I have been listening to this witless noise for years; it’s the shuffle-swish sound a milk ring makes as our cat Rosie bats it around the back of our basement.

Living with a cat is training for odd activities, like the reading of poetry, where the more you pay attention, the more fun you have. If you don’t feel like paying attention, why bother?

We have, as I’ve casually mentioned before, four cats. I rarely bother explaining or defending anymore. When the urgent stirrings of love hits teenagers, sometimes you get babies. Others of us break out in cats.

Rosie is our hockey player, writ small. Very small. She weighs about eight pounds and most of that is, I swear, in the black patches that mottle her white fur. There’s a big patch that fits her back like a slipping saddle. A different black patch fits down over her entire head like Snoopy’s Sopwith Camel aviator helmet. When she closes her eyes half her face disappears.

The first years she lived with us she was a dishrag addict who spent much of her time and energy hunting for damp rags and then transferring them to secret places. There was the year we took our Christmas tree down, lifted the protective plastic sheet on which we’d set it, and found enough dishrags to, well, make us laugh really, really hard.

Somewhere along the line Rosie changed her focus and isn’t that a mystery? When was the day you stopped loving your first love? Do you know how or when or why? It was like that. We knew Rosie had a thing for dishrags. Then some uncharted moment happened in her life and dishrags were left behind like perfect memories of a gentler, younger time when women wore hats and men were princes.

We moved to the Age of Milk Rings. Now when one of us twists the milk ring loose, causing that tiny snapping noise, well, watch out. Suddenly, barreling down the hall, or pitter-pounding up the basement stairs, or leaping from furniture in the living room, comes Rosie -- a tiny Paul Revere risking all in her wild, soft-pawed gallop to the kitchen.

She skids to a stop under our feet, lifts her front paws up the front of the cabinets, and loudly meows that whoever has the ring should hand it right over. We always oblige, often by setting it gently on her nose. This makes her cross-eyed a moment, which only makes her more dear. She then drops her paws back to the floor, the ring falls to the tile, and kitty hockey begins.

Passion does not live in a vacuum. Rosie loves milk rings so much that our other three cats have, over time, evolved into fellow hockey players. Various cats bat the ring as long as it takes to lose it under the stove or refrigerator. Sometimes they get it as far as the family room. (We pulled out the sofa last week. You don’t want to know...)

The next day the other cats are back to their naps as Rosie plays solo hockey with random rings she carries downstairs to slap hither and yon. Often she will bring a ring to me, drop it on my keyboard, then chat at me with great animation. I respond to her remarks and then drop the milk ring on the floor next to me. Sometimes this makes sense to her and she chases it some more. Other days it’s too hard to figure out where the ring went so she takes a nap instead.

Quite a few pictures that mean something to me are thumb-tacked to the wall next to where I write. One is a photograph from a war zone where a middle-aged woman is standing in front of a bombed-out building that, I think, was the apartment building in which she used to live. It’s winter. She’s wearing a thick scarf over her head and a heavy coat.

Tucked inside the coat, cradled in her arms, is a small gray cat.

Behind the two of them is a bleak and sorrowful scene of despair and destruction yet the cat’s eyes are closed as if it is purring. It has a paw curled around the woman’s lapel as if it’s trying to hug her. The cat looks warm, comfortable, and utterly at peace. The woman who has lost everything is sharing all she has left; her arms and her coat, to make one small cat feel safe.

The less I understand the meanness, greediness, and self-righteous violence in our world, the more I am moved by the stunning gift it is to love and keep safe a small creature.

And this is our current cat Susan.

I’ve only ever been proposed to twice. Once was from my husband, though frankly, that was more of a startling conversation than a proposal.

The only actual, “Will you marry me, Mary Beth?” moment of my life happened in a wildly romantic moment on the South Hamlin Elementary School playground when I was eight and so was Danny. We were on the swings, I was sitting, he was standing up and pumping so hard that we flew up and back almost as high as the fifteen foot bar from which we were suspended. He and I had been playing happily together for days. I answered yes, I really wanted to marry him but couldn’t because he was Catholic and thus, sadly, going to hell. But if he ever got “born again” to let me know and I was in. By the time I figured all this out (in my 20’s) he was in the FBI.

But the thing I really want to talk about here is not Danny but that playground. I went to the same rural school from kindergarten through eighth grade; I played on that playground nearly every day.

I was raised in an fundamentalist Christian church; the kind where there were actual debates about whether people who smoked cigarettes could go to heaven. Dancing, movies, and Ouija boards were stepping stones to the devil. An intense childhood, to be sure.

For me the playground was a salvation/damnation neutral area. It was where I could run, climb, screech, act, be a leader or be a follower as a slowly intuited for myself what kids were awesome and which ones not so much. It’s where I learned most of what I know about how to live among humans who are not worried about The Rapture.

We learned how to move; we girls were jump roping dervishes. One to three girls would run in and keep jumping as we all sing-sang, “Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack, all dressed in black black black, with silver buttons buttons buttons, all down her back back back…”

Some of us were better than others but we all were learning balance, cadence, patience, and the breathlessness of sheer joy. I still remember my mom asking me to try to jump rope without ripping out the hems of my dresses. The thing to understand is that back then we wore saddle shoes or Mary Janes that generally had sharp little corners on the heels; thus all hems were vulnerable to high-kicking hem-snagging. In jump-rope season our dresses dragged. We didn’t care. Exertion and precision were more fun than being cute to someone else. Some of us would become feminists. There’s a connection there.

Occasionally playground life was pretty intense. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis this way: a bunch of us were hanging out on swings, kicking our feet a little, some of us were leaning against the steel support poles. All of us were scared. All of us were sharing what we knew which was very little. We were trying to understand if and when we were going to be killed by an atom bomb. Yes, that was the conversation among a half dozen kids who were not yet ten-years-old. At home I was told not to worry because God always held us in His (sic) hand. On the playground we could worry out loud and together.

There was a particular girl in my class who was bright, hardworking, and kind but who also had some kind of muscle tone issue; she was a nice kid who was slightly different than the rest of us. The issue for me was that she esteemed me too much. I don’t know why. Probably because I was the kid who lived with a boatload of “you must be nice to everyone the way Jesus was nice to everyone” inside me. She intuited my inner scruples so she gravitated towards me. I was not the only kid who was nice to her; none of my classmates were jerks. Yet somehow nearly every morning that girl would ask, “Can I play with you today?” For nine years I’d answer that I was going to play with a lot of the kids so she could play with all of us, too. And then I’d make that happen.

I think that I became the leader that I often am today because the only way to not play with her one-on-one was to invent things for a bunch of girls to play at once. Which led to the year I brilliantly (?) suggested we start our own club which I named the “Dumb Nuts”. (Writers have to start somewhere?). We made name tags and we had meetings (what did we discuss?) on the monkey bars.

Decades later I would go to seminary and eventually create and lead groups in and outside of church congregations. I’m telling you now; most of that was modeled on the Dumb Nuts on the monkey bars. Name your committee, make some name tags, get together regularly, talk about what happened recently, what’s coming up, see if anyone has any hopes or goals. Accomplish a little but not much.

South Hamlin’s midcentury playground was rife with unsafe equipment. The slide was easy to tumble off sideways. The monkey bars were twelve feet high and looked like the steel skeleton of an igloo; it was easy to fall from an upper bars, hitting other bars on one’s way down. The merry-go-round sometimes caught and dragged kids. I witnessed all of the above accidents. Most of us learned what the pitfalls were and were careful.

The one fine October day one of those accidents found me. I was sitting on a teeter-totter chatting with Ruth Ann. Eddie walked by, grabbed her up-in-the-air end and slammed it down just to tease her. I rocketed upwards; there was no place to hang on through the physics lesson that was me. I returned to earth via the steel bar fulcrum.

I spent all that afternoon and many more hours over many years in dentist chairs dealing with the damage. I endured more medical trauma and Novocain injections than most kids have to deal with. In my family I was still regarded as the non-serious youngest, at church I was my parents’ cute kid, but in the dentist chair I was me. I found within myself the mettle to mostly stop crying, shut my eyes, and endure. Enduring is a very hard skill.

South Hamlin’s playground also had five horizontal steel bar of increasing heights. By first and second grade we could straddle the lowest bar which was about three feet off the ground. With one knee bent and the other leg locked behind, we’d plunge forward, downwards, and then, if all went as planned, back up to sitting. Really cool girls could do this several times in a row. I could do two.

As we became taller and stronger we moved up the bars. I tried for weeks to be able to clasp the bar that was about shoulder height, then kick up and forward to swing my whole body over. The first time I actually did this my over-the-top glee was exactly the same as the first time I was published.

By sixth grade I was strong enough to hang from the tallest bar to pull myself from a stationary hang into a chin-up. I could barely do this twice but I remember the day an eighth grade boy watched me and said I was good. I was stunned, I hasn’t known anyone was watching. Some random older man (I was ten, he was maybe twelve?) told me I was strong so I believed him. A lot of adults were telling us all who to be and how to behave, yet another kid telling me I was strong was powerful.

For all the regular sane and insane reasons, girls and boys didn’t often play together. This began to change as we became 7^th and 8^th graders interested in actual sports. Everything I know to this day about basketball (and I don’t know much) came from playing it on the macadam court at the back of our sandy playground. I remember running like crazy, yelling to teammates, sometimes aiming and shooting at the basket. There were kids who could actually make a basket, not me, but I loved the sheer sweaty fun of it anyway.

We also played volleyball with boys and I’m confessing right here that yes, I punched Bobby in the nose the day I thought he was cheating. Teachers were amazed at my unexpected violence. (I’m proud to say I’ve punched no one since.) On the playground I experienced anger that rises like lava. I learned how easy it is to lash out. I decided I hated the way it felt.

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Yes, a lot of people have bad playground memories. I talked with friends just this morning who said they remember the low intensity but unrelenting bullying and being bullied.

I’ve probably spent too much time remembering what happened all those years ago. But here’s what I’m wondering.

There are so many words about how we ought to act, about who’s moral, and about who’s a scumbag. We live in a sea of words and cautions and announcements and expectations about how we are “supposed” to act now that we are whomever we are.

Yet what sticks with us grows out of movement, out of talking with others when we are scared or worried. We grow out of what we do and where we ramble. We grow out of the challenging things we attempt more than the old tricks we know how to do without thinking.

So if we need more courage or self-esteem or whatever, maybe we should find some monkey bars. Maybe we can’t Double Dutch anymore but I bet we can jump higher than we think.

The merging from movement to knowing who we are is fascinating and is worth playing at. And who knows, maybe there is someone out there who will ask us to be their one true love for a while.

I wrote ‘A Fairy Tale Dinner’ and this week and it is posted in The Gullet. The Gullet is a Substack for stories about food.

The Gullet

A Fairy Tale Dinner

One of the (many) things that irritates me about being old is that there are so few fairy tales for people in their golden years. I mean, even if fairies don’t exist, wouldn’t it be nice to pretend they do? No one tells bedtime stories to us even though, frankly, we need them as badly as kindergartners need stories about vanquis…

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15 days ago · 3 likes · 3 comments · The Gullet and MaryBethDanielsonStories

This has been a rousingly positive experience for me. If you are a person with inconvenient hopes and dreams you might like this short but true tale of what it’s been like to become published in The Gullet.

I’ve been writing most of my adult life. Obviously, when I finish something I try to get it posted somewhere but, as you may have heard, the publishing world does not have open arms. It’s disheartening and dysfunctional that civilization operates this way. Where people who are creative (all of us?) learn to rarely mention our projects in public. Where bringing one’s best work into the light is regarded either as arrogance or as some contest we are supposed to win AFTER we have created whatever it is we create. Most of us don’t thrive where the official profit-driven world dares us to share our best stuff.

I’ve read the accounts by successful writers who sent their writing to dozens upon dozens of publishers. I’m glad to read their writing but some of us do not have that much time or patience. And yeah, there are agents in the world but getting them is also an “I dare you” proposition.

Just this week I watched Somebody Somewhere for the second time. The main characters are functional adults trying to find the confidence to be who they are. Sam sings gorgeously yet struggles to sing for others. The show is a powerful drama about the comedy and work of being your own grownup.

So anyways. As many of you know, I have a website https://marybethdanielson.com/ which Len built for me because he believes in my writing and, also, he enjoys being his own nerd.

After I won the Wisconsin Writers Association Short Fiction Award in 2023, “How Crow Got Out of Jail”, I wanted a venue where it might be easier to get new readers. https://substack.com/@marybethdanielsonstories/p-138500721

If you follow me, you know that when I write I put it at both of these sites. Some readers are here, some there. I am my own franchise?

I try to get new readers by submitting to sites other than my own but I don’t do this enough because I’d rather write than sell. Story of my life. But I try.

I found The Gullet on Duotrope, an online compendium of venues to which a person can submit their stuff. I emailed my story to them and then stopped thinking about it because mostly I get formatted rejection nopes. I have my own excel spreadsheet of rejected submissions. Fun.

Then in July I got an email from Greg and Kitty who collate the Substack Gullet. They LOVED my story and wanted to publish it. Though they publish nonfiction tales about food and, um, was my story fiction? Could we work on that?

I was flabbergasted. Someone wanted my writing even though I had gone sideways on precisely what their site features?

Well, of course I worked on it. Emails flew. I added true stories at the end of the story to explain where the fictional incidents came from.

You can read me today at The Gullet.

But I’m also here to tell you that the Gullet posts interesting writing about people and food. Each post is accompanied by an illustration by a real illustrator, which means each Gullet post is a venue for two folks who are putting their imagination in a place where they are welcome. Powerful stuff.

If you want to support people who support writers and artists, I’m encouraging you to subscribe to The Gullet. With payment or without, we can respect those who respect us.

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While we are talking about putting one’s best out there. Len wrote a book review at his website about A Review of Crisis of the Common Good/The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America by U.S. Senator Chris Murphy. https://lenlamberg.com/articles/we-are-winning-so-why-do-we-feel-so-crummy

Murphy’s questions are good and Len and I have been talking about his observations. How have we come to this place where leaders lead by magnifying our prejudices? Where rational folks are disparaged? And what can we do?

Also, a movie from Len! You may have never seen a caddisfly larvae before but now you can! Len’s website discusses it a bit. https://lenlamberg.com/articles/more-about-those-two-streams

It started raining this afternoon.

I found this essay which I wrote in 2006. I learned later that the rainbow Len and I saw appeared just as the daughter of friends was marrying her husband in a backyard wedding a couple miles from where we lived.

Here in 2026 our neighbors brought home their new baby a few weeks ago. Two minutes after he arrived here a rainbow arched over our whole street.

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Speaking of dogs (weren’t we?), Sally arrived into our family last weekend. She’s more Australian shepherd than not and she is eight years old. Her person had to move into a nursing home. Intermediate friends have been looking for a good home for her and here we were, a hundred miles from where she was, and karma got us.

Sally is tentative, anxious, quiet, has amber fur, amber eyes, and seems to love adult women best. I arrived home from errands about five minutes after she got here. When she heard my voice she immediately trotted over to herd my legs. She’s a full-hearted sheepherder and I am her newest and biggest sheep.

So this is part of the background of my rainbow story. You know … where animals appear two by two? We now have a brand new second-hand dog plus our original base station Becky. Two dogs and an ark. What else does one need?

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It was late last Saturday afternoon. My husband was sitting on the sofa with seventy-pound Dobermanish shepherd Becky sprawled next to him, her thunderously huge head snoring on his lap.

I was lounging sideways in my Big Chair. Sally was nervously perched close to me, ready, I presume, to save me from leaping into ravines or thickets.

Len and I were drinking some pretty good grocery store Chianti, puckering down some pretty good grocery store Pecorino cheese. All the kids were grown up and moved out, or over at a friend’s house, doing homework.

We’d been talking for a while.

It had been rainy and darkish all day.

I glanced out the window.

A patch of pure sunlight, off to the east, startled my eyes.

You know what I mean. The world is a gloomy, sooty Dickens novel until some startling moment when you see a sun-soaked spot of color. You lean forward.

“Hey, there’s sunshine out there on a tree!”

Right then, more sunshine poured onto more trees.

We grabbed our wine glasses and headed for the porch.

Evening was sailing in like a boat coming into a harbor on a pretty little breeze. The tops of all the trees in the neighborhood were lighting up from the setting sun. The air was moist around us from days of drizzle.

My husband asked, “I wonder if there will be a rainbow....” and one appeared. High, faint in the sky, a ghostly shimmer of colored light.

We kept watching. Like a cheap ending, the colors intensified. Rosy rose, see-thru blue, a skinny layer of verdigris, a band of violet.

What first occurred to me as I stared at the rainbow shapeshifting from nothing into Kindergarten art, was this. A rainbow doesn’t look natural. Our eyes are used to the organic nature of nature shaped by slow growth, dry years, flood, accidents, and hardship. We are used to dog fur hues, the blending greens of leave, trees, copses, the emerald of grass, the shadow of pines. We’re comfortable with imperfectly gorgeous flowers, a punctuation of bird feathers, meandering rivulets through mud, the way clouds pile and scud across the sky in palettes of whites and silver.

A rainbow is unnaturally weird. Always the same. Those irreducible colors. That perfect arch that you never see in things that grow or tumble or weather away.

A double rainbow appeared under the first rainbow. Then another materialized high and pale over the bright one. I kept watching, wondering if the whole sky would break into stripes.

And then I started wondering what it was like to be Noah. Before one knew the “Arky-Arky” song. Before we “knew” rainbows mean importantly religious God promises. Before we knew the physics lesson that rainbows are light breaking into parts through a prism of water drops.

What would it be like to look up and see a rainbow bridging from one side of everything you know, to the other? It must have been something. Those brilliantly curved transparencies that are utterly different from everything we tramp across in our muddy, bumbling world.

But as I thought about it some more what continued to hold my thoughts was this.

The coolest mystery is not what rainbows are. But what we are.

We are beings who need to know what a thing means. We see something inexplicable; we mull it over. We fuss. We tell a story, spin out a tale, hammer that mystery into some metaphor for how it feels to be us.

Our ancients kept seeing those rainbows after rain when the air shimmers, when earth smells the ozone scent of life. The sky goes from too dark to too light and then there might be a rainbow.

There must have been a thousand rainbow stories told over time and space.

Look at the one that stuck. There was a Big Being. He got disgusted with the selfish casualness of too many of earth’s beings and set a flood to clear us out. Along the way She saved one eccentric family plus all earth’s wild, lovely animals.

This is the kicker dénouement to the story we kept.

When the world was saved, the Big Being said, “Never again. I will never wipe it all out this way again.”

When the ancients didn’t understand what was going on the story they told and the story we still choose to hear is this one. A story that starts with disgust and ends with grace and mercy.

Human life on earth is plagued with wicked meanness. But we also have, right here in the middle of us, affection, endurance, and a passion to live lives that are worthy.

We are bowled over by the circus of sweet old dogs and all the other awesome, beautiful, wacky animal life around us. By birds and peace. By the way life feels when we finally come through a siege of grief.

We have chosen, by the story we kept, to look upon rainbows as reminders to seek rightness and be thankful.

That we are not the first people to need this assurance and reminder - this comforts me.

I will shield the details but tell you what happened this week that struck me hard.

I volunteer one morning shift per week at the Food Pantry of Waukesha County. (Many volunteers work several days per week and will often come in to staff slots when regulars can’t make it.)

I was leaving after a long morning, getting into my car when the middle-aged woman in the driver’s seat of the van next to me addressed me. An older woman was in the passenger seat next to her.

“Miss?” She was talking to me.

“Yes?”

“My friend here wants to enroll for some help but we can’t figure out how to do this. Do you know?”

“I don’t really know since I don’t volunteer with that part of the program. But I can find out. Hold on, I’ll go ask.”

I went back into the building and found someone who found someone. “All she has to do is stand in the line. We will register her on the spot. And we are opening in ten minutes.”

I told this to the ladies. The older one got out of the car and walked, with a small limp, to the line. She was dressed in a nice dress, simple sandals, and she had applied her makeup very carefully. As she smiled I could see she was struggling to not cry. She was utilizing a small, simple medical device. It seemed likely to me that she’d run into a medical situation for which had probably been prescribed an item that blew her careful budget.

She looked like my mom. Like my mom’s friends. This was an older single woman. Something happened. She doesn’t have enough this month for groceries. The woman driving the van appeared to be a neighbor or maybe someone from her church. Not a relative.

I’ve been to reading how SNAP benefits are being cut now. It’s varying from state to state, but it’s happening.

Having angry political opinions in one thing. Watching an 80-year-old woman, dressed as carefully as she can manage, limp across a parking lot to get in the line to obtain food at a food pantry … this is so real.

I don’t know what to say other than here we are. Contact your representatives. Give money to food pantries. Volunteer if that works in your situation. Think fierce thoughts.

Do your best, friends, to do something.

Aristotle wrote a lot of important stuff, very little of which I’ve read. But this Aristotelian idea is cool and I don’t know why we are not taught this in high school. It helps untangle why we are reading what we are reading and watching what we are watching.

