Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
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.
Truck Life in the Big City
My friend opened the truck door, looked up at me and said, “How do you drive such a big vehicle?” And I paused for a long minute and then said, with a perfectly straight face, “I’m tough.”
Then I told her that there is an axe in the side pocket of the driver’s side door in case we want to cut down a tree on the way to the swimming pool or cause some other kind of mayhem.
These are moments to treasure – when you realize that you very well could become unhinged, but you haven’t yet. Just moments earlier, I’d encountered both ends of my street being blocked off by orange cones and big public works trucks. I felt the hinges loosening quite a bit then. Workmen at one end of the street were digging a hole between the curb and the sidewalk. At the other end, workmen were standing in the street watching water jet out of a hydrant. They shrugged when I asked if they’d coordinated their efforts so the street wouldn’t be entirely inaccessible to the people who lived on it.
There was repeated shrugging. Rehearsed almost. To the same beat.
I could feel my sarcastic body language bubbling over.
Ultimately, I had civil conversations with all of the workmen although the definition of civil may need to be stretched just a hair. They weren’t impressed with my truck-inspired toughness, nor did they know about the axe in the side pocket of the driver’s side door. The water workmen were willing to negotiate a deal which would allow me to move certain cones in order to park on my street as long as I moved the cones back. It felt like opening the Strait of Hormuz.
Today tough old lady in a truck. Tomorrow sweet old lady in a sedan, no axe. We are who we pretend to be.
Selling What Doesn’t Matter Anymore
Two older women get together for coffee.
It’s a business meeting but the two women have known each other for a long time, probably more than thirty years, so they are friends in a way, business friends at least. They have memories of time spent together, deep discussions in cars traveling to and from meetings. One older woman tears up recalling an ancient conversation. It’s about children and adoption and choices.
Somehow, the two older women talk about jewelry they’ve sold in the past. People don’t usually sell jewelry unless they want to get rid of the jewelry because they got rid of the person who gave it to them or they need the money or both.
A very long time ago, I sold a gold pin that had four emeralds and rubies in a row. It was given to me by a married man who had no business giving someone not his wife such an expensive piece of jewelry. He also gave me a tiny carved elephant, yes, carved of ivory, I suspect, with a wee ruby on its head. I didn’t sell that. Don’t ask me why.
I also sold my high school class ring. That was a mistake. I bought groceries from my jewelry sale. I especially remember the gallon of milk. It seemed a meager prize.
“You never get very much money when you sell jewelry,” I said. And the other woman agreed.
The two women returned to the topics at hand – politics and programs, plans and advocacy. Misunderstandings, clarifications, strategies. Finding the threads to stitch a problem into a solution, using our shared history of hocking our jewelry as common ground.
It’s what two older women who get together for coffee do.
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Photo by Susan Holt Simpson on Unsplash
100 Word Story: Sweeping
This time the broom was right where she’d left it, leaning against the railing on the back porch. But the day before, it was leaning on a far tree trunk and before that it was lying on the top of her car.
The broom takes flight in the night, she thought, then caught herself at how crazy that sounded.
Did it walk on its thin straw legs? Slither around the yard in the dark like a snake searching for a sleeping rabbit?
Her mother told her that objects breathed in the life around them. Her broom knew her so well.
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Photo by Jane Slack-Smith on Unsplash
The Sweet Life of Trash Picking
It’s a sign of something that I want to start keeping garbage bags and disposable gloves in my car so I can swerve over to the side of the road and pick up trash whenever the spirit moves me.
It seems like a very elderly thing to do.
“Who is that old woman? I always see her out here picking up trash.”
“No clue. There’s another old lady who pushes a baby stroller around the neighborhood all day. Loads the thing up with garbage bags and books so it’s super heavy. The trash lady’s probably her sister.”
Today was pick up the trash day along Milwaukee’s rivers. Volunteers were given t-shirts, disposable gloves, and giant black garbage bags and sent forth. I worked my way along a ridge overlooking the Menomonee River. Down below, I could see piles of beer bottles, ragged t-shirts, cardboard, and mysteries. I wanted to, but I didn’t climb down the hill. I’m not surefooted anymore. I know that much. I had to stay in my lane at the top of the hill and pick up the itty-bits, smashed plastic liquor bottles and the like. It was okay.
