What if This is True? By Laura J. Oliver

This is about pet peeves, of which my pet is not one. But squirrels are.

I don’t like being surprised by a load of wet laundry that’s been sitting in the washing machine for three days when I open it to start mine.

I don’t like the cable pull apparatus in the gym.

Ditto resistance bands.

Or when I say to my trainer, “You don’t actually have any clients who can touch the floor with this free weight from a squat, do you?” and he says with a sigh, “I guess you don’t know Lisa.”

And now I’m laughing too hard to stand up.

I know Lisa.

I don’t like having someone fake-look at the very cool thing I’m pointing out on a walk.

Dogs that smell like perfume.

Dressing rooms that smell like perfume.

Drivers who stop for really old pedestrians limping through in crosswalks. (Hahaha. Kidding! I see you’re paying attention.)

Salespeople at the mall forced by their employers to stand just at the entrance to their store waving samples of face cream as you try to speed by unnoticed on the other side of a kiosk. They call out things I can’t hear. Things that sound like, “Ma’am! Your face!” I feel for them, though. I once had an editor who made me cold call potential magazine subscribers. It was excruciating.

Generally speaking, don’t love the mall.

Or the volume of the previews at the movie theater there. We are not deaf. Until we leave.

And I kind of miss the days when you sat up normally to watch a movie and could hold hands and whisper to each other. Now it’s like everyone in the theater is lying down together, and it’s weirdly too intimate in some ways and not intimate enough in another.

People who remember things differently than I do and are totally wrong. And then right.

Fifteen-mile-an-hour speed limits. Really?

Kitchen cabinets that are hung at a height perfect for people over 6 feet tall, not for anyone woman-sized trying to reach the (useless) third shelf.

But there are a lot of things I do like.

I do like it when my neighbor, who is a surgeon, stops me as I’m walking past his car at sundown because he performed emergency surgery all last night, after working all the previous day, and after an hour’s sleep in the on-call room,  he has rolled straight into yet another full day of saving lives, and he’s just now getting home at 7:30 pm, but he’s still full of wonder that he was able to give a woman just like me, who had become abruptly and inexplicably paralyzed, the ability to walk again. Participating in a miracle is news you want to share. Even if the first opportunity to express your gratitude and incredulity is pressing it into a neighbor’s palm passing by on a hot sidewalk. I feel privileged it was me, that our paths crossed just as he was getting out of his car so I could be a witness to a marvel that started the day he applied to med school and just culminated last night in a Maryland operating room.

I like knowing that miracles are speeding toward you, right this second, that may take years to arrive—like light, like gravity waves.

Live in a state of anticipation. Assume help is on the way. (Compare this choice to its alternative.)

I like the fact that a woman walking up Lafayette Avenue this morning paused to tell me that a perfect stranger down in the park just went out of his way to be kind to her 12-year-old son. She’s wearing a wide-brimmed sunhat and yellow capris, and even across the street I can see she is beaming. I don’t know what the guy did, but she has tears in her eyes. “The world is so violent,” she says, “we are in such turmoil. I’m holding on to this kindness.”

“And sharing it,” I said with a smile. She nodded, pressed her hands to her heart, and moved on.

I do like learning stuff. (So, did you know that 96 percent of all the mammals on the planet are us? The remaining 4 % of mammals are where you have your lions and tigers and bears.)

Someone I admire is explaining quantum entanglement to me. He is talking about acceleration. He says, “blah, blah, blah,” followed by “zzzzz—zzzzz–zzzzz.”  I’m nodding as I sip a crisp Sauvignon Blanc, but I think I’ve already cracked the nut on the entanglement mystery.

(Yikes, he’s still talking, so I’ll tell you.)

There never were two particles on opposite sides of the universe.

There was only one.

There is no two of anything, not even a you and me.

In the fullness of time, there is only here, only now, only us.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.