BACK IN THE OLDEN DAYS, when newspapers still had whole sections devoted to book reviews, I had the privilege of being the book review editor of our city’s metro daily. The core of the job was to select what amounted to about 10 books a week to be reviewed from the bids for coverage that came from publishers everywhere, constantly, all. The. Time.

So recently, when I noticed that the Goodreads social media app added a Did Not Finish shelf to its reader-reporting options, allowing users to put a book in its proper place in their history, I thought, “Ahhh. Good.” Because when you’ve spent five years watching 300 books a week come into your office, and you know only 10 will merit reviews, you get a tiny bit less precious about books and a whole lot more realistic about how much time any one of us has here on Planet Earth.

All that is to say that if we are choosing between book-finishing philosophies, I am firmly comfortable with quitting a book that isn’t feeding me in some way. Time is short, my personal reading time is even shorter, and there are a whole bunch of other books hollering “Read me! Read me!”

Well, to be perfectly honest, there’s also part of me that plain rebels against the Must Finish All Books position. I remember friends from grade school who got super competitive about reading. They raced through titles and bragged about how fast they finished things. They were rewarded by an educational system that used math metrics — how many could we read, how quickly? — to encourage reading. That made some sense at the time, but that I think we should have grown out of at some point. I’ve long assumed that Must Finishers were still operating under rules set by teachers who were trying to get kids to read more — rules that make sense when you’re 10 but less so when you’re 35 or 50 or 70.

Over the years, I’ve been a hard-core proselytizer for reclaiming one’s time by setting down bad books, lame books, any book that makes reference to “Canadian geese” (it’s Canada), or even a great book that is the right book at the wrong time depending on what else is going on in one’s life.

YET WHEN WE TALK ABOUT READING “FOR PLEASURE,” I’ve realized, pleasure is defined person by person.

For me, the best books deliver a potent emotional punch and are written with authorial command. The reading I most enjoy comes from a writer who disappears behind his or her irresistible story. The seams don’t show. I’m just swept effortlessly into another world. (Note: This cannot happen if a writer or editor allows “Canadian geese” into the text.)

That definition of reading pleasure is hardly the only one, however, and there is an undeniable satisfaction that comes with finishing a book. For one thing, a well-crafted ending can change how we feel about what led up to it. For another, humans are hardwired to feel good about completing things. This is maybe especially true when that “thing” required effort and stick-to-itiveness.

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tries to help readers make sense of how people on different political sides put the world together. While a Democrat and her Republican neighbor might share a list of 10 values, they will not only put them in a different order but weight them differently, too.

Same goes for reading, I think. We all love a good story, and nearly anyone can see the value in finishing what one has set out to do, but we likely have different lists when it comes to the values we assign to reading. This is especially true when it comes to why we read nonfiction. To be well-informed? To understand the world better? To be up on issues swirling around the zeitgeist? Plain old curiosity? Maybe we read nonfiction for all of those reasons, but with my order of importance differing from yours.

ONE MORE THING. I’ve never regretted finishing a book, but I have occasionally wondered if I gave up on one too soon. Not often, but every once in a while.

I suspect that somewhere between Must Always Finish and the Life’s Too Short to Read Bad Books philosophies lies a nice middle ground. There, the people who have never felt free to put a book down learn that, really — it’s OK to do it. Nothing will break. Nothing crumbles. And the folks like me experiment once in a while with following through just to keep our finishing skills sharp and see whether the whole added up to more than its parts.

To be clear, though: I’m never going back to the “Canada goose” novel.¹
A girl has her limits.

Notes

1. Little Fires Everywhere by Celest Ng.

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LET'S SAY YOU'RE SORTING LAUNDRY. Three baskets sit before you, but instead of clothing, you’re sorting what you think of as your life’s failures.

Into the first basket go your useful failures: the awful corporate job, say, that led you to fulfilling work as an entrepreneur. The starter marriage that taught you what it takes to be a good spouse.

Into the second basket, toss all the efforts that bombed for circumstances beyond your control. Opening a bakery right before covid broke out, maybe. You gave it your all and then you moved on.

The third basket is the smallest but the heaviest. It holds one or more haunting failures. Maybe it’s an important goal that you let slip your grasp. A relationship with a family member that went sideways. Maybe it’s a bungled opportunity that feels like you betrayed a younger version of yourself.

Those third-basket failures can actually shape whether we think of our lives on the whole as successful or not. So that’s the basket I want to talk about, because time is a gift but also a thief, and one of the things it steals is the notion that there’s always tomorrow to make good on a dream. If you’re a law school graduate who never passed the bar and you just got your Medicare card, the odds of doing so are, shall we say, dwindling. (Although they might not be completely gone. The late Maxcy Filer of Compton, California flunked the bar forty-seven times before passing and becoming a lawyer, finally, at age 61.)

The question that pingpongs between my ears these days is how, exactly, the person who missed her big mark speaks to herself about the loss. I wonder how she talks to herself because she probably doesn’t say anything to anyone else about it. Just a hunch here.

In real life, as opposed to the movies, failure seldom shows up as dinner party banter or even, in my experience, as a topic between friends. Sex, politics, religion and gossip? No problem. But if I studied opera and never got a part? If I carry that pain around with me every day like a big bundle of blecch? It shall not be discussed.

As a college journalism major way back in the 1900s, I listened to a professor spend one whole period explaining that we might broaden our career considerations to include business-to-business or “trade” journalism. There was a whole world of specialty magazines out there ready to hire young journalists, he said. Among examples he offered: Dairy Goat Journal.

No disrespect to goats, but this was not the good news the prof seemed to think it was. Many of us considered ourselves would-be Woodwards, Bernsteins, Hunter S. Thompsons and Joan Didions, or at least reporters at a respectable metro daily. Pulling a paycheck as editor of a goat rag didn’t sound like another option, it sounded like a fifth-tier backup plan.

And yet.

AND YET NO ONE IN THAT CLASSROOM made journalism history. Some went on to nice newspaper careers, while nice newspaper careers lasted. Some likely took jobs at, yes, trade publications, which paid a decent wage and occasionally involved travel. And maybe goats. Others went straight into public relations or followed paths that had nothing at all to do with journalism.

If any of us staked our identities on being the GOAT, the greatest of all time in whatever realms were important to us, we’ve likely either peacefully traded that idea for something better or we’re still rummaging through our basket of big failures trying to figure out what they mean.

My own laundry basket contains no childhood dreams betrayed, exactly. I never took or failed the bar, never hoped for nor lost a career as an investigative journalist. On the contrary, I always loved magazines and newspaper feature stories, and I ended up exceeding my early and low expectations by doing that sort of writing and being pretty well paid for it.

When I’m in a mood, though — or when I’m in the presence of someone who has trained their sights and focused their talents to produce a book or a project or a body of work with real heft — I feel the pang of having failed to make more of my skills and opportunities.

This isn’t to say I haven’t experienced some nice moments of success; I sure have. It’s that I feel I’ve been a bit of a squanderer — too readily distracted by easier work, too short on focus, too insufficiently disciplined to keep fighting the first or second or the forty-seventh time I heard “no.”

If you asked me about the dream that got away, I’d say I’d have liked to make a book like the books I have best loved, the ones that spirited me to another world I was happy to occupy and sad to leave on the last page. I’d like to have written the words and drawn some pictures for a book that seeped deeply into readers’ hearts and that, oh yes, made its publisher happy too.

And to the degree that I have not (yet) done that, and that I’m (still) not sure how to do it, that feels like a smallest-but-heaviest-basket-level failure.

On good days, my discomfort around that provides start-up motivation for some new project. On most other days, I try to avoid having any feelings at all about it. Podcasts, a good job, moonlighting, lunches with friends and every other blessing of a good life are marvelous but temporary ways to avoid reckoning with feelings around failure. But avoidance is like Miracle-Gro for existential dread.

I worship at the Church of Paradox, and the paradox here is that the more we hide from certain feelings about failure, the more they mount sneak attacks and whomp us on the head. Who needs that nonsense at our age?

Right-sizing the influence of failure on our assessment of ourselves and how we’ve spent our lives probably requires embracing it. I’m finding that spending a few minutes now and then just sitting with the blecch does something interesting to how I think about these things. It allows me to look at certain disappointments clearly and identify their components — luck, genes, timing, absence of grit, insufficient focus or talent, under-powered effort. One by one, we can see that these are all fully human experiences, and so they become a little less potent.

That’s when it becomes possible to give a failure its proper place alongside the wins and blessings.

Eventually, a garden gnome shows up with his tiny zither and sings a wee ditty about the perils of self-pity.

Well, you get the idea.

I suspect I’m not the only human on the planet with a tendency to let a few lost opportunities or bungled relationships take on inordinate importance as the years accumulate.

We should talk about failure — constructively and with curiosity — a good bit more than we do. You know, right-size it. Make it normal. Ideally we do this naturally, with a partner or good friends. It’s part of life, after all.

And if that’s too scary, we can always start with ourselves.

About the Art

That triptych at the top was done with acrylic paint markers and paint sticks on paper with a tiny bit of Photoshop editing.

Visit karensandstrom.com/shop-new and click on the thumbnails to see the whole image and read details.

Have a beautiful day, friends!

IS IT TOO EARLY TO DECLARE THIS “Our Summer of Becoming a T.C. Boyle Plot?”

Man-versus-nature is one of the themes Boyle returns to now and again in his novels and short fiction. The title story in his collection Tooth and Claw is a phantasmagorical yarn about a young man who wins an African wildcat called a serval and sets it up in his apartment bedroom with hopes his love interest will help him care for it. Friend of the Earth is a dual-timeline novel about a former eco-terrorist living in a climate collapsed “future” — the novel was published in 2000 and its contemporary timeline was 2025.

The wild animal encounters we’re seeing on the news these days seem like they’d be right at home in one of Boyle’s worlds, and they begin with bears startling suburbanites in Cleveland, my hometown.

Time was that a resident of Greater Cleveland could hike a Metroparks trail, or collect the morning newspaper, without any expectation of encountering a black bear. The odds of a bear encounter around here are still quite small, but they are not zero. In recent weeks, bears have been spotted in rural/ex-urban Geauga County but also the tony Pepper Pike/Beachwood area as well as urbanish Garfield Heights, which happens to be a hop-skip-and-jump from my home.

