A theory floated at the time I first started teaching creative writing workshops at St. John’s College, claimed that your first memory is a paradigm for your life. I doubt this is true, but it made a good writing prompt, and it got me to thinking about my own earliest recollections. Now I’m curious about yours.

When my mother’s mother was dying, Mom left my two older sisters with my father in Maryland and took me, then 2 or barely 3, back to Illinois to say goodbye. 

We flew from BWI to Chicago, and somewhere over Ohio, I fell asleep.  When I awoke, my mother lifted me to the window and said, “Look, Laura! We flew right through the clouds while you were sleeping.” She must have been enchanted despite our sad mission. She was barely 35. It was her first time on a plane. 

As instructed, I gazed out the window as the engines droned westward. Snowy-white, cotton ball clouds solid enough to walk on floated beneath us. Flew right through them? Not possible. So, my earliest memory is of trying to process a contradiction—someone I totally trusted, someone holding me in her arms 38,000 feet above the earth, was telling me something that could not be true. 

We had flown from Baltimore but returned by rail. My second memory is of a porter offering my mother a pillow for me to sleep on. I remember lying there with my eyes closed but not asleep. The porter returned and I heard him say, “I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s an elderly lady in the back who needs a pillow. Since your baby is asleep, do you think we could slip the pillow out from under her and let this woman have it?” 

I heard and understood every word. And I wanted to help! I wanted the old lady to have the pillow! But I was a baby. And when they lifted me up and took the cushion away, I wailed. Sobbed. I was inconsolable. Even while I was crying, I was thinking, Why am I doing this? The spirit was willing, the baby body was on autopilot.  

Looking back, I wonder who the tears were for. Hours before, my mother had left her mother dying of a slow paralysis in a hospital ward. Had she yet cried for the loss that was coming? What is repressed in one is expressed in other. Grief by osmosis. Grief by proxy. 

Eventually a flustered porter brought the pillow back.

These two memories have taught me something about myself and something better about you. 

In the first, someone I totally believed told me something that could not be true, but I didn’t trust her less nor doubt myself. This was my introduction to the mystery of contradiction, when two things that can’t both be true, must be true. 

Case in point: how does a puffy white, 500-ton cloud float in a crystal-blue sky? And for that matter how is it that air weighs anything at all? 

Some people call the acceptance of a paradox faith—but maybe it’s closer to humility. The recognition that try as I might to puzzle things out, I won’t, and the world neither requires nor longs for my understanding of it. 

And in the second memory? Innocence gives way quickly to so many emotions— judgment, criticism—I’ve experienced and expressed them all. So, I like remembering that there was a time in my life when I sincerely wanted to give all I possessed to someone in need in the back of the train. This still seems like an excellent plan.  

I like thinking, “Ah, that’s the you who came into this world.” The blank slate wasn’t blank! It was kind. And you know what? You were kind, too. Research shows we’re all born with compassionate hearts.

Harvard Professor Felix Warneken designed an experiment where babies observe an adult appearing to struggle with a task. Without training, prompting or rewards, eighteen-month-olds gallantly retrieved his dropped teaspoons, stacked his books, and pried open stuck cabinet doors so he could reach inside.  They would even sacrifice something they wanted in order to help those in distress, the very definition of altruism.

If we erased all we regret, if we distilled our life experiences back to our pure point of arrival into the world, who would each of us be? 

As unlikely as it seems, 500 tons of water can float like smoke in the air. 

And there is only love, indivisible, at the heart of you.

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.r

 

There are those who think serendipitous timing is a matter of chance and those who think nothing is. I’ll bet you have some thoughts on this but let me tell you what happened.

Mike was a laid-back, bear of a man, who wore a pale-blue oxford shirt with khaki pants every day and looked like a stocky Paul Newman. He’d left his job as an editor at Time/Life Books to start The Chesapeake Boatman when I came to work for the magazine as Associate Editor. A kind and generous mentor, Mike put up with a lot from his young, given-to-drama staff–rather like a long-suffering father shepherding a bunch of rowdy adolescents. We made him buy lunch a lot. 