When a writer writes a play or some other format for public consumption, people in the audience generally identify with the main protagonist of the story. If the writer ends the play in such a way that goodness is preserved, then people leave the theater or TV show or book feeling okay. If goodness is left unprotected and hanging, they leave jittery and distressed.

Artists who produce stuff for the public generally know this and if they don’t they should. Artists influence what we will do or not do by manipulating our emotions.

Our current world, if we are paying attention, is awful. Right? The travesties of greed and injustice are endless.

How do we even breathe in such a world as this?

In the past few years Len and I have streamed-binged SO MANY detective shows where the leading character is a detective with some kind of haunting story in their past. Although, because they are “private” they rarely talk about their traumatic past. You know this plot, don’t you?

Why are there SO MANY detective shows with lead characters like these?

The clue, I think, is in the Aristotelian observation that we follow what soothes us. We get wrapped into a drama. While we watch we are curious and anxious but then everything works out except for the one surprising event which hooks us into watching the next show.

People are anxious. How do we live while we witness so much cruelty and injustice? How do we live fully without losing our sanity and or hope?

It would be crazy (if I even knew) to tell you what to do with your feelings of both power and powerlessness. When I write stories I try my best to not solve issues but to give my protagonist a situation in which they can act and make a little difference.

I know many people - and you may be one of them - who avoids X/Twitter, BlueSky, Instagram, and other online news outlets. I think it’s because one cannot handle the distress one feels when they read about ICE, or the latest corruption tale, or the genocide against Palestinians and in Lebanon, or famine and epidemics in developing nations. And more. We become riled and upset. We don’t think we have power so, in order to feel calm in our lives, we avoid learning what’s going on.

This is probably why broadcast news shows nearly always end with some “feel good” story. So that out horror will tamp down, and we will feel okay, and thus come back the next night so they can sell us more pharmaceuticals.

It’s the dynamic going on now and, friends, it’s been going on ever since people became people. The answer is to bravely continue to learn and care. Write letters and call people in power. Protest and boycott. Donate money.

And THEN watch a detective show.

Not sure If I wrote this for you or for myself.

Len Lamberg is my husband. Len has created a website for himself via the content management system Drupal. And no, there’s no way to subscribe although you can follow him on Facebook; he posts new stuff there. Mostly you just have to go look at his website from time to time to see what he’s put there lately. Kind of like a low rent museum.

https://lenlamberg.com/

On one of our early dates he was talking about the play Hamlet and I was talking about existential eschatology (not kidding, that was the conversation). When he quoted Hamlet’s line “This most excellent canopy, the air” I thought he said “Post-exilic anomy.” I was utterly impressed at Len’s perfect line (which was mine, you see the joke here?). It took us a while to figure out where each of us had gone. Our life has been like this. We bounce off each other and sometimes we bounce so hard we completely miss each other. But it’s interesting.

Both if us grew up in families that were half secure and loving, half unpredictable and weird. What, you never tried to align premillennial religion with upper middle class alcoholism? Reading was and continues to be the pressure relief valve of our lives. When readers like us meet each other, whoosh, life becomes an ever-spouting fountain of words, thoughts, observations, and opinions.

This quote is from Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, which I’m reading this week. “A text – a book – is a resting place for the memory of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”

And here we are.

Len and I write in different directions. You know how I write. My essays and columns are about what I see and care about. My fiction is often about older women because I think we’ve been short-changed in literature. As if we are placeholders and not actual human beings with interior lives.

Len loves science and technology. He observes the world carefully – often from his bike. His brain works in series and steps; he’s exceptionally patient once he understands where he wants to go and what he wants to accomplish. He’s always looking for underlying structure. Since high school he’s carried a camera most of the time.

We are in the part of our lives where we look back. Len’s going through old slides and sometimes he publishes them at his website. I love his photos from a grain elevator fire that happened in Alberta, Canada, in 1973. https://lenlamberg.com/articles/fire-prairies

I will try to alert you when he puts new things at his site, but right now, I want to let you know Len is visiting old places and writing new thoughts. Some of you will want to look.

It’s two writers and no waiting in our messy one-cat office.

I wrote this post about Solstice in 2015 and here we are this weekend.

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This Stonehenge was built by Bill Reid, an artist in Racine. He biked on Lighthouse Drive often, I walked that road nearly every day, and that is how we first met.

These dates and times are updated for Solstice 2026 in Wisconsin.

Are you aware we are at summer solstice? This Sunday, June 21^, the sun will rise at 5:10am and set in the evening at 8:36pm. Fifteen and one half hours of light! Yes, I know, it’s going to rain and probably be cloudy, nevertheless, it is a lot of daylight!

So as we are celebrating the dads in our lives the world will be tipping over the edge of itself from growing light to waning light. Do the dads know this is how we are honoring them?

Most of us are only the second or third generation of all human beings on earth who need to be reminded that it’s solstice. Electric lights and jobs not on farms have removed us from hundreds of thousands of years of people marking their lives by solstices, equinoxes, and phases of the moon. Astronomers and our Wiccan friends still have these markers in mind.

Every major holiday that is not political comes to us from the passage of light through time. Christmas, Easter, and Halloween. School’s out for summer. When I worked in the jail, many deputies and correctional officers claimed they could tell a full moon by the behavior of inmates.

Anyways, many of our fairy tales and superstitions, our nursery rhymes and old hymns built over the structure of older songs, all come to us from poems and tales told to mark time. Babies are born. Old ones sinking into dark places. Seasons pull young men and women into the shenanigans of lust and love. Stories of old people who try to steal youth.

If you ask me if I believe as an article of faith there is magic or power in particular times of the year, I will say mostly no. Humans are not directly affected by stones, solstices, sun, moon, and seasons. We have agency and responsibility and we can’t really blame our lives on moon shadows.

But, also, if you ask me if we are, well, susceptible to the dew before dawn, Scottish rocks at Beltane, owls at equinox, and magic that slip-slides from other worlds into ours and then back – well, maybe. I wouldn’t lay down money on claims that we know what’s going on in the universe. Sometimes myths and seasons makes more sense than the limited amount of facts we are going on here..

…

Len and I married in June and then we went to Europe on our honeymoon. And not just one more admirable tour of this or that. Nope, we went to the genuine pig farm in Denmark where I’d been an exchange student as a teenager. I introduced Len to the Bjerres and it was the beginning of adult friendships among the people with whom I’d been a kid. Some of them might be reading this now.

On that 1981 Midsummer we were staying with Annette and her husband in a village not far from Odense which is, no kidding, the home town of Hans Christian Andersen. Towards evening Annette made a giant pitcher of sangria. Some of her friends gathered other strong and lovely alcohols. At around 10PM we gathered at a tucked-in hollow in the side of a big hill not far from Annette’s house. We walked there when it was still light. I could hear murmurings of people.

When we walked over the edge of the hill, I saw that we were in a long valley. Up and down the sides of the hills were puffs of smoke coming from small bonfires at other hidden hollows. I could see at least a dozen fires with people gathered around each one. All those sons and daughters of Vikings were carousing on Midsummers night to banish the few hours of darkness until morning. Singing and laughter sounded through that valley as we sat on logs around our fire. Someone played a guitar. I remember “Michael, row the boat ashore” and then a lot more songs I didn’t know. Len and I hummed a lot. And drank the sangria. And beer. And schnapps.

I don’t remember how we got home. Scandinavians, in general, don’t celebrate Midsummer by driving someplace they will have to drive back home from.

It was the most amazing midsummer of my life as we did what humans have done for eons. Chase darkness with company, libation, song, and fire.

(Added note: a lot of babies are born in March in Scandinavia.)

So find your firepit. Or candles. Get booze or skip it and make something with rhubarb and strawberries. Maybe real whipped cream. You’ll need an hour or more as dusk comes on and daylight fades. Find music and then find a place to lean back and rest your feet. Maybe invite some friends to hour fire or maybe just inveigle your mysterious cat to sit on your lap. Relax. But watch.

… … …

My friend and fellow writer Sam put together this for those of you who have more interest.

If you’d like to learn more about Midsummer celebrations, check out High Priestess Sam Silver’s Nordic Wiccan Instagram and Facebook page. She shares tips, historical snippets, traditions, and information for anyone who is curious about Nordic-inspired Wiccan practices.

You can also watch the annual Stonehenge summer solstice livestream on June 20–21. The event is traditionally streamed by English Heritage, allowing people around the world to watch the sunset and sunrise alignments at the monument.

If you need to freshen up the links: Stonehenge is

Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/nordicwiccan/

Instagram is https://www.instagram.com/nordicwiccan?fbclid=IwY2xjawSidV1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETF2alB3WkZNa3lhV1dsRFAxc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHjt-tlefQhtPc2uA4YjhKe6micMxXzvW53BRogMhtip5doSDQK2HpQxU_mUg_aem_7KI505NjFiAi3L0JTYzITw

· Geodes are spherical rocks packed with tiny hollows, crystals, and wonder.

· Geodes are diamonds for the rest of us.

· Geodes can cure depression (says MB) in adults who thought they weren’t captivatingly successful because they didn’t get rich, gorgeous, or famous - but then they became captivated by geodes.

· Geodes crack up when creationists come around.

· Geodes are kid bait for old people who want grandkids to come over.

· If you are near when someone (maybe you?) is tapping at the side of a geode, or cutting into it with a diamond saw, or ratcheting a pipe cutter around it .. does that moment make your heart flutter? Opening geodes can be as exciting as new love waiting for a first kiss.

Two weeks ago we visited our friend Otis, and his helper-friend David, in Warsaw, Illinois which is across the Mississippi River from Keokuk, Iowa. Did you know that Keokuk / Warsaw is a geode meccas?

I knew because Otis has given me a few geodes over the years. He’d never hunted for them himself but his brother Mike lives adjacent to a former gravel quarry where geodes are plentiful. Mike gave some to Otis who gave some to me.

When Len and I decided to visit Otis I asked if we could look for geodes and that is how this all happened. (For those who wonder where Len is in this story, he was fishing. We ate two Mississippi catfish that night.)

Mike warned that one gets TO the geodes by hiking THROUGH tick infested poison ivy. Oh yeah. We wore old clothes, pants tucked inside socks, long sleeves, gloves, and hats and after that we sprayed on a layer of bug repellant. (When the jaunt was over we switched back to regular clothes, ferried the geode outfits back home in a closed bag, and did laundry immediately. This system worked.) Also, it was about 90 degrees that day. I got so steamy that I sort of became my own flan.

Our guide was a friend of Mike’s. Nick is knowledgeable about geodes and experienced at hunting for them. He also often gave a hand to Otis or me as we climbed up and down the hillocks, hummocks, piles, and rifts of loose and unstable gravel that ringed the quarry. Otis has Parkinson’s, I’m merely old, and that terrain was pretty much some doctor’s next swimming pool just waiting to happen.

It took five minutes to get through the gauntlet to the rocks. Then, quickly, geodes were everywhere! Round gray rocks that looked like petrified cauliflower. Small ones like mandarin oranges. Some big as baseballs. A few nearly the size of basketballs.

Some had already cracked open, probably when driven over by the gravel company equipment of yore. Most were still roundish. Nick would pick up one to explain something and I’d patiently put out my hand and he’d eventually give it to me. My backpack ended up so heavy that Nick wore it for me as we ambled up and down those gravel rifts around the desolate quarry lake. We picked up rocks, sweated, chatted. Listened to Nick explain how the rusty hues on the outside indicated the possible color of crystals on the inside. Some geodes were filled in; when one opens them they are nearly solid with glittery crystals. Others have the evocative geode trademark “cave” inside the.

There’s a huge amount geode info online if you care to know a lot. Just google “geodes” and that rabbit hole will suck you in for hours. Ask me how I know.

But what struck me was simply this. Earth’s geology around us looks eternal but, boy oh boy, it is not. Highways travel through a cut open terrain; you see the layers. Many of earth’s coolest travel destinations are places where we can see the layers of the earth such as the Grand Canyon or Badlands.

Each layer tells us what was going on in that geologic era. Yet before it was the pale strata of rock we see now, each layer was zillions of years of plants, weather, animals, and more plants. Trees, daisies, birds, seaweed, mammoths. When and where the climate was warm, there was one kind of world. Where there were endless shallow seas there were different plants and animals. Sometimes ginormous volcanoes blew or meteorites exploded into the earth to send up overwhelming amounts of dust and riffraff that would obscure earth’s atmosphere for years, blocking sunlight, changing the climate again. Lightning struck, massive fires could decimate great swaths of earth. Glaciers, jungles, floods, deserts. The earth isn’t impermeable rock underneath us. Earth’s detritus slowly decays and then filters down into itself. Every single thing that grew or happened eventually collapsed and compacted under what came next. And yes, we are a future strata.

Geodes are rocks that begin to form with a gaseous bubble in the middle. You know how if you leave uncooked meat too long the plastic around it begins to puff a bit from the gasses of the decaying meat? Yeah, like that.

Rock forms around the bubble. Groundwater trickles down, bringing various minerals with it. That water catches in the little hollows where the gas bubbles were a couple eons ago. The water slowly evaporates. Leftover minerals form crystals. And Bob’s your uncle.

There are other ways geodes are formed. See the afore mentioned geode rabbit holes. But this is how these geodes happened. And I got to pick them up off the ground, carry them until Nick carried them, watched as he cracked some open. Len shone a black light at the one. All geodes are old stories and everlasting beauty.

…

Geodes from the Keokuk area contain a variety of minerals, but quartz is dominant in most. Calcite is also a common and attractive mineral in many geodes, which occurs in a variety of crystal habits and colors. An additional seventeen minerals have been identified in Keokuk geodes. https://iowageologicalsurvey.uiowa.edu/iowa-geology/popular-interest/iowa-geodes

No other region in North America produces collectible geodes in this density. You can fill a 5-gallon bucket in an hour at most sites during the right season. https://rockhounding.org/rockhounding-articles/where-to-find-geodes-in-iowa

In Dr. Paul Hessert’s dogmatics classes, so long ago now, there was the day he talked about miracles. What he said was something like this. “The way to understand if a miracle occurred is not to investigate the magic but to observe what happens in the lives of those who were there.”

…

You’re a nice adult. Life gave you work, partners, kids, pets, passions and idiosyncrasies, too much to do and not enough time to do it in. And then, while you were swimming through it all, life eddied in a way that surprised you. Life kept flowing but more slowly, until, in what seemed like five minutes or maybe six years ago, here you are now in your quiet, beautiful place; astonished at how quickly it all happened. Now you have weirdly new feelings that sneak in behind you. Wistfulness, hunger, irritation, longing. You still join, still learn, still take care of others and yourself. But this is different and you are often as unsettled as when you were fifteen.

…

It was early in June and my backyard was fluffy with new leaves, blushing peonies in their impossible petticoats, riffling flags of lavender and purple irises. Which is probably why, at first I didn’t notice the fox. I was stirring my blueberry oatmeal while staring out the kitchen window. I have favorite songs that I stream in the background of my life and right then Mahalia Jackson was crooning If I Can Help Somebody.

Suddenly, I realized I was staring at a red fox sitting in the exact middle of my yard. And strangely, the fox was staring back at me. It was perfectly upright, its cinnamon fur glowed beautifully, its white ears glistened, its black socks were neatly pulled up. But I was startled. Foxes are clandestine; they don’t lollygag in backyards.

I turned the oatmeal low, covered it, then went to my back door and opened it. Through the screen door the fox was gazing at me with its intelligent amber eyes. It didn’t appear hurt, sick, or mangy. It was simply a creature with ears cocked towards me and my house, listening to Mahalia’s deep voice in my kitchen behind me.

You may question why I did this next thing but you weren’t there. I opened my screen door as the fox tilted it’s head. It stood up and walked to me and then the fox walked into my kitchen. It looked around, sniffed, and sat down in the middle of my tile floor.

We studied each other.

“Um. Would like some breakfast?”

It blinked.

I understood that it made no sense to have a fox in my house. I should probably worry about rabies or that disease where brains turn to mush. But you weren’t there. The fox’s fur shimmered. It smelled healthy-funky-earthy the way wild animals do. It was calm and alert, listening, watching, sniffing.

I kept talking though quite quietly. “You know, I’ve known some great folks but I’ve never personally known a fox. Are you feeling okay?”

It stared at me, tilted its head again as if to remind me it didn’t know English so I should keep it simple. Mahalia ended her song. The tinkling glass notes of Dragon Lullaby suddenly fell into the room, as soft and fresh as light rain. The fox looked around as if trying to find the rainy woods.

What could I do? I opened my refrigerator to pull out eggs and bacon. I moved the oatmeal off the burner and put the fry pan in its place because good hosts can stir up last minute scrambled eggs.

While the eggs cooked I buttered saltines and put them on a small plate. I dished a small plate with half the scrambled eggs. Then a pit together a third dish of the eggs and the bacon. I stopped a moment, smiled, and added half my blueberry oatmeal.

I set the cracker plate on the floor. The fox stood to move to the plate. As it crunched and smacked, crumbs fell from side of its mouth.

I put the first plate of eggs in the open doorway. The fox swallowed them quickly, then looked up at me as Leonard Cohen’s Yiddish Dance Me to The End of Love spun up into the air. It’s a hard, gorgeous, sad song about good love that is going and is then gone. I walked down my steps to the place in the lawn where this had begun. I set down the last platter of eggs, bacon, and oatmeal. The fox took it’s time biting, pulling up chunks to chew, licking its lips, then eating more. When everything was gone, I saw blueberry stains on its white chin.

That’s when the fox trotted away; its fluffy tail disappeared under the peony. A moment later the fox reappeared. I was on the top steps when the fox walked back to me with something in its mouth.

It dipped its head to drop a tiny wriggling lump at my feet. Which meowed. A tiny kitten, eyes barely open, whimpered.

I laughed a little, “You’re kidding? You were checking me out for kitten mothering?”

The fox blinked, went back to the peony bush, and brought me another kitten. I crouched to pick up the second baby to hold against my heart, next to its sibling.

The fox stood, watched the kittens, looked up at me and then, I swear, it leaned forward to touch my hand with its delicate muzzle.

Tears came into my eyes as the fox finally turned to walk out of my yard.

Well, I did the things you do with foundling kittens. A quick and expensive vet trip. Baskes and heating pads. Round the clock feedings.

A few friends came over more often to visit and help with Romulus and Remus. My granddaughter, who is perfectly eleven, came for a whole week that June to help me with the kittens.

These days the fox sometimes comes around once in a while to rest in my yard and I make it scrambled eggs or blueberry oatmeal.

Somehow, I am less wistful, less longing, more confident that my life counts to others and to myself as fully as it ever did. I still belong to the earth and I guess, it still belongs to me. Things still happen. One has to pay attention.

The photo is: By Rob Lee from Evergreen, CO, USA - Sunny Fox, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6072879

Memorial Weekend, 2026

The first official Memorial Day was May 30, 1868; it was designated as a day to honor Union soldiers who’d died in the Civil War. However, that date came on the heels of at least a half dozen earlier Decoration Days help in various communities throughout the north and south. That such a solemn day would spring up in so many places- and that here we are 158 years later still grieving and honoring members of the military with this federal holiday - says volumes about how much trauma we as Americans have known - and how long we have known it.

My grandfathers didn’t die in WWI although they both came home with gray shadows under the skin of their arms that were, they told me when I was as freaked out kid, shrapnel. I asked Grandpa Vic if it hurt; he said the metal bits sometimes moved a bit when weather changed. Oof.

My dad and uncle didn’t die in WWI although my mother’s brother was wounded. He told me decades later when I was old enough to have conversations like these, that in a foxhole you dream of home. Then when you come home you dream of that foxhole for years.

My brother was a medic in Vietnam. He didn’t often talk to me about that time though he once said that sometimes he waved to guys in the morning as they flew out on helicopters to wherever the battles were, and then, later that same day, he’d help carry the stretchers that brought their bodies back.

But then there’s this. We’ve turned Memorial Day into a long weekend for ‘outside fun.’ And, the shift to picnics, boats, camping, and driving somewhere for the weekend was pretty much brought to us by the men and women who survived those awful wars and now wanted something else.

ALL of us, in various ways, are veterans of what wars did to our veterans. This is a nation preserved and led by men and women who fought, witnessed, survived, and then brought their patriotism home with them. But it goes both ways. They were (and are) skilled and brave. Inventive and tough. Many also became enamored of power, bullying, felt entitled to a machismo that disrespects people in front of them they don’t like or choose. Too often their own kids and neighbors.

It’s easy to be cynical about a country that spends three days honoring soldiers while maybe giving a coffee mug to teachers.

…

I wrote a story about Memorial Day two years ago. https://substack.com/@marybethdanielsonstories/p-164247057

…

And on a lighter note about this weekend - this is from my 2006 Memorial weekend newspaper column.

The pet supply store is remodeled. Now when you walk in the small animals are up front in cages.

We haven’t had gerbils in our house since we had fourth graders so I went over to watch them. Each cage had about a half dozen of the little furry guys and it didn’t take long for one to catch my attention. I’ll say it was a he but you know I don’t know. No one knows the sex of gerbils except other gerbils. This guy was honey blond and as dizzy as a blond joke.