I find this development amusing, because there’s something hilarious about security camera footage of a bear lumbering across someone’s neatly mown lawn before the dawn’s early light. (“That was not what I was expecting to see, but I was also glad it was not a person in my yard at 2 a.m.,” noted one homeowner.) But I also find the bear encroachment disturbing because, typically, direct encounters between humans and wild animals end poorly, and a direct encounter seems inevitable at some point.

SPEAKING OF BEARS, I mean bison, didja see that footage of the latest encounter at Yellowstone? Grandpa and grandson were in a park campground when a honked-off 2,000-pound bull stood up and gave chase. Grandson ran one way and Grandpa, followed by the bison, ran another until the beast rammed the man, flipping him in the air. I haven’t seen a report about what goes through a man’s head as he somersaults through the ether in such a situation, but you have to believe it was something like, I didn’t think it would end this way.

Unlike most such incidents in Yellowstone, this encounter reported to be simply a wrong-place, wrong-time situation rather than daft tourists tucking in too closely for a selfie. Other campground visitors chased off the bison. Grandpa broke a bunch of bones but is expected to recover. Wildlife officials do not plan to euthanize the bison. And the grandson has a tale for the ages.

SPEAKING OF BISON, that is woodland creatures, I was walking the dog the other day when I heard two quick, high whistles and looked over to see one groundhog chasing another out of a patch of hostas. This was very exciting stuff: my first exposure to the sound that gave these critters the nickname “whistle pigs.” Which is also a kind of whiskey, but that’s a whole nuther topic, as they say.

AND SPEAKING OF HIGH, I must share the story of the flower seeds my friend Jackie gave me to plant in a big terra cotta pot on our deck a couple of weeks ago.

A few days after we covered the seeds with a shallow layer of soil, they started to poke up, promising me pretty blue blossoms. Then one morning I’m gazing out the window and see a chipmunk in the pot, going absolutely bonkers — frantically digging, racing around, flipping himself in the air as if he’d been charged by a miniature bison, rolling in the dirt, then digging some more. I assume he’s eating my germinated seeds and intends to leave me blossomless.

Later, I’m telling my daughter about this circus freak ransacking my morning glory pot, when my husband pipes up.

“Morning glories!” he says. “That takes me back.”

In days of yore, it seems, Ye Olde Hippie Class sometimes ingested morning glory seeds for their hallucinogenic properties, and evidently the practice still has a following among teens.

“They were what you took when you couldn’t get anything better,” Carlo explains.

Indeed, a quick Google search confirms that some species of morning glories (including Jackie’s), “contain ergoline alkaloids, such as ergine (LSA) and isoergine, structurally related to LSD. Isoergine can produce euphoria, synaesthesia, and time distortion,” according to the Nova addiction recovery center. “Common adverse reactions include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle cramps, anxiety and disturbing psychological effects.”

So yes, as a friend noted, I believe we had a “trippin’ chippie.” Probably with a tummy ache. Since then, I’ve noted several chipmunks on the deck, but none foraging in the morning glories, the remainder of which seem to be growing like weed. Er, like weeds.

FINALLY, THIS INVENTORY WOULD BE INCOMPLETE without a nod to Neil the Seal, a 2,200-pound elephant seal who spent a little time vacationing and wreaking havoc in Tasmanian coastal towns. Kudos to the Associated Press journalist who wrote the July 3 story about Neil, under the headline, “Australian Officials Ask Fans to Respect the Privacy of Neil, a 1-ton Seal Who Respects Nothing.”

“Neil, the only male elephant seal to visit Tasmania in years, has commanded an enthralled TikTok following of 1.4 million in part because he acts like kind of a jerk,” according to the article. “During this visit to shore, his 12th, his crimes have included picking fights with parked cars and smashing through barriers erected to keep him off roads.“

Since this report, Neil has, like the sailor in Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl), returned to his life, his love and his lady — the sea. He leaves in his wake a few crumpled traffic cones and a veritable trove of video and photo stills with fawning captions.

With or without the addition of flesh-eating screw worms and diarrhea lettuce, Boyle sure has something to work with.

About the art

“Any World That I’m Welcome In” (8” by 9”) is done in pencil, gouache and acrylic marker on watercolor paper. Original art and prints available, just send me a message.

A FRIEND’S REPORT FROM a local Pride festival last weekend noted that someone was selling crocheted penises. This was happening about the same time that my husband and I found ourselves at a summer festival in rural Ohio where the most prominent display under the T-shirt tent was a shirt bearing the phrase “This is how Americans take a knee” and a silhouette of a soldier kneeling to take aim with his rifle.

So much cultural flexing these days. So much obsession with owning the other side. Is this the best we can do?

Cultural rifts are on my mind a lot as our nation careens toward its 250th birthday. I’ve noticed that lots of folks are either asking themselves whether they still love their country or whether, in light of The Horrors, it’s defensible to do so.

Now, generally speaking, if someone is doubting their love of the good ol’ U.S. of A. these days, it’s a good bet they identify as Democrat. Similarly, if someone has plastered their car with the Stars and Stripes and an America — Love It or Leave It bumper sticker, you’re probably looking at a Republican.

Both of these positions seem like extremes to me, and a little too much like Pride penises versus gun T-shirts. But today I’ll leave the critique of performative needling and concentrate instead on love of country. Or my love of it, anyway. Because I do love it. The country. The flag. Our checkered past. The whole messy enchilada.

I KNOW I LOVE THIS PLACE in part because watching its cultural and political descent over the decades (I was born in the 60s) has been so very, very painful. The problems did not start with the way the current administration has normalized government grift and authoritarianism. No, years and years of cultural coarsening and the dumbing of America conspired to give Trump this moment in history. Devolution is excruciating to watch. Great swaths of American society are growing ever more intellectually vacant and spiritually ill even as the smartest of us get closer and closer to curing cancer, and even as funding platforms burst with donations from individuals helping neighbors and strangers who are facing hardship and loss.

You’ll never go wrong betting on paradox here in the U.S.A.

So yes, we are sick and a little dumber than we should be, and yet we don’t stop loving a family member who is sick or who makes a few poor life choices, do we?

An infection of greed and lust for power runs rampant at the moment in our government, and I really hate that. But I sure do love the land itself. The acres of flat Ohio farmland and the Colorado mountains and the seashore and the exhilaration of New York and Chicago and L.A.

I don’t eat funnel cakes, but it makes me happy to know that at county fairs and small town festivals across the land this summer, funnel cakes are being fried and eaten just as they were in 1976. I’ve been to Vegas once and that was enough for me, but the United States wouldn’t be as cool without the place and its excesses. And I’ve never been a farm girl, but I’m glad for cattle ranches and cornfields.

On any given day, if we are out in the world, we’re more likely to encounter kindness than cruelty. Gotta love that. There’s no guarantee, of course, and it was ever thus. And it must be said that the odds of encountering cruelty certainly have increased since 2016, especially for anyone who looks like they might be a member of a minority group.

But caring, generous, polite, righteous, normal individuals also abound, much as they always have.

I loathe the Electoral College, and gerrymandering, and the incessant gaming of politics that has always plagued the nation and continues today at fever pitch.

But boy, do I love democracy.

Every time The People speak through their votes, there’s proof that the system more or less works. “More or less” because ideally, it would be nice if all voters were at least minimally informed, and they’re not, but oh well.

I used to be fonder of capitalism than I am today, given that the wealth inequality in the U.S. is light years past acceptability, and expanding at warp speed; we’ll never catch it, will we? No one needs to be a trillionaire, Elon.

But I love the founding dreams of this nation — the promise of individual opportunity along with the notion of equality that the Founders had the guts to put down on paper, even if fully embracing it eluded them at the time. As it continues to elude us. It matters that these dreams themselves still matter, even if the work of keeping them alive looks a tiny bit hopeless sometimes.

And yeah, I love the damn flag. The house we live in right now is lovely in so many ways, but I haven’t figured out how to get a flag-pole bracket to fit securely on its rounded porch pillars. If I did, we’d hang a flag on the flag holidays, and I’d be fierce about it, because my fellow liberal-leaners have too easily ceded the flag to the aforementioned performative conservatives, and it pisses me off.

These United States, such as they are — well, they’re our home. The country belongs to all of us, and as such we are called to critique it and work together to fix what we can. But critique and disavowal are two different things. And disavowal seems to be in the air.

I can’t tell anyone else how to feel about that, of course, but to me, being embarrassed to embrace one’s home should itself be embarrassing, like dissing your partner at a dinner party.

On this 250th birthday of our nation, I can’t tell anyone else what to think. But if I could, I would ask those who’ve lost their faith in freedom and their love of country to abandon all doubt and recommit.

We have to love the United States if ever we are going to continue to reach for the American ideal. And what other choice do we have but to continue reaching?

Everything in this post was made by me, not by AI. The illustration was done with pencil, gouache, acrylic markers, and Photoshop.

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THERE MIGHT BE SOME DARK ROCKS to turn over in the life of beloved British artist David Hockney, but I don’t know them and I’m disinclined to look. Hockney has left behind a massive trove of work distinguished by an uncommon vibe – smart and joyful. I think this explains his pull on international art audiences.

Hockney died June 11 at age 88. The cause has yet to be disclosed. One can’t help but be curious about such details, given his dedication to chain smoking and his vigorous work on behalf of smokers’ rights, but in the end it doesn’t really matter. He lived as he wished, and what he wished was to make art, always, and in his own way.

Here’s my favorite summary of Hockney being Hockney, from an obituary in The Guardian, describing his education at the Royal College of Art in London in the ‘60s:

He swiftly gained a reputation as a unique talent, albeit one with a rebellious streak. His refusal to paint a life drawing of a female model almost stopped him from graduating – pointedly, he submitted Life Drawing for a Diploma, which depicted a muscular male figure from an American physique magazine. Hockney also declined to write an essay required for the final examination, believing he should be assessed solely on his artworks. The RCA, aware of the talent it was fostering, bent its rules so it could award him the diploma.