The Boatman was a substantive magazine but struggled for three years in a saturated market. I was delighting in my second week of maternity leave when Mike came to the house to meet my new daughter, and to deliver the news that the magazine had folded. He was closing the office. I grieved for the loss of a job, a boss, and a routine that I loved, but I supplanted those losses with new motherhood, which I loved more.

We lost touch and I never saw Mike again, but 23 years later, I was waiting for the pasta water to boil one evening when he came abruptly, vividly to mind. Without pausing, I picked up the phone, asked the operator for his number and instead of giving it to me, she connected the call. A second later, a person I deeply valued and had often missed, came on the line as if we had just paused for breath. “Laura,” he said. “I’m so glad you called.  We just got back from Chicago. I’ve been part of a study there.  I have kidney cancer and it looks like I’ve got about 3 months to live.” 

It came to me then. Conversations from 20 years before.  Mike was an atheist. Mike had been born with only one kidney. 

My family was leaving for New Zealand in a few days where I’d be staying indefinitely—The Land of the Long White Cloud. Mike was soon leaving for parts unknown and was already well beyond visitors. 

We exchanged email addresses and I wrote to him as much as I thought his nurses would tolerate as the days counted down. He believed that at the moment of his death, he would cease to exist. Intuitively, I felt otherwise but kept to the facts.

I told him he was the best boss I’d ever had. And by boss I also meant friend. I thanked him for teaching me to play racquetball and by racquetball I meant how to polish a manuscript, how to make respect the point of origin for all relationships. I asked his forgiveness for redecorating his office over the weekend as a surprise, but getting paint on the carpet, a penalty he must have absorbed when the magazine closed. And by paint on the carpet, I meant, forgive me for every time I took your patient equanimity and generosity for granted.

From 12,000 miles away, I told him about being in New Zealand for the America’s Cup. I described the cheering crowds in the tidal basin, the excitement of watching mark roundings and tacking duels from the spectator fleet. 

Then an email arrived that he told me would be his last. A few days later, New Zealand won the America’s Cup, and I flew back to the States, reentered life here with 3 kids, organizing their activities, their return to school. I tried not to think about the inevitable news that was coming. A few weeks after that a woman who identified herself as Mike’s secretary called to say Mike had died.

I searched my inbox for his last email so that I could hear him tell me goodbye. Just above his name he had typed, “God bless you.” 

I don’t know if that was something Mike came to believe, said for my benefit, or just threw out there covering the bases for both of us. He had told me he wasn’t bitter or regretful about his impending death though he was young. He said, “I look at it this way: X number of people will die of cancer this year. If one of them is me, then one of them isn’t someone else.” Chance.  

But the fact that someone I loved and hadn’t spoken to in 23 years, came to mind at the exact and only moment in which I could have said thank you and goodbye, felt like something other than chance. With or without divine orchestration, it felt like more than an accident in timing. And his blessing felt intentional. 

Maybe we don’t have to believe that everything is chance, or nothing is. Maybe we don’t need to be that black and white. Maybe we aren’t going to know with such mathematical clarity what is a gift and what is a given. 

William James said, “No one knows the truth with a capital ‘T.’ The truth is what works.” 

Being open to possibility is the wild, tender nature of grace. And that works for me. 

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.

 

I joined Ancestry.com to confirm my ancestral points of origin, then, just for fun, had my DNA decoded.  One resulting revelation was that my 10th great-grandfather, Francis Cooke, and his son, John, were passengers on the Mayflower.  But that fun fact was actually not as intriguing as the discovery that you and I share a fragment of ancient genetic code. I’m talking about Neanderthal DNA. And apparently, I have more than most people. 

I admit I immediately succumbed to the stereotype, as in, does this explain my SAT scores? (I had previously defended them to my increasingly dubious kids like this: “Mommy is a different kind of smart…”). But as it turns out, we all have a bit of Neanderthal in us. Some of us less than 1 %. Some of us as much as 2 %. Some of us are not telling. 

