A Speckled Trout

On a stretch of road in the neighborhood I live in are four schools. Three are public – elementary, middle, and high school where all three of my kids attended. The other is a Catholic elementary school where my kids went to religous ed every Monday. It is sage, local advice that if you are in a hurry to get anywhere in the morning that you avoid this road. The chances that you will be backed up behind a long line of cars trying to get into the school parking lot, stuck behind a lumbering yellow bus, or pulled over for speeding in a school zone are very high.

I spent many years at each of these schools. At the elementary school, I volunteered often and was once asked to head programming for the PTA. I turned it down because I knew that whatever speaker was being featured I would have to introduce. At the time I was terrified of public speaking so instead volunteered to be treasurer. This had been known to be the hardest position to fill because it was so labor intensive but there I was throwing my name in without the slightest bit of arm twisting. I got rubber stamped immediately. It turns out the joke was on me because at every PTA meeting the treasurer was required to get up in front of everyone at every meeting and give a financial report. Besides that I was in charge of scheduling library volunteers for over ten years, started an all-school reading program. volunteered for classroom parties, the annual auction and carnival, field day, and the book fair. Like many other parents I was there a lot.

After my kids were grown and flown I’d drive by all of those schools and thank god I was done with that part of my life. Those years were a near constant whirlwind of juggling kids, schedules, and broken hearts from being slighted, frustrated, or exhausted. Sometimes it was me with the broken heart from trying to find my place in an environment that often felt cliquish and unwelcoming. We all managed to find our way, though, and ended up with a collection of dear friends and dear memories.

Last spring I moved in with Michael. The house he was having built was four blocks from the house I had lived in with Mark and the kids for over thirty years so my neighborhood didn’t change all that much. My route to work, though, did. Where I used to be able to cut across this road and be on my way, I now drive directly alongside the elementary school at the peak of the morning rush hour. At the traffic light the school crossing guard holds up her stop sign over and over, and like little ducklings a parade of kids with backpacks and water bottles cross the street.

Last week on a day I wasn’t working I changed up my route, walked past the school, and through the shopping center where an older couple was having coffee on the patio of the French restaurant. We said good morning and then the woman stopped me and asked, “Are you the school crossing guard?” I said I wasn’t but that it was funny she asked because I thought about doing that in my golden years until I drove by the week before and the winds were howling and the temps below freezing. We all laughed and she said, “Oh we see her every day and I thought it was you,” because the woman on the corner with her neon vest is our touchstone to the start of the day.

The next morning I drove to work and there were a couple of dads walking their kids to school which was a rare sight in the days my kids went there. I sat at the crosswalk as the yellow light flashed and watched them all in front of me – the kids bouncing along like Tigger, two golden retrievers wagging their tails, and the dads laughing about something. A block ahead was the traffic light and the crossing guard. I waved and she waved as we were both on high alert for the unpredictability of distracted drivers and little kids.

It is remarkable to me that only a few blocks from where I lived for decades I am able to watch an entire neighborhood descend upon its elementary school every morning. I am long past those years and plopped right back into them by geography. On the way to work I watch it unfold before me while the morning news tells me that the Department of Education needs to be abolished and a president says those people don’t work very hard. Those people? You mean the ones who taught my kids read? Lost in the discussion and rage of such an absurd idea is a community that has been built brick-by-brick for years by teachers, parents, janitors, paras, a principal, a nurse, a librarian, a crossing guard, bus drivers, the lunch ladies, volunteers, and the school admin.

What I knew in the years my kids were in school and maybe even more so now is that people care too much about their school communities to sit idly by while the uneducated try to dismantle it. Ducklings are able to cross the street only when someone stops traffic and everyone else participates in ensuring their safety as they make their way in the world.

Tomorrow morning the crossing guard will be on the corner where she always is but this time she will be waiting for us.

When I would go to visit my mom, depending on the time of year, we would rotate her favorite TV shows between The Young & The Restless, The Bold & The Beautiful (where she would always make fun of how bad the acting was), lots of local news, Cubs games if it was summer, and QVC. She had a pattern of when she would watch her shows – like recording her soap operas and not watching them until later even if she was home when they were airing.

QVC was always at night. She would flip it on and say, “Oh good, this is one of my favorite hosts,” and we’d watch really long stretches of time devoted to a single sweater. If it was Isaac Mizrahi’s line of clothing if would be very, very dramatic. He fawned over every garment and when a customer would call in he’d ask her name and say, “Lorraine, darling, tell me why you love the spring cardigan, item #42-2084 selling at $38.99?” And Lorraine would gush and say she had two and was going to buy three more and Isaac would say, “Oh my dear, I wish I could see how you are going to style them because you sound very fashionable.”On the other end of the line you could imagine how much Lorraine was blushing and dying to tell her friends that THE ISAAC MIZRAHI talked to her. The host would chime in that they needed to cut things short and then remind viewers that there have been 12,000 of these cardigans sold and they were down to their last 8,000 SO YOU BETTER HURRY and even very skeptical me found myself gulping that QVC kool-aid.