He really, really wanted to run in the wheel but brawnier gerbils (brawny gerbils?) were taking all the turns which meant he couldn’t get inside. Over and over this heartfelt gerbil would run to the wheel, try to climb on, not fit, and while he was hanging to the edge with his teeny paws the wheel would zip up and around, whipping our little guy into the air on the outside of the wheel until he tipped over the front edge whereupon the he would tumble off and down.

As they sometimes say about IQ’s; the gates were down, the lights were flashing, but the train just wasn’t coming through.

Perhaps I identified too closely but I started laughing and could not stop. I have been there, I know how hard you can want to get inside the hamster wheel.

My husband, returning to me with pet food stacked in the cart, looked at me oddly. “Do you want a gerbil?”

“No. I couldn’t stand the pressure.”

..

For those of us who are lucky to be alive and still living in liberty in May, small incidents fall around us like pedals off past-their-prime blossoms.

The Great Glory that was Prom is now over and our breathtakingly gorgeous Young People are back in jeans that are either too tight or too loose (Lautrec). Graduation is around the corner. Overachievers are slacking off. Our beloved underachievers are not worrying about how close they are cutting it, but we are.

The grass is growing too quickly; the cardinals have eaten all the newly planted sunflower seeds. Brownies have bridged into Girl Scouts and Girl Scouts have bridged into gangs of friends.

Teenagers are back on their skateboards, defying gravity while wearing no particular expression on their faces.

Cats are in the windows. Rainbow feathered birds are migrating north. You can now sometimes hear music through people’s open windows.

There is so much that is unspeakably awful in our world that it seems, as another summer begins, it would do our souls some good to notice and be thankful for what is small and right.

If you receive a message that says this is truncated - apparently you can ask your email program to “view the entire message.” I’ve also posted this at my website MaryBethDanielson.com Thanks for reading.

MEATBALLS

Chapter 1

Harriet was a small, quiet, watching kind of child who tried to not get in trouble but found that nearly impossible. Just that day, for instance, her teacher reprimanded her for speaking too quietly when she was supposed to answer how many horses would be left after the farmer hitched his team.

She knew some teams had two horses like people who moved west in wagons. But she also knew when the church teenagers went on hay rides at her grandpa’s farm there were four horses. And even though the team was reindeer, Santa had eight regular ones plus Rudolph so his team was nine. But the Christmas carol was about a one-horse-open-sleigh.

She was trying to ask what kind of team even though she knew Mrs. Anderson only liked plain answers so she was nervous and spoke too softly and that’s how she got scolded in front of the whole class.

And now for supper her mom had made a chocolate cake but Harriet would only get a piece if she ate all of her dinner because her dad hated picky eaters. He said that all the time. She tried to eat family meals but there was nearly always terrible food like chicken legs with sharp bones. Or boiled vegetables like wet cardboard. Or pork chops with gross rubbery fat on the edges.

Her dad would glower, “No dinner, no dessert.” She knew it was going to happen tonight because her mom made meatballs which had onion pieces that looked like slimy vampire fingernails. She hated meatballs.

That night her dad spanked her for not eating, which he often did, and then the house would get extra quiet. She went to her room where she could hear her big brother in his room scribbling at his homework. She heard her sister talking with their mom in the kitchen while they did the dishes. She couldn’t hear her dad so he was probably already watching TV.

Harriet hated that she hated food but she couldn’t stop it. She had no idea how other kids ate all that stuff. Especially vampire meatballs.

…

High school was easier. Harriet got good grades plus most of the time teachers did not ask questions where the answer could only be right or wrong so it was easier to not get yelled at. However, being small, smart, and shy didn’t make social life easier. She went alone to the first basketball game of the season and sat warily by herself between groups of other kids.

“Hey, Harriet!” Jason was two rows up and four people away from her and was the kind of boy who didn’t seem to ever mind yelling or getting yelled at.

Harriet turned to look at him as he kept yelling her name.

She wrinkled her forehead and said nothing but he yelled back anyhow. “What do you call girls who like fat boys?”

She spun her head forward; anxiety twisting inside her. He was going to say something rude and she wouldn’t know what to say back.

Jason laughed loudly as others also started laughing. Jason was popular and the others were eager to joke around with the confident guy.

“They’re meatball lovers!”

It made no sense but Harriet knew she was now on Jason’s radar so she stood up and, bench by bench, descended back down to the floor and left the gym. Careful not to fall. Careful not to cry. She slipped through people cheering as the team entered the gym, drowning out the kids who catcalled her as she left.

She hurried through the halls to a back door and then pushed it open into the dark cold night. She leaned against the school’s brick wall and then slid to the freezing ground. She wrapped her arms around her middle and huddled into herself.

That’s when she began to speak to herself aloud which she had never done before. “Okay, I don’t know why but I am easy to pick on so I will have to be careful and take care of myself. Because…” Suddenly Harriet began to swear the cuss words she knew but had never before said aloud. “Because as soon as high school is over I’m going to move away from here and not get yelled at or picked on again. And I hate meatballs, I always will, and it is stupid to ridicule people about meatballs! Damn it!”

Until that night she hadn’t known that becoming angry could make a person feel better. She hadn’t understood that anger was a kind of power. She stood to stare up at the stars with her muscles clenched until, slowly, her shoulders relaxed. She muttered to herself. “I can talk to myself. I can be my own friend.” She walked home.

…

In college being smart didn’t get in the way, being smart WAS the way. Harriet pursued a double major, mumbling to herself as she often did now, that one degree would be for the world and one would be for herself. Business Administration so she could someday get a good job. Literature because she wanted to know what other smart and awkward people had to say.

By her third year she was in an exclusive relationship with William who was a handsome person from a classy family. He told her he was on the law school trajectory just like his father and grandfather. She kidded him once about wearing elegant sweaters when other kids wore flannel shirts. She was skeptical when he called his dad ‘father.’ Once she asked him why he used his full name, “Didn’t you ever just go by Bill or Will?” William had arched his eyebrows and replied that since life is so short one should aim to be always be impressive. A couple times she asked why he liked her and he said because she was blonde and didn’t talk too much. He laughed when he said that. Mostly they were both enthusiastic about sex, he took her to interesting places, and he didn’t cheat on her. He didn’t criticize her and she loved not feeling anxious. Though she wondered why he couldn’t or wouldn’t say why he thought she was the one for him.

Spring of senior year he took her to a sophisticated restaurant in their college town. She was sure he was going to ask her to marry him so she bought an amazing dress that was tight, dark, and had burgundy and gold threads woven into the neckline.

While she was studying the menu William hailed the waiter to order wine with appetizers of bruschetta and meatballs.

She furrowed her eyebrows. “I like bruschetta but I don’t like meatballs, which you know. So you can have them all.”

He’d been quiet and now his expression stiffened which made anxiety twist inside her. Her voice went soft. “What? What, William?”

He took a breath, “I have loved our past two years together. We have had good times. But now I’m going to law school in the east and I don’t want to be tied down so I’m telling you, and this is hard, that I want to return to being single.”

She stared. She spoke carefully. “After two years? No conversation? Just you telling me I’m not the one so this is it? I have no say and I don’t even get to understand what you were thinking all this time or what you are thinking now?”

He shrugged. “I hoped we could toast our successful relationship before we go on to the rest of our lives.”

Harriet was stunned. She stared at his attractive face, his handsome suit, his ease in the world even now. He was uncomfortable but he was sure of himself.

She put her napkin on the table and stood up. She spoke softly but fiercely, “I hate meatballs and soon, I think, I will hate you.”

…

She was proud when she was hired into a six-month internship with a huge investment company in the city. She enjoyed sitting down to the monitor on her desk each morning. When numbers and figures started filling the screen the world went away and she dealt with the tumbling information. Sometimes after a few hours her back would ache or conversations around her would break into her consciousness. Then she’d go to lunch, usually by herself. She’d not been able to break into the company’s cliques. The other interns were easier with the social part of this job.

She went out with them a few times after work but she hated drinking and the omnipresent fried foods gave her stomachaches. She tried to join conversations but her comments were always a bit wrong, not witty, not easy going. Soon she gave up. She worked hard all day, doing more than most of the others and then went home to eat pasta, her plain lettuce and tomato salads, and sometimes chocolate or strawberry milk.

After six months each intern met with human resources about their future in the company. Harriet was dumbfounded when the HR woman told her she would not be hired. “You do excellent work and we will give you a strong recommendation. But a large part of this job requires quick and easy communication among the team and, unfortunately, you do not have that skill. I am so sorry. You are a lovely young person and I’m sure you will find a better fit soon.”

Harriet stumbled back to her desk, stuffed her things in her tote bag, and left the building. It was late afternoon and the winter wind was raw against her face. She stared blankly at the city street in front of her, as dazed and confounded as she had ever felt.

Across the street was a deli she’d never patronized. There was a break in the traffic so her feet, independent of her will which had vanished, took her to the deli. Inside was a greasy sign hanging on the greasy wall behind the counter.

A young counter clerk watched her standing so still. He spoke, quietly “Hey, Pretty Lady, can I help you decide what to order?”

It took a moment for her eyes to focus on his face. “Um. I’m hungry. I guess I need a sandwich but I don’t like fried stuff.”

He chuckled in a friendly way. “No problem. We make our own meatballs for meatball sandwiches. No frying. We bake them and then we make them comfy in little bun beds with a warm covering of kindly tomato sauce.”

She blinked and then laughed. “I’ve never heard such a sweet thing about any sandwich, let alone meatballs, which I hate.”

He laughed, too. “Well, you won’t hate our meatballs and if you do I’ll take it back and give you something else or your money. Give it a try? It’s Friday, it’s cold out there, and you look like you could use some non-violent protein.”

“This whole day is nearly as awful as my whole life. Why not finish it with a meatball?”

He fixed the sandwich and handed it to her with a complimentary orange drink. He said most people got fries but she looked like the kind of person who would like something sweeter and less complicated.

As she walked out of the deli she realized she had nowhere to go to eat. No desk. No car. She didn’t want to eat while standing on a bus. So she leaned against the brick wall, put the drink upright in her pocket, unwrapped half the sandwich and took one suspicious and tentative bite.

It was fine! It wasn’t awful! She took another bite, slightly larger. The meat had no lumps or vampire fingernails, just a warm taste that rolled around in her mouth nonthreateningly. She could swallow it easily. Nothing stuck and no seasonings flayed her tastebuds.

She kept eating it, ignoring the noise of the city, ignoring the cutting wind. One bite after another she ate her way through three meatballs on a bun that was sturdy on the outside and soft inside. Just like he had said. A little bun bed.

The deli’s door slammed next to her. She looked up. It was the guy.

He saw her and stopped, smiling. “Hey, do you like it?”

She beamed while wiping the sauce she could feel on her chin.

“These are the best meatballs I’ve ever eaten. They aren’t lumpy or filled with slimy onions or so spicy or salty that they hurt my mouth.”

She liked his dark eyes that were lively while he talked. “Well, most people cut up onions and peppers and use stale bread when they make meatballs but my bosses are a husband and wife, and Teresa, the wife, says that takes too much time and causes the meat to fall apart. So we use a vegetable powder plus plain oatmeal flakes which make them stay firm in the sauce. I don’t know exactly how she makes the sauce, but she’s an Italian grandmother who learned from her Italian grandmother, so there’s that.”

Harriet liked his chatter. “This was a very bad day but here it is, I am 23 years old and I am liking the first meatball of my whole life.”

He was flirting now. “You have a difficult history with meatballs?”

“Yes, I do. I could tell it to you but that would be silly. You need to go home and so do I.”

He grinned wider. “No I don’t. It’s Friday evening and you say you are twenty-three and I’m only twenty-one and I don’t have plans. Do you? Mulligan’s Tap is right here” He pointed to a bar sign hanging over the sidewalk. “I would love to buy you a beer and then you can tell me your personal history with meatballs.”

She hesitated. “I don’t like beer.”

He laughed. “Well, you didn’t like meatballs until today either. Have you ever had a microbrewery IPA?”

“I barely know what that is.”

They walked into the bar and headed for the back as a few patrons lifted their eyebrows at the aroma of fried food that trailed behind him. They sat at a tall table, she took off her puffer coat, he pulled off his black knit cap which caused his staticky hair to stick up. He tried to pat it down, gave up, and stuck his hand towards her. “Hi, my name is Mason and I am your greasy, staticky person who truly does want to know why you don’t like meatballs.”

She shook his hand. It was warm and it had been so long since she’d touched another human that it startled her. “Hi. I’m Harriet. It started when I was a picky eater little kid. Still am, I guess. My dad was strict about eating everything on one’s plate so I got in trouble a lot and sometimes I got spanked.”

Their beers came while she talked. She sipped the IPA and then put it down, her eyes widening. “Goodness, it hits the bottom of my mouth like bread. It doesn’t burble and sting the top of my mouth like beer does. Wow!”

He smiled and said nothing. She was talking and he liked her careful way of describing moments that were, he knew, not good. She didn’t blame other people. She questioned herself more than others.

“So that ass… that guy you dated for two years broke up with you while ordering meatballs for himself?”

She looked down at her hands wrapped around the IPA. “Yeah. I wish we had just had a fight or something I could understand. To this day I don’t know how I missed that he did not love me.”

Mason watched her arms pull in slightly as if she needed a hug and had no idea one could get it from others. “Maybe you are one of those people who are on a continuum where you don’t read other peoples’ cues super well. It would make sense, since you don’t trust food very much, either. I think those things go together pretty often.”

Harriet looked up into Mason’s eyes. “What?”

“You know, everybody talks about it these days. That autism spectrum thing. Peoples’ brains get wired differently.”

She kept looking at him, then tilted her head a little, her mouth opened in surprise. “No one, ever, even once, suggested that to me. And yet I sit here with you, a person I hardly know, and you just say this thing and it makes sense.”

He could see that she was beginning to shiver, maybe from chilly drafts but maybe from surprise. He grabbed her hands from her glass and held them in his. “Everyone’s on a continuum. It’s why they call it that and they don’t call it an on/off switch. Me, I was in trouble all the time in school until I was in sixth grade and I got kicked out for fighting. My mom got me sent to a psychologist for tests. And yes, I have ADHD. I take drugs but also, my deli job works for me. There’s a lot going on.”

Harriet leaned back. “Wow. I am going to have to think about this. I could call my medical clinic to find out if there are ways to get diagnosed. But Mason?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never had a friend as easy to talk with you are, right now. Can we be friends?”

He leaned across the table to curve his warm hand around her cheek for just a moment, and then he leaned back. “Let’s start there and see where it goes.”

__________________

Chapter 2

They walked out of the bar together; Mason still smelled like French fries and Harriet still had no job, but they were smiling as he put his hand at the small of her back and pushed the door open into the cold Chicago evening.

“I work tomorrow till two but I’d love to do something with you after that if you are free.”

She laughed her quiet laugh. “Not sure if I’ve ever been freer than I am right now!”

Mason continued, “So I never have a lot of money and whatever you have you need to be careful with, I guess. Want to meet at the Lincoln Park Zoo? It’s free and, well, I like animals. I could bring hot dogs and maybe we can get one drink with two straws?”

“I like animals, too.”

..

She was on a bench in the lion house when he blew in, swamped inside an oversized parka with the hood pulled up like theater curtains before the play begins. He stopped when he saw her face, as pink as a rose, as she turned towards him.

He swallowed hard, feeling more than a little off kilter. “Hey, what a nice day to look at animals inside!”

She grinned. “I bet the polar bear will be happy. Those poor flamingos, though, all crowded up inside.”

He chuckled. “Are you hungry? We could eat first and then look at guys until this place closes. I think at five or something.”

They walked to the zoo’s café where wind straight off Lake Michigan pummeled the windows. Few people were visiting the zoo on such a blustery day, even fewer were eating snacks at nearly three in the afternoon.

He wiped his fingers on a napkin. “Every time I start to say anything you look up right away; you have the most alert eyes I think I’ve ever noticed on a human being.

She was taken aback. “Um, thank you? I guess?”

He grinned. “I know. My mom says I say things no one else would say and I’m sorry if I’m too weird. But, yes, you have a sort of polite expression on your face until someone looks at you. Well, until I look at you, anyways. Then you watch me carefully. I noticed it last night and you are still doing it. Were you maybe a wolf in a previous life?”

She burst out laughing. “Everyone I know always says the same things and I never know how to respond. I mean if someone asks, ‘How are you?’ I usually respond fine and then the conversation is done and they move on. If I’d say I’m nearly always anxious and I hate meatballs, well, that won’t work. But your comments I can understand. I know what you mean. I do usually feel alert inside because I watch to try to make sure I’m not going to do or say something awkward.

“I’ve been like this all my life. My mom, when I was a kid, would say I was sneaky because I’d be so quiet she didn’t hear me come into a room and then I’d surprise her. Sometimes I got yelled at for that. I spent a lot of time trying to not get yelled at and that was mostly for just being who I am.”

She stopped a moment to think. He waited.

She continued, “It’s easier when people say unusual things because it means they are commenting on something going on right then so I can think about it and respond if I want to.”

Mason was listening intently. “You know, you’re right though I’ve never noticed it. When people talk in cliches they expect you to know what they are saying without actually saying it. When people say surprising things, they’re actually paying attention to the moment we’re in and that’s easier to figure out, right?”

“Yes. That’s it.”

…

The polar bears were a long walk to the other end of the zoo. Without noticing what he was doing, Mason walked on the lake side to block some of the wind and it sealed the way they were going to be. He used his hyperawareness to protect her as much as he could. She began to relax as she sensed she was not too weird for this guy.

Mason wasn’t impressive. He had a low level job, and as they talked she learned he lived in the garage attached to the tiny house his mom bought after his dad died back when he was a kid. After that, she’d taken some business classes and eventually became an assistant manager at the Jewel where she’d worked since high school. She was friends at church with the people who owned the deli where Mason worked.

Harriet asked more about his mom. Mason tried to explain but then he started smiling which made her curious. She knew so few people who liked their moms.

“A lot of people seem to have iffy moms.” He squinted his eyes. “You know. Moms that either ignore their kids or criticize all the time. I suppose because my dad was gone and she had to work; she didn’t have time to make me as crazy as some of my friends are. I had to become crazy all on my own.”

Harriet laughed.

The polar bear was diving, splashing, and living her best life. The elephants ambled about kicking a huge ball. The birds were beautiful and smelled awful. Both of them were fascinated by the lizards and snakes.

He joked, “Isn’t it your job as a girl to be freaked out by creepy crawlies?”

He loved that she stopped to think about it. “Um, when I was really little I saw a green snake in our yard. I pointed at it and then my mom and sister screamed. I remember thinking that it didn’t even have arms so why would people be afraid? I never did understand and still don’t. I mean, I’m not going to adopt a python, but I like animals who stick to their own business. Which is pretty much all of them.”

Guards were ushering folks to the gates; the zoo was closing.

Mason smiled at Harriet as her bus approached to take her to her apartment. He touched her face again, “I know we are friends and we are going to be better friends and we already know neither of us is rich enough to go out a lot. Think about what we can do tomorrow and text me and I’ll text you.”

She turned as she stepped onto the bus’s first step. “Better than that, I’m going to call you later tonight. Maybe we can just talk and you can say weird things that I want to think about.”

He laughed. “Deal.”

…

For two weeks Harriet and Mason were just friends. Then better friends. Then best friends. By then both of them tried to not think about how much more they could be.

They were sitting on worn velvet seats in a classics reruns theater while waiting for the start of a movie neither of them had heard of. The evening was perfect; it was half price night, the theatre was warm, people were in good moods, and they were together.

Then Harriet’s phone vibrated. It was a text from her mom saying she should come to family dinner on Saturday so the family could have a birthday dinner for her.

She sighed in the way Mason was coming to understand meant she was up against an emotion too complicated to explain quickly. First he quirked his eyebrows and then he raised them alarmingly. “You are having a birthday this week and I don’t know this? Also, why is a birthday dinner at your folks not cool for you?”

She looked straight ahead. “I haven’t told them I lost my job. I haven’t told them about you. It’s going to be tense and I don’t want to go.”

Mason was quiet a moment, “Well then, you have two choices. Say no and don’t go. Or, don’t explain me. Take me with.”

She spun her head to look at him as the credits started to roll. “My family is strict and serious and has all these rules. I mean, they spanked me for not eating meatballs. Who even does that? Why would you come with me?”

He heard the genuine puzzlement in her voice. She really didn’t know how much he wanted to be with her all the time even if it meant enduring people he didn’t care at all about.

He leaned over to mutter into her ear. “Just because I’m scrawny on the outside doesn’t mean I’m not mighty on the inside. I want to defend you with my claws and scales and fiery breath. And I work in a deli; I’ve got lots of fiery breath.”

She started laughing so he took her hand. Because they were friends.

…

He’d arranged to have Saturday off. He’d also gone into the little clothing store for ladies in his neighborhood. He knew his mom bought things there once in a while, she said the two old women who ran the place had been kind to her when she was a girl. He found one of them and told her he was Maria’s son and he needed to buy a birthday gift for a girl who was his age but not his girlfriend.