Early on, he owned his homosexuality and he owned art as the only pursuit that interested him. He reminds me, in a way, of another British David — Bowie — because they both seemed to have arrived on the planet as fully formed artists. By that I mean that each exuded utter confidence in dedicating their lives to that purpose. And as long as I’m mind-reading, I might as well add that because they seemed to have leaped over the moat of self-doubt and despair so many artists have to cross, they simply did what made them happy.

Happiness is infectious.

We can sense it in the work. With Hockney, we can feel it in his joyful embrace of bright, saturated, glorious color, whether to describe the pool scapes he painted after coming to California in the ‘60s; flowers in his window, which he painted on an iPhone as soon as the technology was released; or the fantastic theater stage sets he created.

Oh, and one more thing: The man loved his dogs. He painted hundreds of portraits of Stanley and Boodgie, his dachshund buddies, and collected them in the book Dog Days.

Of his dog paintings, Hockney said, “I make no apologies for the apparent subject matter. These two dear little creatures are my friends. They are intelligent, loving, comical and often bored. They watch me work; I notice the warm shapes they make together, their sadness and their delights. And, being Hollywood dogs, they somehow seem to know that a picture is being made.”

So this is my thank you to Hockney: for painting beautifully, being curious, and for using his entire life so very well.

Gooood morning! Dropping in to share a gander at these three new paintings I did for the soon-to-be-here grandson on our minds.

Baby has a jungle theme going on in his nursery, and Mom originally requested an elephant and a giraffe. To be precise, actually, she asked for a giraffe and for Gregory Elephant, who some of you are familiar with. There was a brief lull where we had to decide whether Gregory would be in clothes, as he usually is, or whether he should be naked, because then the giraffe could be naked as well. We went with no clothes.

(Here’s the original Gregory Elephant when he was a little younger.)

ANYWAY.

It wasn’t too long before we knew our collection needed a lion as well.

Here are what some of the messy first sketches looked like. I started with trying to figure out how the figures would relate to each other on the wall.

Then I played around with trying to get lines and animal stylings I liked. This can be the hardest part. I always aim for super simple and end up being a little too … too.

Honestly, you can do worse than looking at pictures of giraffes on the internet to try to figure out the essence of what a giraffe looks like.

Here’s where I am settling on posture and shape:

I drew everything in pencil (you see some pen here because I knew I was going to trace and redraw selections of these sketches), then I took the pencil drawings into Photoshop for adding digital “paint” and texture.

I had the final art printed on canvas at Bay Photo, which did a nice job, communicated well, and got the canvases here pronto.

These have been delivered to Mr. Little Man’s nursery. I can’t wait to see them watching over sweet sleeping bebe.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Karen

THE PEACE YOU NEED might be at the bird feeder.

At first it might look like a flurry of interchangeable brown birds arguing over too-few perches, scrambling for seed, flitting and fleeing on a hundred whims. Fallen morsels attract sparrows on the ground, too, where they need not compete for real estate until a mourning dove arrives to command them with its bulk and to flash a patch of feathers iridescent as an oil-slick rainbow.

It’s a funny thing, this bird activity taking place just a few feet beyond the window. These creatures are so common that your average teenager might look out and declare “nothing to see.” Your average teenager might miss the fact that a flock of flying dinosaurs has collected in the yard.

But youth retreats, and so does the youthful preference for man-made, larger-than-life spectacles. You are well past anything like youth, so you find yourself looking at common backyard birds, and eventually start to notice them and ultimately to look for them.

That’s when you become aware that not all brown birds look alike, not by a long shot. In Ohio alone, one can see 20 different kinds of sparrows — house sparrows and tree sparrows and field sparrows, white-throated and white-crowned sparrows.

Dark-eyed juncos, cold-month visitors, have mostly headed north by now. They’re dark gray and white, not brown, but they’re sparrows just the same, and for a while during winter they skittered around the ground to find what they could.

Real heat has since arrived. At a distance of 12 feet you can witness, with surprising satisfaction, a small bird panting open-beaked in the sun before it discovers the bath. It flits to the edge, dips its head to gather water in its beak, then bobs up again and swallows. A bird swallowing water that you left for it is the simplest best thing.

A moment later, a fledgling alights on the deck railing and stands opening its beak when someone else flies by, quivering its notice-me wings, to beg one of the older birds to feed it. A parent finally shows up and drops a morsel in the young one’s beak.

This never gets old.

Soon enough, a beautiful buff-colored female cardinal swoops in, then comes her blazing mate with his Catholic crest raised comically high. Imagine being so showy all the time. So on display. They’re aware of the risks, which you know because they’re more sensitive to your presence behind the glass. One false move and they’re gone.

As will be the red-bellied woodpecker who somehow fits its large self onto a feeder perch and jabs its long beak clumsily at the holes, spilling as much seed as it eats.

If you walk away to grab a glass of water, you will no doubt hear a piercing whistle crack the air, a sound like a single fireworks shell just before it bursts into a chandelier of color.

The red-winged blackbird has arrived. It, too, will struggle to fit at the feeder.

OCCASIONALLY, ALL THESE BIRDS are here at the same time, along with the special, sweet-petite sparrow — a chick? a runt? — and a couple pairs of cowbirds, who seem to politely wait until most of the other birds have eaten before they feed themselves.

Everybody just shows up with their quirks and foibles but without any tricks or memes, without any headlines or jokes (although, honestly, the mourning doves are clowns, aren’t they?). They hold you captive just as thoroughly as Instagram, or even the old Instagram before everything was videos and commercials. Somehow you cannot stop looking to see … what, exactly?

Just birds being birds unaware that they are birds.

Nothing much is happening yet everything is unfolding and you can’t look away because you just never know.

Who will arrive?

How many birds will come and go before someone feeds that little guy bouncing and wing-quivering for a meal?

If a bully bluejay shows up, will the cowbirds tell it to scram?

(Someone should.)

(No one does.)

Then a robin alights on the neighbor’s roof and stretches high in song.

A house finch, its ruby head glistening, alights on the deck railing.

A wandering hummingbird darts in, finds no nectar feeder, because you didn’t put one out this year. It darts back out again and you whisper, damn before you remember to stop chasing nature. The peace you need is already here, with or without a hummingbird.

That peace is the little brown bird. It’s the junco late for its date in Canada. It’s a cowbird, a goldfinch, a young thing learning to be a cardinal.

It’s a bird just being a bird unaware that it is a bird.

There’s nothing to worry about here. And all kinds of something to see.

MY HUSBAND CAME HOME LAST WEEK with a bruise on his chin that I think we all should celebrate. Mere months away from his 83rd birthday Carlo took up pickleball. The bruise was the result of him wanging his face with his racquet, to which I say bravo! An octogenarian who can hurt himself in a new sport might just be a model for anyone who has made it past what can reasonably be referred to as “middle age.” I want him to wear that bruise like a badge of honor.

I think a lot about aging these days. I’m younger than Carlo by a not-inconsiderable number of years, but we often mutter together about the various indignities of getting older: uncooperative joints, daytime fatigue, the brain’s peculiar way of downregulating “late night” to 9 p.m. — that sort of thing.

The benefit of watching him reach new milestones first is that I get to see how he navigates it all. And, in short, he tends to just continue to be Carlo, embracing fresh experiences as he did in his twenties, but with Parkinson’s disease and fewer hangovers. He might not be thrilled to drive alone at night now (the eyes), but he is still more than game to make a new friend, meet people for dinner, or head to the Bop Stop to hear some jazz. If we haven’t socialized or taken a day trip to some new-to-us museum in a little while, he gets itchy.

Carlo takes an overshoot-the-runway approach to aging. He’s going to keep moving and doing and greeting new experiences with as much vigor as he can muster until life throws on the brake. He doesn’t sit around thinking about how an 83-year-old should live. He just does.

Me? I need a manifesto, or least some operating instructions. Sometimes when I look back at adolescence, I am genuinely appalled that it arrived without a manual. A kid hits age 12 and suddenly has to DIY massive chaos for the next, oh, eight years. It’s bananas!

Post-middle age seems, oddly, a lot like adolescence, but at least our prefrontal cortex is (mostly) functioning and we can apply a few decades of experience to the problem.

For example, you might know yourself well enough to trust that slowing down is just the right move. You might be done with travel and new friends and fresh experiences and ready to sink into your favorite armchair. Running out the runway possibly sounds like too much work, and you would prefer instead simply to listen to classic rock, allow your opinions to ossify, glide down the back of the aging bell curve and die in your sleep on your 103rd birthday.

I respect that choice, too.

I’m here only to suggest that with fewer years to futz about, we ought to actively choose an approach while we can. Am I on a plane heading in for a landing at 160 mph or am I enjoying an ever-slowing lazy river ride down the back end? Perhaps there’s another way. There’s probably a third or fourth or eleventh manner for greeting our ripening selves that I haven’t thought about.

A few weeks ago, a 72-year-old woman named Dawn Zuidgeest-Craft, mother of ABC meteorologist Ginger Zee, made news by being, we think, the oldest person to become a doctor. I wanted to send her flowers and a thank-you note. It’s not just that I’m such a sucker for people who defy societal norms around aging. It’s that the achievement annihilates the idea that one can be too old to start doing something they’d love.

What might that be for you?

LAST FALL I DECIDED TO SEE what all the GLP-1 fuss was about, so I used an online pharmacy to order compounded semaglutide (akin to Ozempic). I received a vial of liquid and a bunch of needles and syringes with instructions to begin with a low starter dose.

Within a couple days, I noticed that the familiar hum of food noise had disappeared. One afternoon I came this close to forgetting to eat lunch!

As the days passed, however, something else changed: I was feeling pretty queasy and losing my appetite for most of the foods I commonly eat: fruits, vegetables, dairy and protein.

This presented a problem. My plan was to use the drug to solidfy my program, which has been wobbly for a while now, then ween ever so slowly off the drug. (Despite widespread claims to the contrary, this can be done without weight gain.) I had no interest in just losing weight by subsisting on toast and nausea. I wanted a stronger version of the healthy eating plan that has served me well, generally, even if it was prone to occasionally fail me. (Or I it, for that matter.)

Within a month, I ditched the generic Ozempic and figured I’d try again with a different drug, which I did around the beginning of March. This time I used a compounded tirzepatide (like Zepbound), which is newer than Ozempic. In came more vials and syringes. In came a higher price, too, but I had it on reliable authority that tirzepatide was less prone to causing side effects.

