Notes from the Dishwasher Café

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Unfortunately this requires coming up with something to tell them, but I usually find the immediate fascination on their faces sufficient to support me in the effort to pull something out of my ass. I call this laying the tracks in front of the train. You can be a much faster worker than you suppose if there is a train about to flatten you.

THE FALCONER'S CALL

Caroline Manring — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:46:06 GMT

The way my brain works, when it’s working at all, is to see two things that usually don’t go together and put them together.

I see (—not dead people, but—) likenesses. Associations. Ones that (I flatter myself) might make most people get a little concerned that I’ve had a bonk to the head lately. Another way to put this is that I think in metaphors, since metaphors compare things that are kind of different in order to bring forward the qualities they share, which usually helps you regard at least one of those things differently. Newly. More dimensionally.

A metaphor takes two things and lets them be with, and change, each other.

*
We went to a Renaissance Festival.

Desperate to fill the thousand days between the end of camp and the beginning of school, we drove the hour and a half to a town on the shore of Lake Ontario and shuttled our hot, complaining children past the colorful flags and neurodivergent party-goers strapping on wings and horns and leather aprons in the grass parking lot.

It took two hours for my son to calm down enough to enjoy things, which is a state of affairs we’re used to, but that doesn’t mean we’re inured to the stress of a small child’s irritable overwhelm. It took us a long time to learn that in general, the reason he’s blazing like a laser beam to go an acquire a new, expensive item when he enters a new, overwhelming space or experience is not that he’s got an entitlement problem, but that making a novel object his own helps calm him, integrate some of the newness into his sense of the world.

Maybe we were a little behind the ball on this realization at the start of the festival, because we did a lot of silent suffering and wincing at each of his redoubled efforts to get us to buy him an old-fashioned horn. He didn’t want to get his face painted or have a new wooden play sword— no, it’s always the oddest and most expensive thing he fixates on: he wanted an animal horn on a leather strap with a silver mouthpiece for blowing. Never mind that he can’t make it resonate with any kind of embouchure; he just hums into it menacingly.

(Spoiler, we got it for him, eventually— or rather, his kind and generous grandfather took pity on him and purchased one before we could orient ourselves to realize that not all gifts spoil a child; some make living more possible for everyone. Just because it feels good, doesn’t make it bad.)

While the horn saga was going down, my daughter was enchanting herself with live falconry birds, asking quiet, wonder-ful questions about them, feeling lucky to be standing near them and just sort of soaking up the experience. I’m not saying she wouldn’t have also liked to haul home the most expensive thing she could find; I’m just saying some people come to experience more readily, have more immediate access, while others require an animal horn with a silver mouthpiece to get started.

Eventually the two lobes of our amoebic traversing of the “shires” met at the joust, a few hours later, at a spectacle of animal and human abuse that genuinely made me yell and laugh. O boy is it fun to watch extra-large horses and human bodies blast towards each other and explode big sticks upon each other’s armor.

Why? Why is all of the spectacle of a ren faire so enchanting, once you get past the egregiousness of most of it? (Extraordinary expense, long lines, too much heat, the gall of all of these people to be indulging their most whimsical and fantastical strains of self with face paint and elaborate costuming and glitter and silly props, I mean they’re grown-ass people…)

I think that’s exactly why: they are (mostly) grown-ass people, and they’re having fun.

I think our culture isn’t very good at pleasure. We do something more like flickering between puritanical and depraved, each stance jabbing an accusing finger at the other for being wrong. Somewhere in the middle is a hidden and not-oft visited sweet spot that is regular old pleasure: of togetherness, of creativity, curiosity, play, abandon. Imagination.

(Methinks these are a few of the thousand absolutely crucial things we lost when we stopped living in hunter-gatherer communities and left for the pittances and strictures and isolations of nuclear family life under patriarchal capitalism. Not that I don’t enjoy being able to cook pasta off a grocery store shelf and take doxycycline for my Lyme disease. It’s just that it would be nice to have easier access to the communities our brains are evolved to depend upon.)

So… we ate the shortcake, and fish and chips. My daughter got henna on her hand while talking with the artist about cats. We waited in lines that could traverse the moon. My son got his horn and my husband got a copper water feature for the porch (I truly don’t know, I just don’t, but as usual when Daddy has an idea we all end up loving it). We yelled and clapped at the joust, with sweaty children in our laps. The grandmother carried my daughter’s long-abandoned princess costume in a tote while the child drank a berry smoothie in her under-shorts-and-shirt and some white patent leather shoes. We watched the owl sail over, responding to the falconer’s call.

*
The unusual pairing my mind has made, from all of this— the metaphor I was threatening earlier— is the experience of the Renaissance Festival and the experience of reading a good book.

We go in resisting, thrashing even. The difficulty of getting there, the encounters with new and unsettling things, the fatigue of sticking with an unpredictable and attenuated experience. And then, too, the freedom of imagination, the togetherness with others, the novel objects collected for our own, the spectacle and getting to hear ourselves cheer and boo… and, in the end, being sad to leave, and promising to come back.

In going to ren faires and reading books, both, we give ourselves permission for pleasure. We allow the still-young and yearning inside us a chance to come out and be. They’re allowed to want contact with both the familiar and the new; they’re encouraged to soak up the Other and let it become part of their sense of the world. In a word, both make our inner worlds bigger.

My friend ’s recent debut novel, Doll Parts, did just that. It’s a dual-timeline suspense about friendship and grief and the haunting terror of allowing yourself to believe what you know. The haunting terror, essentially, of loving. While it does all that, it’s also of course dishing out delectable details from literary history and the dirt on the dangerous and suffocating ego of academia— as well as its charm and power to afford our minds and hearts elaboration and deepening. It’s also meditating on relational trauma, and how to keep going when it seems like everything has become a nothing.

When I read Doll Parts I remember thinking, and telling Penny, probably in a very garbled and awkward way, that the book had given me a picture of friendship that I’d never really had— the kind of friendship that bears real intimacy. Messy, painful, amazing connection. Ungovernable resonance between people, especially two women. Friendship as a thing that takes on a life of its own.

When I said this to her, I felt sort of forlorn. I think I filed the realization under “oh well.” As in, “I’m so glad Penny has had that in her life, and I’m glad I get to know her and read her books, and also, too bad I’m not one of those people.”

One of the things that readings books does, though, is put pressure on your perimeter fence. Sometimes until it weakens a little. Reading good books fills us with new iterations of familiar truths, or completely new experiences, or both, sometimes so much that we swell to a kind of threshold. Usually without knowing it, we become available to more being.

I’m not crediting reading alone with the new capacity I have, a year later, for the kinds of friendship that are more like what Penny wrote about in Doll Parts— real, transformative, difficult, true; alchemical to the fabric of reality itself. Therapy and life experience and a practice of daily contact with friends are the heaviest lifters here in my personal growth. But what Penny’s book showed me, filled me with, was that potential. The possibility. It made a hairline crack in the exterior that would be critical in allowing more in.

(This is why I’m excited for Penny’s next book, Accidents Never Happen, which you can read about and preorder here. It’s a gothic suspense, based out of a Baltimore dive bar, about family and engaging with the mysteries that both threaten and make us.)

*
After the faire, we piled the kids back into the car and said now we were going to the shores of Lake Ontario, less than a mile down the road. Why, they said. We don’t want to go, they moaned, which was understandable since they had no idea what a great lake really is, and they were tired and hot and already had their henna and hair clip and horn to hum into menacingly.

“It’s not far,” I said, “and you can’t see across it!”

They were quiet. Apparently listening.

“It’s important for you to be in a place where you can’t see across to the other side.” They asked why. I thought about it.

“Because then you’ll know a lot more about the world,” I said.

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O CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN

Caroline Manring — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:16:38 GMT

The walk into Legoland is long.

From the flat-fee $40 parking, the trek to the plastic, primary color archway is about a half a mile.

Half a mile— when measured by surveyors who have stubbed toes, wear hated sneakers a.k.a. foot-sarcophagi, are already hot and tired, and whose teeth hurt because their apparently rather dim and inoperative parents can’t seem to get them off the oral surgery wait-list— is at least a solid 5k in the heat, in the same way that dog-years operate.

Remember, this is fun.

The first plastic flower bed both lifts the spirits and lets us down. A Plastic flower bed is fun, is bright, is stupid, is new and exciting, is a royal disappointment that we will delay speaking of because the warning dirge the parents have been wheezing out has to do with Special, and how Lucky, and Big Trip. OK, plastic tulip, we will touch you and be willing, if not glad.

A large dinosaurish sculpture just past the archway is a better omen, something impressive at least, if misguided. (It is no character we know, so the best we can do at present is wary respect, perhaps the prelude to a curiosity).

A wrist-band, however—this, this is unacceptable.

We have to wear swim bands at camp and their papery stiffness, their shhk shhk against our shorts and towels and what have you, the way they pull and dig and freak out against the flow of water we’re trying to get going in the shallow end… really cramps the style, the groove, the what-freedom-we-have. So a Legoland wristband, a papery shackle on a Special Lucky Big Trip, that’s a no.

We relay this to the parents, the under-no-circumstances part, whereupon one parent throws up its hands and departs immediately with the sibling for Fun Things. The remaining parent goes for the surprise distraction, OH WOW A FACTORY TOUR RIDE, pointing, while slipping the band on with the other hand. Oh that thing? the parent who stayed behind says, yeah totally dumb, everyone’s gotta, no biggie, just —ooo, the tour is on a giant roomba!

We give the remaining parent a super-scowl but the entrance to the factory tour ride is a darkened door, and arcade-like music is coming out of there, plus cool air, which feels very good. Abruptly we take the lead and yank the parent forward. When the parent can’t keep up in flip flops, we let go and begin winding through the dark halls inside at a more satisfying pace. Our name out of the parent’s mouth echoes behind us.

After nine turns through the maze of the building’s ride queue setup, we make it to the front of the nonexistent line in the dark. There are two kids and some parents in front of us, whom we sidle between to peek at the giant roombas under blacklights. Exciting music blasts.

The parent catches up right as the progress preventer gets unclicked and we can finally dash for an upper seat on the rolling disc with stadium seating. We yank down the lap bar and it runs into the parent’s lap, where it locks and we hang on, as instructed by a very excited recorded voice on the loudspeaker. When the roomba begins to lurch and rotate under us, we are sold

.We go on this ride, the factory tour ride, three times before we can agree to go find the other parent and the sibling.

It is very hot outside and there are stands everywhere with Lego sets to buy and candy to eat so why are we not buying and eating, what is the point, really, why are parents so dim and dogged, marching for so long in the heat to where?

When we find the others, the sibling is saying “gondolar” over and over about some box she rode in down to the bottom level.

Driving school sounds great, but oh god, the Store. The Big Store. It probably has a dragster build set. We drove three hours to get here, so why aren’t we going into the Store. We just want to SEE the build sets, and there is probably a dragster. Mom can we just LOOK. She wants us to eat something so we say we won’t. Maybe now she’ll let us go to the Big Store.

OK we can LOOK, but LOOK ONLY, she says. Kapeesh?

Why is she always saying that word?

Never mind, we can shut her up if we repeat it. Kapeesh. We go into the Big Store.

The big store is awesome. And awful. We can’t find it— can’t find— oh but if we run then maybe— ope, no running— ok is it HERE? YES. No— She says the giant Jaguar build is one hundred eighty dollars and that’s a big no. And it sounds like a lot of money but that’s WHY you go to Legoland is to get a GREAT BUILD. Why is everyone dumb.

And no I do not have time for food. I need a dragster build now and ok fine yes kapeesh I won’t open it right away I will wait until tomorrow night if that’s what makes you difficult people happy. Just please let me touch it, let me have it, let me carry its photo-sleek bulk around the park with me. All day if necessary. All of tomorrow too. I promise I will eat. Just let me get this Ford GT40 MKII for the love of God.

*
To his credit, my son does carry the build box for two days at Legoland. Without opening it.

It goes on the DJ Dizzy ride, the Factory Tour ride several more times, and the piracy series, at which my personal water cannon just sort of dribbles while the others’ have the intended range to reach fellow tourists out on the sidewalk. The build box, which is large, about the size of my son’s torso, waits while sister wins a $1 tiger for $15. It stays with a parent during the Driving School visit, which goes for about six rounds.

In short, the unassembled fragments of plastic Ford GT40 MKII in a large, black, logo-ed box mostly prevent the child from rejecting the Legoland experience wholesale; he is very clear on the fact that THE reason to go to Legoland at all is to BUY a Lego. Never mind that you can buy Legos anywhere, and we are here to do the things. The things are meaningless without the GT40. So it goes with us, marginally preventing collapse.

Because, among other things, heat.

It is so hot at Legoland. One begins to understand very quickly the spray-down stations, the giant fans in the lines for the rides, the beach umbrellas everywhere. Decisions about where to go and what to do get made based on the presence or absence of shade.

The child, meanwhile, won’t eat or drink, because that takes time, and there is too much to go see, now that we have the GT40.

The problem with this child not eating is— well, everything. He becomes the bad guy in a soap opera when he doesn’t eat. He is also not drinking. We try, honestly we do.

As he gets in line for Driving School for the fourth time, pink in the face and sweating with a glazed look, it becomes clear that we’re going to have to up the value of the promised food item. We start talking about ice cream. His head twitches a little, as if listening, but the glazed eyes stay on the Driving School Corral.

Just when he almost agrees to begin the very hot trek to the ice cream stand, his sweaty hand half in mine, and I’m turning on the afterburners despite my flip-flops to get us there before he digs in about something else, he spots it.

OH MAMA, he says, pointing, I SAW THAT THING FROM UP HIGH. CAN I?

