Islamic Society was detained by ten ICE agents at his home. He is a legal U.S. resident; his wife and children are U.S. citizens. He has been in this country thirty years, runs a business, and is the elected leader of the Islamic Society. He has also been very vocal in his criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. Community leaders, elected officials and those involved in immigration advocacy feel that this man’s detention is the result of the exercise of his right to free speech. Right now, he is in an ICE detention facility in another state. A cadre of lawyers is gearing up; a community leaders’ press conference is scheduled for 4:00 p.m.
I’m going to have to make a new sign for Saturday.
The signs are stacking up in my trunk. Are we protesting about No Kings or Protect Social Security or No Cuts to NPR or Remember Renee Good and Alex Pretti or Voting Rights or No War or Abortion Rights or ICE OUT or Release the Epstein Files or Hands Off the Universities or Free Liam or Protect Birthright Citizenship or Save Ukraine or Release the Islamic Society Leader?
It truly is everything everywhere all at once. And its intended or unintended consequence is to make our markers run out of ink and us run out of gas. And make us so used to the craziness and injustice that we barely notice it anymore. Oh yeah, another dude got picked up for no apparent reason and disappeared into the black hole that seems to be the ICE detention system. Oh well.
I’ve learned so much from this past year. How it happens. That’s the biggest thing.
Keeping track of all this and not losing our minds – that’s our super power. Hang on.
_______________________
Photo by Soheb Zaidi on Unsplash
Back Porch Meditation with Coffee and Dogs
I go downstairs and let the dogs out. I watch Durant take a giant leap off the back porch and run to the back fence. Tempest picks her way down the stairs as if she’s wearing heels and a pencil skirt.
I make a pot of coffee and then I portion out the dogs’ breakfast into two bowls. I take the two bowls out to the porch where the two dogs are pacing. Durant looks partly crazy at this point. I put his bowl down first, artfully sliding it across the porch floor so his intense energy doesn’t accidentally sever one of my fingers. Tempest’s bowl is set before her as if it is cucumber soup in a china bowl.
Once the coffee is done, my husband and I sit on the back porch. This happens if the temperature is above, say, forty or so, maybe thirty-five, depending on the wind. I put on a coat over my pajamas and robe and my husband, already in a very old but thick robe, brings a blanket and we sit in our ancient porch chairs, drink our coffee, and pet our dogs.
We also take note of the birds. We talk and laugh. The conversation is fractured and often funny, mostly because at this point in the day, I can’t hear because I’ve not yet put on my hearing equipment. My husband uses his own version of sign language to talk to me, often spelling out words, letter by letter, in the air. When we are tired of this and have finished our first cup of coffee, we go inside, get more coffee and go upstairs to read the paper.
There are no pictures of all this because the back porch is a no phone zone. You’ll just have to take my word for it.
Naming Rights in the By and By
My name is a married name and not even the current marriage’s married name. My name harkens from a marriage that ended decades ago. Never mind that my name is a borrowed name, long overdue, what would I like it put on after I’m gone is the question.
I’m from Detroit, so maybe a car? A new edition Thunderbird, something very sleek and low to the ground. Thinking of the guy at the gas pump who, when I rolled up next to him in my 2005 Thunderbird, told me my car moved like a shark through still water. He was awed. I liked that. So, yes, maybe a car.
I’m from Hastings, so maybe one of the ponds at the Fish Hatchery? We went ice skating there in the fifties – my brother, sister, and I – while our mom sat in the car waiting. My brother speared frogs there. He brought them home in a bag and my mother cooked their legs which was wild because the legs danced in the iron frying pan. I can see it now.
I’m from Milwaukee, so a fallen tree along Lincoln Memorial Drive? A few years ago, somebody painted a tree lying on the hillside a deep, profound red. It wasn’t spray-painted. It was painted by hand. You could tell that even from the road – the color was so thick and purposeful. Dead trees stay on the hillside until they rot into the earth so there’s a permanence there that might not exist with a car or a pond, for that matter, global warming being what it is.
Just thinking about it – having this visible legacy in the world is, yes, a true tonic for the soul.
Irony, Laughing, and Coiled Angst at a U.P. Cabin
There’s laughing at funny things and there’s laughing at irony.
I found this picture yesterday while, yes, cleaning my office for the ten thousandth day. This is why it takes so much time, the irony factor.
In the picture, I am drinking a beer while sitting in a rusty chair on a screened in porch. My feet are on the window ledge and I’m looking out at Gulliver Lake in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I am on the first true vacation that I ever took as a single parent. There is a similar picture of my then ten-year old daughter in the same chair leaned over reading a book. I don’t remember if we arranged to take these pictures or they just happened. People didn’t run around with phones then, just, in our case, little disposable cameras picked up at the grocery on the way to the cabin.