Alas, that was not my experience. Once again, the food noise went from “Is it lunchtime? Is it lunchtime?” to “Why am I still queasy? Why am I still queasy?”

This time I gave myself six weeks to see if my body would adjust. I lost about four pounds. I felt lighter and also like I had chronic morning sickness. Eleven days after my last dose of tirzepatide, I finally had my normal-for-me appetite back, plus a brain that mightily resisted giving up the starchy foods that had become my tirzepatide crutch.

So that’s been fun.

Obviously, then, the GLP-1 answer to weight management is a big fat failure.

Kidding.

DESPITE MY TWO ROCKY EXPERIENCES, I think these drugs are miracles.

First, early indications seem to point to the likelihood that they have benefits for preventing heart and kidney diseases and fatty-liver disease, and that they might help with sleep apnea and even alcohol addiction.

But even if all they did was help a large number of people step off the weight management struggle-bus, they would qualify as a tremendous medical advancement.

Food addiction and disorder eating are beasts. They are so much thornier than the calories-in/calories-out equation we were all taught to believe. I often remind anyone who will listen that willpower is required for managing serious food issues, but will power isn’t enough. We need other tools as well. Try as we might — one study showed that U.S. adults tried an average of eight times to lose weight over their lifetime — we can’t just think our way past hormones and brain and gut chemistry.

So if nothing else, the new weight-management drugs underscore the massive role biology plays in cravings, appetite and the psychology of eating and overeating. Interrupt certain chemical mechanisms in a food addict, and suddenly that person no longer needs superhuman levels of willpower.

Let me tell you, 14-year-old me could have used a cool, tall glass of this-body-is-not-your-fault.

So I have something of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to broad attacks on the new weight-loss drugs.

You see them everywhere. Sometimes they sound like this: We shouldn’t trust them. They’re just too new. We don’t have the data. (We should. They’re not that new. We do have data.)

But mostly, I suspect, the issue so many non-fat people have with GLP-1s is that they’ve enjoyed blaming others’ excess weight on sloth, gluttony and lack of willpower. They, who have reasonable factory settings where appetite is concerned, assume that everyone experiences hunger and craving the same way they do. That must mean they are superior to fat people because they can exert a little willpower to deny themselves the third cookie, while overweight individuals are obviously too lazy to to make a similar effort.

Moreover, the non-fat person doesn’t believe the guilty should be allowed to use a drug to “cheat” their way to a size 6.

And the healthcare industry has, frankly, a long history of being part of that unhelpful and judgmental attitude, but it is finally starting to change.

Everyone who is chronically overweight landed there thanks to a unique-to-them combination of genetic, social, psychological and neurological factors. It’s really hard for a lone human, working in isolation or even with Weight Watchers buddies, to align the gears so that her appetite works smoothly, as God intended. It’s difficult to find the combination of food, support and behaviors that will unlock freedom. What works for one person fails for another.

In fact, what works for one person today is not guaranteed to work for them forever. I often think about a former colleague who, years before Ozempic, had lost perhaps a hundred pounds. I really admired her transformation and asked how she had accomplished it.

“Ate less and moved more,” she said, with a bit of swagger.

Within about three years she was back to her former self. She thought she’d had the combination; like so many of us, she needed more and different help.

So I am fully onboard with any safe drug that reduces the suffering of people who have failed one remedy after the other.

There are issues with these new medications, of course. Money is the biggest. I might have been willing to extend my GLP-1experiment longer, perhaps with symptom-relief help from my primary care provider, but it seemed likely that I would shell out a few hundred dollars more and still be struggling with nausea.

The financial barrier with these drugs is quite significant. On the other hand, I am rabidly uninterested in the other so-called problems, such as “Ozempic face” (gaunt and a little droopy) and temporary hair loss, which can accompany significant weight loss from any method. And yes, certain celebrities seem to be drugging themselves to the point of frailty, reinforcing dangerous eating-disorder culture. That’s a whole other ball of wax.

Still, we need to find effective solutions to the suffering caused by America’s obesity crisis.

SO LET’S NOT RAGE. And let’s stop judging those who find relief in the era of Ozempic. Sting sang that he “never saw a miracle of science that didn’t go from a blessing to a curse,” and I get it, but right now weight-management pharmacology is looking far more like a blessing to my eyes. How great is it that at least some of us are experiencing real relief? How refreshing that doctors finally have something useful to offer to their patients beyond admonishments to eat less and exercise more?

Some day before too long, I believe, newer drugs will emerge that have fewer side effects, and they will eclipse this generation of weight-management aids. Prices will come down. Research will explode. Maybe insurance coverage will even improve. A gal can dream.

And as long as I am dreaming, all this will happen alongside a real-food revolution, because the link between whole, real foods and the nourishment of healthy bodies and brains is indisputable.

Sometimes scientific advances look like breakthrough medications. And sometimes they mean we finally have the data that prove what common sense should have been telling us all along: This is a health issue, not a character problem.

So I’m opening up a handful of slots for this kind of work on a small, paid basis.

If you or someone you know might benefit, I’d be happy to help with things like:
• a social post where you want to say something real without sounding like everyone else
• a talk or presentation that needs shaping
• an op-ed, article or bio that’s not quite landing
• an obituary (which can be written at any time, including while a person is hale and hearty)
• a tribute, speech or personal essay

The process can start with a rough draft, a messy version, or something that’s been run through AI but doesn’t sound like you.

And it can start with a simple question: “Do you think you can help with this?” If I don’t think I can, I’ll let you know upfront.

If that’s you—or if someone comes to mind who might be love help with a piece of writing—give me a shout.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Warm regards,
Karen

One night in childhood, I was suddenly and briefly the owner of two pairs of guppies. Did I win them at a fair, like goldfish? Inherit them from one of my brothers? All I remember is that I went to bed with four guppies in a bowl on my dresser, and the next morning I awoke to what seemed like thousands of bug-eyed babies. Le miracle!

Fast forward a half-century, give or take, and I’m walking the dog in the neighborhood and come across a lovely little rubber ball — the kind that easily bounces very high. Back in the day, my friend Lexi and I would bike to the local candy shop with a bit of change in our pockets and pick out a new amazing Wham-O Superball for our collections.

Anyway, last week I plucked the ball from a tree lawn in the park, brought it home, and reintroduced Much-Older-Karen to the weird joy of ball bouncing. Lemme tell you, it has the same instantly therapeutic effect of sniffing a box of crayons. 10/10 highly recommend.

Not long before that, Daisy and I were walking near the edge of the woods by our development when I spotted a clean deer skull in the grass. Granted, this is not everyone’s idea of a great find, but it is for those of us who revel in nature’s weird gifts, like a fallen bird’s nest or a just-shed snakeskin.

For me, the skull was a day-maker. It’s on a shelf now, with the antler I’d come across a month or so before.

If all this sounds like an advertisement — Get a Dog! Find Objects of Wonder! — I don’t mean it that way. Although, you could do worse for your general happiness than getting a dog, but then again you probably already have a dog or a cat or a guinea pig or maybe all three. High-fives!

This is instead a simple acknowledgment of one of life’s great gifts, the serendipitous surprise. Maybe, more importantly, the human capacity for being delighted.

I have a theory that if you expect happy surprises, they tend to show up more often. Beachcombers are poster children for serendipity celebrants, aren’t they? They never know what they might find: a perfect chunk of beach glass, an intact conch shell, a starfish asking to be tossed back out to sea. On a beach walk a couple of years ago, my daughter and son-in-law and I came across a washed-up shark. Yes, it was way dead and a little gross by the time we saw it, but it was also fascinating.

A walk on the beach might be more likely to produce a beautiful surprise than, say, a day at the office, but there are no guarantees. No guarantees about the beach, and, more importantly, no guarantee that a day at work will be just another day at work. How many couples met their partners at work? Le miracle!

By now you’re probably hoping for some kind of point to emerge. I guess the closest I can come is this: Life has a way of turning us into seen-it-all souls who at some level are always expecting the other shoe to drop.

Maybe we can let that go. Maybe there’s a bowlful of guppies waiting for us today.

If not today, maybe tomorrow.

Eyes wide open, then. Carry on.

A note about this content

I learned recently, thanks to the wisdom of Instagram, that the em-dash (the long kind that you see frequently in my writing) is now considered a common indicator of AI-generated writing. There are others, too, including bulleted lists and whatnot.

Let me just say that I’ve been an over-user of the em-dash for decades now. So when you see it or any other writing convention here that someone has identified as a possible signifier of AI, it isn’t. I like my gosh-darned dashes and I’m keeping them. I also like the process of writing these essays and making my art, or else I wouldn’t be doing it. I feel like you probably know this, but I guess now I have to be explicit that the content here is created by me.

WITH SO MUCH TO TALK ABOUT THESE DAYS, vis-a-vis world events, I have decided to take on Gregory Elephant and his tendency to wander.

Now, some of you might recall from Gregory’s origin story, which goes back to when he wandered onto a park bench with his drink and met our friend Francis Elephant (see image below), that his inclination to wander was so strong that his mother tucked a note with their address inside his jacket pocket. Gregory was 3 at the time.

Several years having passed since then, and this being the realm of story, he is obviously now 4.

Which is to say that Gregory has a slightly better grasp of his mother’s wish that he be where she thinks he is at all times.

And yet.

And yet one day Francis (who had since married his mother) took Gregory on a short hike to a vast wild space where wetland meets woodland. It was the edge of a metro park, but remember, he’s only 4, so to Gregory the park is Sherwood Forest. Francis, in fact, calls this very park the “Sure-Would Forest,” as in “I sure would like to hike in the woods today.”

When they had reached a small, shallow pond in the shade of a black birch tree, Francis had put an enormous toe to his mouth — ssshhhhh. And when Gregory shushed, he noticed the sound of spring peepers peeping like a passel of just-hatched chicks. Gregory wouldn’t have said “passel,” of course, but there are five chicken coops at his nursery school, so he knows chicks peep. And on that day in question, he learned that frogs peeped, too.