I look towards where he’s pointing and all I see is a playground. We’re talking giant ship in the middle of the blazing sun, nestled into rubberized ground and just sitting there, land-locked away from the fun rides and promises of shade. It’s just a freighter-looking thing, with no windows and no real Lego flourishes (no brightly colored, block-shaped anything), sitting there sweltering with one or two wilted parents nearby. We’re talking the dregs of what Legoland has to offer. I mean, elsewhere there is a pirate ship playground, if we really wanted to opt for inanimate playground time at an amusement park where things move and squirt and sing.

Yes, that’s what we’re talking about, I realize, as my son loses a shoe while blasting off the starting line of my sad-sack sweaty meatbag.

He disappears into the freighter and presumably finds his way to the top (it has three decks), and I don’t see him for twenty minutes. I stand under the shade umbrella with the other parents, who have foreseen more than I have, and purchased the $28 hand-held spray-fans at the bubbles stand.

I begin to wonder if there’s any way for my son to have exited the playground without my noticing— some back door. I circumnavigate the freighter. Nope, no unmonitored egress. I begin to wonder if his father and sister have made it off the roller coaster yet, where the wait was 45 minutes. (You can do this type of waiting with the other child, if you buy it a necklace.) I begin to wonder how I’m going to get calories and water into my child, and whether he still exists or has been transported to another dimension through some hidden machine inside the freighter.

Then I see a flash of blond and red, and it is the right size. OK, he’s still in there. But this doesn’t solve the problem of how to feed and water him.

Soon my husband shows up with my daughter, and they have had the time of her life on the roller coaster. My husband looks deeply pleased, and also a little impressed and worried when he recalls the ride. It was a real one, he says, quietly.

My daughter is ready for ice cream, which is a good sign as sometimes we can get a critical mass going. If my son sees her eating it, he might FOMO himself into consuming some calories.

I switch kid duty, hand off freighter-watch to my husband, and depart on the marathon walk to the ice cream stand with my daughter, who is game so long as there is mint chip. I pray for mint chip, and for some fruity flavor my son won’t dismiss with a glance when we return, if we return, for it is blistering hot, and the walk is even longer in flip-flops with a daughter known for her sub-sloth pacing.

At the stand, we pay $22 for two ice creams and a water. Then there’s no water in the cooler, and we’re told to wait while Jerry, who appears to be an unpromising-looking sixteen or so, goes for restocking supplies.

I get a call from my husband saying that back at project freighter, we are critical, the child’s face has gone lobster-red. My daughter and I abandon our $8 water, which Jerry doesn’t show with for the ten minutes it takes her to finish the mint chip and the roadrunner raspberry melts to a soft island in a cup of sugar soup. We depart as hastily as a sated, sticky, dragged sloth can manage, and we peel our eyeballs for another water stand on the way back to the freighter with the emergency supplies, which begin to drip.

When we arrive back at the freighter, there is still no sign of the red and blond, and the father is standing under the shade scrap with tears in his eyes. He’s been laughing hard enough to go silent. Apparently he’s gone up inside the freighter, and gotten the news of what’s been happening all along.

“He’s the captain,” my husband manages to get out. He can’t stop laughing. “He’s up on the bridge, barking orders at the other kids, and the other kids are all running up and down to follow the orders, about zombies and rogue waves and engine failures.” He needs a break to wipe his face. “They’re calling him Captain. There’s like ten of them in there. He’s completely red and sweaty and he’s on the verge of a medical event. We’ve got to get in there and give him water.”

I’ll find a way, I tell him, as he leaves with Sister for the nearby Driving School.

I climb up to the first deck, where now I can see a handful of children running. From below, I hadn’t been able to see anything. (This is a rare playground where there is absolutely no line of sight to any child behind the realistic freighter design. It has not been Lego-ified or cute-sied.) The children I come upon are not mine, and seem to multiply as I climb to the second deck inside the belly of the thing.

On the way, I pass a three- or four-year-old muttering “haveta tell da captain, dere’s a fire inna hole” on repeat. The poor thing is taking its job very seriously, while trying to manage some drooping pants. I climb past it gingerly, as it looks quite happy.

As I emerge into the spiral staircase that gives me a narrow slot in the floor through with to glimpse my child, I can see and hear the full glory of his helming. You! Run and get supplies! The zombies have been neutralized but there’s another rogue wave coming! The child in question disappears down the other staircase. My son issues another order involving no yelling, we need to be able to hear orders, and a chastened five-year-old nods and busily departs.

I poke my head further into the spiral, which is only large enough for children to comfortably climb and descend, and I call for my son, who doesn’t hear me. He swerves the helm hard to port and yells something more to a large child who has at least three years on mine. The large child climbs down, past me, and says, with bright eyes, “I’m the second in command!”

Other people’s children continue to circulate in a sort of figure-eight of efficient obedience to the red-and blond captain, whose stance is wide and steering sure.

“Captain,” I shout. His head jerks sideways and down, to where my voice is emanating through the stair-slats. “Your fuel is here,” I say, seriously, as though he himself has given me the order to procure the ice cream and I’ve finally fulfilled it. My son murmurs to the second-in-command briefly, “My fuel is here. You take the wheel. I’ll be back.”

He descends quickly, face lobster-red and hair sopped with sweat. He acknowledges me with a serious nod, snatches the ice cream, and sits down with it. (Usually we have to chase him with single spoonsful, which he sort of half-gums over his shoulder while running elsewhere.)

The plastic spoon goes around like a water-wheel and he empties the cup into his mouth this way over the course of no more than two minutes. He does not look up. I silently hand him the water, which he takes without comment, guzzles, and then dumps some over his head and hands back to me. He is already up and re-ascending to his post. “I’m back,” he shouts, and the big kid steps aside immediately. The figure-eight trail of children resumes its flow between decks in rhythm with the Captain’s orders. The zombies are back, apparently. Also, pirates.

The husband and sister are able to do several more rides while the captaincy plays out its tenure. I stand under the sliver of shade, my husband stands under the sliver of shade, and we alternate while the kid plays out his authority to the last drop. It never loses potency.

We hit four o’clock and my husband and I look at each other warily— the splash pad reservation, which we’ve been working up to for the whole two-day ordeal, has arrived. How are we going to extract the Captain?

I volunteer as tribute, and make my way back into the freighter’s belly and ascend. The exact same scene, now with more children, is continuing its flow.

“Captain,” I bark. He glances through the floor. I summon my best official voice, again as if he’s given me the order to go get this information which I’m about to give him. “It’s time for your splash pad reservation.”

Usually this child would wail in protest, set up a holy-hell tantrum involving scathing treatment of his dim and unfair mother.

What he does, instead, is nod briskly and repeat immediately to the second-in-command, “It’s time for my splash pad reservation,” as if he’s merely saying “it’s time to check the engines.”

He exits the bridge as seamlessly as he took it, ceding the helm to Number Two without a second glance. Number Two steps in with a look of serious fortitude. He’s waited hours for this promotion.

My son descends the stairs as if following his own orders, waving cheerfully to the freighter full of children behind, who are still tracing the patterns he set in play, as though they’re a river on loop, made out of his dreams.

We go to the splash pad without incident.

Until the thunderstorm. And then our exit from Legoland, which would have been a fight under the best of circumstances, moves like greased lighting along the track of my children’s thunder-fear.

It is a swift, adventurous exit, befitting the great freighter’s brave crew.

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A COMPLICATED AGE

Caroline Manring — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:40:21 GMT

We are of a complicated age.

Seven howls for playdates, then does a saddest fish in the sea routine at drop-off.

We’d like the longest hair on record and cheerfully mow it with kitchen shears.

Art? Should be serious, accurate. About cat-i-corns.

We froth for danger and deadliness in the bedtime book and then elbow mom to stop from under the comforter, where we’re wearing noise reduction headphones to listen.

We scold friends (“Your brains will leak out your ears if you’re always watching tv you know”) and then hide the remote from mom when it’s time to go to bed.

We don’t have very many teeth and become worried when they’re loose. We are happy to explain to anyone how to best lose one, how to keep a good attitude about it.

Teasing is criminal and gets a criminal shriek; when we tease it’s fantastic and gets a fantastic shriek.

Shrieking in general.

We wear a gown to a dinner party, jean shorts and camp project tie-dye underneath.

We have righteous rage about the shortness of the dinner party.

We would like to stay home. We would really like to get out more.

Albert the guinea pig, sentient!, requires saving from the know-nothing brother. He is also a puppet whose hands are funny.

I love cursive, teach me teach me. I hate cursive, the C is awful. [Cries.]

We don’t know how to tie a shoe, but always know exactly where north is, will tell you in the rain at night in a place we’ve never been, when you fuck it up.

We’re going to marry our best friend, and brother can come along if he wants.

If the playdate is going to be that short let’s not bother.

We suggest a different kind of burrito when served the special burrito we demolished yesterday, and then when mom barks about it we say “it’s a good thing you didn’t have six kids.”

We’re not wrong.

When you’re dead, we’ll be __________.

How long will __________ live?

What does sentinal mean? Someone was named that in the book. I’m sure. Oh, wait, it was centaur.

We take dawdling seriously. Don’t bother applying for an exception, because it is crucially important to hum and trace lines in the air on the way to … where?

Questions are sacred, their content is irrelevant, and we will not be thwarted by not remembering what we were talking about. We will take that question for a long-ass walk around corners and over streams and eventually park it sideways by a question mark, and you will have no idea where it began.

More and more you will get in touch with the beauty of saying “I don’t know” in reply.

We are sorry to report we did not enjoy anything in our lunch.

Dinner is a disappointment again.

I love your eye makeup.

Your butt is enormous.

Mom is the coolest thing on the planet and we will paste ourselves to her like color.

Nah, don’t hang around, I’m good.

It is not necessary to wash the cheetah face off.

It will come off on its own, you know.

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THE RADIANT ONE-STAR

Caroline Manring — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:38:27 GMT

The last tractor left the Harford fair as we were pulling in. Thunderstorms had chased away that part of the day, and “even though they mowed a nice pulling patch for them, the tractor pull part ended maybe by noon,” the volunteer firefighter grandmother told me, when we got to her prize booth for the fishing game.

Before we even got out of the car, which we parked by the church alongside the road because the parking arrangements in the field weren’t entirely clear there were so few attendees, my children were shocked and horrified.

BUT IT’S SO SMALLLL, they yelled. The whole fair fit in a single camera frame.

Yes, I said, I told you it would be. But we don’t know anything about it yet so how about instead of moaning we go find out what’s there.

And they walked through the mud with the dry sneakers it had taken me twenty minutes to get them to put on.

(I swear I will start a petition to allow children to go barefoot any goddamn place they want, just to save years of my life, for those little banged-up bandaided feet are the definition of freedom, friends, and all we do when we resist it is make ourselves look stupider by the day.)

They went right up the center of the drive towards the pavilion, directly through about three to six inches of sucking mud, which I’d call a minor but relevant feature of the Harford fair.

I will admit I was doing car-math in my head as I followed the children, forty minutes to get here for…. and I glanced around the small, assorted rubble of ideas spread in front of me… what, maybe, twenty minutes, max, to occupy us here? OK, not an awesome return, but still better than sitting at home? I mean, we got some audiobook in on the way? It was a pretty drive?

You know, just engaging the Justification System. I have, necessarily, a very robust one. It does burpees all day long and drinks raw eggs for breakfast.

We met my parents, one of them the grandfather who had so gamely suggested the Harford fair in the first place—yeesh, how to console him? God, nevermind, just manage the fallout first— but before I could even say hi, the gravitational field of the bouncy house yanked the children, who began to sprint, employing the sneaker-shucking move I have no idea how they manage at high speed.

In under a minute, they were flinging themselves around inside the thing, already completely sopped and squelching from the thunderstorm water that had filled it throughout the morning.

It was not a super warm day, either, and the sun hadn’t figured its way around the Debbie Downer sky yet, so soon they were shivering in cold cotton stretch pants and long-sleeved cotton shirts. This of course made ME cold and resentful, having to look at them, flinging cold drops of water from the ragged tips of their unbrushed hair, so I left them to Grampy’s supervision while I went to look for the next tantrum preventer (calories).

I turned to the rest of the fair, which was two guys playing music under a pop-up tent, three guys flipping burgers at a single grill under another pop-up tent, a volunteer fire department engine with two porta-ponds in front of it, and a small white pavilion, which was half enclosed.

I didn’t understand— the flyer for the fair had said there would be a craft fair and raffles and bake sale, but I didn’t see any of these things.

I asked my mother, who was now coming towards me, where to find a hot dog maybe? She sounded quite cheerful, though, when she pointed to the half-walled pavilion and said There’s all kinds of stuff in there.

It looked maybe twice the size of our garden shed but I located my belief and fondled it willfully as I walked towards the white walls, not knowing what to say to the music guys on the way, who were actually really good, and had had to put garbage bags over their speakers, which were puffing the bags out and in like raggedly breathing animals.

Somehow the band’s obviously high skill level made it more awkward to pass them on the empty grass. There was no tip jar. The singer, one of those freakishly talented people who can do anything on the guitar and make any sound with his voice, glanced at his watch between bar chords.

They had two more hours to go, according to the flyer.

I tried to smile at the two-man band, but I have Lyme disease, and only half my face works now, apparently, so what they saw was someone grimacing alone on the grass, clearly confused about hot dogs.

When I finally got inside the pavilion, I actually felt even grimmer for a bit. There were about six tables of bagged bake sale items. Hundreds of glutinous, iced piles in Ziplocs. There was going to be no way to keep the refined sugar to a minimum.

Very well, glycemic fluctuation meltdowns, at least one, we can manage that. OK, move on, you can still maybe fill them with hot dog before they ever see any of it and then there will be less room inside them for the executive function reduction fuel.

