Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
#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.
#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.
#17 of 92: Struggle at the Escanaba Goodwill, Part 2
[See Part 1 of this fascinating story here.)
The old lady was in line just two people away from the cashier. There was still time to get the shirt back. Normally, she’d just give it up, you know, avoid making a scene, but this was a tremendously lovely shirt and, besides, there was the principle of the thing. Shirt-snatching. So wrong.
Leaving her cart next to the boot family, Gloria sidled up to the old lady. She decided to try a little charm, make friends with the old lady, and convince her to give back the shirt.
“Hi, hey, about that shirt. I’ve been looking for a purple shirt for a long time. I just turned 65, really feeling like I’m approaching old age, and I want to do it in style, you know, like in the poem, where it says, “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple?” She tried to smile but it ached, like when she smiled at the boy who bagged her groceries when he put the canned tomatoes on top of her bananas.
“It’s my shirt. You can’t have it,” the old lady snipped, rolling it into a squished purple ball and folding both arms over it.
“Well, it’s not your shirt yet. You haven’t paid for it!” Gloria’s brief commitment to de-escalation and charm evaporated. “I had it first!”
“No. I had it first. It’s my shirt. Here, I’ll prove it.” The old lady unraveled the purple shirt and laid it over a stack of $1 novels. “You see that last button, how the thread is different? I sewed that button back on after my dog chewed it off. See the little bite marks? He was a real small dog.”
“You’re telling me that this is your actual shirt. And you just found it at this thrift store.”
“Yes. That’s my actual shirt. And I just found it at this thrift store.”
“There’s got to be more to the story.”
“There is. But the cashier is calling me.”
The man behind them in line listened to everything. He held a stack of DVD’s, a hockey jersey, and two souvenir shot glasses from Las Vegas. Who buys souvenir shot glasses used, Gloria wondered, but only for a minute. The man looked at her and shook his head and right away she knew he was an ally. He had witnessed everything.
“Don’t you think she should give me that shirt? I found it first.”
“Yep. Finders keepers.” He looked over Gloria’s shoulder at the Mystery Bags for $5, staring so hard Gloria turned to look. A whole rack of them. $5 for what? Nobody knows. The purple shirt was $5. It made no sense.
The old lady was collecting up her buys, including the purple shirt. The store had sworn off plastic bags so people had to trundle their own goods out the door and the old lady did just that, picking up her mound of clothes, one sleeve of the purple shirt dragging on the floor. How could she want the purple shirt so bad and then drag it around like a mop? It was unfair and sickening.
No longer happy to shop and feeling more and more crummy about everything, Gloria followed the old lady out the front door. She watched her walk to her car. There it was, the third aisle, about halfway down. Gloria scuttled over.
“Hey, hi again! Sorry about that in there. I feel kind of bad arguing about a shirt. I’d like to apologize.” She kept her hands in the pockets of the denim jacket that she’d bought last week at a garage sale on her block.
“No need. People want certain things. They can’t help it.” The old lady fished in the pocket of her culottes for her car keys.
“Well, I’m sorry I wanted that shirt so bad. What’s your name, by the way?” Gloria thought charm might still work. Maybe there was still a chance to get the shirt, but why did she care so much? It was ridiculous.
“My name is Anglais.” She found her keys and popped the lock on her trunk.
“Like what the French call British people, that kind of Anglais?”
“Yeah. My name used to be Nancy.” She lifted up the trunk with one hand, still holding the massive mound of clothes. Laying in the trunk was a tangle of pants and dresses and shirts, many purple things, and so Gloria asked, “You have so many purple things, like, look, this t-shirt here! Why do you need another purple shirt? Do you even wear any of this stuff?”
“Not really. I drive around and give stuff to people if they look like they need a shirt or something. It’s sort of a hobby.”
“Okay, well, that sounds like a nice thing to do. I really admire people who do charity like that.” Gloria eyed the purple shirt with one sleeve still puddled on the pavement. “Tell me, Anglais, was that purple shirt you’re holding really yours to begin with, like you said? With your dog’s teeth marks and all?’
