Red's Wrap

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.

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.

In today’s episode of going to the conference, I again sat behind the nuns in green habits and failed to inquire as to the significance of the green.

When the Episcopal priest took the stage in the most remarkably show-stopping, geometrically fascinating, color rush dress I’d ever seen, my jaw dropped. I commented to the woman sitting next to me about the amazingness of the dress, adding that if I’d put it on this morning, I’d still be standing in front of my bedroom mirror wondering if I had the courage to wear it in public.

And then she (the woman next to me, not the priest) said, “Maybe it’s like yesterday, how we anticipate uncomfortableness in interacting with people so we don’t do it. You have to just put on the dress and walk out the door.”

She was wearing pink pants, a print top, and running shoes. She had amazing earrings though, so I figured she’d faced and conquered the dress bear more than once.

Yesterday, the priest wore a black dress with a ballooned hem with a long necklace of big red circles. Not beads. Circles. She also wore red patent leather shoes. Stupidly, I thought that outfit couldn’t be topped.

The priest introduced the speaker, a doctor/writer who teaches medical students about narrative medicine, that is, eliciting patients’ stories and telling their own as a means by which to deepen their practice and heal themselves. Five older people told their stories ranging from being misdiagnosed with a brain tumor, accidentally suspended from a trapeze, and having to navigate life after the overwhelming occurrence of a stroke, a car accident, and a diagnosis of Cushing Syndrome.

The doctor/writer stitched all these parts together in a beautiful, effortless way that made me switch my awe and envy from the priest’s dress to the doctor/writer’s slides. He talked about teaching medical students to set a timer for ten minutes and just write. And how he tells them to just let their pens go where they will and where they end up after ten minutes will be far different than expected. He talked about how doing this freed them from the constant beeps and requests and settled them as people. I want a doctor who free writes for ten minutes every day.

It was beautiful, all of it, despite the mystery of the green habits persisting.

And today is World Storytelling Day which is fitting in many ways. This year’s theme is “light in the dark.”

___________

Bruce Campbell, M.D., A Fullness of Uncertain Significance: Stories of Surgery, Clarity, and Grace, 2021.

__________

Photo by John Cardamone on Unsplash

In front of me sat two nuns in green habits. Next to me was a thin Anglo man writing Arabic on a small pad of paper. He drew each symbol in the most precise manner. When he sensed that I was looking at his writing, he casually moved his arm to block my view. That might not be true. I might be imagining it.

The speaker was talking about how talking to strangers improves one’s health. He is a psychologist teaching in a major university, his research focusing on how people are reluctant to talk to strangers but afterward are glad they did. It’s more complicated than that but this was the core thesis.

In what I thought was going to be guaranteed chaos, he asked an audience of about 200 people to form two lines so he could match us up two by two to have a twenty-minute conversation about three questions, the gist of which was 1) what would a new friend need to know about you? 2) what are you most grateful for? 3) when was the last time you cried in front of someone?

There was a pre and post-test accessed with a QR Code, the results of which his research assistant in Chicago calculated in real time. Of course, our experience mirrored his research. We had low expectations for these conversations, but they turned out to be fun.

I kept staring at the backs of the two nuns. Why are they wearing habits in the first place and why are they green? I wanted to tap one of them on the shoulder but didn’t. Instead, I wondered about how they’d chosen that shade of green, a spring green, a new green, not a deep green, and really not an army green. A hopeful color. I should’ve talked to them.

The man writing Arabic had filled almost the whole page with his tiny writing. Was he taking notes or writing a letter? Was he just learning to write Arabic or had he grown up with an Arabic newspaper on the kitchen table? I don’t know. I didn’t ask.

On the way out, a friend told me that the last time she cried in front of someone (her husband) was last night at an episode of Call the Midwives. It made me like her even more.