The hot dogs came out of a cooler, though they had definitely seen the grill at some point, and cost two dollars. The coffee was one dollar. A bag of iced sugar cookies with the icing plastered to the plastic bag was one-fifty.

And a bonus item, for the Lymey, wheat-intolerant wandering grimacer: rice krispy treats! Also one-fifty! If you can’t beat them, join them!

Though I will admit, chewing a rice krispy treat with Lyme-induced facial neuropathy and weakness on one side is slow work through sand, and every once in a while you have to stick your finger into the unfeeling, sluggish cheek pocket and empty it of its cache, back into the side of the mouth that remembers how to chew and also feels mostly up to it.

Over at the bouncy house, where I was afraid to take my doxycycline-flooded skin-bag because there was no shade, now that the sun had come out, and I’d forgotten my sunscreen because it was the middle of a thunderstorm when we departed our home, the children were beginning to eyeball the fishing booth.

My eyes were glinting, too, because the prize table had, you know, BIG stuff, GOOD stuff— a sparkle alpaca stuffie, a medium-giant unicorn— no, wait, cat-i-corn.

It was right up my daughter’s alley, and if we could devise to somehow get her at least a mid-grade prize, stuffing enough dollar bills from my mother’s purse at the attendant (I hadn’t brought cash, cash? What is cash?), then one half of my children would walk away adequately to deeply satisfied by the whole experience, which was more than I’d hoped when we first rolled up.

My daughter bee-lined, squelching, for the prize table to assess for herself, right as I approached.

The fishing game attendant was the volunteer firefighter grandmother. “These are our porta-ponds,” she said, of the two huge, square frames behind her with tarps expertly stretched between all the bars to make what three children from the same family were using as a very, very cold swimming pool. “We use them to haul creek or pond water to, with tankers, when we go on calls where there’s no hydrant, which is almost everywhere around here.”

Wow, I said, while I was ogled the handwritten prizes sign, which said “Go Fishing!, 25 cents, prize for everyone!”

And although the toys were arranged roughly by size so that you could see the tiny plastic Minions and Paw Patrol figurines in the front, there… did not seem to be any limitation on WHICH prizes you could pick.

Alpaca not pictured. Maybe I was holding it??

I threw the tall, very soft sparkle alpaca a yearning glance, but could see my daughter was already hell-bent on a pregnant rainbow unicorn which un-velcroed to reveal three baby rainbow blobs. Very well. I would forgo the alpaca. I am after all a parent. Such sacrifices are expected.

I handed the lady two quarters and my kids yanked the bamboo poles with strings and magnets on the end over to one of the porta-ponds, where there were plastic fish-shapes with magnets in them scattered across the bottom of the three or more feet of frigid water.

I didn’t start to worry until my son had caught three fish in under two minutes, yelling and rushing to the table, that we would cause some kind of structural meltdown for the whole concept of the fishing game.

The volunteer firefighter attendant, though, seemed unruffled. I handed her a couple more dollars as I looked around — just checking, and nope, no other children were waiting, or indeed even present at the fair, other than those three siblings in the other porta-pool playing marco polo and a baby sleeping in a stroller— and I asked nervously if it was ok if they just kept going.

“We’ll keep it to three prizes,” I said, apologetically, as my son scooped up his second Hot Wheels monster truck, which was a huge score for him, since that’s what he’s been stealing from camp all summer, and his collection was beginning to look venerable. These would seal the deal.

“We have to leave some for the other kids,” I said, more to anyone who was listening than to my children, so that strangers wouldn’t suspect the truth, which is that we are completely feral scofflaws because I am usually too tired for moral fiber.

“Oh, don’t worry, take as many prizes as you want,” the volunteer firefighter said, “It’s just my granddaughter’s old extra toys she doesn’t want anymore. Bring them back next year if you get tired of them.

”

Whereupon we were all set for the next half-hour, and I acquired a paper bag full of prizes.

I still wanted the alpaca and did bother to try and coerce some love for it into my daughter so she might choose it, but with no success. Let this be a lesson to me that in this life, one must step up and play one’s own fishing game at the volunteer fire department porta-pool. For now we have a perpetually pregnant rainbow unicorn instead, and I may or may not see the alpaca next year.

Truthfully, most of the rest of the fair, for the Lyme grimacer, was sitting under one of the two grill tents at one of the two picnic tables using a plastic fork to eat a burger patty with unmelted cheese on it (the guy with the spatula was so excited to overhear my order to the girl working the cash box that he put the cheese on the already-cooked patty before I’d paid, and it was on a plate before the girl gave me change).

While I sat and listened to the band, mercifully where they couldn’t see me scooping pockets of half-chewed food out of my mouth’s involuntary chipmunk storage, the children pursued their hearts’ content each with one grandparent:

My daughter built a keepsake box and a miniature washing machine at the craft table with her grandmother for an hour, hammering at the DIY kit pieces diligently while arguing amiably about what the instructions said; my son began launching himself, fully clothed, into the freezing porta-pond marco polo game, with Grampy chaperoning lightly

At one point there was a visit to the free facepainting table, where two very bored teens were thrilled to have their only customer in my daughter.

She glanced at all their fancy stencils, which would have kept any skill mercifully out of the equation, and said no, she’d like to be a cat please. This was not one of the choices, but the bored teens marshalled their ingenuity and looked up how to paint a kid’s face as a cat on one of their phones.

My kid got ears on her forehead, two whiskers on each cheek, and a pink triangle nose, and was thrilled.

In the end, three hours later, we had to drag my son out of the porta-pool, and my daughter was wearing her grandmother’s windbreaker, which went down to her ankles, over her sopped clothing while she shivered and added the final stickers to her miniature washing-machine piggy-bank.

There were some roses and a “Lowe’s is proud to present KIDS MAKERS” badge to add to her newly assembled kit, but these went, un-applied, into the prizes bag with the pregnant unicorn, the Hot Wheels collection, and two further rice krispy treats the grandparents had bought to try and help the bake sale.

The forty-minute ride home through further thunderstorms and shockingly beautiful skies was satisfied, musing. Pleased. Eager.

Pleasant.

Current status: planning for next year.

Available for iOS and Android

WELCOME TO THE LYME SPECTACULAR

Caroline Manring — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:29:00 GMT

All participants file on stage, or into the park or rink, in whatever costume is available. Boas, cowboy hats, roller skates, last year’s cheetah outfit— there is a place for every costume in the Lyme Spectacular. However, we provide the following as a selected, basic guide:

HOST wears bathrobe / carries stuffie;

NURSE NANCY wears gold jewelry;

ER DOC wears white coat;

PRIMARY CARE DOC wears a flowing vacation dress and bears a cell phone;

PRIMARY CARE PINCH HITTER wears something no one will remember;

RHEUMATOLOGIST wears doe-colored suede shoes and a pastel polo;

CHILDREN wear underpants and sidewalk chalk;

PREDNISONE wears fluorescent pink and a cat mask;

DOXYCYCLINE wears robin’s-egg blue;

etc.

As each speaker’s turn comes, they step forward from the line to deliver the speech and/or action, and, unless otherwise indicated, once done, step back into the line.

MUSCLES: This is bad.

BRAIN: Can you specify?

NERVES: Sure. (Opens toy light sabre, fells several nearby participants. Everyone gasps.)

HOST: (Dials on phone, speaks to it) Hi, we have some bad. What is your brain knowing to stop the bad here?

RHEUMATOLOGIST: You should go to the ER. (Puts sunglasses on, sits in folding chair.)

CHILDREN: It’s almost time to pick us up from camp! We hate the snacks you brought!

HOST: So… we try… chiropractic? (Everyone nods.)

CHIROPRACTOR: (Does “shazaam” motion with hands). There. Should be all good. Remember, stretch three times a day. Sleep with pillow between knees, good for everyone, not just old people. (Everyone nods.)

MUSCLES / NERVES: (Stand forward, start screaming, punch everyone in the face.)

HOST: So… ER?? (Everyone nods. Host goes to “ER” area of stage or field or rink.) Hi, we have here significant bad. Lots of the bad, one week not sleep, not sure why to try keep alive the bad is so badly.

ER ATTENDANT: And you’re still at same address?

(Line nods.)

And you’re still on

Yuckbludzapperate 6mg,

Polygollywannacry 10mg,

Ethylmethylchlorowhiner 50mg,

Sordidmorbidhexylate 60mg,

Peepeemaximusurgentilus 70mg,

Drowzalots 100mg as needed,

and vitamin C?

(Line nods.)

And you’re still allergic to

Beezlebubselate,

Suddendeathorate,

Mysteriomiserioxylase,

and shellfish?

(Line nods.)

OK, go ahead and talk to Nurse Nancy.

NURSE NANCY: You came at the right time! 3am has been really dead lately! (Takes Host’s blood pressure, types for a while). I used to work at Burning Man, you know. Altered people and sick people are kind of the same thing.

(HOST nods, but neck spasms, so she stops nodding.)

And you’re still at same address?

(Line nods.)

And you’re still on

Yuckbludzapperate 6mg,

Polygollywannacry 10mg,

Ethylmethylchlorowhiner 50mg,

Sordidmorbidhexylate 60mg,

Peepeemaximusurgentilus 70mg,

Drowzalots 100mg as needed,

and vitamin C?

(Line nods.)

And you’re still allergic to

Beezlebubselate,

Suddendeathorate,

Mysteriomiserioxylase,

and shellfish?

(Line nods.)
OK, the doctor will see you shortly. You know, you can manage a lot of pain with breathing. I used to work in the piercing business.

(HOST tries to move eyeballs in assent, but they hurt too much, so she just stares, bug-eyed, in what is meant to be a show of agreement, which she does not feel.)

ER DOC: Hello there you look fine!

HOST: Funny thing I am not fine I am very much all the badness I cannot walk or do the turning of head—

ER DOC: And you’re still at same address?

(Line nods.)

And you’re still on

Yuckbludzapperate 6mg,

Polygollywannacry 10mg,

Ethylmethylchlorowhiner 50mg,

Sordidmorbidhexylate 60mg,

Peepeemaximusurgentilus 70mg,

Drowzalots 100mg as needed,

and vitamin C?

(Line nods.)

And you’re still allergic to

Beezlebubselate,

Suddendeathorate,

Mysteriomiserioxylase,

and shellfish?

(Line nods.)

HOST: …and when I can make the think it is about to thinking I might vomit.

ER DOC: Mmm hmm. OK we will put your head in a tube.

HOST: It might be a tick-style badness because my auntie had same bads and it was tick, was Lyme. Can you order that test like please my auntie had?

ER DOC: Yes, I think X-rays are the next move too.

HOST: No, actually, a tick test. Can you order that panel about ticks and their badness please?

ER DOC: Perhaps you’d like a regular blood panel.

HOST: My regular bloods have looked goodish of the recently. I am now as I stand here dying wondering about my tick bloods. Could you order that ones?

ER DOC: (mumbling) …takes a week. Good news! You look great! We can send you home as soon as X-Ray comes through.

HOST: I do likes the wheelie chair and the gurneys for riding to tests in rooms that has quiet darknessing. But, well, the badness is feeling I’m dead or dying or else I shouldz be so do you have the ideas of how to keep livingz I am wonderish bad.

NURSE NANCY: I can get you a Percocet?

HOST: It doesn’t work with this bads. I has trying, has have had the try at it. It’s nope.

NURSE NANCY: Want it anyway since you’re not getting anything else?

HOST: (shrugs) OK.

ER DOC: Good news, you look perfect. You can go home and follow up with your primary care. Would you like her to receive your perfect tests?

HOST: I don’t remembers her name? I knows she can’t be more than twelve…

PRIMARY CARE DOC: (Reads from email on phone screen) Hi, I’m out of office until the end of the month! Vacation’s fun! There’s ice cream!

PRIMARY CARE PINCH HITTER: I suppose I could see you this afternoon for a quickie.

BRAIN / MUSCLES /NERVES: Do you think we can drive there though?

PERCOCET: affirmative, but only if you leave soon and ignore that I’m not actually working. Just believe in me. You just gotta believe.

(later that day, “primary care” area of stage or rink or park)

PRIMARY CARE PINCH HITTER: What seems to be the problem?

HOST: I think I might be d—

PRIMARY CARE PINCH HITTER: Hold up hold up.

And you’re still at same address?

(Line nods.)

And you’re still on

Yuckbludzapperate 6mg,

Polygollywannacry 10mg,

Ethylmethylchlorowhiner 50mg,

Sordidmorbidhexylate 60mg,

Peepeemaximusurgentilus 70mg,

Drowzalots 100mg as needed,

and vitamin C?

(Line nods.)

And you’re still allergic to

Beezlebubselate,

Suddendeathorate,

Mysteriomiserioxylase,

and shellfish?

(Line nods.)

HOST: I have very bad times. Tick times? Can’t walk or sleep or eat or think it is so bads. I did take out the compost maybe so I am perhaps not dead? Is that good?

PRIMARY CARE PINCH HITTER: How about some steroids.

PREDNISONE: (jumps out of line in pink spandex and cat mask with light sabre) YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

HOST: OK if you say so but also can I has a tick test, like a whole tick yuck panel please? My auntie had these bads and it was Lyme and my friend who is a doctor says the other bad tick yucks are bads too and I’d like that panel of testingness. Please.

PRIMARY CARE PINCH HITTER: They already ordered the Lyme test. It takes a week. We won’t know.

HOST: And in meantime I has the deadz so can we plz doxy? Because it seems very badz indeed for if I cannot do the livingz I cannot.

PRIMARY CARE PINCH HITTER: (deeply suspicious look) I suppose….. (backs away slowly, hands meds over. Host pops them.)

