Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Oh, So Talented, Aren’t We All?
My talent is catastrophizing. For example, every time I go over the Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee, I envision my car flipping over the guard rail into the water and knowing that the power windows probably wouldn’t work under water. I watched a video once that said to just take a crowbar and bang out the rear window. But my crowbar (if I even have one) is in the trunk. Who carries a crowbar in the front seat? And could I even hit the window hard enough to break it? And then what? Cuts, no doubt. A lot of cuts.
Another talent, just now emerging at a later age, is striking up conversations with strangers. The only place I don’t like doing this is the dog park since I’m all about my dogs and calling my reps on 5Calls. Otherwise, being sociable has become my new thing. Chatting and joking and carrying on. It’s wild.
Speaking of talent, the Artemis II crew. Talent, competence, humor, and grace sent to us by some weird happenstance to lift us up at this frightful, fearsome time in our country and on the planet. We’re going to be happy, grateful, and really sad when they splash down tonight. Man, it has been a long time between heroes.
I’m publishing a chapbook of 67 very short stories. It’s called Snippets. I’m doing this to celebrate my upcoming birthday. It’s not so easy to organize a chapbook – there’s a lot of arranging and pagination that I hadn’t thought about which is why it was a gift from above to have my very experienced and quite talented artist friend offer to figure it out for me.
And then, there is the remarkable talent of cats to own whatever space they occupy with authority and complete abandon. Here is Herc in repose after all the hubbub and commentary of the Artemis II splash down, his reclamation of attention and affection complete.
Leeches, Bows, and the Shedding of Drudgery
One of the things I love most about my life right now is that I pay someone else to clean my bathroom.
The toilet. The grout. The shower door. Most of all, the shower door. I’ve stopped doing internet research on new clever, multi-ingredient strategies for cleaning the glass shower door. I boxed up the ten thousand bottles of dangerous cleaning concoctions and hidden them away, for what purpose, I’m not sure. I guess in case I run out of money to pay someone else to clean my bathroom.
This was a long time coming. First, there had to be a decades’ long war between my desperate longing for people to clean not just my bathroom but my whole house and my deep belief that one should be able to tend one’s own house without help. It seemed elitist to have a cleaning service. Frivolous.
It’s not. It’s delicious. I love it so much. Today, I came back after the cleaners had left and one of them had made a bow on the stove door.
So, what’s the point of this post? As we say in our writing group, ‘what is this about?’
Shedding drudgery. Not shedding work. I like work. I even like heavy work – like doing the spring clean-up outside. Drudgery is like Mr. Allnut being covered in leeches and then getting back into the leech-infested water to pull the African Queen through the hideous weeds of the Ulonga River. That’s how it was for me cleaning my shower. I’d have to mentally prepare for days. It was sick.
No more. I have shed that drudgery. Cut it loose. Made it a memory.
And now I have all sorts of free time to write about drudgeries I have lost. Meanwhile, there is the bow on the stove door.
How I Hope It Happens
When it comes, if it comes, the twelfth time I put my car keys in the freezer, leave the house wearing a towel on my head, wonder what rain is made of, I hope it will be my daughter who tells me I have lost my mind, that I am ‘off’ in a new way, a pathological way, not the usual, and I hope she tells me while we are laughing so hard that we can barely breathe, and that after she tells me we link arms and go have coffee someplace with a view of the ocean.
____________________
Photo by Lesli Whitecotton on Unsplash
100 Word Story: Soft Feet
“My birthday was on Easter once when I was a little girl.”
“I know. You’ve told that story before.”
“It’s a good story to tell, so you should just listen again. Be a nice person.”
“Fine. Tell me.”
“I was very little and we lived in Hastings. My mother was very sad because her sister Marjorie had died. The night of the phone call, my father cried at the dinner table and my mother stopped speaking. We tiptoed during the day and slept holding our breath. On Easter, my mother slipped into my room before dawn holding three chocolate eggs.”
____________
Originally published in 2022. A story about my beloved mother and Easter.
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.
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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