“Of course not. You think I’m running around to all the thrift stores looking for some shirt my dog chewed?”
“I believed you, Anglais. I really did.”
“I know you did. Everybody does. Don’t feel bad. There are other shirts – you just gotta keep looking.” She dropped the load of clothes in the trunk, then reached down to collect the sleeve of the purple shirt, greyed by having been dragged across the parking lot, and tucked it into a space next to a bag of cat litter. She turned to face Gloria.
“You’re not that old, you know. You’re basically just getting started on being old. You’ve got plenty of time to wear purple.” Anglais slammed the trunk closed and got in her car. She turned the key and then rolled down the window to yell out to Gloria. “Go forth, my dear. Go find what’s there.”
Gloria nodded and turned to go back in the store. There had to be more purple shirts. Anglais was right about that. She had time to keep looking.
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Photo by GLOBALDSIO IT SOLUTION on Unsplash
#16 of 92: Struggle at the Escanaba Goodwill, Part 1
Gloria stepped back from the women’s shirt rack and waited for the old lady to pass. Experienced thrift store shoppers know the dance. A person rifling through the hangers from one direction will step back and let the person rifling from the other direction pass through. It would be best if everyone started from the same direction or to have an arrow that said “Start Here” but there is no such organization, just random rifling.
This makes some sense because everyone has their colors. Some women blow past the browns and linger in the pinks. Others zero in on the blacks and stand at that section of the rack, frozen, imagining themselves vamping, she supposed, black being such a declaration. Gloria, herself, was all about purple, had been ever since she’d read the poem by Jenny Joseph that started:
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, With a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me, And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer glove, And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
Purple had become Gloria’s color, her armament, her flag of independence and power. She had a friend who had dyed her hair purple. Gloria hadn’t gone that far though she thought the shade lovely and thrilling. She worried that people would consider her eccentric if she suddenly had purple hair, maybe think that she’d gone around the bend. Or at least that’s what she imagined, having spent a lifetime worrying about what other people thought. But truth be told, she envied her purple-haired friend and wished she had that kind of pluck.
The old lady was taking her time. Gloria looked over the rack at the jackets and blazers and contemplated shifting her attention there, but she’d had her heart set on finding a purple shirt, something shiny and silky, that she could wear to book club Thursday night. So, she waited while the old lady slowly slid each hanger, stopping every other shirt to inspect for stains, sometimes pulling the hanger off the rod altogether to twirl a prospective candidate around, see how it swirled. That’s some character, Gloria thought, with her gray hair all gelled and spiky and those painted on eyebrows. She was a number, alright, in that chartreuse vest with national park badges stitched every which way. A very skinny old lady she was, too. Her legs, poking out from an oversized pair of culottes, were no bigger around than a little kid’s baseball bat. She had to be at least 80, maybe older.
Lordy, Gloria thought, rolling her eyes and suddenly overcome with impatience. There are other people looking for shirts here, lady. Get a move on! She found herself tapping her foot, crudely like a teenager waiting for a stall in the school bathroom. This whole shirt expedition was bringing out the worst in her.
But then Gloria spotted it – the perfect shirt. The shirt was purple, oh yes, a beautiful rich deep purple, and looked like satin, except she knew it wasn’t really. It had long sleek sleeves with two-inch cuffs and an open pointed collar with deeper purple buttons down the front. It was long, too, longer than your normal shirt and tailored at the waist. The shirt was a work of art, and it was a size 12. She grabbed it.
“No! Wait! I want that shirt!” It was the old lady rushing at her, fresh from the fuchsias. “I’ve been looking for that shirt for years!”
“Oh gee, I’m really sorry but this is exactly the shirt I was looking for,” Gloria said. “It’s a beautiful shirt. I can see why you’d like it.” She draped the purple shirt over the handle of her shopping cart and moved to the deep blues. Within seconds, the old lady snatched the shirt, hugged it close to her chest, and hurried with her overflowing cart over to the checkout line.