The report gained a lot of credibility with me when it went on to explain that I carry a particular Neanderthal gene related to waking up frequently throughout the night while requiring less sleep than most people. Finally, a diagnosis. Blame it on cave men. I fall asleep quickly but come fully awake at least 8 times a night, and yet…I am not sleepy during the day and totally functional. Genes! Who knew? I can see the evolutionary advantage. Who’s going to sense the wolfpack circling the campfire first? The slugabeds who died out, or Team Neanderthal? 

We used to think that modern humans were so intellectually superior that they simply wiped out the Neanderthals. Now we understand Neanderthals didn’t submit to the interlopers. We charmed them. We invited folks over. Who had their thinking caps on the day those two wary groups met, I’d like to ask? Who’s the smarty now?  Think of the meeting of modern humans and Neanderthals as the first blended family.

Why do we do this? Look for roots, our origins, our homelands? I suspect it helps us build a container for the self, that it anchors us, adds to that feeling of I know who I am because I know where I came from. No one knows who named the earth, but we do know it is a combination of old Germanic and old English words meaning “ground.” To know your own history, however complex, is grounding. 

My lovely eldest daughter married a Brit and made England her home in a reverse immigration. My grandsons, 4 and 5, have British accents, and perhaps have relatives who served at the royal court or were served at court. They have never been to America, but I hope they learn their whole rich history. 

And my son married a beautiful New Zealander of Scottish and Māori descent. So, their children’s genetic code includes passengers on a Mayflower manifest, and far earlier adventurers, who crossed an ocean bigger than their known universe in log canoes.  

What if, as the world becomes smaller, these distinctions dissolve? Engineers are working on a next-generation jet with the ultimate goal of getting you anywhere in the world in an hour for $100. Borders may become obsolete. 

What if in a distant future we become one race? Combining the best of all of us? Keen intelligence, fierce integrity, instinctive kindness. Everyone speaking one language, preserving one fragile planet, our only means of transport around our star.

 Race: Human. Home: Earth.

 At what point will our similarities outweigh our differences?  Not us and them. Not my people versus your people. The ultimate blended family of man. 

Maybe we can place our attention on our commonality now.  I’m sure you and I are connected by a thousand similar feelings and behaviors. 

Case in point. Have you ever been in your astronomy class on zoom, turned off your camera, muted your mic, and danced to Shake it Off, (demonstrating your coolest moves), only to discover your camera was on the whole time?

Oh.

Of course not.  

Neither have I.

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.

 

 

Before my grandfather died, accidentally struck by a 16-year-old driver in broad daylight as he walked to his Wednesday-afternoon bowling league, he built a 6-foot-long telescope to study the heavens. It took a year just to grind the lens. When completed, he mounted the telescope on the wheel drum of a Model A Ford so it could rotate. I was 12 when he was killed so we didn’t have a lot of time together. I wish I could have known better the man who built a telescope longer than I was tall, to see out into space and backwards in time.

I carry on his legacy as an Astro-fan—a participant in an ongoing astronomy class that originated at the local community college. We are retired NASA scientists, physicists, biologists, and one embarrassingly exuberant math-challenged writer. We seem to have nothing in common except a fascination with the grandeur of space, the beauty of the cosmos, and an unending curiosity about where it all came from and how it will end. 

Every week I learn something new about the origins of the universe, rogue planets, dark energy and quasars. Fascinating facts I presumptuously assume everyone will want to know. A charismatic writing client once asked, “What lights you up?” And I thought, “Well now, that’s a cool phrase,” and I knew the answer immediately—learning is the light– and like our ancestors before us we have learned to carry the fire when we travel, and, like Herb and Denise, who teach this course, to share the flame.

My astronomy class has seen the black hole at the center of the Milky Way and studied the evidence that smaller galaxies have merged with ours at least 7 times. 

Ten billion years ago, Gaia Enceladus crashed through the Milky Way and more recently we collided with Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy, although to say we collided is a misnomer. In the vast reaches of space, galaxies pass through each other routinely with virtually no direct impacts —just wild disruptions of orbits and redistribution of planets. It’s a cosmic dance, and our next partner, the much larger spiral galaxy Andromeda, will lead. 

