Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
#27 of 92: World Series Woe
Baseball.
That is all.
All my great words are hanging their heads in the Brewers’ dugout.
Tomorrow is another day.
#26 of 92: Flowering
“Why are we always where other people aren’t?”
It is a favorite quote from one of my kids. I like it so much I’d like to stitch it on a shirt or wear it on small button on my jacket. It is what I like best. Being where other people aren’t.
It’s not because I don’t like people. I do. I just don’t like many of them in the same place.
The park worker watering the giant banana tree in the Tropical Dome of the Mitchell Park Conservatory and the mom with her five-year old were plenty this afternoon. I didn’t have to worry about them being in the picture.
I sat on a bench after taking this picture. I wanted to send it to a friend. And then I wanted to sit there as if I didn’t have anything else in the world more important than breathing in the steamy orchid air. I’ve earned this, I thought. So many years of working all the time, never just going somewhere in the middle of the day, being tied to my computer screen, stuck in meetings with people who had all the time in the world.
I can just be here, I decided. I can be here with the other old people, the couple who just came through the door who are murmuring to each other. He is guiding his walker carefully over the wood chips and she is holding his arm. They look happy being here. Like me.
And then my email tells me that I shouldn’t be sitting here. I should be back in my office, scanning a copy of a document to send someone who needs it in order to pay me. So I leave. I interrupt my reverie and I get up and leave. And I think it’s a bitch and I’m fed up with it, leaving places with no people when I’m not really ready. Fuck it, I think.
I like it here.
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Published almost exactly ten years ago. Wow. That’s where I was then and this is where I am now. Time.
#25 of 92: Acing Death & Dying
Do you set personal goals for yourself?
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What’s the meaning of life if you don’t regularly set and not meet goals?
We are supposed to be striving here not just passing the time of day! Are your crops all brought in? Your laundry off the line? Is everyone’s homework done? Including yours?
My goal today was to finish a presentation for my Death & Dying class about culturally competent palliative care for Jewish patients. Palliative care, if you didn’t know, is end-of-life or hospice care. It’s something that you get on your way out the door. There are books and seminars and institutes all studying palliative care. It’s an industry. Everything’s an industry.
Of course, being Jewish isn’t one thing, like being Baptist or Episcopalian. Being Jewish, at least in my experience as a ‘Jewish-adjacent’ person (don’t you love that?), is a complicated, intricate, cultural, religious, historical, tribal thing that is felt and studied and debated constantly. And there are way different ‘types’ of Jews – ultra observant, conservative, reformed, reconstructionist. One value held in common is that a Jewish person is obligated to do everything possible to sustain life. That makes it hard to end a life-sustaining but not curative treatment.
I have a stack of books on my desk about Judaism from my time studying for conversion, a move I ultimately decided against, but I kept the books. I’ve leafed through all of them this afternoon looking for the perfect quotes for my presentation. Meanwhile, the rabbi across the street is raking his leaves. His children help him. When he’s done with his lawn, he rakes his neighbors leaves and mows his lawn. He sweeps everything into the street. He does all this wearing a white dress shirt and a tie. I could go talk to him about Death & Dying but I feel like I’d need to study for weeks to have a discussion. These rabbis don’t do casual conversation about religious principles. That much I learned in my conversion gambit.
So, I am left to read and sift and puzzle and make another PowerPoint slide and have a goal of getting a 10 on the assignment which may or may not happen.
But I am trying.
This Year’s Cake
This year, the banana cake has a half inch layer of cream cheese frosting.
Last year’s cake was bare because I didn’t want to use the last of my cream cheese for frosting and we weren’t shopping in stores then, only getting grocery deliveries. It was my husband’s birthday cake, a pandemic cake, a Depression cake, sweet enough to be a cake but stopping way short of celebration. It was a cake that felt like bread. If we had to, we could live on this cake for a good while, that’s what I thought. Everything then had that feel.
After dinner tonight at the dining room table we haven’t used for over a year, my friend, Karen, remarked on the cake.