The little old lady looked up, “Yet?”

He laughed. “ Not yet. And I don’t want to scare her, you know?”

She led him across her tiny store to a wall with scarves. “We still order these hand painted scarves from the daughter of our cousin who lives in the old country. Do you think she might like one?”

As carefully as he could he pulled them out, one at a time, until a scarf covered in pink and red roses slid into his hands. It was beautiful and it wasn’t too silky so it seemed like it could keep her neck warm. They didn’t call Chicago the Windy City for no reason.

The old lady wrapped it for him in tissue paper tied with a red ribbon and when he handed it to Harriet on the train, she was astonished.

“You got me present?”

“Yeah, Harriet. It’s your birthday!”

She sat a moment, as stunned as if he’d walked across a tightrope to her. He started to laugh. “Really, it’s nothing huge or important. But you are my friend and friends get to give presents to friends!”

She untied the ribbon and pulled out the soft cotton scarf. “Oh! I love it. This is beautiful.” She pulled it around her neck and he leaned over, against everything in him that told him not to, and kissed her soft cheek.

Then they pretended that hadn’t happened.

They got off the train at the suburban station midafternoon on Saturday and that is when her life split into two eras. There was Before and now there would be Now.

Her mother took a step backwards as Mason stepped forward with his hand out to shake hers. “Hello Mrs. Bishop. I’m Mason Conti. Harriet’s told me so much about you and Mr. Bishop. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

Beulah Bishop winced as Harriet leaned forward to kiss her mom’s cheek. “Hi, Mom. Mason and I are good friends. He said he’d come with as my guest so this would be even more fun for me, plus this way we can go back into the city tonight together. I know you sometimes worry about me then.”

“I thought you would stay overnight like you usually do.”

Harriet smiled brightly. “Nope, not today. Thanks, though.”

Her mother’s face was unhappy but she was polite.

“That’s true. I will worry less.” She looked at Mason and smiled more comfortably. “Probably. Well, the car’s over here. Hans and Jade are coming, too. Francie can’t come because Mike has to work and Madison has a cold.”

Mason immediately stored the names in his head. Skills of a short order deli worker.

They pulled into the driveway of a house with an attached garage that seemed bigger than Mason’s mom’s whole house. As they walked in the kitchen door Harriet could see Mason was uncomfortable. She admired how he breathed deep and kept going. When he handed his big coat to her mom, Harriet chuckled.

He looked at her. “What?”

She mumbled. “Your coat is clean.”

He chuckled, too. “I washed it last night. Took forever to dry. I was afraid it was going to shrink it but then realized that would just make it fit. It was my dad’s and now you know he was bigger than me.”

A large man with jowls like saddlebags stepped forward. “Hello, I’m Harriet’s father, Elijah. Can I offer you something to drink?”

Mason reached his hand out to shake Harriet’s dad’s hand but Elijah did not reciprocate; an affront all of them noticed. Mason tilted his head to look up at the man and politely responded, “A beer would be nice.”

Harriet started to chuckle in a strangled kind of way Mason had never heard before. He caught her eye and smiled slightly. He knew, because she’d told him, her parents didn’t drink. He was baiting her dad. Probably a poor choice, but interesting.

“We do not imbibe alcohol in our family. Harriet should have told you that before she brought you here.”

Mason broke into his most dazzling smile. “Actually, she did, so I guess I’m just being a jerk. Wouldn’t be the first time. Sorry if I offended. Water would be great and Harriet’s also told me you are a hunter. Did you shoot any deer this season?”

They moved into the living room as Elijah explained he shot at two deer but didn’t get either because some other hunter shot first and nicked the animals which then ran. Mason didn’t ask what happens to wounded deer because he knew, and so did Harriet’s father who pretended he had not just exposed the shoddy ethics of guy who thought not drinking made him morally superior.

They conversed a bit. Her mom asked Harriet how her internship was going. She said it was over and “How sick is baby Madison?,” which shot her mom into criticisms of “modern mothers who put their children in daycare.”

It was a reprieve when Harriet’s brother and his girlfriend, Hans and Jade, arrived. After that everyone talked about sports except Harriet who was glad to say nothing. Jade seemed cheerful about meeting an unrelated person; she asked Mason about his job. He said he worked at a downtown deli. Harriet’s parents blanched again although Jade, obtuse to the dynamics in the room, squealed that she knew that deli. When she said how much she liked their Italian beef, Elijah picked up the remote and turned on a football game.

Mason was amazed at how uncomfortable he was. He was wearing new jeans, a new plaid shirt, he barely smelled of fried food and even his hair was gelled flat against his head rather than hovering like it usually did. But what made him most uncomfortable was that Harriet, right next to him on the huge sectional sofa, was blankly staring at the TV screen. Her discomfort moved him and he wanted to fix her world for her.

He leaned over and whispered into her ear. “Knock, knock.”

She turned to look into his face, already smiling. She whispered back, “Who’s there?”

He started to whisper “Knock, knock” again but her mother was watching them. “It’s not polite to whisper in a group setting.”

Mason leaned back. He’d been a problem child so many years that this was nothing for him. “I was conspiring with Harriet over a knock-knock joke. Knock-knock, Mrs. Bishop!”

The room was silent except for the sports announcer. Jade broke the tension. “Who’s there?”

Mason smiled gratefully at Jade, “Well, I was going to do the ‘orange you glad I didn’t say banana’ one, but here we are. I guess I’m a bit confused. Isn’t this a birthday party for Harriet?”

Hans looked at him and started to chuckle. “Yes, it is, but in our family we celebrate each other by doing whatever dad would like to do.”

The family room became amazingly quiet for a microsecond that lasted about half an eternity until Beaulah Biship grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. “Let’s have dinner.”

Jade and Harriet were supposed to set the table. They pulled dishes and silverware together as Mason, once again, cheerfully made his way into a fray of his own making.

“I thought I smelled meatballs. Seriously, this is what you’re serving for Harriet’s birthday dinner?”

Harriet’s mom glowered, “Yes, do you have a problem with this?”

He beamed, “Harriet and I have only been friends a few weeks but even I know she despises meatballs. Why would you make them now?”

Her dad was so angry his face was flushing, “We don’t even know you, young man. You just show up at our house and repeatedly offend us. I think you better leave.”

Harriet went still as Mason turned to her. “I’m fine leaving but I’m wondering if you would like to come with me. You don’t have to. I will be your friend no matter what, but this really does not seem like an adequate party for a person as lovely as you are.” He locked eyes with her and whispered, “Harriet, you deserve better than this.”

Her shoulders trembled so hard that her scarf shifted. He reached out to straighten it.

She looked up at her mom and dad. “Mason is right and I am learning from him every day that it is okay to expect that people who say they love me should not make me feel like shit.”

Her parents jerked as if they’d been slapped. Her mother opened her mouth but Hans jumped in first. “Harriet’s right. She’s been put down in our family since she was little and I never knew then and I still I don’t know why, but it’s true. Jade and I will drive her and Mason back to the train station. No one’s breaking up this family. We will all be back sometime, but not today.”

…

Harriet and Mason arrived back into the city train station before it was even dark. They stood a moment at the doors where they needed to split so he could catch a southbound bus and she could take the El north.

She took a breath and then spoke a faster than she usually did. “When I get home I’m going to make my very favorite dinner which is pancakes and an egg. If you would like to share my birthday dinner with me after all, well, you are invited.”

He looked back at her and, dangerously, cupped her cheek again. “If we go to your place I will not be able to keep my hands to myself. I just know it. So if you don’t want me to get closer that way, it’s probably better if I go home.”

She looked into his eyes, then smiled and leaned forward to kiss his soft lips with her own. He felt her hand move to his face and then slide into his hair while she kept kissing him and all his rational thoughts moved to Borneo.

The pancakes had chocolate chips in them once they got around to making them. His favorite part of the evening was when she wore the scarf with the roses and nothing else. Her favorite part was when he removed it with his teeth, while growling, making her laugh so hard.

They also slept a little. In the morning sunshine poured in her window and they were snuggling against each other when his phone rang.

It was his mother. “Hi, Ma. What’s up?”

Suddenly his face stiffened. “Oh shit. Tell Amanda to wait if she can. I will be there within the hour.”

He hung up then sat on the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands.

“What is it, Mason? Do you have a girlfriend? A wife?”

He took a big breath and turned around to face her. “Worse than that. Amanda is my probation officer.”

_______________________

Chapter 3

Mason rushed to leave, then stopped in his tracks and turned towards Harriet. She was her bathrobe, her arms wrapped around herself, her face stricken with confusion and fear.

He touched her cheek. “I should have told you but I never could because being with you has been the best two weeks of my whole life.” He looked at her, emotions churning in him so deep he could barely breathe. “I didn’t want it to end so I pretended it wouldn’t.”

He shoulders hunched as he talked quickly. “When I was eighteen I gave some of my Adderall to my best friend Mike. I didn’t know he’d been doing heroin cut with fentanyl. He was always crazy but it’s why I liked him so much but that day he had that smack in him, then my Adderall, then we smoked some weed and drank scotch he’d snitched from his grandma.”

Mason stopped talking to wipe his hand across his eyes. “Mike just collapsed. I called 911 but it was too late and he died. I was arrested and was in jail seven months until my trial, when I was sentenced to five years for manslaughter. Six months in a prison drug treatment program and parole after that.”

He stopped to breathe. “I miss Mike all the time.” He smiled at her through the fear and misery in his face. “He would have flipped out just to meet you.”

His face completely crumpled. “This is the real me, Harriet. I love you, but I’m a fuck up. You don’t need to contact me again. I know I’m not in your class but believe me, I also know when I’m with you I feel whole and strong which is crazy good. Don’t let people put you down. You are amazing.”

He turned to open the door but she grabbed his arm.

“Don’t you dare just say all that and then vanish. I’ve got stuff to say, too. Call me later. Or send me your mom’s number or give her mine. We are NOT done yet.”

They stared at each other and then he pulled her face to him and they kissed each other deep and fast.

Harriet watched the door close, listened to his steps running down the stairs, went to the window to watch Mason jog to the street, turn right, and disappear.

Her life shattered around her like teacups in an earthquake. She stood in the middle of her studio apartment; arms still around herself, the bed still warm when she collapsed onto Mason’s side. She smelled French fries and his warm skin. He’d forgotten to grab his undershirt when he pulled on his clothes; it was still tangled in the bed so she pulled it to her face and breathed it in until grief choked her. She looked up at the print they’d bought at the Art Institute on the free day they’d gone there. Both of them had responded so strongly when they saw this abstract by a painter who’d lived in Europe during WWII. There were slashes and blocks the colors of a sky before a storm and the painting felt saturated with threat. Did they know without knowing that they weren’t safe?

Harriet curled on her bed under the threatening poster, looking around, wondering, scared. Mason had talked about himself last night. Private things he hadn’t shared before. He said his mom was a lot overweight and also a hoarder which made him sad and was confusing to live in which is why he built himself the room in the garage. He also insisted that his mom was one of the kindest people on earth and he loved her very much. He said, his hand over his eyes, that he knew her life had been hard and he made it harder.

He talked about the English teacher who made him stay after school one day; he thought he was in trouble for cutting up in class. When he got to her classroom she stunned him by saying he was one of the brightest students she’d ever taught and he should make plans to go to college.

Harriet asked him why he didn’t.

“My life got complicated and I couldn’t.”

He’d sounded so sad. Then, suddenly, he had whooped and turned over her and kissed her hard while tickling her and making her laugh until they lost the conversation.

So now she knew how his life had become complicated. And what he was trying to tell her but couldn’t.

She was trying to find motivation to get up and do anything, when a thought came to her like a comet coming into view on a dark night. Mason had told her so many times that she was amazing. At first she thought he was flirting with her, which of course he was. But he was also insisting that she should regard herself with more respect. She should pay attention to what she wanted, and liked to do, and go for those things instead of trying to be good enough that people would stop criticizing her.

What if she believed him? What if she really was the person Mason said she was? What could she do right now?

She thought. She should be ready for his mom to call so she should take a shower and get dressed. Maybe she could figure out where online court records were in case any of it made sense to her. And also, damn it, she needed a job. She could only live on her credit card another month. She got up, took a shower, got dressed with Mason’s t-shirt under her sweatshirt.

…

She worked at the end of the utility table she’d bought when she first moved into the city. Her laptop was open. She’d already enrolled in online employment registries and had done two phone pre-interviews which she’d bombed. Talking on the phone to strangers was not her forte.

She’d decided in the previous week to check out the HR departments of the fifty largest companies in Chicago and she was already a dozen companies into the list. She’d look at what positions were open, then send a cover letter and resume tailored to that job. It was incredibly stressful and boring at the same time but she kept going. She mumbled to herself like she did in high school. “Looking for a job is work and it’s fine. Mason said to believe in myself so that’s what this is.”

It was late afternoon when her phone finally vibrated with an unknown number. She answered on the first ring. A quiet voice asked, “Is this Harriet Bishop?”

Harriet breathed deep. “Hi. Are you Mason’s mom?”

“Yes, dear. He asked me to call you. He’s been taken away by his PO and is now back in jail until she decides what she will do. He would not tell her your name and he told me to keep you out of it, too. So I will. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Harriet realized she was trembling. “Mrs. Conti. I only knew Mason two weeks but they’ve been the best weeks of my life.” She grabbed the edge of the table. “I’m not good dealing with people I don’t know, so I apologize if I am saying this awkwardly, but last night he talked about you. He said you are the kindest person he knows and that he wishes he didn’t make your life so hard. This was last night, before this morning happened. I didn’t know what he meant, though I guess I do now.”

“Oh Honey, he’s always been a handful but I never wanted any son but him. He will come through this and still be a blessing to the world. He just has to get out of jail first.”

Harriet wondered what it would be like to have a mother who was proud of you even when you were in jail.

“Have you told his bosses? What will happen if he can’t go to work?”

Mrs. Conti sighed, “Teresa and Hal are wonderful friends of mine from church and they hired Mason when no one else would trust him. But they need someone so I guess they will have to hire someone else now.”

Harriet smiled her first smile of that long, awful day. It wasn’t a grin, but any crack of a smile helped. “What time do they open in the morning?”

____________

Chapter 4

Harriet swayed in her seat as the El car rattled towards downtown Chicago. It was exceedingly early and she was trying to reduce her anxiety by thinking about places she’d like to visit someday. Paris. A savanna with zebras. Angkor Watt with its monkeys. Yosemite. And yet, she told herself, here she was right now in a place she’d never been before. Riding the El before dawn. Most of these commuters had dark eyes, dark skin, and tiredness etched into their faces. She realized it was pretty naive to want to meet foreign people in foreign nations when so many so-called “foreign people” were right here right now, going to work in an American city before the sun came up. Swaying in their seats just like her as the train rumbled into the city. Trying to get through another confusing day.

…

She was politely loitering outside Della’s Deli when the older man walked up.

“Are you Hal?”

He turned to look at her. “Yes.”

“I’m the new friend in Mason’s life and I think I’m the reason he’s back in custody and I’m extremely sorry about that. I would be happy to try to do his job the best I can this morning to maybe help you until you get better help. I talked with Mrs. Conti yesterday.”

He stopped a moment, key still in his hand, as he looked at her from head to toe and back up again. “You’re even smaller than Mason.”

She smiled a little. “Yes. He told me you called him Peanut Butt but that you weren’t mean about it and he kind of liked it.”

Hal laughed. “Okay, that tells me you really know him. Come on in. Let’s see what we can cobble together. Teresa will be here soon; she stopped for the buns.”

The morning flew. He didn’t call her Peanut Butt but he did call her Olive. She knew he’d forgotten her name but after that he just kept calling her that. And like Mason said, somehow it didn’t offend. It was like getting nickname from Santa.

Lunch hour was nearly three hours long and was the fastest she’d ever worked while standing up, in her life. The front counter was crowded, customers’ chatter plus clatter from the kitchen ricocheted off the tin ceiling. Harriet leaned forward just to hear customers while tapping the order screen. She worked fast and fearlessly even when she recognized some of her previous coworkers. Tellingly, none recognized her with an apron tied twice around her waist and a Della’s Deli cap pulled low on her forehead.

When the lunch rush finally ebbed Harriet was sure she’d never felt so tired in her life. She walked to the kitchen, saw a stool in the corner, climbed up on it, leaned against the wall, pushed her hat up, and sighed so loudly her bangs moved.

Teresa turned to her with a smile on her face. “It’s not nothing, is it, working on your feet all those hours?”

“Oh my God, this is worse than CrossFit. Not that I’ve ever done CrossFit but one of my old coworkers went on and on about how tired it made her and I always wondered why she did it if it made her whine so much.”

Teresa laughed. “I never try to understand people; I just try to sell them sandwiches with a large soda because our biggest profit is in the sodas. So did Hal set you up on the computer so you can sign in and everything?”

Harriet sat up a little. “Um, no ma’am. I just started working. I figured you and he would have to decide if I am a solution to your current loss of Mason.”

“Gah, you work as hard as that boy worked. Figures the two of you somehow, in a world of eighty billion people or whatever, you would find each other. You remind me of him.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, you are little like him though you are way prettier, of course. But when it gets busy, you just dive in and work. I saw some of those times you didn’t know exactly what an answer was but we were all flying so you made up your own answers. I like that. He did it, too. You get what we are doing here. Selling fast food fast. Not being perfect. If people are upset, give them a bigger soda or more fries.”

Harriet was giggling now. “He gave me a free orange soda the first time I came in here.”

Teresa laughed, too. “See! He made us a repeat customer.”

…

Mason was remanded to Cook County Jail for a month. Harriet and Maria set up regular visits on different days, doing their best to support him through incarceration.

It was intimidating to sign in, get patted down, then walk through metal detectors with other family members, usually women. Eventually they walked through clanking doors into a room filled with tables that had an inmate and a visitor or two at each one. It was hard to sit across from Mason, pretending things were fine, digging for upbeat stories from the deli, never touching.

“You don’t have to come here, Harriet. I keep saying it and I mean it. You hung out with me two weeks and we had that one amazing night together but you never signed up for this. I feel shitty that now you even know all this exists. I should have thought. I’ve always gone too fast and then things fall apart and it’s my fault.”

Harriet closed her eyes. He was right, she didn’t have to be here. She could just walk away from all this.

“And then what, Mason? I give up being your friend and go back to my empty apartment with no job until I run out of money and then go live with my parents? Have meatballs on my birthday every year for the rest of my life? I do hate it in here and I wish I had known and we could have avoided this. Though you are also right, Mason. If I’d known this about you from the beginning, there would have been no beginning.”

His face was drawn; hers was stricken.

She dug for something meaningful to say. “So we can spend our hour telling each other how awful we feel. Or maybe we can make a plan. I know you’re under supervision almost two more years. What CAN you do? Can you go to college?”

He smiled wearily. “I don’t know. It’s kind of too much to think about. I’ve been getting exhausted just peeling and boiling the hell out of potatoes, you know?”

She tilted her head. “Yes, I can imagine. But I also think this isn’t regular you and it won’t last forever.”

Guards were announcing that visitors had to leave. She looked into his eyes as intensely as she could muster, trying to break through his despair. But she couldn’t.

…

Teresa was quietly swearing at her desk at the end of the deli’s kitchen. Harriet, walking past, stopped.

“Is anything wrong?”

“Gah. I love making food, I like people, I like our employees, but I hate keeping track of all the numbers we have to keep track of. I didn’t like it when we had ledgers and adding machines but I hate it even more now with computers and e-this and insta-that.”

Harriet smiled more confidently. “It’s the end of the quarter. Are you figuring out your quarterly tax payment?”

Teresa looked up sharply. “You know about this stuff?”

“Yeah. One of my college majors was Business Administration.”

Teresa just stared at her. Then she yelled, “Hal, come here right away!”

He walked over to Teresa as she looked up at him in mock astonishment. “Did you know this girl right here, our Olive, went to college to study how to run businesses? And she says she knows how to prepare quarterlies?”

She narrowed her eyes at Harriet, “What else do you know how to do?”

“Well, I know it is important that this business to be an S corporation. Is it?”

Hal furrowed his face. “Yes, we paid an accountant and a lawyer so much money we have gone out of our way ever since to not go back to them. You know about this stuff?”

She grinned. “Yes, I do. I also have my resume right here on my phone. I could send it to you right now if you want to see it. So far dozens of Chicago’s major corporations have not cared a bit about it.”

Hal’s eyebrows were up and Teresa’s mouth was still slightly agape. “Yeah, Olive, show us.”

Within the next hour she became the parttime, as needed, bookkeeper and tech explainer for Della’s Deli. At a significantly higher hourly wage for however many hours it would take, than taking orders. But a whole lot less than a lawyer.

Harriet face flushed as she realized what had just happened. “This takes me from not making quite enough to now being able to pay my rent and college loans. You have no idea how you just improved my life!”

Hal looked at her speculatively. “So I don’t want to lose you as a counter clerk but I can always hire someone else. In the meantime would you like to do work like this for other small businesses?”