Mom and I were watching one night and the featured item was a combination tote bag, cross body bag, and wallet by none other than Joy Mangano of the Original Miracle Mop. The mop was a miracle for the homemaker because it was self-wringing meaning you never had to put your delicate hands into a bucket of filthy water. Joy became a millionaire many times over off that mop and was a QVC Queen. Her new product was a line of bags for women with built-in technology that thwarted stealing credit card numbers from inside your purse. According to her (and the incredulous host who had never heard of such a thing!), someone could merely walk past you with a credit card reader and steal your info while you’re picking out tomatoes at the grocery store. By the time you realize it they have hit up Wal-Mart with a couple of 55″ tvs that will leave you on the hook. Problematic? You bet it was but if you wanted to be protected you needed the patented, magnetic blocking technology of one of her bags. Like a lot of things on QVC, I thought, well that’s a crock of shit but Mom and I kept watching, my wine glass kept getting refilled, and I found myself saying, “You know, I could use a new bag for work.” Mom perked up and said, “Oh you should definitely get it then. Joy makes good products so I’m sure it will last forever.” But despite the conversion therapy and wine I was having trouble pulling the trigger. Mom offered to pay and I said, “It’s not that,” as I mulled over the idea that maybe this was the start of turning into a Lorraine, a lonely lady with a closet full of cardigans desperately hoping an Isaac notices her. Mom handed me the phone. “Just call them,” she said, “those gals are so nice. I talk to them all the time. And don’t forget you can always do easy pay.”

A few weeks ago was my mom’s birthday and I thought of how I would call her on her big day and she’d say she loved my gift and couldn’t wait to use it, how her phone had been ringing all day, and that my siblings and her friends had her booked all week with plans to celebrate. I was unanchored on the first birthday without her and wished for one more of those phone calls, one more chance to hear the sound of her voice. Now her birthdays are over yonder with Dad having a scotch and soda and a twirl on the dance floor which is the natural, unfair order of things.

Every Wednesday night for the last several years, I have gone to my neighbor’s house to visit with her and watch tv. Mary is debilitated by MS, diagnosed at the age of nineteen, and has endured many heartbreaks over the recent years including the sudden death of her youngest son and a divorce after forty years of marriage. Her fortune, in light of all that loss, is that she lives on a street that is a tight-knit community, that checks in on her, and helps her in many different ways including sitting beside her and watching The Great British Baking Show.

I had not done my usual Wednesday night visit with Mary for several weeks due to the holidays, a snowstorm, and other commitments. Through another neighbor (Marianne) I found out Mary wanted to update her living room and I offered to help. The two of us showed up at her house on New Year’s Day and I listened to what she wanted and offered some ideas. Truth be told, though, the minute I got home I immediately felt overwhelmed. I told Will about some of my ideas, he said he needed a weekend project, and within thirty minutes texted me a color palette. The two of us went to Mary’s house the following Saturday morning, Will loaded up with his paint samples and ideas. “What do you want, Mary,” he asked her and then fine-tuned the plan based on the feeling she wanted to evoke. She showed him a loveseat she thought might work, he gave his stamp of approval, and then he found a new rug that wouldn’t bunch up when her wheelchair rolled onto it. We had a game plan.

The following Saturday we got to work. Marianne had patched the nail holes and we did lots of caulking and smoothing and the not-so-fun stuff before the paint got rolled on. After that we got to work on color – I was the edger, Will was the roller. As is always the case with me when the first coat goes on, I thought it looked terrible and that we had made a huge mistake. The professional next to me, though, was cool as a cucumber and firmly believed it was going to be awesome. We ate lunch and then tackled the second coat. It was starting to come together. I styled her shelves, Will assembled her loveseat, and Marianne came over to help us put the rug down and move the furniture. The end result was that it looked fresh and tranquil, and most importantly, Mary loved it. And for Will and me? We gave our overwhelmed brains a rest from current events, had a day free of doom scrolling on our phones, helped someone out who appreciated it, and who bought us tacos for lunch as a thank you.