PREDNISONE: (still brandishing light sabre) LET’S EAT AND ALPHABETIZE QUICKLY AND WITH GUSTO

DOXYCYCLINE: (whispers) plz…. hold…. very… still…

CHILDREN: IT’S TIME TO PICK US UP FROM CAMPPPPPP LET’S GOOOOOOO WE’VE GOT A FORRRRRRT TO BUILLLLLLLDDDDDDD

MUSCLES / NERVES / BRAIN: it is not good not good hold still i repeat not good not good hold still

CHILDREN: move it lady

HUSBAND: Hold up, hold up, one more thing tonight, there is a melting plastic smell in the walls. It is time to call 911.

(FIRE FIGHTERS Arrive in six trucks, block road in both directions. Ten firefighters in full gear get out and enter stage, sniffing around.)

CHILD 1: Hey, that’s the fire truck that sprayed us down at camp! Hooray!

HOST: I’m sure it looks like it yes that’s of the exciting all trucks probably same though in the looking way.

CHILD 2: (sobbing) What if the house burns dowwwwwwwnnnnnnnn

FIRE LIEUTENANT: Looks like everything’s ok here, but we’re going to keep looking around. You’ll notice while we sniff things and murmur amongst ourselves that we are all very good looking and you can’t even appreciate it.

(HOST nods.)

CHILD 1: That’s Engine Number Four!

FIRE LIEUTENANT: Yes, correct, that’s Engine Number Four. The one that visited camp to spray the kids. Well spotted. (She calls Fire Chief, who arrives shortly thereafter to discuss types of wiring with HUSBAND.)

CHILD 2: (sobbing) What if they don’t finnnnnd the smelllllll and we alll diiiiiieeeeee in the niiiiiiiiiight

HOST: Everything’s of the OK going to soon be sure. (Falls over on grass)

PREDNISONE: PARTY’S ON WE SHOULD EAT IMMEDIATELY

DOXYCYCLINE: Please hold very still and do not eat much.

PREDNISONE and DOXYCYCLINE begin a fist-fight.

FIREFIGHTERS point out one last time the terrible waste their good looks are going to before shaking their heads and leaving.

HOST cannot sit up from grass but waves with two fingers.

MUSCLES, NERVES, and BRAIN lie down on top of HOST.

CHILDREN think this looks fun and join in.

All MEDICAL STAFF exit out the sides, chatting and eating ice cream.

PERCOCET heaves others off of HOST and the two share a romantic kiss before leaving to clean the kitchen.

Lights down as Soundtrack up (“All You Need is Love”).

Make sure a camp counselor tells the audience it is time to clap, for it will not be clear, and then directs them to the lot where the Gelato guy is parked.

FIN

Aaaaand here’s your friendly reminder that the person above, though deadzing much of the time, wrote the book below, which will come out in just over half a year, which is faster than anyone thinks, so start working up to deciding you want it and are allowed to click some clicks to get it when it comes, because the blurbs are now in, and I can share the following excerpt from one of the blurbs: “By combining her own powerful writing with the found poetry she has curated from psychoanalytic theory, she gives a gift that neither form might be able to give us on its own: the gift of becoming the “engaged witness” to our own lives.” --Galit Atlas, Ph.D., author of Emotional Inheritance, faculty NYU Postdoctoral Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

Available for iOS and Android

I HAVE NO TALENT FOR CERTAINTY

Caroline Manring — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:22:58 GMT

I have no idea whether seven miles over the speed limit really is the number that marks the line between felons and model citizens, but it is ingrained in my head. I also don’t know how it got there.

I’m not sure how to spell exhilarate. Or weird.

When my children don’t answer me for the fifth time, I’m not certain whether it’s best to yell, laugh, cry, explain to them in detail my descent into madness, or throw a pillow at their heads. (I do however know that the “Jessica” phenomenon, where parents of tantruming toddlers suddenly mention a Jessica and watch the tantrum halt in its tracks, IS applicable for older children and can be used during a backseat car-fight.)

I haven’t the foggiest how you’re supposed to care enough to clean candlesticks when they’re gobbed with wax. Warm water + self-hate? No thank you. I’ll go with “butterknife + project discontinued by rage” the way god intended.

Speaking of, if pressed, I could fake an answer, but I really don’t know what a Higher Power is. Today, candidates include wildflowers, peanut butter, the red lantern, a game of charades, and our long-suffering guinea pig, Albert, whose love for the world is such that his face remains apparently open and bright in spite of everything.

I’m so deeply uncertain in the appointment making arts that I forget my own name and why I am calling immediately when someone picks up. “Actually, Kevin, you don’t happen to have any idea why I called, do you? WAIT— it’s something about a car. Or an echocardiogram. Look around. Are you in a mechanic’s or a doctor’s office right now?”

I am daily uncertain whether screen-time is the ruination of the world or the salvation of the family.

Rice. I have never once felt any kind of certainty about how to cook rice, in spite of having read hundreds of instruction panels on boxes and bags. The mysteries of rice raze my brain every time they enter my eyes and heart.

Does anyone know what a tablespoon of peanut butter looks like? I have a sinking fear that this particular uncertainty in me is important to uphold. It may be a structural uncertainty. As in: there is perhaps a very good reason I am unable to be certain of this thing.

Guinea pig genitals are FAR more complicated to tell apart than one would imagine. I’m telling you, these pigs have spent hours of their life upside down while I puzzle, and I don’t believe I’m actually stupid. It’s not fair to them, or to me. We may be running an accidental pet store soon. No lemonade stand for us.

secrets and lies / higher power 4

And these are just a few in my ceaseless parade of uncertainties. (It does not throw candy.)

When you add in the issues on which I have multiple and conflicting certainties, we’re really off to the races.

Regarding physical violence among children, for example, I am of so many minds I should be awarded my own post office. One of these certainties is that if they touch each other one more time I’m going to set something on fire. Another is that it’s incidental, a nothingburger, let them sort it out, natural part of life and largely to be ignored if no one’s bleeding uncontrollably. Another is that the perp should apologize. Another is that there’s never a clear perp if you get enough back story. And a particularly rich pairing of certainties I apparently have is that a) it’s entirely impossible to prevent physical violence among children and b) it’s entirely possible to prevent physical violence among children if you’re a good enough mom. THAT ONE’S FUN.

On the topic of seeing people, a) I would rather die, and b) I will die if I don’t.

Regarding writing a novel, a) I am doing just fine, b) I am a complete idiot, c) I am AMAZING at this what are you talking about, d) I will take the disastrous secret of this book to the grave, and e) I think I’ll have it ready to send out before the end of the year.

Regarding the best way to support what remains of my mental health on any given day, I am absolutely certain BOTH that I should REST and also GET UP AND MOVE. (In both cases, IMMEDIATELY.) Sometimes this mashup results in trying to clean the garage and napping on a pile of old boat cushions I’m trying to restack. Other times it results in going out for a walk and sitting down on the shoulder of the road with my feet in the ditch to micro-nap while I look at watercress and someone’s toppled recycling.

Oh, and that, too: recycling. It’s clearly a moral imperative. It’s also obviously a complete racket. The dissonance between the intensity of these two certainties sometimes means the item in question, say, a yogurt container, which I’ve just washed very poorly, gets lobbed towards the trash and recycling corner of the kitchen and lands between the garbage and the recycling bag, forcing me to REMAKE the torturous assessment at a later time. This whole process is also known as the twelfth circle of hell.

So, that’s all a thing. I’ll just never have a talent for certainty.

If, however, we remove the attendant feature of having to be right about the outcome, when it happens, in order to ratify the certainty as certainty, and speak instead of the feeling of the process of knowing something to be true and good and beautiful and correct, then I believe we’re talking about something more like conviction.

And that I am eminently capable of.

I have a deep and abiding conviction, for example, that this cannot be, and will never be, a tablespoon of peanut butter.

Get on down the road with that noise

Available for iOS and Android

HOW WE SPEND OUR LIVES

Caroline Manring — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:42:28 GMT

Even when I can’t stand my kids and they can’t stand me, and we are all 100% correct about the assholes around us, I think we do pretty well.

Because at the very least that’s the truth. It is true that we all periodically escalate from unwitting Muppets to dust devils of rage, butthurtness, selfishness, and/or incapacity, whether we can tie our shoes or not.

What is less forgivable than allowing this slide from ok to not ok (and, it’s worth pointing out here, therefore back again) is to hide it, or any other truth about who and what we are, from ourselves or others.

I’m not talking about going around with my sword blazing, being cruel in the name of honesty. I’m a skilled fibber when it’s kind. And I’m not talking about beating skeletons out of the closet with a broom to clack around in the town square. Privacy is an important option.

There is a kindness that has to do with allowing the truth to stand, irrespective of what’s palatable or how anyone may respond, even and maybe especially when it feels less than awesome.

When we try to skip over an experience, by not acknowledging it or by duct taping it and stuffing it in the trunk of the car, it does seem to go away, for a while, but generally speaking, gremlins are not satisfied with going gentle into that good night. An experience denied is usually merely an experience delayed or attenuated. (And, often, amplified.) But there is also reason beyond trying to avoid getting bitten in the butt to welcome all types of experience, not just the ones that feel good or easy.

We tend to think that what is good is to only be good. That what is desirable is to only be desirable.

I think what is good is to be true. And what is desirable is to be.

So can I just go out there and start shrugging and being a constant mess?

Yes.

Because in the manure of the compost pile is where things get their giddyup for growing. And I didn’t show up to remain what I was when I arrived. It’s the transit that’s true.

Annie Dillard writes,

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.

In the longer context of the quote, it’s clear that part of what Dillard is talking about is the schedule, the tenacity and regularity with which we can attend to our lives, the invented thing between whose ribs our moments hang.

And that’s useful for the writer, or other kind of artist, or anyone.

But something else I see in this quote is the “this hour, and that one,” which I’m naming as the desirable and the undesirable. If we don’t allow both, there is no dimension at all.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but to get the great stuff, you gotta do the shit stuff.

Dillard says of these many different hours of our lives, later in that same paragraph,

Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

What she’s pointing to is how sameness creates heft and power, how repetition grows the backbone of a life.

What I also find to be true, inside of this truth, is its opposite: note that there are articulations between the vertebrae, that each knob of bone needs to be different, distinct, in order to make the joinings, and become the miraculous invention that keeps the most fully sentient beings on the planet ambulating.

So I tell you:

Over the course of 35 minutes, I just assisted two humanoids in their transit from sleep to school bus, by way of crooning, open curtains, fans turned off. By way of gentle encouragement, loud encouragement, and barking. By way of brushing tangles and sniffing unders to assess for clean-enoughness. By way of oatmeal and waffles, made to order and mostly uneaten.

I asked one to go find the towel in the front seat of the car (it is wet-n-wild day, the last day of school), whereupon she exited the house, leaving the door open, to spend the remainder of her morning pulling sweet pea flower heads off their necks and arranging them in wilting mosaic on the driveway behind my car.

I asked the other to put his shorts on, whereupon he exited the kitchen naked to go find his guinea pig, get it out of the cage, spraying pissed-on pine shavings across the floor in the process of the animal’s retrieval, and then return to the kitchen with the pig to not-eat his oatmeal.

I wrote barely legible cards for their teachers and jammed them under reused, kinked ribbons wrapped around compost bags (we didn’t have any nice gift bags) stuffed with paper towels, shipping cold-packs, and un-sterilized jars of strawberry jam, which itself is runny (I guess I didn’t have enough Cert-o powder), but which the children really did pick some of the berries for, and stir the jam, maybe, and lick the pot, certainly.

I wrote pick-up notes that did not contain any of the necessary information (child’s full name, date, time, teacher name, retrieval person, signature)— just “this kid will be pickup today” with a smiley face and what passes for my signature I suppose but looks more like a misguided “OMG.”

IF my children had listened, it would have felt quite nice. IF I had prepared better for the last day of school prior to their final first grade departure, I would have felt less frantic.

And also:

I would not have a wilting mosaic, evidence of my daughter’s sweet and deeply odd mind, made by her delicate and sure fingers, tucked between driveway stones.

I would not have gotten to watch the guinea pig’s lips doing their little shuffle-off-to-Buffalo around a celery stalk while noting the grease-slick of my son’s head and opting not to deal with it.

I would not have made the ill-fitting, chilled lumps of gift for the teachers, adorned with used ribbon, and then had to rush through their thank you cards, the frantic process of which actually freed more truthful writing from my meatbag-mind matrix, and allowed me to write Love instead of Thanks for the sign-off.

I think what makes Dillard’s pattern of life “blurred,” which I think is also to say layered in, accreted, and dimensional over time, is, yes, the repetition and relative sameness of the daily living.

I think what makes it “powerful,” though, is the variation, the departures from what’s intended, or wished, or held as standard. It’s in our movement between these—the same and the different, the expected and the unexpected, the wished for and the undesirable, the great stuff and the shit stuff— that we move beyond living, into aliveness.

So I’d say definitely be responsible and kind and refrain from yelling obscenities. Definitely get your shit together before the last day of school. Definitely try to shape children who respond to your requests and demands. Have nice gift bags ready, work on a signature that looks like a name instead of an explosion, wash your kids’ hair, encourage focused meal consumption, use enough pectin in your jam, and sterilize the jars.

And also, I would say this: don’t.

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QUICKIE

Caroline Manring — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:54:23 GMT

I was prepared not to write this. Because I’m not a genius. Also, lack of clean laundry, having to pee, CHILDREN.

Also there is no time, and I’m so flattened by the mess of life I left the car trunk open in the dark driveway last night standing through the storm like a kid with a giant mouth that was trying to eat rain. And also I’m supposed to lead a field trip today about a thing I care about (birds) in a place I care about (The Cornell Lab of Ornithology) for first graders—to be clear, because I volunteered— which is all together maybe one of my worst nightmares.