Harriet was excited. “You mean, I won’t have to wear suits or chitchat with people I don’t know? Just do accounting and management work as needed for people like you?”

“Yeah, I belong to a small business organization here in the loop and I also know people in my neighborhood. I can think of three other guys, well, one is a woman, right off the bat, who would probably be relieved to hire someone like you. Someone who would do this work for modest wages and no one needs to get their knickers in a twist about it.”

Harriet’s careful smile bloomed across her face. This was something she could do. Own her own small business and run it from her apartment. Spend some time talking with other hardworking people. Spend a lot of time concentrating and making order out of stuff that confused others. Not schmoozing.

And, she told herself, this started with Mason. Without intending to do any of this, just by being himself, he created a path for her into a less intimidating world.

“What?” Teresa was watching her. “When you think, Olive, you go somewhere the rest of us don’t go. I was asking what you will name your new business? Bishop’s Accounting?”

Harriet shook her head immediately, “No, not that.” She started to walk away and then spun back, “Olive Likes Numbers.”

Hal laughed outright. “You can’t have a deli without olives.”

She giggled.

Hal kept chatting. “When are you visiting Mason again? Maria says our bright and lively Mason is not doing well.”

Back to earth. “I’m going tonight after I leave here. She’s right. I don’t know what’s going on, but he’s not the guy I met. He’s enduring in there but there’s not much energy in him.”

“Oh God. Jail is such a shitty place.”

_______________

Chapter 5

It was a gray spring morning when Mason walked out of the jail. When Harriet and Mrs. Conti hugged him he smiled and hugged them back but there was no light in his eyes.

Once they found the car, Harriet climbed in the back seat so Mason could sit in front by his mom. He tilted his head, unsure of himself as he realized the dynamics of his relationships had changed while he was incarcerated. His mom drove silently and carefully; she wasn’t comfortable in loop traffic. A quiet half hour later, as they finally turned onto their street, Mason turned to Harriet, “You’ve been to my house?”

She turned her head away from the window and towards Mason. “No, I’ve not been here before. Your mom and I talked on the phone a few times to plan our visits. Last night your mom invited me to help meet you and then come back here with you. I’m sorry if this is awkward for you, I can just take the El home and skip this if you would like to be alone a while.”

He smiled politely, which scared her. “No this is fine. Just, like I probably said, it’s not a home like your folks’ house.”

She responded with a quiet snort. “I sure hope it isn’t.”

He’d told her that one night they spent together that his mother was probably a hoarder. He hadn’t exaggerated. Every surface was piled with shopping bags, plastic bags, Amazon boxes, plastic tubs with lids that didn’t quite fit. The carpeted walkways through the little house were filthy. Only one side of the kitchen sink was empty enough to rinse a cup. Garbage overflowed, more bags of pizza boxes and kitchen rubbish leaned next to the trash can. The house smelled of dust and garbage.

Maria looked scared as she realized what her home must look like to a stranger. Mason’s face was both angry and stricken. He tried to find a soda for Harriet but the refrigerator was too crammed to see into. The three of them stood in silence a moment; there was nothing to say. Harriet felt her heart race; she wondered if she could faint from anxiety. She hadn’t meant to make his homecoming this difficult. She inhaled a deep breath, reminding herself that he’d told her that she was amazing. If he were right, now would be a good time to use her amazingness.

She walked to Maria who was standing in the doorway of the kitchen. “Mrs. Conti, your house is a mess, yes. But you are not a mess. You are one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. You didn’t even know who I was but because you trust Mason you helped me know where he was and what to do. I’ve felt comfortable calling you when I had questions and then last night you welcomed me to help to get him today. I want you to know that I’m thankful and that you helped make this easier for me.”

Maria’s eyes watered as she reached to hug Harriet. It was as if the two of them had moved a mountain in the past month and now the mountain was finally home with them.

Maria’s voice cracked with feeling. “Mason’s room in the garage is better than this. Go with him there.”

The kitchen door opened to a small breezeway that led to the side door on the garage. Harriet followed Mason as he unlocked that door. It had been a one-car garage so it wasn’t a big but it was tidy. The bed, covered with a faded quilt, was against one wall and opposite it was a large TV. The room had green walls and the floor was covered in beige carpet remnants. In the corner was a tiny bathroom with a door and next to it was a counter with a microwave and mini fridge. Shelves held ordinary kitchen items; there was a tiny table with a folding chair tucked under it.

Harriet was impressed. “Mason, did you do all this by yourself? This is really nice.”

He was looking around, too. He walked Into the bathroom to run the tap, then flushed the toilet. He seemed to be taking stock of the condition of his small domicile.

“I paid for the materials and I did most of the work but one of my mom’s church friends, who does construction for his job, helped me a lot. He helped me figure out what I could do, then he helped me draw up the plans and then he showed me how to work on most of the parts of it. He got another guy who’s a plumber to help bring the water out here and another friend of his, who is an electrician, to help me run electricity. I couldn’t have done it without Manny.”

“How did you begin?” She stopped. “I mean, I should probably leave. I didn’t mean to make this day be complicated for you. Though I am impressed with how much you must have had to figure out to do this.”

He shook his head, “No, stay. We’re friends and I need friends now. I’m not sure if I can ever be your boyfriend again but I don’t want to lose you from my life if you’re okay still hanging around with me.”

She tilted her head back at him. “I don’t know what we are either but like I said to your mom, I don’t have that many people in my life who know me and choose me. I don’t want to walk away from you or your mom; I’d miss you way too much. And I do want to know how you built this. Also want to know what the rules are now. I know you’re on ankle bracelet.”

The both glanced down at the ugly black plastic contraption just above his shoe. “Yeah. I’ll have this two to six months, I guess. Depends on how well I do.”

“What does that mean?”

“I can get a job and go to it and then come back home. Other than that, I have to be here. Oh, I can go to church if I want, which I don’t.”

“Why not? It seems like your mom’s church friends are nice. If you go to church, it will keep those people in your life and maybe, I don’t know, maybe it would help your mom worry less.”

“That’s a good point.” He pulled out his only chair for her, and she sat down. He sat on the corner of his bed. “You really do like my mom, don’t you?”

“Yep. I admire people who are kind. I also like Teresa and Hal. I even like whoever Manny is who helped you build this space.”

He chuckled a little. “Manny would like you, too. He’s married and has kids and grandkids and was always on the phone with one of them, telling them how to do things. Then he’d finally finish talking to whoever it was and he’d hang up and then he’d tell me I had to make sure to find a good woman because, therein, he actually would say therein … Made me laugh. ‘Therein, Mason, lies the secret to a fast and happy life. Why just about last year I was as young as you are now.’”

She smiled. Mason was, at least in this moment, his energetic self.

But when he glanced around at his room, she saw the shadow come back into his eyes and she felt whatever this weight was that he was carrying. “You must be tired, Mason. I’ll leave. I’ll text tonight to see if there’s a way we can spend time together.”

She stood up so he did, too. Without thinking she went to him and wrapped her arms around his torso and he pulled her into a hug. When her head was tucked under his chin she smelled his skin and nearly cried. She was right here inside his arms and yet, she missed him.

…

She walked into the kitchen to say goodbye to Maria. Maria was bent over throwing something into a garbage bag. When she straightened up, the sleeves of her sweatshirt were wet.

“Are you cleaning, Mrs. Conti?”

The older woman smiled wanly. “Call me Maria and yes, I don’t know how I can ever make this place better but I thought I’d try a little.”

Harriet slung her purse strap over the back of a kitchen chair.

“Let me help.”

“Oh honey, you don’t have to do that. This mess isn’t your stupidity, it’s mine.”

“Well, I don’t think what’s going on here is stupidity. Maybe it’s related to being anxious about making mistakes, or grieving, or something like that, but this isn’t stupid. I don’t have to be back to my apartment at any particular time. I can help for as long as I’m actually helpful. Where are you starting?”

“That’s part of the problem. I never know where to start.”

“Oh. Well finding a beginning point and then going forward a bit at a time; this is something my brain can do. So maybe you empty the kitchen sinks and then wash them. Are there dishes in the dishwasher?”

“No, it broke years ago. So now there is moldy stuff in there.”

“Can I just empty it all into the garbage and carry it out to the bins?”

“You would do that?”

“Sure.”

They worked nearly two hours to clear the sink and the counters around it. Harriet was amazed at how awful the stuff in the dishwasher was, including the bugs, but instead of freaking out she distracted herself by asking Maria ordinary questions. What was your husband like? Mason said he died on a road construction crew on a rainy day. What kind of classes did you take to be able to become a manager at the grocery store? Who were some of you favorite employees over the years?

Time flew. By midafternoon Harriet washed her hands, remembered her purse, and took the El home to a very long shower. She made an egg to eat on a toaster waffle. After that she worked for hours. She organized a logical bookkeeping system for a small beauty salon that hired some of its employees, plus rented chairs to several other part-time stylists.

The next morning she woke to a phone call from Mason.

“Hey, Olive.”

Harriet giggled. “I love being called Olive.”

She heard the laughter in his voice, too. “It suits you. Small, not too spicy but not sugary, either. Can roll alone or with others.”

As she stretched she noticed the sun was shining brightly and it was the middle of the morning. “I worked late last night and I’m just waking up. What’s up?”

“Well, thanks to you and the Instant News About Mason Network, I got a call from Hal last night so I’m at work this morning and I already informed PO Amanda. I’m street legal to work and I wanted to thank you for keeping this job warm for me while I was gone.”

“Oh Mason, that’s awesome!”

“I was so out of it yesterday. I just crashed asleep when you left my room and that was the best sleep I’ve had in a month. This morning, I saw the cleared sink and counter you helped my mom with yesterday.”

“Yeah, that was both gross and satisfying. Was it that bad when you were a kid?”

“No. She never was into super neatness but it didn’t get that out of control until a couple years after my dad died. Sometimes I tried to talk to her about it but it would just make her feel worse and still nothing changed. It was easier for both of us once I moved into the garage. I don’t make enough to totally move out plus I like my mom, you know?”

“I could come against tomorrow afternoon. Would that be good or just more stress for everyone?”

“I only work the morning since it’s Saturday. I’ll be home by around one and my mom almost always works the weekends. I’ll talk to her this evening to see if she’s okay with this. It’s a lot of stress for her to get rid of things; even things that seem like trash.”

“Well, let me know. I get it that this is not laziness, this is something else.”

“Yeah.”

_________________________

Chapter 6

Harriet stood on a stepstool to pull faded Lucky Charm and Froot Loops boxes off the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard.

“Are these from when you were a kid?”

Mason looked up from bottles of random cleaning solutions jammed in a broom closet. “Oh shit, yeah. That stuff is at least ten years old.”

Harriet pulled away a few more boxes and then squealed. “Whoa! What are these?”

From behind the cereal she pulled antique cranberry glasses etched with designs that sparkled under the fluorescent ceiling light.

Mason looked up again. “Oh wow! I remember those!”

His face broke into a smile. “When I was little, before my dad died, sometimes relatives came over at holidays. I remember sitting on his lap while he was drinking something from one of those glasses. It was some kind of alcohol and he let me have a taste and everyone laughed.”

Harriet climbed off the stool to take the glasses to the sink to wash. “They’re really pretty but they look very old. Do you know where they came from?”

“Not really, though I know some of ancestors on my dad’s side came from Bohemia. Maybe they’re from there?”

An odd expression came into his face and in the tone of his voice.

She stayed quiet a few moments, curious about what he was remembering.

“Did you like your dad?”

He blinked. “Yeah, I loved him. I was in fourth grade when he was killed and that turned our whole lives upside down. My mom had been working at the grocery store since she was in high school but that’s when she realized, I guess, she would have to earn a lot more. So she took those classes and started working fulltime.”

“Who took care of you when she couldn’t be around?”

“Well, I was nine so I came home from school by myself and watched TV. Most of the time my mom was home by supper.”

“Was she sometime out later?”

“Yeah, at first she’d arrange for me to go to the neighbor when she worked late. But by the time I was in middle school, I stayed home alone. The hoarding was really kicking in around then. I’d try to clean things but I was a kid, not all that motivated, and I couldn’t keep up.”

They were quiet again.

She looked up from washing the glasses. “By the time I was in high school my mom was working fulltime and my sister and brother were already in college. Those after school, before the parents got home hours were the best hours for me when I was a teenager. No one was watching me.”

He chuckled softly. “We should have known each other then, huh?”

“Yeah.” She hesitated. “I would have become a different person if a guy like you had wanted to be my friend back then.”

Right then a mouse scurried from one side of the kitchen to the other and she shrieked. He laughed but also with revulsion.

“This is really gross, Olive. You don’t have to be here.”

She shrugged. “The sink and counters are now clear. The fridge is usable. I’m almost done emptying expired stuff in cupboards although it’s weird that she has enough plates and glasses for fifty people. This is daunting but look at you! You are a really nice human being. She raised you. She’s not a failure.”

Mason threw a half dozen empty spray bottles in the trash and then turned to look at her. “Thanks for continuing to say I’m a nice person even though I’m just out of jail with nearly two years left to serve on a felony that lead to the death of my best friend.” He shuddered and closed his eyes. “It’s a lot to be and it’s a lot to say. But I know I wouldn’t do this cleaning if I wasn’t stuck in the house. I love my mom but it’s crazy she let herself get this crazy.”

Harriet took a big breath. “I’ve been reading about depression on the internet so you know this is the ‘absolute truth’ …” She stopped to make air quotes with her fingers. “But here’s a thing I learned. Depression runs in families, and also, not always but often, depression is associated with people who are above average intelligent and above average sensitive.”

He was listening until he laughed. “So my mom’s a genius. Probably.”

She tilted her head to look at him. “And you are totally coping with your life, right now Mason?”

He wrinkled his brows and stared at her.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this. I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t think the two weeks when we met and had all that fun and you made me laugh and feel good about myself .. I don’t think that was unusual you. I think that was your regular personality. But what’s going on now with you being this quiet and this hard on yourself, I think this might be the way you are when depression sort of takes over.”

He took a step backwards as if she’d slapped him. “You’re a therapist now?”

She felt her shoulders stiffen. This was not easy, “No. I’m not even close to a therapist. But, remember, you figured out a big piece of my personality within twenty minutes of meeting me. You noticed I might be on the autism-obsessive continuum even though not one other person had ever mentioned such a thing to me. So because of you I contacted my clinic and set up an assessment that I will have in a couple weeks. I listened to you and now I am the one saying the uncertain thing. And as we both know, one of my superpowers is sticking to a subject.”

She rolled her shoulders, trying to be at ease. “So I stuck with reading about depression and hoarding and I’ve read more than any sane person would. So my question to you is - what was going on around that terrible time when Mike died? What else was happening around then?”

Mason just looked at her a moment. “Holy shit. There’s a question I never expected.”

She kept talking. “Do you remember back then?”

He turned back to the closet but picked up nothing.

Harriet stood at the sink watching him.

He swore as he answered quietly. “As a matter of fact, I do remember. Nothing huge was happening. Just the regular crap of me being myself.”

She took in a big breath. “What do you mean? You’re thinking about something specific.”

He laughed hollowly. “You may have noticed. I’m short and skinny so of course in high school I got teased a lot. Lots of short guys get teased so it was so stupid that I let it get under my skin. But senior year I liked this one girl. Christ, I can’t even remember her name now, but she was smaller than me with pretty blonde hair and a nice smile - maybe I’ve got a type - and I’d talk to her after class when I could.

“Then once during lunch hour I left the table of guys I usually sat by and walked over to where she was sitting with some of her friends and I said hi. Immediately, these guys who were jerks noticed me making my big suave move, and I don’t know, for whatever reason it became their sport after that to call me Lowrider.

“I hated it and I suppose they knew that because they just kept at it. Until one day I was behind one them who was chanting ‘Lowrider eyed her, tried her, couldn’t glider.’ God, it’s all these years later and I still remember that. I got so angry that day that I grabbed that guy’s backpack and pulled it so hard he fell over backwards and hit the back of his head on the floor. His buddies jumped on me and, of course, I got all beat up and of course, they said I started it. I wasn’t about to repeat that stupid taunt to anyone, so I said nothing.

“He ended up with a concussion and I got expelled from school for a week. Then when I came back is when that teacher said I should go to college; just one more piece of information I didn’t know what to do with. And also, because my mom had just had covid for a couple weeks and the grocery store didn’t pay her while she was off, we were broke and I wasn’t eating much. I could have eaten free school lunch but by then I didn’t want to go in the cafeteria. So I just wouldn’t eat.

“And then that day, Mike came over. It was such a relief to have a friend with me in my house, not out there where all I could do was be harassed and be in trouble. Plus he knew how dirty it is in here in my house and he didn’t care because, unlike at his house, no one was going to beat on him.

“He already done the smack that I didn’t know about. We did my Adderall and then the booze. And then he died.”

Harriet stood silently, absorbing the unbearable tragedy of Mason’s story. She turned to the faucet, poured two beautiful glasses of water, and took them to the table and sat down. He pulled out a chair and sat also. He looked at his hands wrapped around the glass some old relative had brought across the ocean from a different century.

His voice was so quiet. “I wonder if my great-grandparent who brought this was also depressed. So yeah, that time for me was already pretty awful and then Mike died.”

They both drank quietly.

After a while she asked, “Did you tell your lawyer all this?”

He snorted. “No. She was court appointed and had a zillion other cases besides mine. Plus no one asked and even if they had, I don’t think I would have said. I’m already scrawny. The last thing I want is for the world to know I blew up when a jerk bullied me, you know. Like, that’s just weak.”

She nodded and then she got back up, crossed the kitchen, grabbed some of the black garbage bags they’d filled and took them outside to the growing collection by the garbage bins.

When she came back in she asked an easier question. “How are we going to get rid of the garbage? It’s too much for regular pickup.”

He looked up. “I already called Manny last night. He said he’ll come by sometime during a workday when mom isn’t here. He knows it’ll trip her up to see stuff being hauled away. I asked how much and he said it’s only a small amount to dump it where he dumps construction stuff so not to worry about it. He’s got it.”

He chuckled. “He actually said I’m a stand up dude and, get this, he said ‘It’s not my place to tell you I’m proud of you but in case it makes a difference to you, I am.’”

Harriet smiled.

“So what happened to you in jail?”

He was startled. “I thought we were done talking about me. In fact, I welcomed the reprieve, Investigator Olive.”

She chuckled. “It takes me a while to get my thoughts together but eventually I know what I want to know. That’s always the place to go next.”

He leaned over to pretend sock her shoulder. “You’ve got so much going on in your pretty head. But I don’t want to talk about any more hard stuff today. Don’t you have to go home and organize someone’s business?”

She angled her head at him. “Yeah, actually I do. I’m going to the hair salon tomorrow to help the owner figure out how to use what I gave her. She’s nice. She asked how much it would be for me to come over again to explain her the program I made for her.”

Harriet grinned. “I told her my hourly fee. But I offered that if she could give me one fairly good referral to another business that could be my payment. She says she know someone!”

“That’s awesome, Harriet!”

“So I can come back here in a couple days and if your mom isn’t here, I’ll probably pester you about jail so be ready to stonewall me. If that’s what you want to do.”

He tucked her hair behind her ear. The sensation tumbled through the both of them.

“I’ll think about it.”

______________________

Chapter 7

By the time she got back to her apartment, ate a sandwich, and took a long shower to erase the vision of the scurrying mouse, it was late evening. She closed her blinds and pulled shut her blue curtains printed with flying parrots. Her studio was so small that her mattress filled a corner, the striped comforter she’d had since high school was askew, a tumble of bed pillows were covered in random pillowcases from the Goodwill in her neighborhood. Her favorite featured the Magic School Bus. Someone in college had asked her if she had a spirit animal, she’d thought a minute, then answered Ms. Frizzle.

She’d been scolded so often as a kid for not making her bed. Now, on her own, she loved skipping what she didn’t care about. Breakfast and dinner plates were stacked the sink. Her six pack of IPA’s was on the counter next to the fridge; she left them unrefrigerated because she didn’t like cold teeth.

She pulled a beer from the pack and then sat, one leg under her butt, on the ergonomic office chair she’d bought just that week. She rolled close to her utility table, stretched her back a moment, then opened her laptop to pull up her latest job; preparing a business plan for some Pilsen artists who created useful items from found treasures. Coat racks made from wood found in city alleys. Benches and stools assembled from logs and hubcaps. City bird feeders made from plastic cartons, wrapped with slices of the indestructible soles of lost gym shoes, with twig perches. The feeders came with adorable bundles of extra twigs “in case of theft or breakage issues.” The junk was free, the costs for the business were tools, time, and imagination, and it created intriguing challenges for Harriet. When she looked up again it was long past midnight so she brushed her teeth, tumbled into her tumbled bed, collapsed onto Ms. Frizzle, and fell asleep.

She woke to persistent knocking; her heart raced as she heard her father’s voice loudly calling her name. She pulled herself up, grabbed the decrepit plaid bathrobe she’d also bought at Goodwill, and stumbled to the door to open it. Both her parents barged in.

“Mom? Dad? What are you doing here?”