The following week I was at my grandson’s indoor soccer game. It is not my favorite thing to do as it’s hard to watch. The boards are about four feet up then plexiglass so either you stand the entire time or, in my case, you sit in a mini version of bleachers and see it all from behind black netting. Mabel kept me company with a book on dragons and pretty soon the game was over and we climbed down from our row. A few minutes later I noticed a young dad in a wheelchair and my first thought was, “How could he even see his kid play?” The boards were too high for him to see over and there wasn’t room on either side of the bleachers for him to roll his chair in to watch. I waited with Michael and the others for my grandson to come out but every once in awhile would glance back at this man. I felt like I should go to the manager and say, “DO YOU SEE WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE? THAT THIS GUY HAS TO PAY FOR A KID TO PLAY THAT HE CAN’T EVEN SEE?” But I am aware that I am so mad about everything in this country that I’m sitting on a a hair trigger of rage that needs to be closely monitored. A few minutes later I saw him high-fiving the kids on the team as they made their way off their field as a canvas bag sat on his lap. “Banana or orange,” he asked every kid as they passed by, pulling out their choice from the bag, and that simple, poignant act of service made me want to sob.

I stopped by Mary’s yesterday afternoon and she told me about one of her aides that comes at night to put her to bed. These women spend their day driving all over the area providing services for the disabled- their nights ending well past dark. She was at a Hispanic grocery store and was stopped in the parking lot by ICE. She is Puerto Rican and now carries her passport with her every day so she doesn’t get arrested. .

People are mostly good, I tell myself over and over. I know this, I’ve witnessed this. Meanwhile, those holding the microphone are loudly cheering when the undocumented are getting rounded up as if the food on their plate, their mother being cared for in assisted living, and the roof over their head hasn’t been provided by them.

I try to drown them out then decide that the mostly good need to get mostly better at fighting harder. Will it work? Who knows? I am a person of unrelenting hope and clinging to that seems like a better plan than getting swallowed whole by those who quote scripture as hate gnaws at their souls and calls itself patriotism.

It is not often anymore that I recount the days leading up to Mark’s death, the manner in which he died, or the aftermath of that devastating day. In the beginning I had to tell the story over and over which I learned was common and even necessary after a death. Now it seems like everyone knows and those who don’t can hear it from someone else. On the rare occasion when I hear my own voice recounting those days from six years ago I still have trouble believing any of it.

I went to lunch last week with a friend who lost her husband three years ago. Our daughters have been friends since middle school but it was the sudden death of our husbands that forged a friendship. We seem to need to touch base after the holidays when we feel steam rolled and flattened and need to check in to make sure we aren’t crazy. Eventually we start talking about the things people say to us that feel like a knife to an open wound that will never heal. “Happy couples on Facebook,” we say, “gawd, I hate their smiling fake faces that say look at us.” There is no escaping we say and I thought of all the times I posted a happy anniversary and photo of Mark and I for all the world to see how much I loved this guy I married. Surely it stung someone I knew who had lost their spouse or was in the midst of a divorce they never wanted. BUT HEY YOU GUYS MAYBE YOU CAN STRIVE FOR WHAT I HAVE was the hidden message when I was clueless about the permancy of loss. “To be honest,” I said to my friend, “I was probably one of those obnoxious people who tried to cheer someone out of their grief and did everything wrong including piss them off,” and she agreed because experience dramatically changes your empathy. “When you know you know,” she said as the ghosts of the two men we loved hovered over our table.

A few months ago I was invited to a dinner party. I knew the hosts and one other person and since it was centered around an author the subject of my writing came up. I said that I started a blog many years ago and mostly wrote humorous pieces about life until my husband died suddenly and it changed the course of everything in my life. Before I knew it I was recounting Mark’s death to the rapt attention of everyone at my end of the table, hearing my own voice tell a story that sounded horrific and must have happened to someone else because how could it be me? How could I live through that and casually say why yes I’ll have more wine. At one point my voice cracked, the specific detail I don’t remember because it is all worthy of cracking. The faces of those around me looked stunned and uneasy and I don’t think there will ever be a time in my life that I won’t want to crawl out of my skin when I see the reaction to the retelling of the day Mark died. Maybe it’s because it spectacularly fails to match up to my heartbreak and that of my kids, maybe it feels like a heaping dose of pity instead of empathy, maybe because if it could happen to me it could happen to you and nobody wants to believe that could possibly be true.

When the dusty remains of my story settled and blanketed the table, someone asked, “Are you mad at him?” Are you mad at him? I fumbled, I deflected, I forgot for the thousandth time the thing my therapist said was the only proper response to a question like that. Why do you ask? I don’t remember what I said. Did I throw my dead husband under the bus for leaving me? Did I say anything that made sense to someone who never knew him, never saw his passion or exuberance and delight for life? That he got so excited when his grown kids were in the house that it felt like Christmas morning? That after his Saturday morning rides with his biking friends his eyes would glisten as he said, “I love those guys.” Or did I say that I saw a despair on my husband’s face that I hope you never see because you will never forget it. That I saw him struggle and come out on top over and over and the last struggle took him down in a way that on any other day would have shocked him to his core.

When you know you know my friend and I say to each other over lunch, which is why the only thing you need to say when someone invites you into the corridors of their grief is, “You must miss him terribly.”