“Stop! Come back here! You can’t take my shirt!” Gloria peeled around the end of the rack so fast, her cart went up on its two side wheels, nearly running into a little girl sitting on the floor, pink and yellow snow boots splayed about, while her mother examined the bottoms of a pair of high-heeled thigh highs.
Jesus H., Gloria thought, what the Goddamnhell? Who grabs shirts out of somebody else’s cart? The old lady has to be off her rocker. Gloria didn’t say these things out loud, there being a child present and all, but she thought them so hard they might have lit up her forehead.
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To be continued.
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Photo by Sean Benesh on Unsplash
#15 of 92: Baseball is a Metaphor for Everything
We went to our first parent-teacher conference in twenty-five years tonight. We sat in the tiny kindergarten chairs (which was not as easy as when we did it the first time) and listened to the lovely bilingual teacher launch into all the wonderful things about our granddaughter. I was on to her game though. I knew all the good stuff was preamble to the challenges.
I won’t recount them here.
After that, we came home and watched the Milwaukee Brewers win the National League pennant which they haven’t done in forty-four years. The Brewers have been magical this year. So much so that I know each player by name, how he likes his eggs, and his shoe size. Only kidding.
Commentators are fascinated by the Brewers because they play small ball, meaning they run out every hit, steal every base, challenge balls and strikes. Their coach, Pat Murphy, calls the team woodpeckers. In addition to their wood pecking, the players seem to love each other and it’s that wholesomeness that has enthralled the city, well, enthralled me.
I’ve decided we’re going to be the Milwaukee Brewers of grandparenting. Keep playing small ball, steal those bases when we can, and always run out the ball. Tonight we got the coaching report complete with a list of things to work on. How do you say get out from under the table and stop coloring on the floor in Spanish?
Nobody was born great, right? We all had to work for our greatness. Like the Brewers. They used to be scrubs and now they’re on top of the world. Or near the top. Don’t quibble.
National League Champions – our Milwaukee Brewers. Next is the World Series. We never figured to be in the World Series of grandparenting but here we are.
Play ball!
#14 of 92: Sightseeing (aka Living in the Moment)
In the last hour of my flight home, the setting sun shone on the wing of the plane in that rich, surreal vividness that you sometimes see unexpectedly walking out your front door at twilight. The wing’s edge had become studded with grand rubies, each more brilliant than the last. I considered taking a picture but decided to watch instead, betting that the gloaming, if that’s what it could be called, wouldn’t last long and it didn’t.
It reminded me of the time we saw a wolf trotting alongside a highway in the dark. In disbelief at seeing such a wild creature along a busy road, we pulled over to watch him. He trotted along some more, sauntered actually, uncaring and unconcerned about his audience. And then he turned to look at us looking at him. We thought of taking a picture then, too, but we didn’t because his look was fleeting, just seconds long, and then he dashed into the trees and the night.
Photos wouldn’t have done either of these events justice. Both would seem smaller and less remarkable than they were. So I am glad for my judgment to witness and not record.
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Originally published in 2018
#13 of 92: Found Behind the Gates of Prayer
Go ahead.
Go ahead and find your gone daughter’s senior pictures, the ones that were judged not to be worthy of the big frame, the ones tucked behind the three copies of the Gates of Prayer, the ones that have sat there for so long nobody remembers the beaded jeans or the furred boots or the red beaded sleeveless top, the straight at the camera looks, the over the shoulder smile, the long black hair fussed over for hours that morning, the eyebrows plucked to razor thin lines; find the pictures and you will remember driving to the park to meet the photographer, you will remember the conversation in the car, you will remember parking in the lot, you will remember the specific spot where you parked, and you will remember the photographer dashing around with her long lens, and you will remember leaning against a boulder waiting for the photo shoot to end and for your girl to be happy.
#12 of 92: Heat-Dried SEO
What are your strategies for SEO?
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It is mid-October and very hot.