Anyway, Francis showed Gregory how to squat down and look for the little frogs in the vegetation growing up through the water at pond’s edge. Once Gregory spotted two or three of them, he suddenly saw what seemed like thousands of them, or at least 17. The chorus of peeps seemed to grow louder and louder, and Gregory wondered how such small frogs could make such a ruckus. Then Francis coaxed one onto the end of his trunk and Gregory watched up close as its throat bubbled out with every “peep.”

Of course Gregory wanted to visit the frogs again, and he had asked a pazillion times (at least four), but Francis and his mother always had something more important to do and promised “maybe next week.”

SO YESTERDAY, Gregory got about half-way through washing his pogo stick when his wandering spirit took flight and down the street he wandered. He crossed a vacant lot and headed over a split-rail fence, which he climbed with the help of his trunk, stopped briefly at an exercise station along the park path, where a picture on a sign instructed him to do some lunges (so he did), and eventually reached the very spot he and Francis had visited.

He stood under a clear spring sky, held his right front foot in front of his mouth and shushed himself. He thought that was the “on” button for the peeping chorus. At his feet, snowdrops bloomed in the damp ground. Blades of grass grew verrrrrry slowly. A light breeze kissed his wee elephant forehead.

But, standing there as shushed as he could be, he heard no frog chorus. Not a duet or even a solo. He could hear not a single peep.

He got down on his haunches at the edge of the shallow water and watched the light flicker, but he saw no peepers. With a twig, he made sparkling ripples in the water until a passing bluejay suddenly screeched and he lost his balance and toppled onto his side, landing at the water’s edge.

With roughly half of himself now sopping wet, he rose to his feet and decided to wander back home.

You’re probably thinking, “Oh, now’s the part where she tells us that he got lost,” but I assure you he did not. Gregory doesn’t talk much, but he’s an observant young elephant, well able follow the landmarks back toward home. At the exercise station, he even dutifully performed three more lunges, although they were damp lunges and he did not feel especially athletic.

By the time he reached home, as you can imagine, his mother had noticed his absence and was just standing in the driveway and considering a call to the authorities. Being Gregory’s mother, she waited a little longer than other mothers might have, because this was not her first rodeo, so to speak. At the sight of her half-wet son ambling toward home, she let out a trumpeting sigh and ran to embrace him.

“Oh my goodness, Gregory!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been? I’ve been scouting the neighborhood looking for you!”

Now, I’ll be honest here, and admit that Gregory considered fibbing. He wasn’t much of a liar, but he knew he’d wandered too far and that he had been expected to wait until his parents could take him to look for peepers. The trouble was that he couldn’t think of a story his mother would like much better than what he’d actually been doing.

These thoughts zipped around in his elephant head, and he was just about to speak when, from the folds in the hood of his jacket, just behind his right ear came a single, loud “Peeeep.”

Gregory nearly jumped out of his skin. His mother cocked her head and said, “Wha — ?” and then came another loud “Peeeep.”

Gregory’s mother reached around her son’s face with her trunk and snuffled around his jacket hood, finally retrieving the peeper who had caught a ride in his coat. She held the creature gently, closing the end of her trunk oh-so-carefully around its tiny body. Then she lowered her head and glared with one eyeball at Gregory.

“Ahem. WHERE did you go?”

Gregory gazed at his feet and murmured, “Park.” Then, perhaps unwisely, he added, “But no peepers today.”

To which the peeper seemed to respond, “Well, there was at least one“ by inflating his throat and replying “Peeep.”

THE PENANCY FOR GREGORY’S WANDERING would be two days without his pogo stick; way harsh, as he saw it. While he changed into dry clothes, his mother placed the frog in a large container with some water and a few blades of grass and placed the container on the kitchen table so Gregory could watch him while he ate a grilled cheese sandwich.

Afterward, they trekked back to the pond together and gently lowered the container into a thatch of damp grass so the frog could hop off to find his friends.

His very quiet friends.

But later, after Gregory’s family had their dinner and took turns playing checkers, Francis explained that peepers tend to sing more around dusk. Why, he could almost hear them now, he said, their songs rising up and pulsing like stars in a dark sky.

And as Gregory clutched his rabbit in bed that night, he fell asleep wondering, “Where should I wander next?”

This is when Gregory first met Francis, who went on to meet and marry Gregory’s mother, Margaret Ann.

NORA COURSEY WAS BORN IN MAY 1871 in County Cork, Ireland, a country still reverberating from the effects of the Great Famine. When she emigrated at 15 to the United States, she would surely have been regarded as part of “the Great Unwashed,” as English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton called the rabble.

Those were times, I guess, when some of what was “great” about being Irish really wasn’t.

But Nora went on to marry John Francis Burke, and to give birth to Mary Madeline, who in turn begat my mother, Margaret Ann, who (obviously) had me.

And so it is that Nora, my great-grandmother, is my most recent immigrant relative.

Everyone else on my mother’s side hailed from the Emerald Isle as well, and I’ll admit to feeling a certain pride on St. Patrick’s Day when I say that I’m “half Irish,” even if I don’t wear much green or own a claddagh ring. Here in America-the-melting-pot, it’s nice to think about one’s heritage, and to have a connection to some culture or another that used to have sharper edge lines before mass media went to work on homogenization.

As a kid, I saw my Irish heritage show up mostly in the freckles on my mother’s skin and maybe something in our house with the Irish Blessing printed on it. I never knew Nora, who died before I was born, but my grandparents and their children all had apple-cheeked faces you could pick out as Irish from 20 paces.

There was shepherd’s pie, occasionally, and oatmeal bread when our great-aunt Helen visited, and of course there was the Catholicism. Well into her dotage, our grandmother prayed the rosary and sprinkled Vatican holy water near the windows if a storm swept in. Well into adulthood, I clung to the Church as long as I could possibly stand it.

All of that makes it almost impossible to imagine the time when the Irish in America were the unwelcome immigrants, but of course they were. Anti-Irish sentiment was still alive, if no longer thriving, by the time Nora arrived on these shores. I don’t know what she might have encountered but I wonder if she looked for work and found lots of want ads that read like this one:

Clean, active girl wanted to do the housework of a private family; must be a first-rate washer and ironer, a good plain cook, and obliging to the children. Apply at No. 27 Lamartine place, 29th St., between 8th and 9th Aves. No Irish need apply.

Those were common in the day, as most settled European Protestants tried to protect themselves, their neighborhoods and their jobs from poor, starving Irish Catholics. The conflicts were deeply ugly: violence, torched houses, cartoons depicting the Irish as apes. Sound famliar?

For a searing account of the history and horrors of anti-Irish sentiment in the United States, you could do worse than to read “When America Despised the Irish” by Christopher Klein. And if you do, it’s likely you, like me, will be unable to resist drawing parallels to contemporary anti-immigrant stories.

That’s how it’s supposed to be, anyway.

We’re supposed to see history’s recurring themes and, if we’re doing things right, to make the connection one way or another. Science tells us we are a species hardwired to protecting our own tribe from perceived threats of outsiders. But on the other hand, we are also wired with empathy. And how hard is it, really, to step into someone else’s shoes?

How difficult is it to open up Ancestry.com and find the very point in time when your forebear stepped onto the land of milk and honey and got something less than a warm welcome?

Most of us who claim native-son or -daughter status are simply lucky. Someone who came before us did the hard work of being a newcomer and maybe an outcast. This is nothing to be cocky about.

So, hey — Nora, if you happen to be reading from the Great Beyond, míle buíochas; a thousand thanks for making the big trip.

I hope you were blessed, and that every now and then, the road rose up to meet you.

IT’S FRIDAY AT LATER-THAN-LUNCHTIME and my husband and I have been unexpectedly plunked down at a random McDonald’s in the town of Wheretheheckarwee, Pa. Modern navigation failed to deliver us to IKEA as we had planned. Could I blame GPS? Human error? It’s impossible to know, but we are starving, so we have procured burgers and drinks.

A regular reader in this space might wonder what a thick-through-the-middle woman eats at McDonald’s these days since they stopped selling salads during the pandemic and never brought them back. Well, she eats an apple plus a cheeseburger that has been debunned except for a bready little island at top and bottom so her fingers don’t have to grip meat. Here in the Thick of things, we bend like bamboo.

Anyway...

Carlo is enthusing about the surprising deliciousness of his quarter pounder when an old Black guy carrying a backpack wanders into what happens to be, at this moment, a room full of white people, and he starts asking diners for money. Some kids robbed him, he says. He just needs bus money.

I mention race because it might or might not have influenced the interactions that followed.

The man has some kind of revved up energy. I avoid eye contact, but I gather he is hearing mostly “no” as he makes his rounds.

Now he stops at a table close by, where a lanky trucker has folded himself onto a bench and begun to eat his lunch, and here there is no mistaking the rejection. The trucker is, as the old people used to say, cross. When the trucker says he doesn’t carry any cash, he sounds resentful at merely having even been asked.

Thus rejected, the begging man approaches our table.

Very often, I could say in good faith that I have no cash, because often I don’t. This time we are prepped for a weekend in Pittsburgh, so I have brought several neatly folded hundred-dollar bills plus a lonely George Washington scrunched in a purse pocket.

I have cash.

All the usual advice about why not to give money to beggars is running through my head alongside the memory of that time I gave a few bucks to a person claiming they needed to buy diapers, only to learn later that this was a regular ruse carried out in that selfsame parking lot on repeat several days a month. I felt like a chump.

So I am now almost always programmed for “no” in these situations.

But “no” requires a certain separation from, and dehumanization of, the person who is asking for money. If you don’t mentally distance yourself before rejecting the person, soon you are face to face with some version What would Jesus do? and I think we know the answer to that.

Still, in this moment, it is not Jesus I’m channeling. It is Dana, the salt-of-the-earth charge nurse from HBO Max series, The Pitt. Portrayed splendidly by actor Katherine LaNasa, Dana is fast on her feet and prevailingly unflappable, ready to keep the order among her colleagues with a witty word or a raised eyebrow.

But Dana’s core character traits are tenderness and a judgment-free attitude toward patients — even toward Digby, the rank-smelling guy with an ... infestation.

For some reason, the spirit of Dana wafts through me and I dig into my purse, muttering the lie, “A dollar is literally all I have.”

I am not prepared to give him a hundred.

The man goes on overexplaining his need for bus money and talking about “these kids.” I hand him my wrinkled dollar and he moves on to a couple at another table, where I hear the woman explain that all she has is a bit of change, she doesn’t carry cash ... .