Last month when I linked the pre-Christmas post I had written on my Facebook author page, someone commented that my writing was always profound. I kicked that word around for a good, long time while frantically finishing my shopping. The only conclusion I came to was, like another word someone and I were recently talking about it, that is one that has some weight to it.

Our Christmas Eve plan was to go to a friend’s house. Both having three kids of similar ages and living around the corner from each other, we’ve been friends for decades. Last year we celebrated with them and had so much fun that we were looking forward to a repeat. But first Maggie, Mal, Rubin (Mal’s partner), and my two grandkids went to the performing arts center to see the matinee performance of The Nutcracker. We have done this for the last few years and this time my grandson had reached the age which my daughter said was old enough to go. I was exhausted and last year fell asleep during it. My prediction was that I would do the same this go ’round. I made it through the first half, we went to the lobby, and the grown-ups in the group (sans me) had a glass of wine. When we returned to our seats and the house lights dimmed, there was the distracting noise of someone opening a bag. While Joseph and Mary were wandering around Bethlehem on their donkey looking for a place to have a kid and little dancers were doing step-ball-chain on the stage, someone behind us decided it was time to partake in that corned beef sandwich and bag of chips they had stuffed into their coat pocket. Rubin turned around and gave them the stinkeye. When the show ended and the lights went up I turned around to deliver the old-lady-stinkeye which is more effective because it’s been done much longer. The offenders had skedaddled as one might expect since they were lunching at A PERFORMING ARTS CENTER DURING THE PERFORMANCE. The audacity Rubin and I said as we were leaving as my six-year-old grandson exclaimed, “This has been the best Christmas Eve of my life!”

When we got home I saw a message from my friend followed by a phone call. She had Covid, our Christmas Eve plans came to a screeching halt, and so Michael and I decided we’d get Chinese food (a la A Christmas Story). I have been ordering take-out from the same restaurant for over thirty years, made some choices for five of us, and called it in. The phone rang and rang. I tried again and then again. I was certain they had to be open and so we decided to drive over and place our order.

We walked into the packed restaurant, lines of people waiting for a table, the phone lit up like a Christmas tree ringing and ringing. When we saw one of the harried owners and asked about placing a to-go order, she wrote it down, said it would take an hour, and to come back. Not what we were expecting but at least we had a dinner plan in the works. When we returned to pick up our food the restaurant was even busier with groups of families crammed in from the cold and waiting for a table. Occasionally a group would leave, another group would get seating, three more groups would walk in the door. Grandparents hobbled in like wise men around the manger and sat waiting amongst us. I whispered to Michael, “I hope if the time comes that I am using a walker that the people I love don’t drag me out in freezing weather on Christmas Eve to a packed restaurant because I think it’s probably going to kill half these people.” In the meantime, the husband half of the owners kept disappearing while the wife kept telling us our order would be “two more minutes.” Over in the corner, a short, middle-aged, white guy (SMAWG) said, “My wife and I come here every Saturday at noon. I’ve never seen it like this.”

After waiting a good while, a tall, angry white guy (TAWG) comes in the door and he’s got an ax to grind because nobody is answering the phone. When he gets the attention of the daughter of the owner and says he wants to place a to-go order she tells him they can’t take any more orders, that the kitchen can’t keep up with what they have, and he stares at her menancingly because apparently nobody has ever told him no. The wife gets wind of the problem, comes over, looks at his order, and says they’ll do it. There are some words exchanged in Chinese between mother and daughter. I have no idea what they are saying but I am backing the daughter because TAWG seems exceptionally unlikeable. SMAWG leans over and says to him, “My wife and I come here every Saturday at noon. I’ve never seen it like this.”

From the back of the restaurant comes another guy to pay his bill. He announces that they need a plumber and because it’s utter chaos nobody pays attention to him. Then his wife and young daughter join him and he asks if she went to the bathroom. The wife says the toilets in the women’s room were being plunged. “Just take her to the mens,” her husband said. “That’s backed up, too,” she says and then he not so quietly said, “Just have her go on top of what’s in there and don’t flush it,” and I was like I CANNOT DO THIS ONE MORE MINUTE. “She can’t,” the wife says, “there’s too much in there and I lean over to Michael and whisper, “Are they really doing this here? Are they really going to keep talking about the shitter being full?”