They stood in the middle of her small room like angry swans surveying a dirty chicken yard. Her dad attacked first. “It’s nearly eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning. We raised you better than this.”

Her mother crossed the room to pull open the curtains and the bright light made Harriet squint. Her mother looked her up and down critically. “What are you even wearing? Does that bathrobe belong to your fry cook boyfriend?”

Harriet stood a moment. This was what Mason had talked about. This was weird, mean, and she didn’t have to answer their questions. She took a breath, found words for herself, not for them. Don’t apologize, Harriet. There’s nothing you can win by arguing with them. You can only lose.

She took another breath. “I was up until three working on a project. All my clothes are mine. No, Mason is not here but why are YOU here?”

Her parents started to take off their coats and her dad pulled out her office chair. She froze. Nothing to win here. Just keep yourself for yourself.

“Mom and Dad, please do not sit down. Please do not make yourself comfortable.”

Their facial expressions exploded into the fury that had terrified her as a child and she wrapped her arms around herself. “If I’d known you were coming I could have prepared but you didn’t call and I’m working on a project. It’s complicated and I don’t want those files on my table to move even an inch. There’s a coffee shop two blocks up the street. Go there and I’ll join you in twenty minutes.”

“This is rude.”

She breathed in. Nothing to win, nothing to lose.

“Yes, but the rudeness is going two directions here so if you want a conversation it’s either there or nowhere.”

A half hour later, her hair still wet, she walked towards the booth where her parents were finishing their breakfasts.

“Hey, thanks for waiting for me.”

“Stop it. We are here because we heard from Barbara Crandell who heard from her daughter Bailey, who works at SBR, that you were fired. Is this true?”

The server was standing there. Harriet smiled her widest smile because Mason said good folks always smile at servers. He said he could tell right off the bat when taking orders at the deli who was going to be difficult. “They never acknowledge you until they’re pissed about something.”

So Harriet smiled up at the tall guy with tattoos and piercings. “Hi! I’d like a small pot of tea and a large strawberry milk shake.”

Her mother gasped, “That’s junk food!”

Harriet shrugged. “A day’s worth of calcium and more protein than an egg.”

Her dad glowered. “So did you get fired?”

She sucked in a big breath. “No, I didn’t get fired. Yes, my internship did not evolve into a position at SBR but they were nice to me. The HR woman said I worked faster and made less mistakes than most of the others but that I am not good at impromptu socializing and much of the job requires fast sales skills. She said if I ever want a reference she will give me a great one and that I’m a textbook example of why they start with internships. Really talented college graduates like me, yes, she said ‘really talented’ - sometimes don’t solve their needs but it allows them to consider my work. I got valuable experience plus that reference if I need it.”

There was silence. Then her mother asked, “Why don’t you socialize more appropriately? How hard can it be to be polite?”

Harriet sighed. “It’s not about being polite, Mom. It’s about being quick in conversations with a great deal of fast changing information about SBR’s business status on the stock market. I was supposed to be able to communicate that quickly to coworkers as well as explain and sell the info to customers; and many of those customers simply intimidated me. I’m not good at schmoozing. I was not the only intern who was not hired into the company.”

“So how are you living? Why didn’t you tell us you were without income?”

“I’m not without income.”

They stared at her. She stared back.

“Well, Harriet. What is your job now?”

“I started my own business. I do quarterly tax prep, financial reports, accounting support, and other numbers related stuff for small businesses.”

More silence.

“My business is called ‘Olive Likes Numbers / Affordable Business Support for Small Enterprises.’ I have a website so if you actually want to know more, start there. I’ve been at this over a month and I already have eleven customers, and I’m making almost as much as I was at the internship which was intentionally low paying because big companies can get away with that. I’m still careful with my money but I’m doing okay and this will grow.”

Her father snorted. “This is ridiculous. You do not have the skills to run a company. You are young and still wet behind your ears.”

Harriet took her glasses off, lifted them towards the light, looked through them. Amazingly, they were clean. She wondered how that happened.

“Dad, there are so many answers to your rude comment that I think I’m going to say nothing at all. Other than that I know you started your business when you were in your twenties with a large loan from Mom’s family. Maybe we should talk again in a month or two when you’ve had more time to digest this.”

Her mother shook her head. “Why is the company named Olive? Why not use your actual name?”

Harriet looked into her mother’s eyes. “Olive is a nickname given to me by people who actually, if you can imagine, like and respect me. They realized I’m good with numbers, accounting, and recordkeeping so first they hired me and then they suggested I do it as a business. I’ve never been more interested in the work I do.”

…

After they left, Harriet stared out the diner’s window while slurping her milkshake. The tattooed server startled her when he asked if she needed anything else. She came out of her trance and looked up at him. “My parents don’t approve of me today. Actually, I’m not sure if they have ever approved. Any advice?”

He laughed. “Oh Honey, welcome to being young in a city. None of our folks, as far as I can tell, ever approved of us so now you start your scratch art.”

“What? What’s scratch art?”

He glanced around the room to make sure no one was flagging him, then perched on the edge of the seat across from her.

“I love art and I’m trying to create a life as an artist though right now, obviously, here I am. Anyways, remember when we were kids and we did scratch art in school? The kid colors a piece of paper really hard, uses lots of crayons, just scribbles and scribbles and covers the paper. Then they paint the whole thing back. Then when it dries the kid scratches designs or whatever into the black paint which reveals the rainbow colors underneath.

“That’s how you live now. You’ve got your rainbow but it’s probably mostly covered under all that negative shit. So now you scratch to find what’s underneath. Find the stuff you like and want to do. Find the people who will be your people. Scratch the surface and find your rainbow.” He laughed at his own bumper sticker philosophy of life.

Harriet stared at him, shook her head just a little, then started laughing. “You are amazing This is actually really helpful.”

He stood up to go back to work. She handed him a business card, told him about the artists who were creating things with found stuff. He was interested in their enterprise and also clearly intrigued that, for modest payments, she could help people with the business ends of their dreams.

She went back to her apartment, made a pot of hibiscus tea, and called Mason.

“Can we talk? I need to scratch off some of my black paint.”

“What?”

“Listen to my day so far.”

He did.

They’d been talking more than an hour when Maria came into his garage apartment to say that she was back from church and lunch afterwards with friends. Harriet heard Mason say her name and then she heard the cheerfulness in Maria’s voice when she replied. Harriet loved hearing her name bandied about so easily.

“Well, tell Harriet I say hi and that I am forever thankful that my kitchen is better. That girl is a treasure.”

Mason chuckled. “You know she can hear you.”

Maria laughed, “In that case let her know that I told my friends that as far as I’m concerned, she hung the moon in the sky.”

Harriet laughed. “What a crazy day. My parent drive into the city to tell me I’m a failure but then your mom says I’m great. Very confusing, but next time I pick parents, I’m picking your mom.”

He chuckled, too, as he said goodbye to his mother who was leaving his room. When Harriet heard his door click shut, she scootched further into her snaggle of pillows. “So this whole day is odder than I could ever have expected. Might as well ask you again. What happened in jail?”

The phone connection went absolutely still for a few seconds; then she heard Mason sigh. She heard a creak as he leaned back in his chair. “Because you asked and then you keep looking at me with that question in your eyes, I keep thinking about it, too. I don’t want to think about what happened. I’m not happy when I think about it. But I don’t think it’s even done yet so there’s that.”

She was quiet. She could almost hear his thoughts churning like laundry tumbling in a laundromat.

She asked, “Does anyone besides you know what happened?””

A moment. “Yes. Amanda knows. It’s partially how I got out earlier than the release date she had set at first.”

“I’m listening, Mason. If I thought this would be easy I would have bugged you harder. I don’t expect this to be a neat story all tied up with a movie ending.”

“Well, start with this. When Mike died and they put me in jail to wait for my trial. That was seven months and I hated it but it was doable. So now I know jail is like everything else. Depends on the luck of the draw. Depends on who’s incarcerated along with you. Sometimes it’s a lot of schmucks like me. Sometimes it’s guys who are dangerous. This time there were dangerous guys.”

The story unrolled. She listened, saying nothing more than an occasional “Oh, Mason.”

“There are lot of people in the Cook County jail, like, thousands. You get escorted in wearing wrist and ankle restraints, get assigned to a cell, probably get assigned to a work crew. I got kitchen crew because I know about working with food. Though jail food, in case you were wondering, is about as far from Della’s Deli as the moon is from Jupiter. Whatever.”

He took another moment. “Long story short, this time there were these three guys who hung out together. I noticed them right away because they were always looking around. In jail you go out of your way to not stare at other inmates; it’s part of staying safe. Don’t stare. So guys who stare are either crazy or dangerous or both.

“These guys, another guy tells me, are Rockwell guys. I never heard of them before, they probably belong to some bigger gang, I don’t know. But at meals they were always looking around and I’d only been there a couple days when one of them is saying pretty loudly that he’s feeling horny. Then he says, just as loud, that he needs someone like his girlfriend who is small with shiny dark hair. Oh Christ, I’m a chipmunk in a lion’s cage. He looks at me but I look down really fast.

“Nothing happens right then. I go back to work in the kitchen. One of the guys I work with is this Asian guy. I don’t even know what country he came from; it’s not like we’re celebrating cultural heritage, you know. But he’s shorter than me and has shiny hair, and once he said he only had eleven days left. He got caught on the outside passing something illegal from one guy to another. He shrugs and says his dad says this is bad but not as bad as being killed, which happened to people where they came from.

“That night I heard screaming and the next day he’s not on kitchen crew. Someone tells me the Rockwell thug got to him. At night it kind of depends on which guards are around, how safe you are. That night his floor had one of the guys probably on the take, or lazy, or both.

“A couple days later I hear the thug at dinner, same shitty remark. Horny. Wants a little guy with shiny hair. I don’t look up but I feel his stare anyway.

“That night right before cells are locked he slides into my cell. My cellmate is not stupid, he leaves. The guy moves at me; I grab under my mattress for my three lousy Adderall pills. It’s not much, but I thought this day might come at me so I’d been palming my daily pills. I did magic tricks a lot in fifth grade; who knew that would come in so handy, you know?

I turn back to the guy and say, ‘If you rape me, I’m out of here tonight. If you leave me alone I can get these for you every day for weeks. And that sort of worked.”

Mason’s voice becomes softer. “It was crazy, Olive. If they caught me palming my meds, I’d be sent straight to prison. If I didn’t, I was going to get raped. And of course, without the Adderall, I’m feeling even more anxious and hyper than I always feel. I kept talking to myself all the time. Like you today, reminding yourself there was nothing to gain by arguing. I muttered my way through the days. I hummed. I thought of you and my mom and Manny and getting back to the deli someday.

“And then, damn it, I see another short guy get set up and that night I hear him scream and then he’s gone, too. So I called Amanda to please visit me as soon as she could because I’m not safe.

“She’s one of the good ones. There are lots of them. She came the next morning and I told her what was going on. She said the PO’s know there’s violence in the jail and it’s hard because what else is there? So if she writes up our interview for gang division, will I sign it?

“I know what she’s saying. It will help in the short run but it can make my life more dangerous if or more likely when, those guys, and their buddies on the outside, figure out who I am. And they might.

“But I think of Manny. He’s like my go-to macho guy, you know? He has a wife and kids and grandkids and he says back when he was in the army, there were really dicey times, but nothing was ever as hazardous as trying to take care of people you love all the time every day. And then he says this thing which stays in me all the time. Taking care of people you love takes courage, Trying to watch out for people you don’t even know, that’s where the shit hits the pavement. Yeah, he said shit. He is pretty real.

“So I think of guys more vulnerable than me, who are getting raped by a specific guy that I know and can identify. So I say yes, I’ll sign it. And that’s how I got out early.

“And that is why I am not sure of anything. I hope I’m okay. I hope they don’t find out where I live or work. But I’m not sure.

“So I’m still unsure of everything and maybe I just saved my own butt while putting others in harm’s way. Amanda gave me her the phone number she has on a phone that’s not her work number but related to it, for, she says, high priority calls. She says she never leaves it or turns in off so to call it if something happens. I gave the number it to my mom, and to Hal and Teresa. So now, I guess, I’m giving it to you. Just in case.”

Harriet was quiet. Then she spoke slowly, thinking as she talked. “There is a lot of black paint to scrape off the surface of your life, Mason. But underneath you are the truest of true blue.”

_____________________

Chapter 8

A few days later Harriet stopped at the deli after an afternoon meeting. Hal, Teresa, and Mason all looked up when she walked in the door.

Mason grinned, “What can I get for you this afternoon, Ma’am?”

She laughed, “I’d like an Italian beef, not dipped, and maybe three smiles on the side?”

Hal chuckled while Teresa made a shooing gesture towards Mason. “I’ll get her sandwich while you check out and take this lovely girl home with you.” Then she stopped to sputter, “I mean if that works for you both. I didn’t mean to presume. I just got used to thinking of the two of you together but of course that’s your business, not mine.”

Harriet smiled. “I like the way you think because I was wondering if I could get invited to spend some “alone” – she made air quotes - time with Mason, um, decluttering his mom’s house.”

Mason leaned over the counter to barely kiss her cheek as he joked, “I’ve been dreaming of you standing next to stacks of newspapers taller than you are. My mom was not a lazy hoarder.”

Hal shook his head. “You two do have a unique story.”

…

The kitchen was now workable with cleared countertops, cupboards in which one could find clean dishes and unexpired food, and appliances that were functional. Harriet had spent hours just cleaning beneath the sink where there’d been tipped over cleaners going back five presidential administrations. She’d safely tossed most of it and then cleaned the dank space. She’d put back a dozen products including the toxic degreaser she’d used on the stovetop, the oven cleaner she’d applied three times in two days to clean inside the oven, bleach, ammonia, and a few less lethal soaps and cleaners. Maria had laughed her shy laugh when she first saw the tidy space. “Even my super-duper clean friends have messy under-the-sink cupboards. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

So the kitchen was done enough. Mason and Harriet stood next to each other in the archway that opened from the kitchen into the small living room.

Mason sighed. “This is going to be something.”

Harriet sighed, too. “Well, it took years to get this overwhelming. We’ll take our time bringing it back. Did you tell your mom about those hoarding disorder support groups?”

“Yeah and she says thank you. All of this is hard for her but she says if I’m going to work this hard on straightening out my life she will try to do the same for herself. She knows a lady at church who has a brother in a group that meets not far from here. That woman and her brother took her to her first meeting a few days ago. She says it was so helpful she’s going again tonight, though, interestingly, the brother was picking her up at work, then they go to the group, then he will drive her home.”

Harriet smiled. “That’s cute and that’s really good. It’s too hard to change lifelong habits all by one’s self. And like I keep saying, she’s not lazy. This is not because she’s a failure; this is the way some people cope with their lives. It will be easier to change if she knows more and meets people like herself.”

Mason also took a big breath. “I suggest we start by the front window and move, however many weeks it take, clockwise around the room.”

Harriet nodded. “I’ve barely seen a newspaper in years since everything’s online. But here’s your mom with what, a thousand Tribs and Sun Times? How old are they anyways?”

“Old. My dad used to bring them home from work. He’d sit in his chair and read them while my mom finished supper. It was a nice time of the day.”

Harriet nodded again. “That sort of explains how the newspapers got stuck here. They’re like a souvenir from when her life felt safe and good.

“Wow, I never thought of that. Well, what should we do with them?”

“Maybe keep a couple but ask Manny to recycle the rest?”

“That works.”

They were nearly two hours into plowing through the piles when an enormous black pickup pulled in front of the house. Mason noticed it before it even came to a full stop.

“I don’t recognize that truck.”

Harriet looked at Mason whose voice had become quiet and serious. They both watched as two muscular men started to climb out of the massive vehicle. One had a red baseball cap on backwards, the other had a ponytail. Both wore sunglasses even though it was nearly night.

Harriet murmured. “The doors are locked; I checked a while ago.”

He muttered back, “I saw you do that. I’m calling Amanda. You call 911.”

The men sauntered up the sidewalk, bulges under their hoodies as Mason and Harriet, phones to their ears, pushed the sofa in front of the door.

The men knocked hard; the sound ricocheted through the house. Harriet darted to the kitchen where, flooded with adrenalin, she pulled the refrigerator in front of the side door while bottles and jars clanked as they fell over inside. Her mind raced as she tried to think what else she could do. And then she jerked open the doors under the sink. She grabbed two cans to jam in the back pockets of her jeans, then stuck the ammonia and bleach containers in one arm. She dropped to the floor to peak around the archway.

Mason was crouched in a tiny space between the end of the sofa and piles of newspapers when gunshot blasted the front window into a hailstorm of shards. The ponytail man knocked shards from the frame with the butt of his gun as he began to climb through the window, combat boots first.

Harriet rolled the oven cleaner and industrial degreaser across the floor to Mason; in the chaos of that moment the guy didn’t see Mason lean forward to spray both cleaners into his face. He screamed and grabbed his face just as the second guy started climbing in and Mason sprayed him, too. The second guy tried to shoot his gun but he could not aim; the bullets went upwards and everywhere but not into Mason or Harriet.

Harriet turned quickly towards Mason, “Pull away the sofa. We’re leaving.”

It only took a few seconds for him to do that as she uncapped the bleach and ammonia bottles and then tipped them between the men who were trying to see and trying to get up.

Mason and Harriet erupted out of the house as the chemicals became toxic chloramine gas. They ran towards squad cars squealing down the street.

A huge officer in full tactical gear squinted down at small Harriet who was explaining what she’d done. He wrinkled his forehead at her. “What? What is chloramine gas?”

She shook her head, talking fast, “Not mustard gas but, depending on how long people are in it, it’s about that toxic. Your guys should put on masks.”

They did. After that they pulled the cuffed, shackled, and shrieking men out of the house to the ambulances that had just pulled up.

…

It was a long night. Mason called Maria to tell her to not come home and while he was talking he heard the man next to her say she could stay at his place. In the middle of that terrifying night, he chuckled. Good for his mom.

The house would be off limits until the police investigation was complete, which Mason and Harriet were informed, would definitely be hours, and might be days. Amanda was sitting in the interview room while detectives began to talk with them. They asked Harriet how she knew how to do what she did.

“I took high school chemistry, Sir.”

He chuckled as he began to ask more questions. Harriet politely waited for the man to stop speaking.

“Sir, we really want you to help you but right now I’m worried that someday they may come back at Mason and me to sue or whatever for whatever’s going to happen to their eyes. Mason and I need a lawyer before we speak with you.”

Amanda sat up. Mason arched his eyebrows at Harriet. The detectives sighed.

She squared her shoulders. “I’m sure this isn’t convenient for you, but it is what it is.”

Hal and Teresa were surprised to be called, just as the evening news came on, about how to find a criminal defense attorney. Hal did not sigh or laugh; he immediately agreed that he and Teresa would do what they could do.

Mason and Harriet sat next to each other on a bench in the hall where officers were going back and forth all night. Eventually Harriet gave up, pulled up her feet, rested her head in Mason’s lap, and went to sleep. Mason leaned against the hallway wall, his hand smoothing her hair. It was an odd place to finally achieve such trust and intimacy.

They sat up abruptly the morning when a small woman dressed in a black suit with a black silk shirt stopped in front of them. “The real estate attorney of a Mr. and Mrs. Dell contacted me to come here for Mason Conti and Harriet Bishop. That you?”

She advised them very carefully to explain, under questioning, exactly what they saw but not to talk about what they felt other than to acknowledge that yes, they had felt terrified. If they couldn’t be precise, she warned, say nothing. She sat with them through hours of interviews and then after the officers finished and left them, she informed them that the Dells were covering this appointment. If she were needed later they could negotiate at that time.

They called Amanda. Where should Mason go since he couldn’t go home and it was too much to go into work. In a moment he didn’t expect, Amanda laughed on the phone and asked what his ideas were. He looked at Harriet who was looking back at him. “Hey Olive, can I move in for a while?”

She nodded. He pulled her against his chest, kissed her hair, and an hour later they walked into her apartment. They took showers, made breakfast, and then made love the way they would live the rest of their lives together. With trust, laughter, and very few apologies for who they were.

He moved fast; she thought things through. He made her laugh; she made him slow down and consider. He intuited; she planned and carried through. He went to college and became a high school counselor. She never ate meatballs.

I will be posting my short story “Meatballs” right here tomorrow/Saturday morning. I’m posting all of it at once - all eight chapters aka19,054 words! Some of you already read the first seven chapters; you can just scroll through to chapter eight. (I did go back and edit a little.)

But I’m warning you today that this whole long story is coming your way tomorrow.

Here’s some back story:

This story began on Christmas Day. Len and I had spent a big day with our kids and grandkids a few days before so on the actual 25th we were alone and we made meatballs with spaghetti sauce for our dinner. I laughed with Len about how much I hated meatballs as a kid (those vampire fingernail onions) but as an adult I love them.

I didn’t know what I was going to write next so I sort of dared myself to invent a story about meatballs. I mean, not an immediately gripping idea, right? Meatball are plebian (or so they were before ground beef cost $8 a pound). One thing led to another and by mid-January Harriet and Mason had moved into my head. I’m interested in humans who do not seem, at first glance, to be on the same life trajectory - and yet they fall into friendship and sometimes they fall into love.