I glance at the trucker, who is fixing me with a scowl. Maybe nurse Dana doesn’t judge, but the trucker definitely has opinions about me giving a buck to the person who interrupted his lunch, and he unleashes a soliloquy on the topic. The man broke the rules, is this guy’s song. You don’t bother people while they’re eating. If the guy had approached the trucker in the parking lot, he’d have given him five bucks, even ten bucks, he says, but not in the restaurant. He drives a truck ten hours a day and only gets a half-hour for lunch. He wants to eat in peace.

This man sounds so angry. So disproportionately mad at having been asked for bus money — or, sure, maybe booze or drug money — in a McDonald’s in western Pennsylvania. It’s tempting to think the trucker’s annoyance is race based. It certainly is unsettling, this level of agitation toward someone who has, by now, left the restaurant to go drop his dollar on whatever.

With a little distance on the matter, however, I think I get the trucker’s rage. When a stranger asks for a hand-out, the reasonably nice person feels suddenly trapped by dueling instincts — the urge to not be scammed, and the desire to believe that if he himself were ever really desperate, eventually someone would say “yes.” This hard-wired tension between “don’t scam me” and “what if I had to beg?” means there is no getting out of the situation without one’s conscience clearing its throat.

And this is why the peaceful choice is usually to give something and to decide that how the money is spent is of no concern to you.

Nurse Dana would not care how the beggar spends his cash.

Jesus would care, but not for the same reasons as you and I.

Back at McDonald’s, I shrug at the trucker and say “It was a dollar. It just didn’t bother me,” and the folks who gave the guy their loose change pipe up to invoke Jesus to justify their meager donation.

All of this sparks more irritation on the part of the trucker, who is now officially making me more uncomfortable than the begging man had.

I attempt a redirect. “So you’re a trucker, huh? Long haul?”

And before you know it, the trucker’s whole face relaxes and he’s telling me that he used to drive long haul, but drives shorter trips now, although he still has to stay in hotels every now and then. He moves big steel doors. It’s physically demanding. Sounds like it, I say. I tell him he should get more than a half-hour for lunch. And when he rises to leave, he smiles and wishes us safe travels. Back at you, I tell him, and I make it a point to smile, because what would Dana do?

THREE TAKEAWAYS, THEN.

First: Dana might have given up one of the hundreds. I’m just saying.

Second: Jesus would have parted with all of the hundreds and trusted God to provide a hotel in Pittsburgh.

Third: A guy driving a truck for ten hours a day might not be angry at whatever it is he seems so angry about. That’s true for many of us now and then, right?

And, finally, a postscript.

As we exit the McDonald’s parking lot a little while later, we pass the begging man, his backpack hanging in his hand.

He is standing at a bus stop.

He is waiting for a bus.

BOOK REVIEW

Rereading Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

GROWING UP IN THE 60S AND 70S IN BAY VILLAGE, OHIO, “Iran” and “Iraq” were sounds in the background, interchangeable names mentioned in TV news about the ever-present “conflict in the Middle East.”

All that changed in the early 2000s, when I first read comics artist Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis and its companion, Persepolis II. She uses sweet black-and-white panel drawings to recount stories of what she and her family and friends endured when the former Imperial government was replaced by theocracy during the Islamic Revolution.

Satrapi was 10 when things were heating up, a precocious daughter of well-off intellectuals. She read about Marx and nurtured an early wish to be a prophet when she grew up.

Her memories showcase how complex the social and political changes were at the time. Leadership change seemed to promise the elimination of sharp class distinctions, yet it ushered in the reign of Ayatollah Khomeini and repression. Women and girls were suddenly forced to wear the veil. Textbooks were scrubbed of facts that the government didn’t like. And families such as the Satrapis faced life-and-death decisions about whether to flee, protest or learn to abide in a world that had previously granted them privileges better known in the West.

These days seem like a good ones to revisit Persepolis and reconnect with its heart, as represented by the young Marjane, and its history. To those who say, “I can’t/don’t read graphic novels,” I offer the thought that Persepolis, like Maus, is a graphic novel worth stretching for.

ABOUT THE ART

This mishmash of images appear on a spread in my sketchbook.

THE NETFLIX SERIES CALLED REALITY CHECK: INSIDE AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL is a four-part documentary takedown of one of the early smash-hit reality TV shows. Young women moved through a series of absurd trials in hopes a panel of judges would declare them America’s Next Top Model. The notion was that the winner would go on to enjoy a high-powered career, which prevailingly did not happen. But for 15 years, ANTP was watercooler TV with sky-high ratings.

The show debuted in 2003, when my daughters were tweens, and the good news here is that America’s Next Top Model did not feature in our home entertainment habits. In fact, I had never watched a minute of it, having sussed out from the commercials alone that ANTP was likely to kill brain cells I couldn’t afford to lose.

But recently I found myself watching the documentary out of perverse cultural curiosity. What was the specific nature of the noxious messaging Tyra Banks and her cronies were pumping into the ether at the time, I wondered. What was being absorbed, exactly, by the show’s audiences?

The answer: The show was casually peddling body dysmorphia and stoking eating disorders.

America’s Next Top Model turned its fresh-faced contestants into self-assessing neurotics and sold the same to its audiences. Within a framework of invented drama dressed up as young women chasing their dreams, ANTM cashed in big on reinforcing that old myth that a woman’s value lies in achieving physical perfection as defined by outsiders.

No surprise there.

What makes the documentary alluring — in the way of National Enquirer headlines screaming at you in the check-out line — is its parade of former contestants telling their tales of abuse. Mixed in with typical reality-show melodrama were stories of sexual assault (I’d call one rape), and others about contestants undergoing dental surgery under duress. There was a photoshoot for which models dressed as the homeless and posed with actual unhoused people, and another where the models donned makeup to “switch races.” Loathsome stuff.

The real horror, however, is that millions of people, including children and adolescents, watched a parade of beautiful women being assessed, week in and week out, and often found wanting. The contestants were being told to maybe just eat the burger and leave the bun. They had their tiny waists measured and remarked upon. And the audience was ingesting the message.

I’d like to think that America’s Next Top Model was so over-the-top that it actually provoked critical thinking about what women were being told about their bodies, and maybe that occasionally happened.

More likely, though, this stupid program became just one more refrain in a terrible song we’ve heard on repeat since birth.

What does it all mean for women today? I think it means that no matter our age, no matter how wise or culturally aware, it is possible — with or without having watched this particular TV slop — we might still be carrying around some pretty corrosive mental programming.

TWO THINGS HAPPENED IN MY WORLD THIS WEEK. One was that I turned 65. Sixty-five! — how? (And the answer is good luck and the passage of time, of course!)

The second is that my husband and I watched My Cousin Vinny for the first time, during which 90 percent of my brain was being highly entertained while a small, familiar 10 percent was busy admiring Marisa Tomei’s lithe figure and wondering what it would be like — what it would ever have been like — to have a body like that.

This two-track viewing experience might be familiar to anyone who has struggled with The Food and Weight Thing (TFWT), but I confess that I thought it would have, y’know, kind of faded by the time I was eligible for Social Security.

Alas. Here we are. And honestly: Good. Because at least now I’m paying attention to that second track and getting curious about it.

With a geriatric twinkle in my eye (I’d like to think), I took that curiosity to my custom ChatGPT, and typed in the following:

Imagine that I just turned 65 and I were to tell you that for virtually all of my life — since I was a child — I have been enormously self-conscious and judgmental about my body, specifically my weight. I have achieved many things, enjoyed family and friends, had a good career. But always running in the background is an awareness of the size of my stomach or thighs, the difference between my body and the bodies of other women, what strategy I’m going to use today or tomorrow to “fix” myself. Imagine that I told you all that and asked whether you think it’s possible to shift my mindset to make myself more accepting of my body as it is.

TO WHICH CHAT RESPONDED: If you told me you were 65 and had carried that running commentary in your head since childhood, the first thing I would say is this: Of course you did. Of course it makes sense.

You grew up in a culture that has been relentlessly, creatively and profitably obsessed with women’s bodies. You didn’t invent that voice. It was installed early, reinforced often, and rewarded socially. The fact that it has been humming in the background for decades doesn’t mean you are shallow or vain or broken. It means you were paying attention.

The second thing I would say is this: Yes. It is absolutely possible to shift your mindset. Not necessarily into some Instagram-ready “I love every inch of myself!” place overnight. But into something saner. Kinder. Quieter. More spacious. Even appreciative. Even loving.

At 65, you have something you did not have at 25 or 35: perspective. You have evidence that your body was never the central story of your life. You achieved things. You loved people. You built a career. You had joy. And all of that happened while your thighs existed exactly as they were.

Our conversation proceeded, with Chat offering some simple steps for reframing my thinking.

It also added this, the first line of which made me laugh: At 65, your body is not an aesthetic project. (No kidding.) It is a companion. It is the vehicle that carried you through love, disappointment, work, children, loss, ordinary Tuesdays, extraordinary Fridays. You don’t have to adore it. But you can decide to stop being its adversary.

So, yes: I would have preferred to have reached this age liberated from old programming installed, in part, by coming of age during the Virginia-Slims 1970s and inhaling Glamour magazine — our era’s version of America’s Next Top Model.

I’d have preferred to have arrived by now at a more balanced and rumination-free mindset regarding my particular bag of bones. Most of the men I know seem pretty content with their bodies, on the whole. They, too, might watch My Cousin Vinny with eyes fixed on Marisa Tomei, but it’s hard to imagine they’re comparing themselves in any way to Joe Pesci or Fred Gwynne, or even the young Ralph Macchio.

With regard to body image, wise contentment isn’t yet where I find myself. Why is it so much easier to download these apps than to uninstall them?

Even so, I’m feeling optimistic. With a bit of work, more luck, and the the passage of more time, I might yet get there.

BOOK REVIEW

A Beautiful Blue Death
Charles Finch
In 1850s London, the wealthy amateur sleuth Charles Lenox is asked to apply his skills to the mysterious death of a housemaid who has been employed at the home of an acquaintance. Lenox quickly discovers the maid has been poisoned, and sets out to find the who and why of it all. This is the first in Finch's Lenox series, and it has a genial Sherlock Holmes feel to it (complete with a wise sidekick — Lenox's butler, Graham). It’s a standard, old-fashioned whodunnit and a pleasant diversion from life in the 21st Century.