SMAWG weighs in with, “What you have here is a sewer backup. One wrong move and you’ve got a restaurant overflowing with everything in that toilet,” and I feel a dry heave working its way up the chain of gastro command. We hear someone say to us “two more minutes,” TAWG stops fuming for five seconds to say this is ridiculous, and SMAWG says, “My wife and I come here every Saturday at noon. I’ve never seen it like this,” and while Mary is in labor with a bunch of men standing around and doing nothing I think about strangling this guy in her name. There is more discussion about the toilets and the wife says, “It’s a good thing they have a waste management guy here.” Her husband chuckles and I wonder why that’s such a good thing if he’s not offering to do anything about it. They decide maybe Walgreen’s is still open and they leave so their daughter can pee there. The husband and wife owners pass by and are arguing in Chinese. He’s flustered and sweaty from plunging. She keeps telling people they can get a table when clearly they are beyond capacity. I’m on his side. SMAWG says to nobody, “My wife and I come here every Saturday at noon. I’ve never seen it like this,” and I was like FOR THE LOVE OF THE NEWBORN JESUS WILL YOU LET IT GO.

After forty minutes our order is ready. They read it off and everything is there. Mary has a healthy baby boy, some kid thinks drumming in her face is helpful, and we have Chinese food. It’s a Christmas miracle. We head for home only to come across a backup of cars waiting to turn into a tiny cul-de-sac known as Candy Cane Lane. I have seen it a thousand times. Every house is over-the-top decorated for Christmas. When Mark was alive he said, “What if you’re the guy who doesn’t want to do this? What if you’re like eff it. It’s too cold. I’m not putting up the lights and a fat, dumb snowman.” I told him he’d probably get silenced, stuffed in a storage shed, and end up on a Dateline episode. A few days earlier when Michael and I drove by it he said, “Huh, do you have to do this if you live on this street,” and I started seeing a pattern in the men I choose. Behind the line of cars Michael said, “Maybe I should go around them,” and I said “Gun it,” and finally, blessedly we arrived home with our dinner.

We filled our plates, played a game of Yahtzee, I got a little hammered. The next day we we told Maggie and Nate about our wild night trying to get some food. Then we opened gifts, the grandkids happily played with their new toys, we hugged each other and said thank you I love it. I do not have a single profound thing to write about any of it except that like every year it was A GIGANTIC CLUSTER WITH ENTIRELY TOO MUCH PEOPLING INVOLVED and that for the first time in many years it felt good to love every wild minute of it.

When I was ten years old, there was an epic January storm in Chicago that dumped 23″ of snow. It was forever known afterwards as The Blizzard of ’67. The snow started early in the morning and didn’t stop until the early hours of the following day. While accustomed to large amounts of snow, this one packed winds of up to 50 mph.

We went to school that day because that was what we were supposed to do. Dad went to work and, Mom, who loved the cold and snow, was at home with Ann. We got an early dismissal from school and at about the time we would normally be coming home, Dad called Mom to say he was leaving work as it would take a bit longer to get home given the weather. What unfolded over the rest of the day and night I don’t remember except that every hour Mom and the boys would get into coats, boots, and gloves and go outside and shovel. My sisters and I watched from the living room window. When it got dark Mom went out alone and you could barely make her out as the snow swirled around her. She’d come in, wipe the tears from her cold face, warm up, and repeat. As the night wore on, Mom said Dad would be home any minute and shooed us all to bed.

What was normally an hour ride from work to home with his carpool buddy, Roscoe, took Dad eleven hours. He was driving our VW bug and credited that little car with being able to manuever where drivers in bigger cars weren’t able. It was also small enough and light enough to push when they got stuck. They got close to Roscoe’s house and Dad walked the remaining four blocks home.

The following day my three brothers went with Dad to dig the car out. Mom was in a panic because, Ann, who was only a year old needed milk and we were running out. We headed to the store, put a couple of gallons on our sled, and walked home.

This weekend we had a snowstorm that dumped half the amount of snow from that infamous blizzard of my childhood. For days before it had been predicted to land on Saturday afternoon starting with freezing rain and turning to snow. On Thursday I went to two different grocery stores – one was packed, the other nearly empty. I ran some errands on Saturday morning for essential things like going to the paint store and getting samples. Michael went to the grocery store. I asked him to pick up a few things I forgot and he came home without any chicken breasts because they were completely sold out.

We watched the local news, the Weather Channel, and our phones to keep track of it all. There was not a moment this weekend when we weren’t aware of the weather conditions, the road conditions, school closings, store closings, work closings. Yesterday when I turned on the tv to watch my favorite Sunday morning show, it was wall-to-wall coverage of the storm. Bundled up reporters running their booted feet along icy streets, cutting to another reporter standing next to a pile of snow as a plow rumbled by, cutting back to the studio where the breathless, suited weather guy was so hyped up over the weather you’d think he snorted something every time he was off camera.

Decades after that snowstorm of my youth, I was talking to Mom one day about how different it was back then, how there were no cellphones, nothing more than the six and 10:00 news to know what was going on, how you may have known that it was going to snow but it didn’t cause a city-wide panic and a run on the grocery store. “I was so worried about your dad,” she said, “that I kept going out to clear the driveway and looking down the street hoping to see his car.”

And all that time I thought the tears we saw on her face when she came in from shoveling was because of the cold.