“I usually don’t like frosting but this frosting was really good. What’s in it besides cream cheese?”
“A stick of butter.”
“A whole stick of butter?”
“Yes, and three cups of confectioner’s sugar.”
“Three cups of sugar?”
I left out the bit of vanilla and the sprinkle of salt. And I didn’t tell her how I beat the frosting for a good long time just to see it be thick and smooth in the bowl or that after I frosted the cake, even layering on the half inch, there was enough frosting left in the bowl that, if I’d wanted to, I could eat spoonfuls of it, scraping the sides nice and clean. It seemed amazing and indulgent and somehow, oddly, earned.
Now is the time of frosting.
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Originally published in 2021
#23 of 92: A Cake to End All Cakes Friday Round-Up
I’m going to have this cake picture framed and put on my living room wall. Seriously, have you ever seen a more beautiful cake? Four layers of vanilla sponge with cream cheese/buttercream frosting and the most perfect flowers ever. It was to celebrate the end of my term on the Milwaukee County Commission on Aging. I also got a proclamation from the County Executive, but I’d swap it for more cake.
We are having a big race for governor in Wisconsin that features a super competent guy who came up from hard times to run the state’s biggest county and a guy in a flannel shirt using a dairy barn as backdrop trying to convince us that he is a good ole’ boy because his mom likes him awful much, never mind that he voted to overturn the 2020 election. And somehow, there are voters in Wisconsin who are puzzled about who to vote for. Oh, the first guy is Black. Could that have anything to do with the dilly-dallying?
Tonight is the first game of the 2026 World Series – Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays. We are prepared to be sad. I mean we really never get the big cake. Oh! Wait!
Leaving the Milwaukee Public Library with an armful of kids’ books, I wanted to find one book for myself. I’d started reading the Legend of Sleepy Hollow in the kids’ room but left it on the chair thinking I should get something more adult. Next to the exit, I grabbed a book about rehabilitating turtles. I don’t read enough books about creatures. Who does, really?
A newlywed couple stood on the street outside the library, posing for their photographer. Paulina was rapt, so much so that she walked backward down the street on the way to the car and then hit her head on the side of the building. Weddings. They’re hypnotic.
#22 of 92: The Making of a Recluse
It is just a brief (and metaphorical) journey from where I sit to a house at the end of a long narrow dirt road where there would be three cats curled on the front porch steps and an old tire filled with dying geraniums nearly hidden in knee-high weeds, an area that, in another time, would be a lawn.
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Photo by Leonid Privalov on Unsplash
#21 of 92: Blue Sky Good Life
Judge minutes, not years
Let go of the last bad thing
Love a smiling dog
#20 of 92: Point the Way
[A good time to remember that there have been tough times before and things got better. They really do always get better if you just keep going.]
I like trees with style. And they’re so rare.
We found this one on a short walk on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. Years ago, there was a path down the bluff, a road actually that the local police used to surprise midnight partiers, half dressed and half in the bag in the summer moonlight. Maybe this tree marked the beginning of a secret trail. Come this way, the tree says, the fun is down here.
But the bluff started to collapse. Big trees with deep roots that were supposed to protect the bluff slid out from under themselves, whole giant trunks laying sideways and upside down, their leaves green for years because of one last tenacious root. The temptation to climb those fallen trees down the bluff to the shore was often overwhelming, the signs threatening permanent damage to the ecosystem notwithstanding. You can’t just go an indulge yourself whenever you want. There’s nature to attend to.
I’m married now with four grown children but when I used to come to this park in earnest was when I was single. I went there with my daughter on the weekends she stayed with me. That the bluff was shot was the perfect metaphor. Everything was upended and askew and there was no way to get to the better place, the place by the water. You had to stay up high and just look at it from afar.
Why I chose to go there I don’t know. It had an old fashioned merry-go-round that was propelled by holding on to it, running like the devil and then leaping on or if you were the parent, putting your child in the middle, and running like the devil until the child laughed. When we were there a few weeks ago, I was surprised that the merry-go-round was still there along with a ridiculously high old metal slide. Across the way, there was a modern playground, safe, with a lot of things to climb and nothing that spinned. “I’m glad they didn’t take the dangerous stuff down,” I said to my husband.