In the picture, I look relaxed, maybe even carefree. I am in a beloved place, a place I visited with my parents many times. Everything in the one room cabin was familiar and dear to me – the round edged refrigerator, the curtains with tulips along the bottom, the plastic shower curtain and the tiny, wrapped bars of soap, the sound the screen door made when it slapped shut.
We played hearts on that porch and maybe checkers. We ate dinner at a tiny table. I want to say we slept well and ate donuts in the morning, but I don’t remember that part. It was, after all, forty-two years ago.
I do know that there had been a trail of angst that followed me on the six-hour drive north and that the angst was curled up in the grass behind the cabin waiting for me to get back in the car to go home. Hard, thick, complicated things waiting at home. I remember all that, all the dots to connect, and maybe it’s not laughing that I’m doing, maybe it’s just smiling and shaking my head. Looks can be deceiving but so comforting, especially decades later.
I love this picture, though. I’m going to put it on my wall.
Wave to Me Down the Line: No Kings
There’s nothing that’s keeping you from showing up at a No Kings demonstration tomorrow. You could be a hundred years old and if you can somehow get to a demo, the people there will create a seat for you. They’ll pile up their jackets and backpacks so you can sit down, they’ll tell you what the speakers are saying and match your very slow step in the march.
Because the people who show up are the best.
Oddly, No Kings is non-partisan. There is a square on the sidewalk, room on the street, a patch on the grass for every single person who believes in democracy. And tomorrow, assuming you believe in democracy and you live in the United States, you need to claim your space.
Don’t just watch on the news and silently agree. Your silent agreement has no currency. We are at a moment in history when we have to be physically present, we have to be ‘in that number when the saints go marching in.’ That’s us. We’re the saints. And tomorrow is our day to march.
Don’t over-analyze. Don’t conjecture all the bad things that you think might happen. Don’t decide that cleaning the refrigerator is more important than democracy. Remember that there is a place for you. Believe that you can hold hands with a stranger. Trust your country-loving instincts. Believe in your own amazing, unique, and incredible power.
And wave to me down the line.
_________________________
Find a No Kings demonstration near you at the No Kings website.
Photo of my protest partner, Judy, and her terrific sign. She and it are the best.
Hat Mishaps on Opening Day
I got snippy with a Dancing Granny today because she insisted on opening the $12 can of beer I’d just bought at the ballpark. Like, why do you have to open it? If you open it, I can’t put the can in my pocket with the other can so I can have my hands free for the two hot dogs and cheese curds that I’m also buying. I didn’t get awful, I just asked her to relay to management, if they ever asked, that some folks put their beer in their pockets and having the beer open makes a terrible mess.
That she was a Dancing Granny, that is, a member of a beloved dance group that marches in all the big parades, twirling batons with streamers and doing super cute, synchronized dance steps, well, all that went way over my head despite Dancing Granny being stitched on her baseball cap. Her group was manning a concession stand to raise money for their twirling. (Which I love and have thought of doing but you have to try out to be a Dancing Granny and I can’t risk rejection like that.)
Speaking of hats, today was opening day for the Milwaukee Brewers. It wasn’t until the fifth inning that I felt the top of my new pink baseball hat. And behold, the little black plastic hook from whence my hat once hung in the team store was still there.
I felt like Minnie Pearl. (I make that reference because it hasn’t escaped me that my readership is largely comprised of my age peers, in which case you probably know exactly who Minnie Pearl was, but I provided a link just in case.)
I was incredulous. How could I have dressed, put on my hat, gotten in the car, driven to the ballpark, walked to our seats, and sat through five innings with my husband and he doesn’t say a word. Not, hey, let me get that thing off your hat, or you probably didn’t notice it but the plastic hook from the store is still on your hat, or you might want to check the top of your hat because the guy behind us is looking at your hat funny. Nope.
Lordy.
My beloved is going to let me walk out of the house looking like Minnie Pearl and, honestly, I don’t know what to make of that. That he doesn’t care if I look like Minnie Pearl might be the best interpretation. His love is enduring despite plastic hooks, price tags, or bits and pieces of last night’s dinner hanging from my hat. I jest.
It’s all good. Brewers beat the White Sox 14-2.
We’ll Deal with the Hat and the Meat Grinder Tomorrow
I threw out a study of the county jail’s handling of people with mental illness, a plan to redevelop a neighborhood park, and extra copies of survey reports on homeless people in our town. I also threw out a massive, multi-site study of delinquency prevention programs in Wisconsin that was cursed from the outset because I forgot to invite a key guy to a planning meeting. I got paid but I was treated like dirt. Less than dirt. Gum on the bottom of his shoe. It was a great looking report though.