A few weeks before Christmas when we were young, our mom and dad would take my sisters and me to downtown Chicago to see the department store windows decorated for the holidays. We would go to mass at 8:00 a.m and then to Almar Donuts where we would pick out our breakfast. Mom would pour her and Dad a steaming cup of coffee from the red plaid thermos she had filled before leaving the house and we would head towards the city.

Bundled up against the December cold, we would walk to State Street where we would ooh and aah at the windows of Sears, Carson Pirie Scott, and the big finale of Marshall Fields. Nobody was downtown on those early Sunday mornings so we could stand right against the glass and be mesmerized by the elaborate displays and decorations. Between the two of them, Mom and Dad would excitedly point everything out and as I got older I wondered if this adventure was more for them than us. It didn’t matter – it was an annual event just for us girls. If it was close to opening time we would go into Fields which was the Cadillac of department stores. Red bows hanging from every light fixture, the first floor perfume counters, and boxes of Frango Mints stacked everywhere. It seemed magical.

When our kids were little, Mark and I wanted to have our own tradition and so we decided to take them on a carriage ride on the Plaza where we could leisurely see the store windows and lights from the comfort of a horse-drawn buggy. The only problem with our plan was that the night we had reserved a ride was a mixture of snow and sleet and bitterly cold temperatures. Not to be deterred because Chicago was firmly embedded on our DNA, we forged ahead and hyped it up for the kids. Despite the conditions we were managing to perservere until we rounded the corner and sleet was hitting us directly in the face. Mallory was a baby and even though she was bundled up it wasn’t enough and I unzipped my coat and tucked her inside. Maggie and Will were crouched down on the floor to avoid the sleet. Maybe they were crying – I don’t remember because I felt like a pioneer woman on a wagon train fighting for our lives – or maybe their tears were frozen to their tiny, frigid faces. It was miserable. Afterwards we were supposed to have a family dinner but only made it as far as McDonald’s. Mark tried to cajole the kids into walking a few blocks to a nicer restaurant but they weren’t having it. All they wanted was a happy meal and for the frozen blocks that were their feet to thaw out.

I’m not sure if it’s an age thing or no longer having a living parent but this year the memories of all my Christmas seasons have been like a movie that’s been whooshing by on fast forward. The simplest task brings up memories of my mom and dad, how hard they worked all of the time but especially at Christmas to make it feel special. I see my daughter and her husband doing the same thing with their kids even when it’s clear they are exhausted. I remember those overwhelming days.

This year I am in a different house with a different partner. I’m not sure yet how Christmas will look, but Michael is kind and generous to a fault so I have no doubt that it will be lovely. But even if it isn’t, even if there’s some hiccups that throw a wrench in our day, we will show up in sparkles and plaid and a snapshot will temporarily stop the whooshing of time and prove that we were together and we did our best.

Therein lies the magic.

Merry Christmas.

If you are one of my followers on this blog or a frequent drive-by, you may have noticed that things here have been a bit off. When I wrote my last post I was unable to share it on my Facebook author page. After a few days of repeatedly trying I found out that all of my posts (900+) had suddenly been flipped to private meaning only followers had access to the content. How this happened is a mystery and after many tries on my end I reached out to WordPress for help via a customer chat. They offered to correct the problem and I was like ALLELUIA THIS IS MY BABY AND I NEED IT FIXED PRONTO. A malware problem, they said, and could do a one-time fix of $199 or a year of monitoring for $499. That’s when I realized that their logo was ever-so-slightly different from the real WordPress site and I’d just handed over my login information (but not my credit card) to a hacker.

Long story short this has been trying to say the least. My friend, Lisa, who six years ago helped me move all of my content from Blogger to WordPress was doing everything she could on her end. She enlisted her friend, Gina, for help. Gina (who I have never met) tried many fixes and sent many emails with updates on what she was trying without success. I had an online chat for over an hour with Bluehost who tried on their end to flip my work back to public. Michael’s student, Thomas, came over for nearly two hours to work on it, I reached out to Mark’s biking buddies to see if anyone had experience with WordPress, a friend who is a coder offered to look at the problem. I had a small army of people trying to help me.

Yesterday I sat down again like I have done every single day since this happened and decided to changed the theme of my site. Though this was one of the things that had been suggested, I resisted making the change. I liked how this little home for my writing looked but since nothing was working I gave it a go. Through the new theme I was able to change my posts to public and they didn’t immediately revert back to private like they’d been doing with my previous layout.

I could have cried from happiness and relief. However, if you have been getting a flurry of emails from here, it is because everything I’ve written in the past 13 years has to be manually changed to the public setting which I have found out results in an email. I’m so sorry for that but it’s the only way I can fix it so please delete them and don’t stay mad at me. I’m rather fond of this little blog and having it crippled and on hold felt debilitating so my early, most welcome Christmas gift is having it up and running with a new look.