So I was going to skip.

And then I thought a few things, including

—we’re all going to die

—maybe just do what might be good, a little

Namely, today, to read a poem and take it with me like a raindrop to the eyeball: quick and clean, startling reminder of whatever-it-is we need to remember.

I HAVE QUESTIONS

Caroline Manring — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:28:03 GMT

These nincompoops forgot their 15-year wedding anniversary:

Note that they have a lot of hair and will to get up in the morning

But we forgive them for several reasons. One: they are cute. Another: they forget every year, so at this point it’s actually getting very funny.

It was fun to get the Happy Anniversary text from my father that made us both freeze like cartoon villains where we stood (I out on a walk and the male specimen back at the house doing the two- to three-hour preparation to decide to go for a run). We were happy idiots, receiving the good news from the Land of Wits, as we paddled in Amnesiac Harbor, completely unsuspecting of the happy day it was. And then we were gifted with it.

Would it have been as fun if we’d remembered? Some planned flowers and cards? Maybe. And also, no. It was as if the day handed us our own forgetting as a cuddly offering: silly goose, here ya go! And we got to hold our flat palms to our chests and gasp a little, looking around at the ditch weeds and messy house with many shy blinks, as we accepted an award we didn’t expect to win and breathlessly thanked anyone and everyone for getting us where we are today.

We got to receive our life like a sweet-tempered guinea pig to the lap—hapless, unassuming, and ready for celery— rather than chase it around trying to get it to do something it clearly has no aptitude for.

It all puts me in mind, as I often am, to wonder why we do things the way we do, on repeat. Which also puts me in mind of one of the better questions I’ve heard in my life:

“Why is everyone always looking for the right word all the time? Why isn’t anyone looking for the wrong word?”

This was one of my poetry teachers in graduate school, Dean Young. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this question, both on the page while writing poetry books and a novel, and also, interestingly, elsewhere.

Recently, on a walk, I was trying to learn more of the names of the ditch weeds (ditch weeds feel important to me) and I was beginning by naming all that I did know or might know, and there was one little errant tuft I was staring at and thinking I know that one, somewhere in here, but I could not dredge up any information except a rhythm, a sound pattern, in my brain.

“Well, give me whatever you do have on this sucker, then,” I said to myself, and the reply was “OK, but remember, you asked for it.” [Drumroll] And then the answer I got: “Cornered Mugwump.”

Reader, it was a “Wild Parsnip.” But “Cornered Mugwump” is better. It is not in any way the right word combo; it is very clearly the wrong one, and also, better.

Which begs the question: what all are we missing when we’re trying to get it right? Well, for one thing, surprise wedding anniversaries. And for another, cornered mugwumps.

The question is also adaptable to many situations. For instance, it can be adapted to:

“Why is everyone always looking for a bed to sleep on? Why isn’t anyone looking for a nice garage floor?”

Husband, calling on phone: What are you up to? Me: I just took a nap in the garage. Husband: OK. [Some other topic, for a while] Me: Did you hear the part where I took a nap in the garage? Husband: What about it? Me: Well, it was great. Husband: Well yeah, that place is amazing.

Or “Why bring the right grilling supplies? Why not bring the wrong ones?”

We also used a driftwood stick to stir the mushrooms and onions, a swim towel as a hot-mitt, cattail reeds for kindling, paper towels as plastic wrap, the ground as a countertop, strangers as babysitters, and a number of other adaptations simply because this Cornered Mugwump wumps when cornered.

Or “Why play catch with a ball? Why not with an owl?”

Or “Why make every single snack for the kids yourself? Why not let them figure it out once in a hot while?”

“I made some nice fresh mango slices”

Or “Why have an adult put the new pine shavings in the guinea pig cage? Why not let the kids do it?”

Friends, it is almost summer, and I have many, many questions.

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AWW, BUTTS LIKE ME

Caroline Manring — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:35:59 GMT

I can’t add to the abundant material online about how you can still become famous at 92 for the three-book series you will finally sell because you didn’t give up! (this and “comfy knits” is how the algorithm regards me), but I can let you in on some situations in which persistence bore fruit this week.

Namely, here are just a few things that took me three or more tries:

—Learning that if a pig’s name is supposed to be Peanut, you will not be able to make it Pickle (this actually took me three weeks)

—Getting the pediatric dental surgery scheduler to call me back (six tries and three voice messages)

—Cutting a chapter of my novel down from 12k to 8k words (five work sessions)

—Getting my husband to start using emojis (two decades)

—Putting up a makeshift curtain over the kitchen sink where the sun has burned out all adult retinas in the house (three weeks)

—Getting my children to respond on the first or second request rather than the tenth or not at all (seven years and the concerted elimination of the words “please”, “let’s”, “could we”, “how about”, and “I need you to”)

—Starting to treat incoming butt-dials not as disappointments or inconveniences but surprise communications from an old friend (“aww, butts like me!”) (about 25 years)

—Giving up on adding too many healthy things to my kids’ smoothies and making them significantly grosser than they need to be and consequently having to eventually throw most of it out (just kidding I will never do that hahahaha)

—Figuring out that it’s actually better and moves our lives more smoothly to let my son go straight to the weedwhacker after school than to try and put him off until after “the fun things I have planned” (two weeks of fights)

—Learning to JUST SAY YES ONCE IN A GODDAMN WHILE to things that have been hard NOs, like can we have ice cream for snack / wanna hang out / can we meet up / would you like to try doing anything at all outside your house and routine (a lifetime)

—Asking people who are a way bigger deal than I am if they would be willing to help me out (turns out some are! I scored a total reach of a blurb for my next poetry book, Flesh & Language, which will be out in early 2027!) (also a lifetime)

—Doing what feels good and right for a book cover (this took me three books. The first, although I did end up loving the cover, was a process the press achieved independently of my input and I didn’t argue even though that felt awful; the second felt fine but I also did the easiest thing to do, which was to use a picture I already had rights to; the third has been a surprising and lovely process of reaching out to an artist in Mexico whose work I imprinted on while writing the book, and conversing with him in Spanish cough ok google translate to purchase rights to an image of his for use by a designer at the press in the making of my cover)

I realize I am late to the game here but because I am terminally shy and tend to either DO IT SELF or RUN AWAY, I didn’t know how amazing it can feel to put money in another artist’s hands to place your two arts in conversation, and to achieve a meaningful meeting of selves in the process (also a lifetime)

So. With no further ado, I give you the cover reveal for my upcoming poetry book, with the reminder that I was terrified the whole time, both writing the book and securing the art for the cover, and it was absolutely worth doing all of that to learn that I didn’t need to be terrified, and I could in fact be very excited:

Pencil it in! Available from Cornerstone Press in 8 months! Which sounds like forever but I can attest it really does happen overnight. Original art by (the very kind and warm as well as talented) Alberto Cruz

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MILE X

Caroline Manring — Thu, 28 May 2026 10:21:35 GMT

7: CAN WE WALK THE WHOLE RIM TRAIL INSTEAD

44: Um… that’s three miles and 500 feet of climbing.

7: MOM WE NEED TO

44: It would take us probably two hours.

7: WE’RE GOING TO CATCH A CHIT-MUNK

44 : Sure, go ahead and try!

7: WE WILL KEEP THE CHIT-MUNK

44: You have guinea pigs

7: WE WILL KEEP IT IN A CAGE IN OUR ROOM

44: How many donut holes can I fit in my purse

*
—Mile 0.5, 300 feet elevation gained—

7: CAN WE JUST GO HOME

44: No

—Mile 0.75, 350 feet of elevation gained—

7: HOW MUCH MOSS AM I ALLOWED TO TAKE WITH ME

44: You’re not

7: I PEELED IT UP ALREADY CAN YOU PUT IT IN YOUR PURSE

44: No

7: THEN WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO LIE ON IT FOR A WHILE

44: ok

—Mile 1, 400 feet of elevation gained—

44: That’s a hemlock. Look at the needles, all flat and sort of lacey.

7: PUT IT IN YOUR POCKET

44: ok. That’s called a specimen.

7: WILL YOU CARRY MY SHOES

44: No.

7: WHY AREN’T YOU HELPING US CATCH THE CHIT-MUNK

44: They’re too fast.

7: THIS IS THE MOST BORING DAY EVER

44: Walk around the puddles please.

—Mile 1.5, 500 feet of elevation gained—

7: MY SHOES ARE TOO MUDDY WILL YOU CARRY MY SHOES

44: No

7: I’M GETTING BACK PROBLEMS FROM CARRYING THESE HEAVY SHOES

44: That sounds serious

7: CAN I GET A FERN SPECIMEN

44: Yes

—Mile 1.75, top of trail—

44: I found a fern specimen—

7: THAT IS THE WRONG KIND OF FERN

44: Oh.

7: WHEN HE GETS HIS TOOTH SURGERY IS HE GOING TO STAY HOME FROM SCHOOL

44: Probably for a day, maybe two.

7: THAT IS NOT FAIR

44: The rule is that when you’re sick you stay home and when you’re not you go to school.

7: I’M NOT WALKING ANOTHER STEP

44: It’s fine to be mad but we don’t get split up in the woods.

7: THEN I WILL WALK AHEAD OF YOU MEAN HORRIBLE PEOPLE

—Mile 2, 200 feet of elevation lost—

7: MY TOOTH HURTS

44: I’m sorry, it was probably the donut holes

7: WHY DID YOU GIVE ME JUNK YOU SHOULDN’T GIVE ME JUNK

44: Maybe if you eat this Pirate’s Booty it will clear the sugar

7: YOU HAVE PIRATE’S BOOTY FOR HIM AND NOT FOR ME??

44: I had popcorn for you and you already ate it

7: THAT’S NOT FAIR

44: I have this orange

7: I DON’T WANT AN ORANGE

—Mile 2.5, 300 feet of elevation lost—

7: THIS IS THE WORST DAY EVER

44: You’ve almost made it 3 miles! You’re like professional hikers!

7: CAN WE BRING THIS PYRAMID SHAPED ROCK WITH US

44: That’s a twenty pound rock

7: PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE

—Mile 3, trail complete—

7: HERE’S THE THING IS WE’RE GOING TO NEED SEPARATE TVS WHEN WE GET HOME

44: Dinner first then TV

7: THAT’S NOT FAIR

44: You can tell your teachers tomorrow that you did the whole rim trail!

7: WENDELL MAKES FUN OF MY ROTTEN TEETH I’M GOING TO FEED HIM SUGAR FOR BREAKFAST LUNCH AND DINNER

—Home, bedtime—

7: CAN WE DO THE RIM TRAIL AGAIN TOMORROW?

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WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR

Caroline Manring — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:26:06 GMT

Albert humps Pickle
Pickle humps Albert
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Pickle can make twenty poops in four minutes and that is some serious math
They’re not actually dumb, they’re just NOCTURNAL1
which means wishing they could sleep right now
The veg mountain is gone by noon
The difference between dandelion green and plantain
No one’s sure what “hump” means but it’s funny
Dark places are good
You can trap them using their LaCroix box house
That’s because they like dark places
And mom only cut one hole in that one
Albert runs the LaCroix house around at night like a roomba
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Pickle used to be Skittles
Albert used to be Ron
No we cannot bring them to bed
The plan was a rat and a cat and there was neither at the pet store
Mom used to put her guinea pigs in a doll bus and we don’t have one that’s not fair
You have to pat them WITH THE HAIR not against it
Except if you want to give them DJ HAIR which is so funny
Use transport boxes for transport
Skittles used to be Peanut
Ron used to be Icicle
Did you know they have NAILS
Mom will cut them she used to cut a parrot’s nails you just put their head in a sock
Peanut used to be Harry
Icicle used to be Tiger
Maybe they aren’t the greatest pets after all
Leave a comment
But mom likes them so
Outdoors is ok in the wire enclosure but watch for hawks
Why do we have hawks that’s RUDE
Hawks are not mean they have to eat too
Not my piggle!
Harry used to be Piggle
Tiger used to be Fluffle
If mom’s not looking you can take them for a ride in the dune buggy2
They’re doing that climbing on each other thing again what’s it called
Oh yeah
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SUPPORT THE BUTT OR THEY WILL BE SCARED
Everyone needs a solid butt spot
Also a blankie, go get the swaddle
I am King Albert Ron Icicle’s mom
He needs me even though he’s the king

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spelling word

Appropriated from neighbors after a melancholic two-year pining period

SIMPLE, EFFECTIVE, DARING.

Caroline Manring — Thu, 07 May 2026 10:28:33 GMT

My kids are raising me right. Painfully, but right. Here are a few pages from their book, for free. They like to spread the wisdom.