Astronomers estimate there are 20 sextillion planets in the visible universe. I memorized that fact last week, so I could imagine the immensity and so I could tell you.  

So much wonder in the world. I like to stun myself with remarkable discoveries so I can experience one of the few characteristics that is unique to humans.

Self-awareness, language, altruism?  

What sets us apart is our ability to feel awe.

We grow silent in the giant redwood forest—catch our breath at a mountain vista. There is a documented universal outcry at the moment of totality in a solar eclipse and a feeling of communal euphoria afterwards. 

Wait! Did you know that our ability to witness a total solar eclipse is time-limited?  

  Cup the match. Pass the flame. 

You witness the totality of the moon blocking out all but the ring of the sun’s corona because of a mathematically uncanny synchronicity. The sun’s diameter is 400 times greater than that of the moon, while the moon orbits precisely 400 times closer to the earth than the sun. 

But the moon is moving away from the earth at a rate of 1.48 inches a year. In some distant future she will slip from earth’s embrace and set sail into infinity. Some discoveries are about letting go.

The James Webb telescope will begin sending back to earth its first pictures this week. We will be able to see almost to the beginning of time—back 13 billion years to what astronomers call the “wall of last scattering”—the impenetrable plasma that existed until some 380,000 years after the Big Bang when photons were released to begin their journey from then to now. From there to you.

Prepare to be astounded. 

Prepare to feel your intense insignificance and your connection to what is limitless at the same time. Prepare to be awed.

A friend once said to me at a dinner party, “Oh I get it. You study this stuff because you think you are special—  that you are somehow connected to something infinite.” It was simply an observation and not a wrong one. Why did it feel like a challenge? There is nothing to argue. Ever. Only new things to learn.

 Light me up.

I took a sip of my wine and admitted, “True. And I think that love powers the universe in ways we don’t understand. And that love is refracted in the human spirit.” 

So, let’s look at the numbers again because reverence is evoked by vastness. There are 7.7 billion of us on this planet—the only planet in the solar system not named for a god. That’s 7.7 billion of us looking up at 400 billion stars in a Milky-Way sky.  

It’s not that I think I am special. 

 It’s that I think you are. As is the mysterious, uncanny, ever-changing universe that holds us in its arms.

 And I’m in awe.

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.

 

This is about cows with boundary issues, and if you read this column regularly, you’re already saying, “No it’s not.”

Five heifers from my sister’s farm recently went on the lam. The jailbreakers are young, just weaned. They don’t even eat grain yet, but they’re brave and bold and maybe highly incentivized. How’d they escape the pasture? They didn’t jump the fence (though I’ve seen this). They didn’t find a break in the fence. They went under the fence at a stream.

Now they are their own herd of guileless youngsters, out past curfew, and it’s a bigger problem than you would think. They’re black, and even this young, they weigh close to 600 pounds. If a motorist were to suddenly come across one in the road at night, it would not be a good thing. Law enforcement was notified, animal control, neighbors, a veterinarian. It took days to even figure out if they were still on the property. Proximity to an airport precluded the use of a drone and the farm’s 80 acres feature a lot of wooded hillsides and sheltered hollows of oak, maple, and pine. But eventually they were located on a neighboring farm having a drink and some recreational weed which is cow-equivalent to water and real grass though I picture them having a beer and a smoke behind the barn.

It’s a serious problem. I love my sister and brother-in-law and would fix this if I could. As a mother, my theory is that the calves are heading for their mothers on the farm where they were born 100 miles south in Amherst. But that’s because mothers want to believe they are lifetime homing beacons for their offspring when it’s likely your offspring hasn’t thought about you in weeks, maybe months, and rightly so.

So cowgate has become a thing. My other sister and I check in periodically to see if the cows have come home, but I swear every time the answer is no, there is sincere concern for my sister, new brainstorming of solutions, and (I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry), a little fist bump for the cows.