Speaking of Christmas….as I have written about a few times, I have struggled with reading since Mark’s death. For years I have had no concentration with the exception of any book that promised to fix the unfixable. Other than that I could read for hours and not retain one word. Thankfully, that has changed in the last year. Maybe it was the passing of time or more likely it was having Michael in my life and the safety net of love and support that made me no longer feel like I had to be on high alert for trauma. That, too, is a gift.

Below is the stack of books that I’ve read since the spring. The Wedding People was good – funny, poignant, real-life kind of stuff. James was stunning. Buy it – it’s like nothing you’ve ever read before. Paradise was about the largest wildfire in California history and was one of the most harrowing stories I’ve ever read. I picked up Winter Birds at an estate sale for ten cents. The story is told through the eyes of a young boy who is a hemophiliac, the abuse his father reigns down on the entire family, and the endless cycle of poverty and violence. The Collected Regrets of Clover was about a woman who was a death doula and her only friends are her clients who are dying. The Yellow Bird Sings – oof, this takes place during the Holocaust and is about a mother trying to hide her and her young daughter from the Nazis. It was really, really good.

I listened to Between Two Kingdoms on audio and it was incredible. It is the story of Suleika Jaoud (wife of musician Jon Batiste) and her diagnosis and treatment for leukemia. I highly recommend it especially on audio. She has an incredible voice and paints such a vivid picture with her storytelling that you feel like you’re in the hospital with her.

And last but not least is I Will Send Rain. The month Mark died was my turn to pick a book for the book club I was in. I chose this because a writer friend had recommended it. I had read about a third of it when my life was upended and after many months I moved it from beside the bed to a shelf. Every time I came across it I remembered talking to Mark about it and how I would be hosting that month. I couldn’t open it and I couldn’t get rid of it. This summer I looked on the library site to see if it was an audiobook and downloaded it. It is a stunning book. The writing is exquisite, and this is another one that I think is worth listening to via audio.

Is it good to be back among the reading? Wondering what story is waiting once the cover is flipped open? At the book store wondering what would make a great gift this Christmas?

Yes, yes, and oh yes.

When I started my first freshy-faced adult job in downtown Chicago, I took the bus back and forth. I walked to the end of the street where the bus would screech to a stop, choke exhaust out the back end, and wait for me to board before traveling on to the next stop. My friend, Pat, was already on board and we’d sit next to each other towards the back and on the right.

The same people were on the bus every day – always occupying the same spot. For as much time as we spent together there was little conversation except when traffic on the Calumet Expressway was backed up merging onto the Dan Ryan. Stopped still with a sea of red lights ahead of us, the bus driver would shout, “WHO WANTS TO TAKE THE SKYWAY???” We’d shout back an enthusiastic WE DO and his cap would be passed down one row of the bus and up the other so his passengers could fill it with spare change to cover the cost of the toll.

At the front of the bus sitting on benches facing the aisle were two regulars. One of them I knew – he was in my social studies class in high school. There were a couple of occasions during that class when he would pitch forward in his desk, rock back and forth, and moan. It was a very scary thing to witness, mainly because nobody knew what was happening. The teacher would stand beside him until it was over and years later I would find out that he had epilepsy. After high school he went to work at the local donut shop. He lost both his hands to burns when they were plunged into a fryer of hot oil when he was having a seizure. It wasn’t until I started taking the bus, him sitting in front with his prosthetic hands (which at the time were two silver hooks), that I found out what happened which to this day has not lost its horrifying effect. I got accustomed to seeing him every day and in time his hands ended up being the least remarkable thing about him. It was his booming laugh that frequently filled our quiet bus that separated him from everybody else.

Next to him was a guy who was probably in his early thirties. In retrospect he seemed to be on the spectrum which at the time wasn’t something anyone knew much about. Because he sat in front he was in charge of the hat passing for the toll – making sure it made its rounds and there was something to give the bus driver. If that job wasn’t required, if we were moving at a decent clip during the morning rush hour, he’d keep watch over his fellow passengers the entirety of the ride. What that meant was that he’d watch them sleep, and when their head bobbed forward or off to the side, he’d get up and lean their head back so they would be more comfortable and wouldn’t wake up with a stiff neck. Sometimes he only needed to do it once, other times over and over. This tended to startle people but then they’d go right back to sleep and he’d go right back to monitoring the situation. It was odd to say the least but nobody ever complained, got mad at him, or asked him to stop.

Last week for a die-hard liberal like myself and millions of others, was a blow to the knees. Finally, I thought, this country would elect a woman president like so many other countries had done decades before. I woke up at four a.m. the next day and found out otherwise and haven’t stopped feeling sick since. Added to that was something that happened at work that had me teetering between rage and a super-sized helping of rage. On another week I might have been able to shrug it off but instead it seemed like a heaping pile of disappointment and unfairness that was on the verge of collapse.