People can wait. For me, moving out of the way as if I’m radioactive is as strong a reflex as the thing your shin does when the doctor hits your knee with the little plastic triangle on a stick. My children: “enjoy the back of the top of my head while I stand in this doorway and survey the land of kerosene in the far hills, mouthing lyrics to a song I’m writing about poop and how stupid my sibling is.”
People need invitations. “Would you like to play with me?” is not enough. They have to know you really mean it, and be clear on what you have to offer. Try: “Will you play with me? We’re ghost cats. And you’re saving us from the most dangerous lab in the world, founded in 1817, on Rat Pangea.” When that doesn’t work, start meowing.
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Dress up or down, as desired. Everything is made up and no one’s going to the police station for wearing a white, ermine-trimmed tunic with antique brooches on it to first grade. Likewise, there are seasons for the lacy dress, and these are shaped inside the mind, not given on the calendar. When it is not lacy dress season today, go with the bat wings. Also: a gaucho hat is the best hat, with many purposes such as cowboy, king, farmer, superhero, fisherman, bad guy, and antique dealer.
Old things are beautiful. They tell me, over and over, “new stuff is junk, Mom. We need to go to the antique store.” And I keep finding that even when it smells like mothballs or is doomed to fall apart within hours, I still feel better bringing an item home from an antique or second-hand store than anywhere else. I feel like I’m getting some version of other people’s stories, too, almost like asynchronous friends, even if I don’t know who they are. It’s like the ghost of company. Company that doesn’t eat any of my cheese platter.
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An obsession with bathing is just one more way humans are brainwashed. If you stink, or are going to put buckets of sand into your bed upon entry, yes, it’s worth the psychic and physical wrestling match with your mother. Otherwise, the hair does fine in cool weather for a month at a time, looks quite nice when left alone and merely brushed, actually, and hands and feet and face etc. can easily be attended to by a passing, swiping, desperate mother while you play. Cut down on worries by throwing bathing out the window, following your own and other people’s noses for major course corrections as needed.
Rocks are always permissible. See a rock? A good one? That is your birthright. If you can carry it, and no one stops you from putting it in the trunk, it’s yours.
Make sure you have a lot of uncles to talk about, and if you don’t, make some up. Telling people about the uncle who gave you the Shelby Cobra before he died can have a great conversational effect, even if there is no such car and no such uncle. This is a way to make friends and followers.
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When no one is responding to your invitations and uncle stories, you can just yell CATS UNITE with your arm in the air and begin running. You will get a few followers on surprise factor alone— those who are willing to do a few hundred yards before knowing what the reason for the stampede is, and by then you’ll have them anyway.
Assume the world is a safe place. You will, yes, be incorrect much of the time, but a) Mom will fix it, and b) the number of times it will work out fine means you’ve saved yourself a lot of thinking and worrying. Go ahead and leave your most prized items in random, unsecured locations, walk into a room assuming the best about everyone’s intentions towards you, and treat people as if you’re already old friends. Everyone can just keep up. Forget good intentions: go for leaving a swath of good assumptions like a wide wake behind you. People are often shocked into benignity by its passing embrace.
Holding hands is one of the most underrated activities on the planet. Grab some paws nearby and find out how much better a walk gets, how much more deeply people listen to you, and how much more willing they will be to follow you to an unscheduled important thing. Simple, effective, daring. Like you.

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SOFT RED BODY

Caroline Manring — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:41:41 GMT

Soon there will be a major motion picture of the Odyssey. No shade on whatever they’re cranking out, I’m sure it’s impressive, but good lord, do they not KNOW about Madeline Miller’s book Circe? OK, the Odyssey is arguably, like, one of the biggest stories known to humankind, but come on, declining to do it Madeline Miller’s way is like saying no thanks I don’t want to eat the best meal I’ve ever had / just hand me that very good sandwich with chips*.”

*I know there are those among my sometimes readers who would scold me for comparing the Odyssey to a very good sandwich with chips, but I believe they aren’t looking right now, so I suppose we’ll just see whether I get away with it in the comments.

My husband, off duty from ferrying people through the sky in aluminum tubes for a week, has been checking daily for more information on the upcoming film— specifically which actor is to play the role of the sorceress Circe, a book we both read and were hopelessly enchanted by while our children were marinating, and so we lifted the title name and offered it to our infant daughter on the day of her birth and she took it with obviously magical miniature hands.

Part of what the book offers, other than pitch-perfect concepts, characters, structure, sentences, and an audiobook performer (Perdita Weeks, OMG, how??) who could woo a hunk of granite, is that every page is a poem. The Odyssey is a narrative that used a poetic structure for becoming, and Circe is a poem that used narrative structure for becoming.

What this means is that whereas if you take any (poetic) line of the Odyssey you can feel the pulse of action and the flow of narrative moving through it, when you take any page of narrative movement from Circe you can feel the distilled heart of… um… everything in it. I could devote every remaining Substack I have in me to a page of this book and always come out richer. While I don’t plan to do so, of all the wormholes I could topple into, that might be one of the best.

Anyway, today’s gospel comes from page eighty-five:

ON THE OCCASION OF EXCOMMUNICATION FROM THE CHURCH OF AGWAY

Caroline Manring — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:29:51 GMT

We have won no prizes this week at our local Ace Hardware, which we still call Agway because corporate name changes are for the birds.

(Editor’s note: the expression “for the birds” is used here solely because it sounds good. The saying itself is a bad one because I would give even good stuff to birds. I once had birds I arranged breakfast plates for on antique saucers to fit their moods, but that was another life. Now I toss frozen waffles at children and pray.)

We the people were unaware that we had wanted prizes from Agway. Until we fell out of their good graces. Now the absence of positive regard stings like a nettle to the naked shin.

It is customary in spring for our household to tithe to Agway for mulch, compost (ours stinks because we don’t care for it), seeds, transplants, mower rehabilitation, and replacements for the gloves and shovels we lost in the fall.

But this year the urgency to get to Agway began several weeks before average date of last frost because my daughter has discovered her personal Plant Acquisition Mania— an organ that comes into maturity in people of my lineage long before and sometimes exclusively from the organ for Tending Said Plants. This revelation about my daughter in combination with her brother’s cart fanaticism persuaded their simpleton mother that the after-school activity should indeed be Visiting Agway as the mob-of-two suggested. No problemo.

In my defense, the day before, when we had accidentally stopped by Agway, no one was in the outdoor Garden Center area except the acre of fool’s bait (tender annual transplants before June 1) and a fleet of flaked and bent garden carts. It had been a matter of course to allow the children to use the gloriously various and happily fenced-in property as a country of flowering and utilitarian riches.

The chiminea and large flower pot section was a great city of the west; the rangy native tree section a ghostly forest; the watering can area a friendly village brimming with local commerce. “Welcome to my kingdom,” my son had said, from behind his caster-wheeled best friend, also called a cart. (For a while when he was three or four he had an emotional support rototiller. I think it may have gone to bed with him once.) Yesterday, you see, the children had stayed busy, easily, in and around these landmarks and at the great Oversized Adirondack Chair Monolith.

(Please, by the way, do tell me, what is the purpose of a great Oversized Adirondack Chair Monolith if it is not to be climbed upon? Is it for adults merely to look at and think, “yes, that would be fun, if fun were a thing”?)

This next day, however, there were several very busy workers in the Garden Center. One was watering plants, another was walking around looking darkly resentful, and one was clearly feeling deeply fraught about a forklift delivery process but trying to make up for her blooming anxiety with an extra telegraphing of Know-how/Capacity involving hands-on-hips and pacing.

I made an audible performance of mothering, as an offering to these variously sour-and/or-bothered looking folk: “Remember, we want to give other people enough space and quiet to do their jobs and enjoy their shopping.”

This was a Level One announcement, and I know now I should have gone straight to Level Three, which would have been “No running or enjoying yourself in any way.” For the wandering resentful one, I should have gone to Level Four, which would have been “sit in the car and do not exist until I get back.”

(Oddly, though, it’s the wandering resentful ones who will also call the cops on you for leaving your kids locked in the car where you can see them for three and a half minutes with the windows cracked, fresh food and water, and an audiobook playing.)

Now, lest you think me to be what I think me to be, which is a Doormat Parent, let me include the tidbit that there were not one but two sets of Other People’s Grandparents shopping at the Garden Center as well, and these individuals all smiled and made appreciative, wry, delighted-anyway, bobble-head-nodding remarks regarding my small village of ruffian wonderment engaging in its rather active wonderment-ing.

Let me also say that Child B is so deft with wheeled items that he was driving a garden cart axle-and-wheels by eighteen months old* in such a way that he could thread the needle between our parked cars at speed with an inch or two to spare on either side, never once dinging any doors with rusty cotter pins. So I am acclimatized to his cart-steering in crowded places and do not fear a collision when other parents might do well to. AND, he had not to my knowledge made contact with any item in the entire realm of his kingdom at the time of his First Great Reprimand.

I felt, before it happened, that perhaps the specter of a nominally engaged Doormat Parent loosely tailing this kid, with her other child in tow, adding transplants to her own cart, transplants she was going to be tithing to the institution with, would perhaps ease the Resentful One’s disconcertment. It did not. RO turned and locked down on the child only, no reference to or acknowledgement of the drifting Doormat, stabbed a finger at the air between them, and said, “NO RUNNING WITH CARTS. THAT IS THE SECOND TIME I HAVE TOLD YOU.”

Lady, I wanted to say, if you think that is running, you have been raised among snails. This child has gears your eyeballs’ capture rate would struggle to process in anything but a lean stack of still-frames. What you have just witnessed is a deeply mild and uncommitted warm-up speed-walk.

The contentious definition of “running” notwithstanding, I let this First Great Reprimand ride, and said nothing, since I have seen enough evolutionary-mismatch parenting reels on Instagram (same smart & sane author on Substack here) to know that what we lack so guttingly in this country is the Village, and in other countries, a more communal approach to the vectoring and caring and shaping of children in public is seen as a support rather than an affront to the parents’ good sense or a criticism. Good, maybe he’ll listen to you. He doesn’t listen to me. Clearly. Have at it, Grumpy Helpful Friend.

We moved on, and my daughter continued to shuttle six-packs of tender annuals to our cart (which we can’t plant because it was twenty degrees a few days ago, and she can’t quite seem to hear my reasoning on this point above the roar of her internal delight). I continued to quietly place the tender annuals back on the shelves each time we went by their Agway-assigned locations, so the overall effect of our opposing tasks was to create a sort of rotating door of plant visitors to the rolling land of our cart. The Grandparents of Others seemed to understand the project, and stood aside in the narrow aisles smiling so we could pass. Again, and again.

Meanwhile, my son returned to the Chiminea and Flower Pot City of the West and began narrating aloud about Criminals and Hot-rods. He engaged partial participation from me over the Native Tree forest, wherefrom he would intermittently emerge, at a barely-lawful speed-walk, with his cart, announcing that I was the police and I should say “there goes that greatest criminal of all!”

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I don’t think it helped that he kept introducing his cart loudly as a “tricked out ’64 Dodge Charger I got from my uncle before he died.”

Perhaps what people find even more disconcerting than the physical vitality of the child is his deeply textured narrations, which, if you aren’t used to imaginary dead uncles’ hot-rods doing sudden and allegedly criminal things in the garden center, might cause some vertigo in your reality processing. It might seem that there actually is criminal activity going on.

Editor’s note: to my knowledge, not a single plant was harmed in my children’s wanderings; nothing but the ’64 Dodge Charger itself was displaced. The only item that was bumped and went a little sideways was a rather stupid metal lawn-duck that my daughter accidentally unbalanced while admiring with signature earnest respect. After which event, by the way, she looked unsettled, stroked it with one apologetic hand, and looked to me for whether all was well. I telegraphed full wellness of things and went on.

The problem, I suppose, is that I assessed the situation as stable. I informed the hot-rod criminal that we needed to go in to pay for our items (to which I had added a flower pot, in good faith with the capitalist system, hoping that the sourness I was still somehow noting on the workers’ faces would be mitigated, if by nothing else I’d done so far, by the knowledge that I was about to drop a silly amount of money). I let him know, audibly to anyone near, that he was welcome to stay out here as long as he remained at a walk and did not leave the fenced area. He agreed cheerfully and my daughter and I went inside for all of five minutes to stand in line and pay and come out to the car.

By the time I’d loaded the bags of compost (which even the loading guy looked sour about— maybe the Garden Center workers had radioed in that Doormat Parent was on her way while they were being forced to babysit a dangerous criminal), my daughter had gone back into the Garden Center, as I’d asked her to, in order to tell the hot-rod criminal that we were ready to go. But she didn’t return with him right away, so I wandered across the twenty or so yards between my car and the gaggle of Workers and Children assembled near the Adirondack Chair Monolith.

The Second Great Reprimand must have been serious, indeed, because it was quiet, and the worker was bent over towards my son, and it concluded with the confiscation of the cart. To be fair, I do not know exactly what transpired while I was paying and loading mulch a few yards away, but from where I was, I would have heard any large collisions, and I could see no upended lawn decorations or suffering plants. I assumed whatever transgression had occurred was somewhere in between egregious and nonexistent. Once again, the worker made no acknowledgment that Doormat Parent was in fact now present, and offered no information.

Because I do not want my children to think the first order of business is to control or shape other people’s behavior, especially when I don’t know what it is they themselves have done, I called them to the car without engaging the worker who issued the Second Great Reprimand and confiscated the cart (it was the one who was anxious about the forklift delivery and still compensating with arms-akimbo pacing).

I told my daughter, who was now sobbing in her seat and saying she didn’t like people she doesn’t know, that I was sorry I hadn’t walked over with her, and that she was not in trouble. I said that everyone has different ways of being, and our way of being is probably louder and more active than these people are used to, and they were probably just doing their job of trying to keep things neat and quiet for the store. I asked briefly if they wanted to tell me what the worker said, if they thought that might help them feel better (my son was in an extra-nonchalant disposition in order to defend against his shock and shame at having had his very best prize of the week taken away without ceremony). They declined, deeply shocked and chagrinned, and I said OK, don’t worry, Mama should have been there, and this is not your fault.

We moved on and went home to fill boxes and pots and plant seeds, which led to a whole other disaster story. I will leave that one where it is.

I suppose what I want to say is I get it— oh lordy do I get it— you poor, dear, Grumpy Workers: yes, my children are entirely too vibrant and errant to be set loose in capitalist society.

And also:

Where else am I supposed to take them?

Where else am I supposed to allow them to interface with what has got to somehow pass for their village?

Yes, we can go to sciencenter and playgrounds, and the kiddie section at the library, But after five or six years of that— friends, the exile, for both parents and children, begins to foment absolute madness.