Anyway, picking up trash is very gratifying. And probably a metaphor for something really important. Like dealing with the detritus of life, all the dropped balls and lost jobs and wounded people. Or proving one’s continued value on the planet by making everything tidier and more orderly. Old people love having a place for everything and everything in its place, it makes it easier on the heirs.
I ramble. Suffice to say, picking up trash was an oddly elevating experience. So much so that I’m just going to carry on, comparisons to the baby stroller pusher notwithstanding.
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Photo by Tommaso Pecchioli on Unsplash
Where’s the Money When you Need It?
I wish I’d come up with the scratch to buy the land adjacent to our cabin on Lake Superior, so someone wasn’t able to build an enormous, earth-scarring monstrosity next door. I say ‘next door’ hesitantly as it implies neighborliness, as in, let’s go borrow a cup of sugar from the folks next door.
There is more wrong about the building next door than the building next door.
I wrote about my frustration with the construction of this Trumpian horror a few years ago but then a reader told me to get over myself and my second house and go do something useful like help the homeless. Oh well.
Looking back, I could’ve sold my car, taken a second job at the 7-Eleven, you know, hustle a bit. As it was, I just watched ugliness unfold, like the world’s slowest vomit.
Most of my life’s regrets are about actions I did take not ones that I didn’t. This would be the exception. And it’s a doozy.
Not the most beautifully written post but you asked and I answered.
Two Vignettes for Your Reading Pleasure
We followed a beat-up white panel truck with no license plates down the street that winds through the forest of apartment buildings along the Milwaukee River. When the street expanded to two lanes, we pulled up next to the truck and right away heard the driver talking to us. “One day I’ll make a lot of money, and I’ll buy a car like yours.” He was a young, good-looking guy, smoking a blunt. He went on to say more about how he admired our car (a 2017 Audi sedan) and then announced, “I’m a plumber.” We almost invited him home with us because the day before our water heater had died but we already had a plumber coming. Still, it’s not every day that you meet a plumber who likes your car.
The cashier at Walgreen’s asked if me if my day was going like I’d planned. I said, “yes, pretty much,” and then added that it was my birthday. “So what great thing are you doing on your birthday?” he asked. I told him I was cleaning my back porch. “Ah,” he said. “Is that your place of peace?” Later in the car, I saw that in addition to the Advil and lotion I’d bought, there was a small box of fake nails in the bag. I’d seen the box on the counter, left by someone else, but in my delight in contemplating the porch as my place of peace I’d not noticed I’d bought them. The next day I took them back for a refund. The same cashier wasn’t there and I was glad because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
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Photo by MacDonald Almeida on Unsplash
People You Can’t Forget: Mr. Dillard
Mr. Dillard always wore a dress shirt buttoned up to the neck but no tie along with pleated dress pants, I remember khakis but maybe they were just plain black pants, and nice shoes. He was always handsomely put together with a cardigan or light jacket over his shirt. He was a man who thought about what to wear.
I remember his brown hands and his long fingers, the perfectly manicured ovals of his nails. Everything about him was finely trimmed. And his demeanor matched. Circumspect, quiet, every utterance a complete sentence. He was, as they used to say, very particular.
I knew Mr. Dillard from picking up and taking him home from a regular meeting that we shared. Our conversations were sparse and I remember only one with any clarity.
We pulled up to a stoplight next to another car.
“Chartreuse,” he said. “You don’t see very many chartreuse cars.”
“No, you don’t. Unusual color for a car.”
“I once knew a woman named Chartreuse,” he said, his sentence hanging in the air like letters strung on a string across the windshield. It was all he said but the sentence seemed heavy and thick like Chartreuse had left a mark on him.
Mr. Dillard passed away many years ago but I think of him too often for the slight encounters we had, driving to and from a monthly meeting. It’s because of Chartreuse, the woman that Mr. Dillard once knew; the color, a mixture of yellow and green that is so rare to see on a car these days.
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Originally published in 2018
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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