THIS BEING VALENTINE’S WEEK, it seems the perfect time to catch up with a couple from one of the most iconic* love stories of modern times. And no, I don’t mean Taylor and Travis.

I mean Susie and Sam from “Muskrat Love.”

Now, I shan’t waste your time arguing the merits of the song, or even which hit version was superior (because it was obviously America’s, which is why I linked to theirs rather than to the Captain & Tennille’s, despite the fact that the latter rose higher on the charts with it. Travesty).

We have much more important agenda, namely finding out how things have been going since the ‘70s. Without further ado, then, I present …

Susie and Sam: The Interview.

Susie, Sam, good to be with you. Let’s start with the basics: What have you been doing in the 53 years since the band America dropped the first (and far superior) version of your song?

Susie: Good golly. Where do we even start?
Sam: Maybe with our greatest accomplishment, which has to be outliving the average muskrat lifespan by a half century. Soos and I feel pretty happy about that, don’t we? (Smiles at Susie.)
Susie: Not to mention the kids. We are the proud, proud parents of one-hundred and thirty-seven children, and frankly we lost track of the generations beyond that. I can only knit so many scarves at the holidays!
Sam: I called her fertile Myrtle!
Susie: Don’t be crass, dear.

Your relationship was famous for its gentleness, but be honest: Have there been any rough patches?

(Brief awkward silence.)
Susie: Well, there was that episode —
Sam (interrupting): Oh hush now, that’s ancient history.
Susie: I’m just saying, that dalliance —
Sam: It was NOT a dalliance, for goodness’ sake, you’re giving people ideas.
Susie: I had a few ideas, that’s for sure.
Sam: Are you going to force me to mention that winter you went off to find yourself?
Susie: Never mind, then.
Sam: That’s what I said.

Your names are always mentioned together, almost as a single unit. Has that caused any resentment? For example, Susie, did you ever want to be known for your own accomplishments?

Susie: No, I’d say it never was a problem. I have always felt a sense of deep appreciation, not only for finding my true soulmate in Sam, but also for the many individual accolades I earned over the years. I don’t mean to boast, but I’m sort of famous in baking circles. County fair. Church social. That sort of thing. Lots of ribbons.

Sam: Woman makes a darn fine blueberry buckle, is all I’m saying.

Over the years, your love story has been covered, parodied, and — let’s just say it — viciously mocked. What do you say to critics?

Sam: I say, “Where’s your taste, lads?”
Susie: And I say, who failed to hug you as a child?
Sam: A person must have a heart of stone to turn a cold shoulder on that sweet song.
Susie: Also, I know the trash that some of you listen to, friends, and it is NOT feeding your souls.
Sam: You tell ’em, dear.
Susie: Am I right?
Sam: Almost always, yessirree. ’Cept for the “dalliance.”

Let’s talk longevity. What’s your secret to staying together for so long — communication? Shared values?

Susie: Mutual respect.
Sam: And preserving a bit of mystery!
Susie: And learning the value of taking three deep breaths before responding.
Sam: Also, just LOOK AT HER!
Susie: Plus he smells good.
Sam: She’s a FOX.
Susie: Sammie!
Sam: The blueberry buckle doesn’t hurt, either.

Valentine’s Day question: How do you celebrate?

Sam: I tickle her fancy and rub her toes.
Susie, (giggling): Anything goes.

And finally, which is the superior version of the song that made you famous?

Sam: You’re kidding, right?
Susie: I’m surprised you’d even ask.
Sam: It’s obvious.
Susie: What was with his ridiculous ship’s captain trope, anyway?
Sam (shaking his head): Embarrassing.
Susie: Although she did have a nice voice.
Sam: Nice enough, I guess. Not my favorite.
Susie: Honey, let’s go home now. I’ll play the piano.
Sam: And I’ll sing.

Notes

*Re: “most iconic”: I use it only ironically, because good grief! What has happened to language!

First of all, e v e r y t h i n g is “iconic” these days. Cars! B-level celebrities! Sandwiches! Every night I pray for peace and that people will stop overusing “iconic.”

Second, “iconic” is a non-modifiable adjective. Either something is the epitome of an era or category of thing, or it isn’t. There’s no “most” nor “very” nor “extremely” about it.

Thanks for letting me get that off my — oh, never mind.

BOOK REVIEW

Vigil
George Saunders

IT ISN’T THAT OFTEN THAT one finds a need for the word “phantasmagorical,” but it surely pops to mind when the topic is George Saunders fiction. Weird, otherworldly and shape-shifting vibes are his specialty, but he uses that sensibility to examine the most human of problems. In his last masterpiece of a novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which is set in a chatter-filled graveyard, that problem is grief. In this new book, Vigil, the question is nothing less than whether humans have free will.

So if you’ve ever heard it said that, “Everyone is doing the best they can” and wondered but are they really?, you might just love Vigil.

Clocking in at a mere 179 pages, Vigil has the physical weight of a novella and the psychic weight of the world. Our protagonist is Jill “Doll” Blaine, who died young and violently, and whose sacred calling in the Hereafter is to bring comfort to the imminently dying.

She usually succeeds, but this time her charge is K.J. Boone, a wealthy oil man whose life of power and privilege depended on obfuscating the influence of his industry on the climate. Boone is an arrogant son-of-a-gun, but Jill is determined to bring him comfort until a character known as the Frenchman shows up with plans to force Boone to repent.

Can it be done? Like many of us, Boone is quick to own his wins and justify his sins. Jill is, at first, inclined to let this go. She believes a man ultimately must be forgiven his weaknesses because, as she puts it, “Who else could he have been but exactly who he was? He seemed, if I may say it this way, inevitable. An inevitable occurrence, upon which, therefore, it would be impossible, even ludicrous, to pass judgment.”

But her theory is tested by Boone’s thoughts and deeds and by the Frenchman’s extreme efforts to get the old man to admit he has been wrong.

While Boone is the object of this novel, Jill is, ultimately, the subject. As the story unfurls, she trips down memory lane and must decide what she believes about human fallibility.

Funny and moving, incisive and wildly imaginative, Vigil suggests, “To judge or not to judge — that is the question.”

I’m judging this one extremely satisfying. And I’m likely to reread it soon.

P.S. Here’s a pretty good interview of George Saunders by Ezra Klein. Although, speaking of judgment, I think Klein talked too much.

My Facebook friend Jajai asked me this question yesterday: I am so distraught and sickened by the callous and downright cruel comments a lot of people are making about Alex Pretti’s murder. Do you have any words of comfort for me and the multitude of other decent people who feel the same? (The only thing I can come up with is thank God I’m not like them - even if that means being distraught and sickened on a daily basis.)

THIS GOES RIGHT TO THE HEART of what so many of us are experiencing right now, so I wanted to share a slightly edited version of my answer in case it’s helpful for even a moment or two. Writing it was. Helpful, that is.

Hi Jajai,

I have thought about your question and offer a few insights for consideration.

First: Yes, you and I and so many good people are appropriately distraught and distressed by the events of this dark era. We are supposed to be repelled by cruelty and inhumanity. So I want to remind us both to take comfort in our discomfort, for it means our hearts and souls are functioning properly. Painfully, yes. But properly.

Having spent time over the last few weeks spiraling in my own tortured questions about why the souls of so many fellow Americans seem not to be working properly, I now admit that the answers have not arrived and are not likely to.

I can set down the task, then, of figuring out this horrible puzzle. There might be someone who understands the abject cruelty of those who have wreaked havoc on lives in Minneapolis, and those who celebrate it, but that understanding is not yours or mine. The fixing of their souls will happen, or not, on someone else’s time.

There’s real comfort in that, too, but it requires sitting for a while before relief sets in.

I have spent many hours now focused on the discrete moments of the executions of two Americans at the hands of our government. I have watched and rewatched actual video of these crimes. I have played and replayed these scenes in closeup on the movie screen behind my eyes. I have been frozen in place, stuck with these good, normal human beings at the moments of their dying in storms of cruelty. I keep wanting the movies to turn out differently. They keep ending in tragedy.

Today as I stood in line at the post office, I succumbed to more obsessive reading in the New York Times app about nurse Alex Pretti’s death. I was scanning the transcript of a person describing Alex’s last moments as shown via various video vantage points. When the narrator reached the part where Alex’s assassin put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, I yelped.

Out loud. In the post office.

No one reacted.

I HAVE NOT BEEN ALL RIGHT, and that weird, embarrassing moment forced me to see it, albeit not for the first time. Sounds like you are not all right, either. I have been stuck in a freeze-frame with Renee Good and now with Alex Pretti, much as I was stuck for decades after my brother Greg died violently in a car accident back in the ‘80s. I could not stop thinking about that very worst moment of Greg’s life. I am embarrassed to say that this scene eclipsed any joy I had in remembering his life before that moment.

As it was after 9.11.85, when Greg died (when Greg was killed, as my father always put it), and again after the terror attacks of 9.11.01, I forget that the dead themselves do not get stuck in their own terrible last moments. They are alive one second and then suddenly not, at which point they shrug off the chains of this world and, I feel sure, are lifted into the glories of the next. Perhaps not to heaven as we are taught by religious tradition, but perhaps something better.

And if the dead could still be here, I am sure they would place their hands on our shoulders and tell us to waste no more time thinking about the cruel ones. They’d remind us to take just a few steps forward to do the next right thing. To do our jobs. Feed the squirrels. Run our households and care for our loved ones. Be righteous citizens.

They would remind us, I think, that we have a responsibility to run better movies in our heads — the ones where everyday people commit ordinary and miraculous acts of love and creativity in this, yes, glorious world.

I’m a big fan of Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax. The other day, Hax’s column concerned a woman who was suddenly dumped by her partner and kicked out of their home. The cruelties mounted. She learned that when she’d been on a trip, her partner had let his side piece use her toiletries and drive her car.

The letter writer wasn’t asking Hax how to get over the loss of her love. She wanted to know how to feel safe again in her own skin after experiencing such a terrible shock.
Part of Hax’s fulsome response made such an impact on me that I took a screenshot to keep it handy on my phone.