None of us is meant to go into a silo of one way of being. None of us is meant to stay with only the others who are in the exact same predicament as us. If you want my children to become citizens of the world, they cannot learn it exclusively upon a swing set. If you want anyone’s children to become balanced adults in society, they cannot get there by sitting in a padded room with plastic toys and people their own age. If we contain ourselves within the perimeters of what we already are, then that is what we will continue to be.

Also: couldn’t you use a little ’64 Dodge Charger by the lupines in your life? Given that we are all going to die one day?

I know that it’s likely everything you said was perfectly warranted, and that you were just doing your job.

And also, what if your job was about more than getting it right, though? What if everyone’s job included tolerance for mostly-harmless deviation from norms, or even an appreciation that what’s causing the disruption in the first place is often the great and ungovernable heart?

While I appreciate your stewardship of the cart, I wonder how we can also be stewards of the heart.

I know this sounds like new-age passive-aggressive holier-than-thou gentle-parenting disavowed-scold drivel, but I mean it as an earnest, genuine question. And I do get that there really have to be guardrails in place. I know better than anyone that societal norms also help preserve much needed order and sanity, since my kids run roughshod over them all the time and I am keenly aware that we mostly have access to neither much order nor much sanity.

And still, necessary guardrails acknowledged, I want to know: how can we be better stewards of the heart in a culture meant to dominate it?

I will go to the great Oversized Adirondack Chair Monolith and offer my Prayer of Village to the strung-out, dissociated god of capitalism.

If no answers come, at least we will have gotten some fairly rad static-hair out of the deal. You know, for the wonderment of it.

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MOONY LEVITT & BUDGE

Caroline Manring — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:43:19 GMT

Budge is in the pickup line, craning. Moony comes out of the school, sequin backpack ripping light to bits in April sun. Budge leaps out of the car to make Many Gestures of Welcome. Moony merely trudges, a quarter-smile smeared lightly across part of her face. Budge reassesses the Gestures. Perhaps less.

BUDGE: Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

MOONY: Hi.

BUDGE: Is it OK if I hug you?

There is a tiny nod and a brief mashed face into Budge’s coat.

MOONY: Sparkle rocks.

Moony points at the ground, backs away to scratch at mildly reflective debris near the sidewalk.

BUDGE: Cool! Sparkle rocks!

LEVITT: MAMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Levitt cranks out of his handler’s grasp at the school doors and sprints. The handler issues fragments of responsible speech for a few meters and then peters out. Budge waves to indicate reception of Levitt, who is wearing a fluorescent orange backpack about ten years too big for him. It hits his heels as he runs.

LEVITT: CAN I GET A FINGER LOCK

BUDGE: Hi! We’re going to Sciencenter!

LEVITT: A FINGER LOCK

BUDGE: I don’t think Sciencenter has fingerprint locks but they might have something cool. Did you do any chores this week to earn your allowance?

MOONY: He did not.

BUDGE: Did you?

MOONY: The toilet. As usual.

LEVITT: WHERE ARE MY TREATS

BUDGE: I have a few good snacks! Cider! Popcorn the good stuff! Fruit leather! Triscuits and a banana!

LEVITT: I DONT WANT ANY OF THAT

BUDGE: Well maybe you should get in anyway.

Everyone gets in the car. The rest of the pickup line and the buses have all departed. Moony and Levitt take several more minutes to buckle their seatbelts, pausing to hit each other, throw debris, and argue whether it is allowable to LOOK AT SOMEONE LIKE THAT. Budge pulls out of the now-empty lot. There is some relative quiet while Levitt eats the popcorn he DOES NOT WANT.

MOONY: Thank you for the food but I don’t like any of those snacks.

BUDGE: What are you talking about. You loved them yesterday. Yesterday.

MOONY: Well, see, I didn’t feel very good after eating them. It might be the ingredients.

LEVITT (mouth full): YOU SHOULDN’T GIVE US JUNK

MOONY: Can we listen to an audiobook?

LEVITT: DUDE LOOKS LIKE A LADY

BUDGE: We can do a bit of both. We’ll start with Dude because it’s shorter.

MOONY: [noises of disgust]

LEVITT: WHERE ARE WE GOING

BUDGE: Sciencenter! We haven’t been in a while!

LEVITT: I AM NOT GOING THERE WE GO THERE ALL THE TIME WE’VE BEEN A MILLION TIMES I AM NOT GOING

BUDGE: Yelling in the car isn’t allowed.

MOONY: I have to poop.

LEVITT: I AM NOT GOING THAT’S FINAL

BUDGE: That’s not how we talk to Mama. We’re almost there so we will go to Sciencenter to get to a bathroom and then see how we feel. Can you please get some more food into you.

LEVITT: I NEED HELP OPENING THIS

MOONY: I really have to poop.

BUDGE: We’re almost there. [parks car] OK, run in!

MOONY: I want to finish the chapter though

LEVITT: I AM NOT GOING TO THIS STUPID PLACE [gets out of car, runs towards Sciencenter] LOOK HOW HUGE I AM IN THE WINDOW I AM HUGE

MOONY: Can you help me open this cider

BUDGE: I thought you had to poop

MOONY: I just need a little help Mom. It’s not a big deal.

Eventually everyone is inside the Sciencenter.

LEVITT [from gift shop]: THERE ARE NO FINGER LOCKS IN THIS PLACE

BUDGE: Right. They might have something else though.

MOONY: I want this fox

BUDGE: You got a fox two days ago. A brand new fox. For Easter. From Grandmeg.

MOONY: That’s a borrow.

BUDGE: Nope that was a gift. It’s yours.

MOONY [to Levitt]: Look, they have snakes!

LEVITT: I DO NOT WANT A SNAKE WHERE ARE THE FINGER LOCKS

BUDGE: Remember I said they don’t have locks here, but they might have something else cool. Did you look around?

LEVITT: [Lies in front of registration desk and gift shop] I HATE IT HEEEEERRRRREEEE

BUDGE: Let’s go out to the playground.

STAFF MEMBER: The playground is unfortunately closed. There is still some ice out there.

LEVITT: I HAAAAAATE THIIIIIIIIISSSSSS

BUDGE: Maybe we better go.

MOONY: My fox!!

BUDGE: I thought you had to poop. That’s why we came in in the first place.

MOONY: [shrugs] Not anymore.

Budge turns to leave. Moony and Levitt follow, Levitt still wailing. Everyone gets back in car.

LEVITT: I NEED A FINNNNGERRRRRRR LOCCCCCCKKKKKK

BUDGE: I really do not understand the finger lock thing. Can you explain the vision to me.

LEVITT: A LOCK FOR MY TREASURE CHESSSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTTTT

BUDGE: Like, a padlock?

LEVITT: YES

BUDGE: OK. Did you do any chores this week to earn your allowance?

MOONY: He did not.

LEVITT: I DIIIIIIID

BUDGE: What did you do?

LEVITT: [……..]

BUDGE: OK, can you do a chore when we get home? If you promise you’ll do a chore when we get home we can go to Agway and get a combination lock with your allowance money.

MOONY: Agway? Ugh. There’s nothing I want there.

BUDGE: There might be.

LEVITT: I PROMISE I’LL DO CHORES I’LL DO ALL THE CHORES

Budge drives the car to Agway.

BUDGE: OK, let’s go get a lock.

MOONY: We want to listen to the audiobook.

BUDGE: Fine. I’ll lock you in and be right back.

MOONY: But what are you going to get for me?

BUDGE: We may have to go to a different place for that.

LEVITT: CAN WE GO TO SKATE PARK

BUDGE: [Goes inside, gets a two-pack of small gold combination locks]

MOONY: Ugh. I don’t want one of those.

LEVITT: CAN YOU PUT IN THE NUMBERS NOW

BUDGE: We can do the programming later.

LEVITT: I WANT IT NOW

BUDGE: Before skate park? Can’t you just ride with them in your pockets? There’s nothing to lock there.

LEVITT: NOW NOW NOW

MOONY: I don’t want to go to skate park.

BUDGE: What if your friend Jonathan is there?

MOONY: [grudgingly reconsiders]

BUDGE: OK what do you want the combination to be?

LEVITT: SEVEN TWO SIX

BUDGE: You need four numbers.

LEVITT: SIX NINE FIVE

BUDGE: Four numbers, buddy.

LEVITT: SIX NINE FIVE SIX

BUDGE: OK, here you go.

LEVITT: WHAT AN AWESOME GOLD LOCK

MOONY: When will we get MY treat? Will we go to Barnes and Noble to get a stuffie?

BUDGE: You have a thousand stuffies.

MOONY: You don’t understand. It’s really special.

BUDGE: Did you do your chores?

MOONY: I did. The toilet, all week, as usual.

BUDGE: We can go after skate park.

They arrive at skate park. Budge sets about trying to get the front wheel back on the bike. The children go climb too high in an ornamental tree.

BUDGE: Here’s your bike and scooter!

MOONY: I won’t be as fast on the scooter.

BUDGE: That’s why we need to do more practice on your bike.

MOONY: I’m not used to it yet.

BUDGE: Correct.

LEVITT: [running past] I’M TAKING MY LOCK TO THE PLAYGROUND

BUDGE: We’re here so you can ride your bike— here’s your bike—

LEVITT: [keeps running to the end of the block. Moony follows]

BUDGE: [yelling after them] I’ll be here with the vehicles! Don’t go past the playground!

There is a small interlude during which Budge can see Moony’s feet flashing over the playground at the top of each swing arc, which seems to indicate Levitt must be somewhere around, since Moony wouldn’t stay if Levitt left. Budge keeps an intermittent eye on the flashing feet while engaging some semblance of correspondence with a friend.

MOONY: [whose head has suddenly appeared at the driver’s side window] I have to go to the bathroom.

BUDGE: Oh come on.

MOONY: Not poop this time!

BUDGE: [wearily] OK. [Budge gets out of car slowly, grabs long winter coat for a “screen” to do the illegal thing they are accustomed to doing, which is tucking into a ditch on the perimeter of the bathroom-less skate park and letting the kid pee in the ditch behind the curtain of the winter coat. It is a cumbersome process and relies heavily on strangers continuing their long streak of not noticing anything]

MOONY: [working hard behind the coat-screen to hold herself up] Mom I’ve peed all over my pants.

BUDGE: It doesn’t look that bad. It’s what we’ve got, anyway. Pull them up. Let’s go.

MOONY: [Sighs, pulls up leggings too slowly as she emerges from the partial curtain. Someday they are all going to go to jail for this stuff.]

LEVITT: I LOST MY LOOOOOOOCK

BUDGE: Where?

LEVITT: ON THE PLAYGROUUUUUUUUNNNNNDDDDD

BUDGE: What were you doing at the playground?

LEVITT: PLAYYYYYYINNNNNNNNNGGGGG

BUDGE: [Looks at playground, where there are three enormous piles of mulch dumped] I’ll go find it.

MOONY: When can we go to Barnes and Noble?

BUDGE: We are here for skate park. You can ride your scooter. We will go when we’re done. I’ve put in an order for dinner and we will stop by Barnes and Noble on the way to pick it up. We have half an hour. Can you do half an hour on the scooter?

MOONY: [accusingly] Jonathan’s not even here.

BUDGE: I know. Some days he’s not. But we can still have fun.

LEVITT: MYYYYYY LOOOOOOOOOCCCCCCCKKKKKK

BUDGE: I’m going. You guys ride.

MOONY: My helmet pinches my hair.

BUDGE: You’ll work it out. You’re very clever.

Budge goes to look for the small gold lock in the piles of wood chips. Just as she is about to give up because the pickup order notification is about to flash “ready” at her, two things happen: 1) she sees the lock lying on its side on the grass, and 2) Jonathan’s parents pull up.

BUDGE: Hi Jonathan

JONATHAN: ??

BUDGE: My kids play with you. Remember the twins?

JONATHAN: Oh yeah!! You look different.

BUDGE: I haven’t showered.

JONATHAN: […]

BUDGE: They’re right over there.

Jonathan bombs over towards Levitt on his bike, roaring a greeting. The boys exchange snippets of excited language including the words PONTIAC DRAG RACER and FIRE BUTT 2000. They race off on their bikes.

MOONY: They don’t even want to play with me.

BUDGE: It’s just a vehicle issue. It’s hard to go slower on bikes because there’s a scooter too if you’re so excited to see someone and have been waiting all week to play. [Budge looks at phone notification, which has just dinged that the order is being made and will be ready for pickup in ten minutes]

MOONY: Can we go to Barnes & Noble?

BUDGE: We will stop by on our way to pick up dinner in a few minutes. Why don’t you try again with the boys.

MOONY: They don’t even see me.

BUDGE: They’re just excited. You have to make sure they see you.

Moony leaves slump-shouldered to try. Returns crying.

BUDGE: OK, we will walk over to Barnes and Noble quickly and Jonathan’s parents can do the caretaking while we’re gone.

Budge notifies the boys. Then she and Moony run to Barnes and Noble, trying to be as quick as possible. Moony selects some egg-thing that will open into a surprise. Fine fine yes ok let’s go says Budge. They purchase the egg-thing and leave, hurrying. The notification says dinner is ready. They run back to the skate park.

BUDGE: We’ve go to go!

LEVITT: BUT THIS KID IS LETTING ME TRY HIS BIKE

BUDGE: Two minutes!! [Scribbles on a piece of paper yanked from a journal in her purse, addresses Jonathan] This is for your parents, Jonathan. It’s my phone number. We came here all week to find you and we’re so glad to finally see you today but we have to go! If you give your parents this note maybe we can coordinate next time.

JONATHAN: OK. [Leaves, slumping.]

The phone dings again that the order is ready. They’ve lost orders to scavengers before, so Budge agitates, whips a hand in the air to Levitt to indicate leaving-ness, makes loud noises with car doors, prepares trunk to receive scooter and bike.