I also threw out medical records I’d requested decades ago that described surgery for an ectopic pregnancy and then the labor and delivery of my baby girl. Why I needed those medical records I couldn’t tell you. There are thick manila envelopes full of handwritten notes when we were going back and forth with Nicaraguan orphanage officials about adopting three of our kids. They have phrases like, “he doesn’t sit up or stand but there’s no reason he can’t.” This was in regard to a seventeen-month boy we were asked to adopt. I kept all those papers along with newspaper clippings, so many of them about the Sandinistas, the war, the kids who had been adopted by Milwaukee families. I threw none of that out.
I kept all four high school yearbooks.
I haven’t tackled the stuffed animals. For an older woman, I probably have an unusual number of stuffed animals. And let me be clear. I did not buy them. They were gifts. Don’t ask me why family members look at me and think Stuffed Animal! Anyway, since I have a cat and a husband to sleep with, I’ve not taken any of the stuffed animals to bed with me. But, oddly and don’t make me explain, I could see myself doing that, you know, if worse came to worst.
On one deep bookshelf, way in the back, is the red hat I borrowed from a friend ten years ago when I was invited to a Kentucky Derby party. I am loathe to ask her if she still wants her hat back because, really, why haven’t I asked her already? I ended up not wearing the hat to the party making it all the worse. I will address this problem tomorrow.
I am not Swedish Death Cleaning. I don’t think. I haven’t read the book. But it occurs to me that somebody who has stuffed animals, old reports, and a meat grinder – an actual meat grinder – gathered like a still life on the bottom shelf in her office needs some psychological rearrangement. I am much attached to the meat grinder.
The bag that I took out to the trash was very heavy. I forget exactly what was in it. Which is the whole point, I guess.
Potato Mashing is so Pedestrian
I suppose saying that I’m really good at mashing potatoes is kind of lame.
It seems a skimpy skill compared to playing Chopin or changing the oil in one’s car, which nobody does any more so who cares?
Still, I can mash potatoes within an inch of their lives. I can also make a perfect white sauce which, if so desired, can become a cheese sauce, a skill I will exercise tonight in an effort to redeem our healthy vegetable pasta. I can also make breakfast for a lot of people fairly fast, write a letter of recommendation in five minutes, and hold a protest sign, often over my head, for an hour and a half.
This does not erase the fact that twice this week I unwittingly stepped out in front of moving cars. There are spatial explanations for both incidents, but neither would have saved me if the drivers hadn’t hit the brakes. I am starting to not look where I’m going. I’m conscious of this, walking behind parked cars that might be backing up, but in my head, I think, I am the pedestrian as if pedestrian is written in capital letters and as if I am wearing a bright neon jacket, a magic one that stops traffic coming from all directions.
I take the two incidents of stepping into the path of oncoming cars as what? – a warning? – a symptom? – a sign from the gods? I resolve to be more careful. To become better at avoiding death or serious injury. Or causing some poor soul endless grief because they rammed into an old lady crossing the street. I wouldn’t want that to be my legacy. Heavens.
Will my secret skill or ability be avoiding death by bumper?
What I know about writing prompts is this: they can lead you anywhere, even into the street.
The Sun Changes Everything
It has been nearly six full months of winter. The cozy and snug part of winter has diminished as hunkering down fatigue grows. Continually grey skies and leafless trees suck the life out of the most cheerful folks. I would be one of those people – I love weather, pretty much love winter and snow and the limitations on normal life that they sometimes impose. But this year, my enjoyment turned to tolerance and then to patience and then finally to stoicism, barely achieved.
But today, the sun was shining and the sky had not a single cloud. So we cancelled what we had planned on doing and decided to stay outside. It made me remember the deals I’d make with my mother to stay out at dusk – for a half hour, for fifteen minutes, for five – because the air smelled so green and there was mud on my shoes and the wind lifted my bangs off my forehead just the slightest amount. That’s how today was.
We went to a nature preserve and hiked for a bit. The trees were arching and posing for us and there were shadows – because of the sun – and the path we took was wide and even and just very lovely.
We walked past this tree and then I turned back to look again. When I was a child, I thought there were little creatures wearing aprons that lived inside trees like this, a function of fairy tales taken literally and of my brother’s tales about elves dancing under shrubs in our front yard. I believed all of it for a very long time.
With all its shredding and the sun hitting it just so, this was the most beautiful tree on the trail. It reaffirmed for me that old and wrecked things are often stunning – we rush too fast to the new and flawless. On a cloudy day, this scene would feel like destruction and death, with the sun, the splaying of the tree trunk, the pieces of the trunk strewn about – it’s art. The sun changes everything.
________________
Originally published in 2022, but so true today. The snow is gone and the sun is out in Wisconsin. Finally.
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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