“Meatballs” is about this. That our strengths are our weaknesses are our strengths. It’s about the chaos that too often accompanies poverty. The stifling narrowness that rides high in too many self-satisfied upper income families. And the wonderful people in the middle – Teresa, Hal, Manny - who usher all of us into welcoming spaces where we can begin to “scratch the black to find our rainbows.”

I hope you like meatballs.

I first published this in my Racine Journal Times weekly column on January 17, 2003, which is, whoa, 8506 lunches ago.

Are there sweeter words in the English language than, “Hey, time for lunch!”?

Lunch is low-rent heaven. It puts everything you are supposed to do on hold while you go off to eat pretty good food in the company of good enough people. You don’t get Eternal Release, but then did you really want THAT much of a break?

Visualize the comfortable bustle of the noon-time crowd at your favorite local restaurant. Hear the reassuring sound of coffee pots sliding on and off their warmers, the hiss and splash of new coffee dripping into a glass carafe.

Servers greet familiar patrons, take orders, and call out instructions to the kitchen. Friends and co-workers rearrange chairs to fit whoever shows up with the squawk of chair legs being dragged across the floor.

Recall the aromas of institutional lunches. Remember the perfume of pizza floating out of the high school cafeteria while you sat in geometry class? You were yearning with all your soul for the buzzer that would release you to food and friends? (Can you hear Patsy Cline singing, ‘Please Release Me, Let Me Go’?)

Have you smelled mac and cheese at a grammar school? Mystery meat and mashed potatoes at the nursing home? Shepherd’s Pie in the dorm cafeteria? (Rumor was shepherd’s pie was made from ground shepherds.) None of these scents are Chanel yet when you are bored and hungry they evoke a powerhouse of human longing.

Some of us eat alone. If I’m working at home I carry a PB&J to the living room where I collapse sideways in the big chair, my legs dangling over its overstuffed arm. My mind wanders as I chew while staring out the window at tree branches and at flapping crows. On rare occasions a coyote pads down our quiet street and I jump from my slump to admire her chutzpah. Do coyotes have chutzpaw?

Lunch is our break from everyone else’s agendas. Click that save button, grab your brown bag, run an errand for your family while you listen to your favorite radio station in the car. It isn’t a week in Hawaii -- but you don’t give it up easily, do you? How irritated do you become when a phone call steals five minutes from your lunch hour? That’s the clue as to how much we need and crave this little downtime in our day.

Breakfast is too early, just fuel the body and go. Dinner is the meal that reflects values, hopes, and pretensions. We set the table, eat with family, share our days while eating things we’ve spent time and imagination cooking or at least picking up from the drive thru.

But lunch is the meal for here and now. It’s seldom about who we want to be or how we want to impress. Very few of us love lunches accompanied by cloth napkins, power suits, or foods we can’t spell. That’s not lunch, that’s just more workday masquerading as a break.

Lunch is the meal where we are most free from our families. First Grade liberates us. We taste the sweetness of a meal where no one cares if we eat that icky bologna sandwich, if we trade homemade carob granola bars for the some other kid’s Twinkies. Lunch is where we practice being ourselves and not our family’s kid.

We take this odd hour of personal freedom with us into our adult lives. Our spouses aren’t there to see what we’re eating and whom we’re eating it with. Our kids don’t know that we are talking about them. The pillars of our churches don’t know we are flirting with co-workers. Our Book Club doesn’t know we are parked in a fast food parking lot slurping drive-thru diet cola while race-reading a book from the genre euphemistically called “popular fiction.”

My son told me years later that when he was in middle school, he and one of his friends would sometimes go to the store across the street from their school to buy cans of frosting for lunch. You know, that’s so insane it makes me laugh - but it is also lunch in a nutshell. When it’s your dollar, your hour, and your friend you have found a space in your day that belongs solely to you.

It’s not just kids who indulge in insane food. My husband worked years ago with a guy who regularly ate two double-bacon-cheeseburgers for lunch. I checked the nutrition charts -- that’s more grams of fat than adults are supposed to eat in a week. We kidded he could add variety to his life by eating Chapstick on rye.

Lunch is a stretch of time that belongs to us. It’s food we don’t mind eating. It’s conversation with people who know our work worlds. For kids, it’s a time to practice freedom. For adults, it’s when, like the unworried kid we once were, we are allowed to accomplish nothing much.

Lunch time is temporary freedom from schemes and dreams in order to live, however foolishly, in the here and now.

I reread a book this week that I first read years ago. The book is The Raven’s Gift by Jon Turk; it’s about kayaking and cross-country skiing in northeastern Siberia. I’m drawn to vast and empty places (yes, I’m the girl who’s travelled to the Badlands ten times) so a book about exploring a tundra is my cup of tea. The book didn’t disappoint.

But this time, reading it, I was struck by thoughts that didn’t engage my imagination the first time through.

The deal is this. Turk has a PhD in chemistry and earned much of his life’s income writing textbooks. He’s also a passionate skier, rugged bicyclist (I need to read the book about riding a bike across Mongolia) and wilderness adventurer.

He was once caught in an avalanche that broke bones in his legs, shoulder, torso, and pelvis. Surgeons fixed his pelvis with a metal plate although his pelvis would hurt, ache, and sometimes cripple him for days at a time in the coming years. It took nearly six months for him to heal enough to walk again.

A few years later we meet him kayaking across the northern Pacific. (Oh yeah). He and his travelling companion encounter a storm near Vyvenka which is a small town on the Kamchatka peninsula of eastern Siberia. Over the next few days he meets some people in this community. We learn a lot about how folks live there now that the Soviet Union collapsed.

We also learn about the tens of thousands of years of reindeer herding from which these people descended. Their culture goes so far back that the few herders who remain still use some tools that are, not kidding, made from mammoth tusks.

Turk meets Moolynaut who is an old woman with shamanic powers and, amazingly, she heals his pelvis. There’s a lot to all this and it’s fascinating to read.

What struck me was this observation. The evolution of humans from prehistoric times to now is exceedingly long, it took eons for people to begin to make even the simplest tools. Some cultures figured out clubs and axes. Plus, probably much of their everyday accouterments were made from materials that simply disappeared over time, so we don’t often dig up sleds, animal skin clothing, ropes, leather belts, boots, and harnesses.

We call them primitive and compared to us, probably they were. But, Turk asks, how did humans survive all those hundreds of thousands of years in places as harsh as Siberia? Did they just bumble around? Of course not, so what did they know that we don’t know?

How did they not only exist, but also flourish in places where we modern folks couldn’t last two days without high tech gear?

What he postulates is that the way we use our brains has changed so much we no longer have access to what was normal consciousness for them. What he encounters in Moolynaut and others of the Koryak culture is a way of existing that is oriented to the moment that are in, not to socializing, not to a chronological way of getting through a day.

The Koryak are intelligent and welcoming, but they live tuned to the weather, to the way the wind is blowing, the way the ice is forming or melting, to the sounds of weather, animals, and people that are around them. They don’t panic, they have confidence in themselves and their skills. They don’t rush or worry too much. They know what they need to accomplish, even in the insane political changes brought to them by their government that changes how much fish they can or cannot sell in a year. Their world changes like crazy yet they have an underlying connection to nature and each other that is stunning to watch.

They are not naïve. They are not some western invention of “innocence.” They live in deep poverty gratis of Russian politics and many are ravaged by vodka addiction. Life is hard, consumerism is futile, they live with infrequently purchased food stuffs, plus the fish they catch and small animals they can snare or shoot.

They don’t live in anticipation of the next thing they can do or buy. They spend their intelligence and energy to survive together in their community. They know old stories; they watch bad TV; mostly they watch out for each other. When the power goes out, which it often does, they go to bed.

I’m not saying this as powerfully as it struck me while reading. So much of our lives happen in our to-do lists, grocery lists, making the list for what we need to go on a vacation, buying presents for others, remembering this and that. We fix our houses and take our cars in for checkup and tuneups. Look at how much time and mental energy we spend just trying to stay healthy - medical appointments, the gym, bike rides, and hikes, and weight equipment et al. We read online reviews to find the next thing we should stream on our subscription TV and music platforms. So much of our mental bandwidth is about getting ready for the next thing.

By being the modern people that we are, we are oblivious to clues that are around us. What the birds are saying. What color is the lake this morning and what does that mean about the weather tonight?

What healing and centeredness might happen if we listened? Could we sleep at night if we knew how to listen to what’s outside our head instead of obsessing over what’s in it? What would we know if we could tell direction by the way the air is moving? What are the connection between our bodies and the world around us that we completely miss, don’t see, don’t honor, don’t know? What if we listened to our skin and guts instead of the chorus of new, old, and ceaseless social media voices that clamor in our heads?

Could we, too, flourish a hundred thousand years if we listened for the reindeer that might be over those hills over there?

Somewhere lately I read -‘Sven the Cod.’ I don’t know where I read it; I’ve googled but come up with nothing. If there’s something out there entitled ‘Sven the Cod’ and I am misappropriating, I apologize. Let me know and I’ll change his name.

In the meantime, Sven the Cod has been living in my brain.

…

Sven was neither a sexy nor glorious fish. He left that to orcas and Mandarin fish. Sven was an older cod with whiskers, scales, beat up places where he had bumped into stuff, plus a terrific scar from the time he tangled with a grumpy mother octopus. Although, to be fair, as time passed Sven accepted that that mêlée had been his own fault. Some males eventually do grow into an understanding that, yes, sometimes they are boors around women who have a lot more on their minds than the egos of males.

Anyways, the formidable thing about Sven was this. He read. He read Twitter (he rarely called it X). He scrolled Instagram, mostly looking at political stuff though he really enjoyed the AI cats in overalls. He didn’t do TikTok because cod are afraid of Chinese misappropriation. Sven read the Atlantic, of course, plus whatever newspaper articles he could get without a paywall. He read Heather Cox Richardsen and the Columbia Journalism Review. He belonged to a local Facebook group of fish who tried to represent for justice issues, though it was hard because they had to stay underwater which meant their opinions were seen by very few.

Sven would read the dire news and then he would get up out of his fish bed and swim round and round in agitated circles. He wanted to fix life on earth yet, it seemed, all he could do was angrily slap his tail at trash, hum loudly, worry, and care. Especially care. He cared all the time. Some of comrades would lift their fishy eyebrows at him and suggest, “You don’t need to read it all, Sven. Life is short, enjoy the currents still left to you before the panko hits.”

But Sven could not stop caring. In his opinion civilization was being taken over by egregious politicians and the solipsistic billionaires who owned them. All of them, he mumbled to himself and anyone else who would listen, were anchor worms, flukes, and toxic bacterial infections on the starry velvet skin of the cosmos.

And then one morning as he was reading the news, he read the worst news yet. The current administration was about to lift most limits on the outflowing effluents of the chemical and fertilizer companies that stretched along the waterway where he lived. One factory CEO was secretly recorded as gushing, “Glyphosates are coming home, Baby!”

Sven stopped swimming. He literally stopped wriggling, stopped swishing his fins, his massive head stilled and his gills barely rippled as he absorbed the news that this time the doom was coming to his home. Because, as any well-read cod knows, where chemicals run a fish’s world is done.

He drifted all morning as fellow fish were beginning to hear the news from their sources and their water world became silent. No one knew what to say. No one knew what to do.

Some fish who knew Sven read a lot swam to him to ask the eternal questions of hope and hopelessness. “What can we do? The chemicals will be here within weeks. Can we stop it? Do we have to move? How do we know where to go?”

Sven shook his head. No simple answers.

And then, slowly, he began to become angry. “Why is it I know how bad everything is but no one ever told me what to do? Why have I been reading minutes and hours and days of my life and yet the only political action I know comes from people who are already safe? Or people with access to power? Why did I learn how to read but not how to act?”

And then, boom, he jerked his dorsal fins to make them pop and flip. He splashed sideways like a reckless racecar swerving a tight corner in a deep puddle. He faced the smaller fish who were watching him with wide eyes.

“All I know is that we can’t do nothing. So what we ought to do is the best and craziest stuff we know how to do. We are fish filled with surprises. They think we are swimming meat; we will show them, and ourselves, how much more we are.

“Spread the word. On Sunday we are going to gather in front of those death spray-arama factories. Anyone who knows anyone with a human voice and access to media, tell them to be on shore to watch all of us be our wildest and bravest selves. We will swim as close as we can to shore; we will be as loud and confusing as we can be. And By God and by Gum, we are fish! We know something about teasing, tantalizing, and obfuscating.”

“What?”

“We will make them think they have us but then we will swerve and splash and give them all the gusto we have. But first, fish friends, we have to lift up and acknowledge not just the skills all of us have, but also the unusual and rambunctious talents some of us have.”

Conversations began. Fish folks were surprised to discover how many things, among them all, they had learned to do. Older dolphins had (who knew?) choreographed a dolphin leap-a-thon set to Bob Marley’s ‘Stop That Train.’ Young dolphins dove and streaked to ‘Big Fish Theory’ by Vince Staples. No one new exactly how it pertained but that, Sven said, was the point. Not rearranging their loves and lives for the sake of “the man.” This was to be a gathering of the talent and passion of who they, the fish, were.

A fish named Wanda said, shyly, that she had learned to fly a kite. There was a little girl who fished every weekend with her parents except she did not like to catch living things so her parents gave her small kite and, Wanda rambled on breathlessly, no humans knew this part. The little girl had allowed Wanda to hold the kite string in her mouth. The fish were astonished at this marvelous feat and soon, who knows how, several dozen fish were flying small kites in air currents as they swam in water currents.

There were lobsters who knew how to do the Macarena. Dozens of older fish from Slow Currents Assisted Living could follow each other nose to tail, nose to tail, cutting slow silver swaths through the water.

Fish talked. Crustaceans clacked and clapped. Everyone laughed as many learned to do new and impossible things that some already knew. They were having more fun than they’d ever had. They were more than existing, they were learning and moving. Sven listened to the music, the bubbles, the booms of distant whales and tinkles of shrimp with teeny tap shoes on ALL their tiny feet. He was amazed that inside his ordinary fellow beings was this flow of lively life, derring-do, imagination, and swishy energy.

Sunday came. Several dozen people were lined along the shoreline as the fish with kites began the show with their little kites of pink, royal blue, rainbows, cartoon guys, and painted flowers. The kites polka-ed and waltzed over the water as humans, astonished, lifted their phones to take pictures and send them to everyone they knew.

Within an hour reporters, children, more reporters, old folks, TV crews, nervous conglomerate bozos, short buses filled with absolutely glorious humans, some drones from FOX and TMZ, and Pope Leo (by zoom of course) were there and more were gathering.

The Epic Ichthyic Talent Show of Earth’s Positively Piscatorial Pals ended in triumph as every fish and sea guy from near and far leaped from the water and flying fish flew over with a gauzy net fitted put in opalescent scales that read, “Don’t Poison Us & Don’t Poison You”

…

“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will live as one.” John Lennon

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.” Langston Hughes

“We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.” Colson Whitehead, ‘The Nickel Boy’

I remembered this old piece of writing when I was at the No Kings March last Saturday. Which felt, I think, like the first Easters felt. Hope in community.

…

From my Lost in Racine newspaper column of April 2, 1999

This weekend many people of Christian faith are celebrating the resurrection of Christ by re-checking their Easter dinner grocery list, going to the store to buy multiple bags of candy, then rushing home to vacuum the house before the mothers-in-law arrive.

If we are particularly devout we might also attend a Good Friday religious service. I’m not sure why, but these services tend to be ecumenical; folks from different churches meet together to share the rite.

I was raised in an emphatically non-ecumenical tradition. People of my childhood church prayed for ‘spiritually blind’ folks such as Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Catholics. Our prayers were to save those lost sheep from eternal damnation via conversion to our small Scandinavian denomination.

Years later, in conversation with a Catholic friend, I learned that she’d spent her childhood praying for Protestants like me. We both laughed.

This distrust of ecumenism is why I was so surprised the year my parents made us kids put on our Sunday clothes so that we could attend our town’s ecumenical Good Friday service.

I was impressed by how excruciatingly boring the service was. Clearly, my denomination was not the only one that knew how to make a child fidget nearly to death. I also wondered why they called it “The Seven Last Words of Christ” when the preachers were speaking hundreds upon hundreds of words.

Why, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” has ten words just on its own. Solemn adult rites can be so weird to kids.

The good part came later when eternity ended and we went home. I put on my play clothes and went outside into one of those beautiful days that April can bring. Balmy, breezy, the world on a hair trigger set for The Full Glory of Spring.

I wandered into the field next to our house and casually lowered myself into the huge earthen trench my brother and some of his friends had dug years earlier. They’d excavated the site for some wild game of war but the hole was so big it never disappeared back into the ecosystem. (It still existed decades later). Once a kid lowered herself into that sandy hole she was completely hidden from civilization.

The bright sun beat down on me in that windless shelter. I remember slowly noticing a sense of kid-peace. It wasn’t spiritual or mystical or any other grown-up thing, it was simply a rich feeling that I was safe, warm, and I had not only the whole afternoon but also the entire rest of my life to do anything I wanted. I was a kid tucked into a pocket of cold-boned winter earth but I was also underneath the vivid blue sky of the summer-to-come. I was safe and there were no limits.

Later that afternoon I found a kite, unfurled and strung the thing together, started running across the field. Within seconds it caught the wind and climbed the sky.

It was a beauty as it soared so high it caught some kind of air stream. As I let out the string the kite sailed further and further away. It crossed our field, soared over the river, and was on its way to a woods a half mile from where I stood. Did I really have that much string? I tied ball after ball of string end to end. I was just a kid but with my zip-flying kite I was reaching places I didn’t know a kid or a kite could go.

In one afternoon I cruised two human passions. I hunkered down. I flew.

Those old yearnings awaken in us in Spring. Snow melts, the ground thaws, some greenery starts to poke up, we get the urge to dig, to plant, to find a sunshiny place on a warm afternoon. Outside our house, away from work, free for a while from lists and obligations, we remember what it feels like to hunker down to rest our weary brains and bodies in the big lap of Mother Earth.

At another moment we feel that drive to spend energy, to make a mark, to fly. We plan trips, go for hikes along the lake or in the woods. We sign up for courses, canvas neighborhoods, ride bikes, visit the sailboat.

Jelly beans come and go. High holy religious days will be celebrated by some with great pomp and fervor. Others will toast the moment with chocolate bunnies and cling-to-your-carpet-till-May cellophane grass. No matter how we all celebrate or survive the coming days and season, this is definitely the beginning of this year’s chance to be wild and wise, to participate in real and satisfying human activities instead of frittering away our lives in non-essentials.

Spring calls us out of our houses, out of stale routines, out of ourselves.

In November I guest preached within my own congregation on the Unitarian Universalist theme of Gratitude. This is from then.

Pure Religion vs True Gratitude

In the Gospel of Luke Jesus heals ten lepers - but only one seeks out Jesus later to say thanks. What happens when we become grateful?

FYI: Samaria is approximately where southern Lebanon is now. Where, as of this morning (3/20/2026), the Israeli military is bombing. Death toll in Lebanon, so far, is over 1000.

…

Some friends were visiting while we happened to have two kinds of cookies in our kitchen. We offered their toddler a cookie. She looked at them, picked one and ate it. Her parents prompted, “Now what do you say?”

She said, “I want the other one.”

I had just started to work on this sermon on a day when I went for a walk by Carroll University. Suddenly, running straight towards me, was a bunch of college guys, probably their track team. I got off the sidewalk so the pack of them could keep running. They passed; I was about to get back on the sidewalk when here comes one more guy. Shorter, skinnier, slower, big glasses. I just KNEW this guy was going to say thank you as he passed and thus become the star of my sermon. But nope. Ran right past. Whatever. Kids these days.

I kept walking. A couple minutes later here comes the girls’ track team. All running, their ponytails bouncing. I got off the sidewalk, stood there, they came up and don’t you just know.. ALL of them called out thank you thank you thank you!

I laughed. You wanna see gratitude? Watch women. We’re good at it. We pave our way through the world with good manners because 1.) it makes life more pleasant and 2.) nice manners tend to make us safer.

If Jesus’ ten lepers had been women, they would have all come back.

Here’s our story from Luke 17: 11-19. ¹¹ Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. ¹² As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance ¹³ and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”

¹⁴ When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed.

¹⁵ One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. ¹⁶ He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.

¹⁷ Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? ¹⁸ Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?” ¹⁹ Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”

What too much of the religion in which too many of us were raised taught us is this. The leper got his health back because 1.) he was properly thankful. And 2.) also because he really, really, really believed. Ergo, if you need a miracle, you just have to squinch your eyes shut, tap your ruby red slippers and .. oh wait, wrong cultural legend. Funny how often gospel and happy ending stories run into each other. We keep waiting for Hallmark Christmas Special Jesus.

So first - don’t forget the inconvenient part of this gospel story - the other nine guys who were also healed DIDN’T come back - apparently ‘proper gratitude’ isn’t a requirement for obtaining grace.