When I went to the park then, I was so bereft. So full of regret at what I had done to my little family, so lonely and purposeless, so eager to create a normal day. To run like the devil while my little girl sat on the merry go round so I could hear her laugh. When I go back now, so many years later, so many happy times since, so much healed over, I remember those raw sunny days of pretending life would turn out okay.
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Originally published in 2015
#19 of 92: Sailing on the Purple Sea
[I host a small writing group at a local senior center. Today’s writing prompt was purple. Here is my piece.]
This morning, the bath water is purple. Paulina’s aunt has given her a bath bomb. It’s a fist-size ball of something that sheds vivid, swirling colors, gradually disintegrating in the water. In the middle of the bath bomb is some little thing, a tiny toy. I don’t stick around to see but I know the tiny toy will make Paulina ridiculously happy as if she had no idea life would hold such a surprise.
When I come back ten minutes later, Paulina, who is five and not terribly interested in washing herself, is laying on her belly in her little purple sea examining a tiny plastic bowl that is part of her Moana outrigger canoe toy. Every morning, she spills the ten thousand tiny outrigger toys into the bathtub. They circle the drain when I pull the plug and it’s a scramble to swoop them all up. I think, why am I not putting these tiny toys somewhere else and having her play with the canoe and her two little ducks and things that won’t go down the drain. I wonder about this every morning. I ask her if she has washed herself. She nods yes. I see that the soap is dry in its dish.
I am Paulina’s grandmother. I am also her legal guardian because her mother died several months ago and there was no other relative able to guard her. That may change in the future but not for a while. So, in the meantime, I am the one assigned to worry about the infinitesimal Moana toys going down my bathroom drain. It’s a concern since we have an ancient house with prehistoric plumbing and there would be hell to pay for a jam-up. Elves would have to come help us.
After the bath, Paulina gets dressed. She picks out her favorite ruffled skirt and a t-shirt that doesn’t match. She loves this outfit very much. She puts on two blue socks. They don’t match. This bothers me in a deep secret cellular way since I am part of Boomer Nation, a place where we learned early that one piece of clothing has to ‘go with’ the other. I say nothing. She brushes her teeth. Later when I walk her up to the school door, I see that she’s dripped toothpaste on her shirt. I try to rub it out with spit and my thumb. The spot is blurred but still there.
In the car on the way to school, Paulina looks out the window and sings. The songs are always in Spanish because she is Nicaraguan and lived in Nicaragua for a year and a half before coming back to the States last spring and she is now attending a bilingual school. I don’t understand Spanish, so I don’t know what her songs are about, but they seem to be happy songs, sweet and light. Sometimes, she stops singing and says quietly, “I miss my mom.” And I say, “So do I.” I think if her mom was here, Paulina’s socks would match and her shirt would be spotless. Her hair would be braided like the other girls. I don’t know if Paulina would sing in the car.
Sometimes, Paulina calls me mom. It is her yearning talking. At the school door, she turns and waves. “Bye Mom!” I smile and wave back. The people around me – the parents and grandparents – hear this and they smile and nod like it’s a secret we all share. I head back to the car and then remember to check Lost & Found for her favorite black furry sweater. I find it tucked in a bin. It is a good morning.
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Photo by Mathis Mauprivez on Unsplash
#18 of 92: Who Needs Advice? Not Me.
If you could go back in time and give your younger self advice, what would it be?
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Which younger self? The last week younger self or the fiftyish younger self or the chick who dusted the ants off a peony so she could stick it in the waistband of her flowy skirt and go fight poverty?
You need to be more specific.
But even if we settled on a specific era to address, I wouldn’t be giving advice. I’d be giving kudos to myself for not having my life go in the dumper despite colossal mistakes, miscalculations, ridiculous risks, and other mishaps.
But if I was forced to give advice to my younger self, my arm twisted hard behind my back, I’d say this.
Keep going.
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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