As I write this 3 have been recaptured by experienced cowhands. The mastermind heifer and his cohort are still at large. They are all going to be shipped out west. Once a jailbreaker, always a jailbreaker, my brother-in-law says, and he should know. He’s been successfully raising cattle for decades. (Irrelevant fact: he is very handsome which makes you want to believe him.)

The cows can’t run forever. We know their freedom is limited, they’re on borrowed time. But I guess there is something about an underdog we can’t help but champion.

If you are an American, you are here because of another group of rebellious underdogs. The colonies, of which Maryland was the 4th largest at the time, took on an enemy 4 times their size in terms of population and one armed with incomparable resources. American Revolutionaries endured over 1,500 military engagements with a professional army over an excruciating 8 years. And unlike conventional wars, the War of American Independence was fought for an ideal. A principle.

Once declared, there was no going back. We’d be free or die trying. And we did die trying–25,000 men lost their lives in battle or from disease.

A ragtag army fought in below-freezing temperatures without coats or adequate clothing, marched for days without shoes, without medicine, shelter, adequate weapons, or food. Recruits could enlist at 15 years old with parental permission, 16 otherwise. A lot of teenagers fought this war.

George Washington’s biography, which details these years, will bring you to your knees in awe and gratitude. When you come to understand the sacrifice exacted, you come to appreciate more fully the absolute miracle of this or any republic.

We are surely as imperfect as a nation as we are imperfect as individuals. How could it be otherwise?

Yet what an astonishing privilege it is to live in a democracy. Happy Birthday America. I’ll be grateful long after the cows come home.

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.

 

I have a confession. I read my horoscope (Pisces) every day in The Washington Post because (must I really spell this out?) the ones in the Post are completely accurate!

I also read the horoscopes of former flames to see if they’re suffering. 

Capricorn: “You will want to move on today but persistent thoughts of a certain someone make it impossible.” Yes!

Also in the confession category: my best friend mispronounces my name. She’s called me “Lora” for 15 years and I’ve never corrected her. Now I can’t. But it’s worse for my writer friend Brian Doyle who has been referred to as Drain Boyle, Brain Doyle and Brian Dooley.

Besides answering to the wrong name, I listen to books on tape and report that I’ve read them. And I think keeping a secret means you only tell one other person. Okay, two.

But back to horoscopes. Do I believe this stuff? Of course not? But I do know that words are the power tools that change experience into feeling. Because it’s not what happens to us as much as what we tell ourselves about what happens to us that creates our mood and determines our futures. That’s powerful stuff. And it’s all just story. 

Remember I told you I’m a student of neuroscience?

Well, did you know that when you hear the words, “I have a story to tell you, ”your brain sends out a flood of endorphins in the belief that intriguing information is on the way?

Research shows our brain believes what it hears, even when the words contradict the facts. For instance, we are affected by false flattery, even when we know it is false! (By the way, you look terrific today.)

The placebo effect makes people get better on the power of belief alone (cool), but recent discoveries show health improves even when patients know they’re getting the sugar pill! (Cooler.)

Don’t believe me about the influence of words? 

I have found your horoscope.

You are filled with joy when a burden is lifted today. A financial windfall is coming your way. Exciting news arrives before noon.

I know what you’re thinking. She just made this up! And yet…

We are affected by the story we tell and not just about ourselves but about others. Sure, the guy who cut you off in traffic could be a jerk. But the story you can write in response as you merge onto Route 50 is this. 

His mistake was unintentional. He’s as embarrassed as you are annoyed. He’s late to pick up a frightened 4-year-old. He’s distracted by his lab results. He would give his life for his children, just as you would for yours. 

Feel the difference? You are the author of all that you feel, and it so often is a judgment when it could be a gift. 

It’s not just an emotional sleight of hand. The primal brain is ego-centric and sees all action as inner-directed. When you criticize, you feel criticized. When you forgive, you feel forgiven. When you offer understanding, you feel understood. 

I have a story to tell you…

You are exquisitely compassionate, infinitely kind. In your heart of hearts, there is only goodwill– for yourself and for others. Love prevails. Goodness and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life.

That’s a story that could heal the world. Share the news. 

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.