“There are basically two responses to a shocking experience like yours, where it stops being theoretical that life can come for you at any time, no matter what, and becomes all too real,” Hax wrote. “The first is to be on constant watch for life to strike again. Ever on alert, never trusting.”

This was me for the first 30 years after Greg died. This was me for the first 20 years after terrorists flew planes into buildings on 9/11.

“The second,” Hax continued, “is to say to yourself: ‘It seemed unbearable at times, especially thinking I could be so wrong. But I cried, worked hard, used the support I still had and got through it. And I feel strong for knowing I have that in me.’”

“Maybe that’s the only ‘safe’ there is: internal,” Hax said. “Confidence in a strength that can be summoned if we need it again.”

Confidence in our own strength to endure. Boy, could I have used that that perspective years ago. It never occurred to me that feeling grief and pain wasn’t the same as being helpless. All those years, I never thought to notice that I managed to keep going, which is a form of strength, and that if the bottom fell out again some day, I could rely on that same strength.

Here we are, then, living in the shock and bearing life in all its unbearability. We fixate on the reality of government executing American citizens in the streets. We allow ourselves to be obsessively drawn toward proof of the oozing cruelty with which far too many of our neighbors have responded.

But. We bear the horror by remembering that, no matter what, love always lives alongside fear and hatred here on Planet Earth. We get through it by recalling that we each have a well of inner strength to drink from when we are thirsty.

And we take comfort in holding two truths at once: We have to bear witness to our times and we also have to step forward into each new day, doing the next right, life-affirming, truth-seeking, loving thing.

Hope this helps. God bless.

I BEGIN TODAY by letting writer Patrick Ryan slip in here with the start of his latest novel:

Cal Jenkins was born in the spring of 1920 with one leg shorter than the other. Just two inches shorter, but that was enough to make plenty of things difficult. Balancing on a bicycle took twice as long for him to learn as it did for other kids. Track and field was out of the question. So was walking without a pronounced limp or going up and down a set of stairs without securing himself on the railing — until his father, amateur carpenter and junk collector, improved Cal’s condition by carving a new, thicker sole out of tire rubber and nailing it onto his left shoe. At school, boys made fun of the way Cal walked, then made fun of the shoe with the extra thick sole (someone noticed within an hour of the first day he wore it). But one boy — flush-cheeked and small for his age — pulled Cal aside during morning assembly and told him he was unique in God’s eyes. “I know,” the boy said, “because I am too. I can’t touch my toes, you see. I have unusually tight hamstrings.”

That’s the sparkling first page of Buckeye, a gorgeous, compelling literary novel about two families living their intertwined lives in Western Ohio during the World War II and Vietnam eras. Oh, but I probably should rescind “literary,” shouldn’t I? For some readers, “literary” conjures memories of drab, plotless snoozefests that started as someone’s MFA project.

While it is true that Ryan earned his MFA (at Bowling Green State University) it’s also evident that he is dedicated to the yarn, to the interior lives of fully imagined characters, to a great story unfolding through exquisitely smithed language. In this way, Ryan is like his fellow BGSU alum Anthony Doerr, who has a string of his own beautiful novels. Yes, now that I think of it, if you love Doerr you might well love Buckeye.

This may sound a bit like a book report, but I hope to make a deeper point. I often use this space to share what aids me in wading through the morass of life, and I find fiction helps. So if you like fiction, or you used to like fiction but got away from it, you should give Buckeye a go. It is almost guaranteed to nourish your heart and mind in a way the news and Facebook are ill equipped to do.

Some of us stand to benefit right now by turning more deliberately toward story, particularly through the kind of reading that asks us to focus. Smart phones have trained us to chase microdoses of dopamine. It’s gotten harder to latch on to anything that rewards sustained attention.

This is not news. But what are you doing about it? What am I?

Around the end of last year, I started forcing myself to carve out more reading time. My house is filled with books I haven’t read, novels I know will rebalance my psyche and restore a sense of humanity if only I will give them the love they deserve.

I’ve always got a book going, but over time I noticed I had gotten into the habit of reading with less vigor, more passively, and maybe with the expectation of being entertained rather than immersed.

SO I STARTED CHOOSING TO BRING more avidity back to what had become my flaccid reading life by just reading more and for longer stretches. Which meant becoming the tiniest bit less reactive to the lure of languorous time killers. I started leaving my phone in another room a little more often to pick up Buckeye, and found myself tumbling into Ryan’s world, falling in love with his characters, following him back to rural Ohio. I, too, once spent time at Bowling Green, an island of higher learning in a sea of soybeans and corn. It’s so far in every way from where I live now.

This is the thing about good novels: When we give ourselves to them deeply, we collaborate in the author’s world building, and for a time that world is as potent as the one we wake up to each day. In certain ways, the brain can’t distinguish between reality and what we vividly imagine. These places we visit through fiction can become important to our humanity, because we are formed and re-formed with every world we inhabit and new life we lead. Even the imaginary ones.

Sometimes at night, when the world has gotten to be a bit much, I long to take my brain out and set it on the nightstand with the hope of curing the kind of fatigue that normal sleep doesn’t relieve.

I’ve been doing a lot of that kind of wishing lately. Yet books really can help restore one’s factory settings. Artwork does that, too. And music. One of James Taylor’s sweet but lesser-known tunes, “Music” from Gorilla, has a line that goes

Don’t I dig the big time rock and roll
Sit in the darkness and be somebody else

Art of all kinds has the potential to sweep us into the darkness to become someone new. We enter another consciousness — that of a wanderer or a naval veteran, an orphan or a clairvoyant. We experience strange trials and never-dreamed-of triumphs.

Empathy grows.

Fatigue lifts, too, if only for a little while, but maybe just long enough to let us return to our lives, or even to the news, with our wits better gathered.

God knows I don’t want to reduce books to therapy; they’re so much more important than that. But I can’t deny that story tripping has therapeutic effects. It certainly does.

And we certainly need them now.

And then came Skylark

Buckeye is well in the rearview mirror, and I’ve recently finished Skylark by Paula McLain (The Paris Wife).

Paula is a friend, and I am a no-holds-barred fan of the human being and her writing. That said, it also happens to be true that her historical novel Skylark might just be her best. Brilliantly researched, richly imagined and deeply felt, Skylark follows two young Frenchwomen — one a 17th century dye-crafter’s daughter, one a Jewish girl on the cusp of adulthood in Nazi-occupied Paris — on their journeys to freedom.

Chef’s kiss.

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Dear reader,

It’s highly likely that if you are a regular or occasional reader of Thick Through the Middle, you appreciate the fact that it usually provides a break from The Horrors. I feel generally protective of that aspect of this ongoing project of mine, but at times I experience a strong urge to address the darker stuff. Mostly I resist doing so, reasoning that you come here for something else, and the world doesn’t need another opinion about what ails our nation.

And that is still true. But this week I just can’t not talk about it.

So if you’ve gotten only as far as my sweet old illustration — which today must do the work of being a peaceful island in an otherwise troubled space — I won’t take it personally if you decide to git now while the gittin’ is good.

We all need to protect our own humanity.

And of course, I welcome your continued attention if you decide to read on.

Either way, take good care.
xo
Karen

THE THING IS ...
... THEY LIED.

It’s probably true that Renee Good could have made a different decision about precisely where to be Wednesday morning. I have to confess that I’m a little angry that she seems to have taken the sort of risk that contained the possibility that it would leave her youngest child, whose father is dead, without any parents. I feel angry about that in the same way I become a little angry about moms whose military careers have them deployed for long periods of times when their kids are at tender ages. And the way I get angry at myself for weeks I attended writing workshops when my own girls were young.

All things being equal, I think, little kids deeply crave the presence of their loving mothers and they deserve our best efforts to guard our ability to be there for them.

So yes, I confess that I wish, for the sake of all three of her children but especially the little one, that Renee had decided to be someplace else on Wednesday.

That said, she had a right to be where she was, and an absolute and unassailable right not to die in her Honda Pilot at the hands of the Secret Police.

There isn’t a lawyer on the planet who could make me believe that Renee’s killing was even close to justifiable. I saw the thugs. The big men playing cops — rule-ignorant and probably a little short on actual testosterone, if you want to know the truth.

I saw them make one cowboy decision after another, rat-a-tat-tat, just as their ultimate bosses in the federal government do every goddamn day. They’re all fools who have been slipped too much power by the fools who live and vote all around us.

And all of that is terrible, tragic, infuriating and yet ... that’s not even the worst part.

LIKE SO MANY PEOPLE, I went to bed soul sick Wednesday night, having been saved only by my dog and a few Instagram comedians. I have come late to learning to regulate my emotions in ways that don’t involve calories, so I muddle through as best I can.

I was sick about a thoroughly preventable death, yes, but mostly because They lied.

They called her a terrorist when they knew she was not.

Said she ran over an ICE agent when she had not.

Said she sent agents to the hospital when we saw them ambling around after they had killed her.

Claimed medical help was rendered quickly when we heard them refuse to let a physician on scene get anywhere near her.

They invented stories so provably, breathtakingly false that thinking people can only conclude what we have concluded many times before by now: Our power-soused despot and his minions do not care if we believe them. They do not care that we know they’re lying. Being believed falls so far down the list of their concerns, it kisses the gates of Hell.

You know what kind of officials don’t care whether the plebes believe them? Authoritarians. Authoritarians cheerfully make it all up and give it to you straight-faced for the pure pleasure of knowing there’s nothing you can do.

Authoritarians also send masked thugs into neighborhoods with no accountability, zero transparency. They watch people die and tell you it’s for your own safety.

Honorable leaders of democratic nations don’t do that.

This is why my soul is sick: because I saw a young woman be needlessly killed, and then I saw the despot lie, and watched that absurd woman with the bad skin and cowboy hat lie some more, and then I heard the multiple-fake-name national embarrassment of a vice president blame the victim, and ...

... they all know we know better

... and it does not bother them at all

… and the peril in that is absolutely chilling.

Something about how everything unfolded on Wednesday woke up a part of me I didn’t even realize was still sleeping.

It whispered, Hey! Time’s up, Sweetheart. The authoritarians really are here, and it’s going to get far worse before it gets better.