This has interrupted my years’ long preoccupation with SEO. (sarcasm)
[For normal people who have never thought about SEO and don’t want to, here’s the AI explanation: SEO (Search Engine Organization) is the practice of improving a website’s content, structure, and authority so it ranks higher in unpaid (organic) search engine results.]
One reason to worry about SEO is if you are selling a product or service. More viewers, more potential buyers. Or if you are monetizing your blog, like charging a subscription for blog followers, you’d want to maximize SEO to wrangle all the customers possible.
Early on (now this is about sixteen years ago when I started Red’s Wrap), I thought about monetizing for about thirty seconds and then convinced myself I didn’t want to do any bookkeeping. The truth was I knew I’d make about five bucks a year trying to arm twist followers and besides, if people are paying for content, don’t you kind of have to generate the sort of content they like?
I couldn’t do that. I never knew what I liked much less what readers would like.
So SEO is not a thing for me. I have a small, but solid bunch of followers. Every once in a while, someone I would never imagine reading my blog will quote something I’ve written. Occasionally, this mortifies me like someone overheard me one stall over. But I smile. It’s so nice.
It is mid-October and very hot. But if I wrote about that, no one would read it. Weather posts are so boring, so mundane. My SEO would dry up and blow away for sure.
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Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
#11 of 92: Blanketed: Writing Means Remembering How Things Were
[This was written in winter of 2018 when Street Angels operated a winter warming room for homeless people at a local church. Much has changed for the better since then. Including me. I am older, wiser, and a better person for having folded those blankets and belonging to Street Angels.]
Sometimes the blankets are warm from having been slept on just minutes before. This happens when someone gets up, gathers up his blankets in a bundle, and makes a beeline to the storage room. They seem to be saying, here’s my bed. I’m done with it. Take it. It feels strange receiving still-warm blankets, an action too intimate to occur between strangers but that is what we do.
Other times, the blankets are folded and stacked, cool as if displayed on a counter in a department store. Always the largest blanket is on the bottom and the smaller ones are centered atop, the corners aligned. Nothing haphazard for the people who fold their own blankets. Maybe it’s a message they want to send; we are more careful and thoughtful than we seem here.
Both the gatherers and the folders have spent the night sleeping on the floor of a cavernous gym in an old church, a place formally called a warming room. It is where homeless people can come to keep from freezing outside. The room is only open if the temperature falls below 10 degrees; this has already happened 23 times this winter. It’s been harsh.
There is only a thick blanket between each person’s tired back and the floor where sometimes children in Sunday School might play basketball. There are basketballs appearing now and then so that could be true though I’ve never seen it. I wish the people staying in the warming room could shed all their heavy clothes, their thick rubber-soled boots and layers of hoodies and put on t-shirts and basketball shorts and play pick-up games all night long. They can’t do that though. They need to spend the time they have inside sleeping. I wonder if they even remember having fun.
Along with my storeroom partner, I take the blankets from people’s arms and stack them along one wall of the storeroom. There is a science to this because blankets stacked too casually quickly become a pile and we don’t want that. We want order and symmetry; we want something to be tidy beyond 72 homeless people sleeping on the floor, their blankets all laid, by them, east to west.
Our town has about 1,500 people who are homeless on any given night. The authorities say that about 130 of them are unsheltered, people living on the street or in parks. Yet every morning that I go to the warming room to clean up, I see new people. I see new old people, new young people, new disabled people. Oh, some are the same, but many are new and I wonder where all these new people are coming from. They are all coming from someplace worse than a warming room, that’s for sure.
I don’t tend to them. I tend to the blankets. Other volunteers tend to other things like breakfast or mopping the floor. No one tells anyone else what to do and no one has a solution to why some people end up sleeping on a gym floor. No one is healing or praying except to themselves and that makes the room quieter than one would expect. People, all of us, are simply tending to ourselves the best way we can at the moment. A man carefully folds his blankets; I carefully stack them. And when all is done we lock the door and leave and wait for the temperature to drop again.
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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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