Jesus comments that the man who came back was Samaritan. Curiously, there are two other Jesus stories where the punch line is – “and they were a Samaritan.” The woman at the well who recognizes that Jesus is Someone. The Good Samaritan who stops in a dangerous place to helps a guy who was mugged.

Why do we care that these people are ethnically Samaritan?

Quick history lesson here. In the Abraham to Moses to King David era there was one united kingdom of the twelve tribes called Israel.

In 930 B.C.E. – so about a thousand years BEFORE Jesus - the kingdom of Israel split after King Solomon died - more or less because Jerusalem leaders were heavily taxing poorer folks until their tribes revolted; and da-da, those people were in Shechem aka Samaria. (today this is southern Lebanon) This section of Israel would be, in Wisconsin terms, Eau Claire, La Crosse, and Chippewa Falls. Up and over.

North and the east aka Green Bay and Manitowoc became known as Galilee because it surrounded the Sea of Galilee. The Galileans stuck politically with the middle and southern Judah Jerusalem Madison and Milwaukee bunch.

Over the next several hundred years everyone was invaded by Assyria and later Babylonia. It was rough for everyone but devastating for Samaritans. Many were killed, kidnapped, forced into slavery over a period of two hundred years. When they finally returned to their own land, they brought with them their partners and kids who were no longer “pure” Jews.

When the Judeans were sprung from their fifty-year Babylonian captivity, they wanted to rebuild their temple and return to their pure and holy old time religion. The Samaritans said hey, it’s been hell for all of us, we would be glad to come down and help you build that new temple. The Judeans said nope, we don’t want your unclean hands and wives with accents and multi-racial kids in our religion. There’s obviously more than this, but you get the picture because, sadly, we know about “Religion so pure it’s for the likes of us - but not for the likes of you.”

So Jesus is walking towards Jerusalem. Disciples are with him when they hear yelling in the distance and the good thing it isn’t robbers - but it IS lepers.

The lepers recognize Jesus. “Look! There’s that prophet guy who’s been healing sick people. Well, that’s us!” “Yo, Jesus. Heal us!”

The story says that Jesus tells them to go and present themselves to the local priest and they will be healed. They did that.

Except this one guy; this Samaritan leper; this outcast of outcasts. We don’t know how far or long he had to walk or what he was thinking as he found his way back to Jesus after he realized he was healed - but when he finds Jesus he falls face down on the ground. He’s probably crying as he offers the best prayers of praise and gratitude he knows. He glorifies the God of the Universe by thanking this man who changed the trajectory of his life.

This verb used here for this moment of this man thanking Jesus is eucharistōn (Pronunciation: yoo-khar-is-TEH-o) and it’s an uncommon word in the Bible. It’s the root word of Eucharist which (all you ex-Catholics and Lutherans etc.) know is the Latin word for communion. Eucharist is when and where everyday bread and wine becomes more than bread and wine. Eucharist is where sustenance becomes a miracle.

Eucharist is when and where we wake up to our lives, when we acknowledge what we have been given and we become floored and humbled with gratitude.

Because 1. Gratitude stops us in our tracks. We thought our day or our lives were going to go one way – then something unexpected happens – and suddenly the moment we are in is different. We feel healing, we understand that at least in this moment and place we are seen. Gratitude creates in us a place to acknowledge our situation, our fortune, the gifts of healing and understanding we are given.

2. Gratitude calls us into relationship What we received was not a thing we could have won, stolen, or achieved all on our own. We were sailing along thinking we were coping – when we received a moment, help, awareness, a gift – and we thank the child who gave us a hug, the partner who did the dishes at the end of a hard day, the friend who listened to us, the musician who played Build Me Up Buttercup that brought back wonderful memories, the doctor, nurse, or prophet who healed us.

3. Gratitude reequips us for what comes next. We can pretty much assume that the Samaritan leper - who is no longer a leper - goes back into his community to share himself and his story mightily.

………………………………………………………

So now I have a story and in my defense, I probably think about prairie dogs and coyotes more than most people.

Once upon a time there was a UU prairie dog named Cheyenne who was ALWAYS grateful. She was grateful for sunshine but then, if it rained, she was grateful for a wet head. “Oh My Friends, I am just so thankful for drenched fur, aren’t you?”

Her friends would look at her sideways and roll their eyes. But whatever. That’s the way Cheyenne was. Always grateful. Always thankful. Kind of a wimp but in a true Unitarian Universalist congregation, you just let people be who they are and hope they don’t get too much nuttier than they already are. (Says the woman offering you a sermon that includes an imaginary prairie dog.)

In their congregation, although he didn’t attend very regularly, was also a poorly raised coyote named Cillian. I don’t know how he got a traditional Irish name like that, sometimes you really wonder where people erupted from. But Cillian Coyote was NEVER grateful. He was always watching people interact poorly, who were seldom, well, really never, up to his standards. The coffee was weak. The bacon was vegetarian and, he said “All I can ask is Why?” The congregational children were loud and confident. The old ladies of the congregation had too much assurance of their value to humanity and wore pants with stretch waistbands and went to movies without inviting him.

Sometimes during Joys and Sorrows, if Cillian was in the congregation that Sunday, he’d trot right up to the front. He was, he said, upset by teenagers in his neighborhood who rang his doorbell on Halloween even though he had no decorations, no lights on, and his front door said, “Go Away.” It had been disrespectful and disruptive and no wonder people were so harried these days. They were not getting enough rest because the nation’s young people only ate what they wanted to eat, not what was good for them, and they were undisciplined in other areas, too.

Then one day, deep in that autumn, Cillian became sick at heart. At first even he didn’t know what was happening. His fur started to thin around his ears which made him feel awkward. The pelt on his haunches turned gray almost overnight. Whiskers grew straight out of his eyebrows and his voice kept cracking awkwardly, like sticks breaking in a windstorm.

He had always been so confident about his good health, his sleek fur, and energetic lope. Suddenly he looked and felt entirely rumpled, and his loping gate was more of a limping gimp.

Being substandard embarrassed him so he didn’t go anywhere anymore. He ordered in rabbit and chipmunk fricassees from Door Dash and was grouchy when the stews were lukewarm. He’d hobble down to the creek in the morning for a drink and a washup, but that was all he went out. And of course, no one visited him because no one knew he needed anything. Being a shut-in coyote is a drab existence.

Until the morning, freezing creek water coursing over his threadbare snout, he looked up and there was Cheyenne, briskly sashaying along the other side of the creek, her prairie dog physique magnificently plump in the rising sun.

He gulped so loudly that Cheyenne looked over and then, Cheyenne stopped in her tiny tracks.

“Mr. Cillian, there you are! We haven’t seen you in a chihuahua’s age! We’ve missed you! No one complains as beautifully as you! How are you?”

Killian stood there, threadbare ears, crooked legs, ice on his whiskers, utterly stymied.

Cheyenne realize that not all was well with her fellow congregant, and as a representative of the Social Concerns Committee, she slid plumply onto the creek ice, plunked in and under, and then bobbed back up laughing. “Oofda, now that’s what I call brisk! Lovely way to finish waking up.”

She climbed out onto the bank by Cillian.

“You know, you look a bit peaked. How can I help?”

Cillian said nothing although one tear started to roll down his sunken cheek. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He squawked. “I’m disassembling and I don’t know who to blame.”

Cheyenne furrowed her plump brow. “Well, dear, I think blaming is low on the list of what’s important right now. It seems to me you need a good luncheon with plenty of roughage, an afternoon with friends, and an opportunity to share yourself with others. Or at least, this always helps me when I’m down.”

He was so exhausted by his months of heart sickness that he just let Cheyenne take over. They walked to town and had parsley soup. Cheyenne was going to quilting group at Marcia’s that afternoon so she brough Cillian with and he was so overwhelmed he kept his mouth shut except to bite threads for the others. And that evening, Cheyenne hauled him along to snack time at the evening study hall for teenagers who didn’t have actual homes of their own. Cillian was astonished to see the teenagers who had rung his doorbell on Halloween. Of all the things he never expected to learn, learning those kids had probably been hungry and had hoped they might get snacks at his house devastated him out of his life of opinions.

He turned to Cheyenne, tears in his eyes. “It never occurred to me that I am blessed. Thank you.”

And as he said that, unbeknownst to him, some purple fur started to sprout around his ears.

Within weeks his lope was back, a family of poor robins was sharing his den, he had a regular gig leading the Alaskan malamute choir. He had learned that being grateful was a wonderful way to grow thick fur. Especially when it grew in, amazingly, in LGBTQ supporting rainbow colors.

He had become a grateful coyote and it was way more fun.

In the fraught WWII autumn of 1943, Winston Churchill caught pneumonia from traveling too much, staying up too late talking too much, smoking too many cigars, eating and drinking too much. His doctor told him he had to rest. Since he was already in North Africa he zipped over to balmy Morocco to lay low and recuperate.

World War II was in its fourth year since the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. Italy was falling apart militarily; Mussolini had been more-or-less ousted in July of 1943 and moved offstage to an Italian island. Russia was steamrollering Nazi soldiers out of Russia. (According to Wikipedia, twenty-seven million Russian soldiers and civilians were killed during the German invasion of Russian. One million German soldiers lost their lives.)

It seemed pretty clear that Nazis would eventually lose the war but that day wasn’t going to arrive until there had been a whole lot more war. Can we ever look at this dynamic with enough disgust? What is more dangerously stubborn than arrogant men who play at macho by sending others to fight and die for them?

There would have to be an invasion of the Allies into Europe. The colossal military/political question thus became, where and when that would happen? Americans lobbied for France. Churchill agreed, though first, as he advocated from his balmy villa in Marrakesh, they should invade Sicily and Italy. Americans were not convinced this should happen. Italy was complicated, hilly, craggy, filled with poverty, suspicions, and embedded Germans. However, Eisenhower (and others, always there were others) was trying to not just win the war but to do it in some kind of collaborative accord with all the Allies.

Imagine coordinating the baking of ten thousand cookies in one ordinary kitchen with seven cooks from seven different cultures. The kicker being that if you don’t plan it well - people will die. WWII was too many cooks and yet, without the resources of each other, no one would succeed alone.

Churchill lobbied hard for the invasion of Italy. There were hours of discussion. Leaders tried to not yell because they knew, aggravating as it was, they had to stick together.

In the end they agreed to do what Churchill wanted. Some of those planning leaders said it would be easy because Mussolini was out of power. Some experts insisted Italians would have no heart to collaborate with the Germans who still violently occupied their homeland. Italy is a smallish. Tying up Germans in Italy would keep them busy while Allies organized to invade France next year. It made some sense.

Here is where I mention that my dad was one of the 300,000 Allied troops shipped to Sicily and Italy in 1943-1944. The photo of the guy smiling while he holds puppies – that’s my dad, Wilman Danielson, in Italy. He died of a heart attack when I was a still a kid so I barely heard his stories. I guess that’s why, all these decades later, I’m reading “The Day of Battle” by Rick Atkinson. It’s a fiercely compelling 600-page tome about the Allied invasion of Sicily/Italy. I trip over the names and numbers of military divisions but the tale itself is never tedious.

What I’m learning is what those of you who are history buffs likely already know. The men who planned, orchestrated, and carried out WWII were mostly ego-driven, fairly (but not always) smart, courageous white men. Many had been soldiers during WWI so they were aware of what it’s like to be a soldier in a war. We admire them now because it was so long ago and “we won.”

Up close, watching their acrimony, arrogance, and bullheaded determination to send young guys to overpower and rout other young guys – it astounds me how dangerous, loud, and impossible it was.

In August, the Allies invaded Sicily. In September, they crossed from Sicily into Italy. The American 5^th Army was led by General Mark Clark who, almost everyone agrees, was sometimes good and brave, but often seemed more interested in his own glory than the success and welfare of his men. When things went wrong (it was a war) he blamed others.

The 8^th Army was British, led by General Bernard Montgomery who was touchy, held grudges, and believed Americans were not as tough as Brits. He occasionally did not do what collaborative plans said to do; he’d move his guys differently so they could get to an end goal before the Americans. This, as you can imagine, made him no BFF’s among the Americans. Then again, General Clark did the same when he could get away with it.

I absolutely hate that these two empowered men were ‘working their careers’ while thousands upon thousands of soldiers and Italian civilians’ lives were at stake.

It was January when Churchill (and many others) directed Clark and Montgomery to cross the Winter Line to rout the Germans who were hunkered in. The Winter Line was a waistbelt across the middle of the boot of Italy that bisected the nation with valleys and intertwining rivers that tumbled from the Apennines mountains. The Apennines ran up and down (north and south) the boot of Italy like the Rockies or Appalachians do in the US. They are smaller than our mountains, but are famous for rocky crevices, caves, abutments, and terrain that would stymy a goat.

By that winter of 1944, the Nazis had been in Italy for years and thus were ensconced in that terrain. They’d built bunkers from which they could easily shoot down into the meandering valleys. They’d placed tens of thousands of mines in the marshes and along the riverbanks.

The Winter Line’s Gari river (usually called the Rapido when people talk about this battle, though apparently that’s the wrong name) would become the site of an assault by Americans that started January 20. They started at dusk so, the planners said, it would be harder for the Germans to see them. Mine sweeping soldiers had been through the area several days before but there were still mines. Americans were assigned to cross the river at the mouth of the Liri Valley – which was directly below four hundred embedded German guns and rocket launchers. Americans were supposed to ford the river, then fight their way up, into, and eventually over the mountains. This offensive, the planning leaders said, would help clear the path of the Allies to Rome. It would also keep thousands of German soldiers occupied so that a different Allied assault along the seacoast at Anzio would have a better chance of succeeding. This plan was nuts.

One of the units was U.S. 36th Infantry Division led by Major General Fred Walker. The division had started as a Texan division but over the months since Sicily, 60% of those men had been lost to casualty and death. Thousands of replacement soldiers were sent in the few days before the assault at Rapido/Gari . Most of those replacements had little to no training relevant to crossing a river or climbing a mountain. Bazooka teams were sent with men who had never fired a bazooka. The regulars had, along the way, stripped their stripes from their uniforms in order to protect themselves from identification by Germans. This meant new guys didn’t know the ranks or expertise of the guys they would fight next to.

Fred Walker was anxious. In his diary he wrote to himself that they would need miracles if they were going to succeed.

From The Day of Battle, pg. 339. “At 7:30 PM sixteen artillery battalions opened fire in gusts of white flame. … more than a thousand shells per minute shrieked overhead…” Dozens of both rubber dinghies and plywood scows had been hidden in one locale for the Americans to pull from under camouflage, haul to the deep and fast running river, then paddle across. But German artillery had, that very afternoon, fired so many rounds down into the valley that half the rubber boats had holes. The plywood boats weighed five hundred pounds each and had to be carried by soldiers, who were also carrying their guns, all their ammo, and all the other equipment they would need. They were supposed to carry those boats along a narrow road beside the river, while Germans, who could see the dark shadows in the night, blasted volleys of fire down upon them.

The Texan 36^th was one of several divisions trying to cross the river that night. Nothing went right. One group got lost and had to backtrack. “Paddles, rifles, and human limbs rained across the road.” The white tape that minesweepers had used to delineate safe places to walk had seemed too visible so they’d switched to brown cord - at night those cords were impossible to see. Men stumbled onto mines and, “It’s pretty hard when you are dying to keep quiet.” And thus Germans up in the hills and crags were even more informed of where the Americans were.

That night was brutal. By early the next day leaders realized hundreds of soldiers had been killed, thousands wounded, and only a few men made it across the river. Those men were so precariously positioned that they were ordered to come back.

Soldiers, the ones who were the actual “boots on the ground,” knew this battle plan would never work. Yet the next evening they were sent into it again. They didn’t know they’d actually been weirdly successful because they DID keep two German panzer units occupied so they couldn’t make their way to Anzio.

Official medical records of those two nights listed 2019 causalities, more than half were deaths. Later General Clark, defending himself, would accuse Major General Walker of “inflating” those numbers in a bid for sympathy. The Germans found 430 American bodies and took 770 prisoners. German losses were sixty-four dead and 179 wounded. A captured American carrier pigeon flew back to its American Corps with a German message attached to its leg that read, “We look forward to your next visit.”

A company commander reported, “I had 184 men. Forty-eight hours later I had seventeen.”

So many men died that after the war there would be an investigation though in the end no one was charged with anything.

A Brigadier from New Zealand who weighed in on the reports wrote, “Nothing was right except the courage.”

…

War. What is it good for?

Yeah, you got that right. War is good for absolutely nothing.

But if our leaders are going to launch our young men and women into it, by all that is holy, they ought to plan it before they start it.

(To those who are reading Meatballs - I’m working on Chapter 6 and will post it as soon as it’s done.)

This week I emailed my reps, once again, telling them to use their effing positions of power to oppose this stupid war. You don’t need me to convince you of the disaster that this Epstein Administration is. I’m not a political writer though I am a citizen of the US, I’m paying attention, and I’m incredulous, angry, and scared.

I was looking at some of my old writing this morning and this thirty-year-old newspaper column about making phone calls caught my attention. It’s incredibly outdated, yet the exasperation is still true. So is, I think, the weird and heartfelt hope that we can make a difference.

I’ll edit this a little, not much.

…

March 1996 / Phone Calls

I know a lovely human being who’s been making too many phone calls lately. She says in that small moment between when she dials someone and when they answer she tends to forget who she’s calling and why.

She also mentioned that not long ago she was on her cordless phone (remember when we called them this?) coordinating a meeting while she was making dinner -and the phone fell in the soup. She says she’s going on vacation just as soon as she can call for arrangements.

Last night I made fifteen organizational phone calls. There should be some kind of special term for these kinds of calls. They’re not job related, though making them is a job. We do them to get volunteers for PTA, coordinate a banquet, remind Scout parents of the next meeting, arrange a church project, plan someone’s retirement party. These calls come part and parcel with interesting lives. They are not fun, although they’re not awful, either.

I think of them as lima bean phone calls. They won’t kill, but who in their right mind would seek them out?

When I was a teenager I read a weird short story about a grown woman. The plot seemed so curious and banal I never forgot it. Now that I’m an adult, I think it’s hilarious.

The protagonist was a fine but rather introverted woman. A service club she belonged to was arranging a bake sale. She was given a list of forty people to call to ask for baked good contributions.

The task loomed over her. She didn’t want to call people she didn’t know. She felt overwhelmed by shyness but she was also disgusted with herself for being such a wimp.

She procrastinated until it was almost too late, and then she discovered she’d lost the list. Panic grabbed her until the light went on in her head and she breathed a sigh of relief, smiled to herself, and sat down to make a careful grocery list. She proceeded to bake for two days and brought forty desserts to the sale by herself.

Quick. Which seems easier? One hour of lima bean phone calls or two solid days in the kitchen?

I know plenty of people (me) who, given a choice will pick the kitchen, the work shop, the garden, or the home office every time.

If de Tocqueville were writing his treatise on American democracy now he’d probably talk about the amazing amount of time we spend on the phone arranging the activities, events, and politics of our lives. It isn’t glamorous but it’s definitely the tool by which most of the good works we do get coordinated.

Perhaps we should amend the Statue of Liberty. She’ll still hold high the Torch of Freedom but we could tuck a phone under the other arm. (Or in a pocket. Does she have pockets?) The message should be clear. If one is going to contribute to the strength of this nation eventually one’s going to be on the phone.

One of the first fine moments of my young adult life came to me because of my willingness to stick a phone to my ear. It was Thanksgiving of 1972 and I was a college kid home for the long weekend. I was quietly and politely eating turkey down at the cousins’ end of my aunt’s dinner table. People were talking about the recent election where Nixon had trounced George McGovern. Twenty-nine people were satisfied and grateful with the results of that election. “That simpering liberal McGovern” was not a big favorite in my family.

Right then my brother announced, “Of course, the fact that Nixon won was no thanks to Mary Beth, who volunteered for McGovern.”

Silence reigned. You could hear turkey chilling and cranberries jelling. An uncle at the grown-ups’ end cleared his throat. I saw his great head swivel. He leaned slightly forward in order to imprint a clearer image of me in his beady eagle eyes.

“I expected better of you, Mary Beth, than to fall prey to the blithering liberal blather that erodes our society.”

I flipped my long hair out of my eyes, re-adjusted my granny glasses, and straightened my bell bottoms. Then I grinned. It isn’t just every day that a nice girl with good grades and no boyfriend can startle and surprise twenty-nine people. Especially people who’ve known her since she born.

They thought I was doing something powerful and dangerous. I knew all I’d done was call a hundred citizens of Illinois’ DuPage County and I didn’t bother telling my relatives what a pathetic experience it had been. DuPage (at least at that time) was the second most Republican county in the country. Out of all those phone calls, I got one person who didn’t mind talking about McGovern. He chuckled when he told me to keep up the good work.

Maybe the people of the world who agree to make a few phone calls for this organization or that cause aren’t exactly power brokers and superheroes. But there is something to be said about the way we stitch together the pieces of our communities with these eternal, infernal, informative, low rent calls. I remember when President Kennedy told us the Chinese proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Maybe it begins with a phone call.