I was barely managing to hold it together until I spent a little too much time online the day after the election where a widow who used fitness to overcome her grief and create a business wrote, “Tell me what you’re grateful for today.” Were we really supposed to sunny-side-up a felon as our president? Start counting our blessings less than 24 hours later? There was no better example of why in the midst of loss or pain, people shut down. Why it is so much easier to say nothing than to pretend that things are fine. Why every time someone saw me after Mark died and said I looked great I’d say everything was a-ok when it felt like my heart was dangling from a string tied to my back belt loop and bouncing off the ground with a trail of blood following it. “Oh that thing,” I would say, “that’s the real reason I look so good. My heart’s been cut out of me and so I’m much lighter. I mean the blood isn’t appealing but do you like my new outfit?” Meanwhile, despite how I looked everything in my life had gone to complete shit.

I’m feeling a lot like that again and it’s not a healthy place to linger. I don’t like how loud hate seems to be, especially my own. So I’ve taken a leave of absence from the news which may be permanent, went back to reading at night, and loaded an audiobook from the library to listen to when I’m out walking. I’ve also been thinking a lot about those two guys from years ago who were on my bus every day – joyful warriors of the morning shift. I desperately could use the laugh of one to lighten my soul and for the other to gently push my weary head back so I can rest before the work starts again.

 

When Will was a fifteen year old boy and told us he was gay, the first thing I said to him was that we loved him just as he was. My immediate thought after that was that his dad and I would protect him at all costs from the hate and vitriol that was surely going to come his way.

A few years after he had told us, I went with him and the girls to see Barack Obama at a rally nearby when he was running for president the first time. As we walked to the venue Will spotted members of the Westboro Baptist Church, a ragtag bunch of a religous zealots who gained notoriety for their hatred of everything. Their specialty was their God Hates Fags signs and promises of eternal damnation for anyone who was not straight. Will grabbed my arm hard and said, “Mom, we can’t walk past them,” and I could hear the fear in his voice. We crossed the street and avoided them, but I wanted to confront them, I wanted to grab their signs, I wanted them to fear my wrath like my son did theirs. But the funny thing about this group was that they were heavily protected by the police wherever they went unlike my young, gay son.

That was many years ago and as a country we have since graduated to hating the transgender community because now everyone knows somebody who is gay so there’s no novelty in that. But that group of people? Well, they’re coming for your bathroom, your swimming medals, the dressing rooms at the moonlight madness sale at your local Kohl’s, and in the course of your kid’s school day changing their sex in the nurse’s office.

When I worked at a local university, our office was home to LGBTQ Affairs so seeing students of every identification was a normal part of the day. I was working with a student group on one of their events via email. The student rep’s name was Katherine, but every email was signed off with a different name which kept confusing me. When they came to the office to meet me in person and talk over details, the person at our front desk came to tell me and said, “Just so you know, they are presenting themselves as male,” which I was grateful to have a heads up on. What followed was a conversation on the business end of things and then a different conversation about the difference in name and my apologies for the confusion. We had more emails, and phone calls over the weeks that followed and their event went off without a hitch. Through it all I stayed solidly female.

Last fall I took a writing class sponsored by our library where a trans woman was in attendance. Her look was over the top and garnered lots of attention which for me would be so uncomfortable I’d probably end up hiding in the bathroom out of embarrassment. A few hours later we were in a class together where she furiously took notes which I admired because I was having trouble staying interested. As the class wound down and the instructor asked if anyone had any advice to share about their method of writing, she raised her hand and proceeded to wow the room with a multitude of tips. In that moment her look melted away in light of her enthusiasm for writing and supporting everyone in the room who was struggling with the same thing – making time to write. I often think that trans people are the bravest of us out in the world. We all package ourselves in order to be accepted and they have the courage to rip the packaging off to show their true selves and face ridicule and often violence at every turn.

I cannot accept punishing anyone who has purposely been pushed to the fringes of society for being who they are, for wanting the same things all of us want, for daring to dream that they, too, get a chance. As the holidays get closer and we are starting to think of our celebrations, for those of us missing someone (and isn’t that all of us?) there are so many bittersweet reminders of how it used to be. Mark loved pumpkin pie, my mom used an old-fashioned meat grinder to crush her cranberries, my dad loved stuffing. As the turkey is in the oven the memories flood in and the longing of setting one less plate never goes away.

The airwaves this election season have been flooded with the vilest of commercials demonizing the other. We are being groomed to hate. But there is a person on the receiving end of that, a chair being made ready for them, sisters who can’t imagine life without their brother, and parents desperately praying that they can shield them from that which they do not deserve.

Hate has consequences.