MOONY: [finally gets the egg-surprise thing from Barnes and Noble open, gasps] It’s just a stupid elephant! [begins to cry loudly]

Levitt miraculously gets into the car somehow. The bike takes more work, with the auto-trunk declining to latch because some sensor is sure it’s not in all the way and is actually a child’s head. Moony is sobbing now.

BUDGE: Listen, sometimes we get disappointed. I’m really sorry it’s not what you expected, but sometimes we choose something that doesn’t work out.

MOONY: [sobbing] I didn’t knowwwww it was going to be a stupid elllleeeeephhhhhaaaaanttttt. The picture on the front was of a tiiiiiiigerrrrrrr. It is a bad idea to trick people! It is mean and unfair!!

LEVITT: I NEED YOU TO PROGRAM THE OTHER LOCK

BUDGE: Not now buddy, I’m driving.

MOONY: [still wailing] Pleaaaaaase just give me anotherrrrr chaaaaaaaancccceeeeee

The phone flashes another notification. Probably that scavengers are dragging the dinner order across the parking lot into the crosswalk to be obliterated. There is no food Budge can think to make at home. She’s desperate now.

BUDGE: OK!!!! If you want to spend all the rest of your allowance money you can try again. But I want you both to know that it makes me absolutely insane that we’re going straight to little kid tantrums whenever something isn’t exactly what we want it to be. Sometimes things aren’t going to be your absolute favorite.

LEVITT: THE NEW LOCK’S NUMBER WILL BE SEVEN FIVE EIGHT

BUDGE: You need four numbers buddy.

LEVITT: SEVEN FIVE EIGHT SIX

BUDGE: We will do it when we get home

LEVITT: NO NOW IT’S IMPORTANT

PHONE: Hi, this is Glen, Jonathan’s Mom. Thanks for the number. He was so excited to play. He’s crying since you had to go!

LEVITT: SEVEN FIVE NINE FOUR

MOONY: [sobbing] Pleaaaaaaase another chaaaaaaaance

BUDGE: Fine. But please don’t pick another egg-thing.

MOONY: I won’t. I am learning.

LEVITT: SIX NINE FIVE SIX

BUDGE: Got it buddy. Thanks.

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FOOL

Caroline Manring — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:48:01 GMT

I want you to know there is a bird who can trick my phone. It’s not a parrot, either, in case you’re thinking of the ones who order strawberries from Alexa and forty pounds arrive the next day, scaring everyone in the house. I support that as well and would vote for it for president.

What I mean is that as old as this body is, with a neck that has receded into its tenure as heartwood, whatever lives inside it can still be astounded. Gobsmacked. Titillated into near-oblivion in the April fools’ ditch-grass on another goddamn gray-sky, idiotic-wind kind of walk.

I thought it was a Fox Sparrow, not gonna lie. There’s this thing where no matter how nerd-begone you are, it’s not actually the perimenopause cooking up the havoc in your identifier cells when the avian migrants return; it really is just that you haven’t heard the damn thing in a year or two or ten. I frankly don’t expect anyone to remember a sound that dusty on the brain-shelf the second it shows up in the middle of a pine tree where you can’t even see it.

In other words, I forgive me. For the starter misidentification. Even though it irks me. And I accept it as a good donkey accepts her rattling panniers. Birders have got to allow occasional or even frequent mistakenness, or else they become assholes rather than the dearest geeks you can call when something from the sky hits your window and you need encouragement not to put it in a shoebox and try to feed it worms. No, Stephanie, the stunned American Goldfinch doesn’t want your tweezered nightcrawlers; you’re just scaring the bejeezus out of it while it’s already deathly addled.

Anyway the thing in the conifer was not at all a Fox Sparrow. That was an idiot moment. One I have accepted, as detailed.

Next I will disclose another embarrassing thing (this is why you pay me the big bucks) (that’s a joke) which is that I whipped out my phone. The Merlin app is utter witchcraft, and I have betrayed my puritan roots by embracing such devilry. In case you don’t know it, it listens to birds and tells you what they are. Sound in, name out. it’s complete balderdash that an electronic device can do this, but I’m a goner, totally crushed out, that it exists.

Here’s an interlude where I will boast, similarly disrobed in an ungodly way: reader, I am better than the Merlin app1. I am faster, and can hear farther.

Nonetheless, I rely on it when bamboozled. So, reader, I did whip. Opened that app with a thumb on fire.

Within seconds (if I had been in my right mind—which really I guess is generally a fiction, but whatever— I’d have identified it faster) the app booped up a dry little knowing: the thing was a damned Purple Finch.

Don’t get me wrong, also a nice find, satisfying morsel, but for one thing, it was, like, a tenor Purple Finch or something, like, out busking with a sax bigger than its torso, and for another, well… I forgot, but there was a list in there. A righteous one.

I stood for a good long time, while gravel bits climbed up the heels of my shoes and nestled down in around my socks, laughing at me meanly. They do that, and to spite them, I regularly prove my mettle by balancing on one foot, sock swinging in the winter awfulness, while I dump those fuckers out.

Anway I stood and listened while the wind did the most stupid things. I stood with my mouth open (why do I do this? Somehow it makes me hear better? Something about nose breathing liabilities and intra-head audio interference? Whatever, I was looking dumb, is the point) and I tried to track what this little dude was saying.

He did the thing he was supposed to do, albeit weirdly low-pitched— that happy burbling, gossipy syrup-chatter, and then… I heard a few notes from an American Robin, one that had to be smushed inside the evergreen right next to this little booger. Like, in his lap. I know birds don’t have laps but that’s how close, OK?

It’s true that humans and other large mammalian predators are absolutely miserable at echolocation, what with our stupid symmetrical ears and a pitiful hearing range, but I’m still pretty stinking sure these two sounds— the busking Purple Finch and the chup-chupping American Robin— were issuing from the same tiny slash in spacetime. Wherefore?

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Before I could remove my glove and incur the obligatory Reynaud’s while scratching my noggin, another birdsong slipped from this black hole of nonsense: a short fragment of an Eastern Bluebird song. OK, so, now we either had the weirdest invisible interspecies birthday party ever happening in a pine tree not ten yards from me, or something else equally astonishing was happening. I waited and the phenomenon proved itself repeatable. Repeating. I was really starting to get frothy about this, almost snarling with confusion.

Then the little turd gifted me with the one thing, the only thing, that could solve the great mystery: it flew out of the dense pine into a deciduous skeleton immediately above my head. I watched, in relevant danger of getting finch-poop dropped directly into my yawp, while the insouciant magician issued more and more finchy gossip. I tracked its quiver and thrust: yep, that’s him, for sure, the one singing.

And then I watched. While. He. Robined.

I watched As. He. Bluebirded.

Friend, I saw the Purple Finch body squeeze itself to make these other species’ sounds, and I witnessed as the Merlin app was duped. Utterly had. It pronounced confidently, without even the little half-moon icon that indicates some measure of doubt, that it was hearing first an American Robin and then an Eastern Bluebird. Oh the scallywag finch! I am such a fan I would send mail!

There is only one thing I like better than being right and that is being wrong. My god it’s fun. NO ONE TOLD ME IN TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF BIRDING THAT PURPLE FINCHES CAN MIMIC. Yet there it was, plain as day in a sleazebag AI round-up summary: “Yes, Purple Finches can mimic the sounds of other birds.”

I would have skipped the rest of the way home if it weren’t for needing the gravel not to win in the long fight over my sad heels. So I walked measuredly. But I let my face do some absurd foray into the upturned stretch, that thing we do in summer maybe? I’ve forgotten. It’s something like the glowing orb in the sky whose name I can’t remember.

The point, I guess, is that they will all come back, the facial calisthenics and the light-blasting sky-thing, and I have living proof that any and all of what returns to us might say things we had thought impossible.

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with the roughly 150 species I hear locally on a regular basis. I am absolute shit at shorebirds, waterfowl, anything pelagic, and anything that lives anywhere other than the northeast. Also shit at a few of the warblers. OK a bunch of them. But still.

THE PALLBEARER RACES

Caroline Manring — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:40:07 GMT

The following recording supplied with my apologies for being completely and hopelessly unable to say the word “ululate.”

And for those of you who, like me, will roll your eyes and vow undying hatred of the writer at the paywall that’s coming up, just think of it as getting a poetry class once a month for $5 —because this is pretty much exactly what I do when actually in front of a poetry class— but with no grades, and you can quit anytime. xo, Prof.

PS: anyone and everyone can join the paid list, no questions asked, so if your budget isn’t working in this godforsaken economy in a way that makes signing up for another gd substack possible, just send me an email saying Hey, I’d like to be on that list. Great, I’ll say, and add you.

PPS Thank you, as always, to those who take the moment to click the heart button and tell the beast of the algorithm a thing or two. Go ahead, tell it you want this, not more cellulite dissolver ads.

OR ELLS YOR BUTT WILL ICSPLOD

Caroline Manring — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:10:56 GMT

Recently my daughter taped a sign to her bedroom door that warned trespassers not to come in, “or ells yor butt will icsplod.”

Once I figured out what this meant, I had cause to wonder if perhaps I make use of the “if [undesired behavior], then [undesired outcome]” figure a little too often.

As in: “if you keep hitting each other, I will take away TV time,” or “if you keep yelling, we’re leaving the restaurant,” or “if you can’t clean up your toys, I will give them to Mr. Tom” (The neighbor with whom they love to be in cartoonish antagonism, including trips across the field to deliver mason jars of “dangerous potions” to his porch.)

The message my “if you do this, I will do a thing you don’t like” figure delivers is basically “persevere at your own peril.” “Refrain from what you wish to do, or ells.”

Don’t get me wrong, natural consequences are important for kids to encounter so that they don’t become reality tv stars and/or malignant-narcissist/arbitrary-destroyers-of-the-world.

But what I’m seeing, with the icsploding butt, is that I’m reinforcing some things I don’t actually want to reinforce. (Including but not limited to a fear-based sense of the world and a binary take on causality.)

The alternative, unfortunately, is to encourage desired behaviors instead. This is harder to do and takes more time. It is also more effective. But it means you have to live with a lot of bullshit in the meantime. Here’s the secret though: you were living with said bullshit anyway. You were just doing it in a more pissed-off way.

When we concentrate on ending the undesired thing as quickly as possible, we focus on stopping the behavior without considering its source. Sometimes that source is simply that children are assholes. But more often, it is that they need something they’re not getting.

Womp womp. Oops, something they’re not getting. That’s my department. See how that works?

When I’m trying to stop a thing from happening, ASAP, I’m working to change the world around me, that world which is patently stupid and requires my meddling, my control. When I’m trying to encourage the things I need and love in the world, on the other hand, I have to look at myself and how I can support these changes, while appreciating that the world is not, ultimately, under my control.

More responsibility and less control sounds about as fun as vacuuming out the car. It is also, actually, oddly preferable. Much like a car freed from the cheeto dust that is forming a type of sedimentary food-rock on the pleather.

Once, in graduate school, I used an anonymous student poem in my thesis essay to illustrate a point about language choice, so that I had some material to demonstrate what it looks like when someone does the “wrong” thing. My then-advisor wrote a short note next to this move, one that stuck with me: “It is usually worth showing us the thing, rather than the not-thing.” His mild and understated admonition had the effect of making me feel immediately skanky for throwing a student under the bus.

Why? Because I didn’t have to. It wasn’t necessary. Was my point incorrect? No, it was fine, and well argued. But did I have to cut something down in order to make the thing I desired? Undo one thing to create another? I did not. I did not need to use time and energy speaking judgment or enforcing my view. I could have used that time and giddyup to build, validate, and celebrate the thing I desired instead.

Would that approach stop the student from making a boring poem? No. But neither would cutting them down. And that’s my point: either way, whether we try to stop the undesired outcome or try to redirect toward a desired one, we don’t prevent the undesired outcomes from happening. We only spend more time in the world of the undesired.

I’m not saying children’s behavior is a beautiful perfect poem and we should look the other way while they draw on furniture and punch each other in the head. I’m saying that to move away from these behaviors, we are in more need of a positive force leading us away from them than a pissed-off one stomping things out in situ.

Most of the time, kids are either already aware that the behavior is undesired or the behavior will resolve/fade into the west on its own in time. Or both. So by spending time on site, stomping things out, I’m actually kind of reinforcing the bad behavior, in a way, by spending time and attention on it, all of which sort of paradoxically dignifies its presence, and gives them attention from Mama, even if it’s… kind of curdled attention.

Because there is no negative in the unconscious, according to Freud. (Dude got a lot of things wrong, but so many things right or mostly right that we should probably be listening. I mean, given how the world is going and all.)

If you want to know what “no negative in the unconscious” means, take a lesson from elementary school teachers and try dealing with a kid running in the hall when they’re not supposed to.

First, yell NO RUNNING (a negative) and see how effective it is. There is usually no or little result, except in the most workable kids. Then, try yelling WALKING BODIES, and see something probably different: the kid’s body gets the message that there is a desired alternative, and can use their own momentum, their underway-ness, to transform towards that thing, rather than having to fall off the cliff of disapproval into a nothingness of guidance.

If we accept as given that the world is going to contain behaviors and realities we find undesirable, rather than taking the position that we must patrol and enforce the “right” way, we free up some of our inner resources to move into generativity instead of destruction or disallowance.

Will we feel like doormats, and failed parents? Yes. Usually. Mostly. But that shit was going to happen anyway.

So let’s make sure some of our one wild and precious life was spent moving not just away from what frightens or harms or annoys, all of these things we are certain of already, but also towards what we desire, which may also be to say towards all we cannot yet know.

Do it. Or ells yor butt will icsplod.

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