Easter is near, and although I no longer participate in an organized religion with an origin story, we have a brain bias to believe what we have grown up with—a homing instinct, perhaps. So, this is a resurrection story based on my Methodist upbringing —not the resurrection of God Incarnate, but of a family pet called Mr. Fish.

Is it silly? Well, it’s about a goldfish, so yes. But also no. If there is anything I’ve learned of late it is that there is no coincidence too subtle not to consider nominating for the extraordinary. We can’t be sort of pregnant, half-loved, or more perfect. While the U.S. Constitution refers to a ‘more perfect’ union, in reality, “perfect” is an absolute, like “always,” “never,” “all,” and “none.”

Like “miracle.”

When the kids were in elementary school, we bought them two goldfish. I’d had two goldfish in my youth—Tipper and Topper –who met a mysterious end I want to blame on the cat, but the evidence doesn’t support that theory. In the novel Lolita, Nabokov writes: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”  In deference to Nabokov, I’ll just say, “My very pretty goldfish died in a freak accident (hole, pencil) when I was six.”

But does any goldfish story have a happy ending? Stay with me. This may be a first.

In the uncanny way we recreate our own experiences for our children, I bought two goldfish for our kids. We set the bowl in the dining room, where I found Mrs. Fish floating belly up within days. But Mr. Fish lived! I removed his dead companion and cleaned out the bowl. A few days later, however, I slipped downstairs in search of my first hot cup of coffee and found Mr. Fish also belly up, eyes glazed and covered in some kind of spots.

I felt terrible. Unreasonably sad.

I’d been thinking about miracles, prayer, love, and possibility since Mrs. Fish died. Okay. All my life–or at least since Tipper and Topper bought it. So, I was alone in the dining room with a dead fish bobbing around in his glass bowl, saying a dead-fish prayer over his little spirit, when the thought popped into my head—What if to God death isn’t a thing?

What if it is all the same to God—it’s just that no one has asked or expressed a preference? What if there is no judgment over the worthiness of a request?

So I stood there and prayed, “God, if it’s all the same to you, please let Mr. Fish live.” I beamed my love, hope, and gratitude on his little floating body and left the room.

It was a spur-of-the-moment experiment—no risk and nothing to prove. Just a desire to understand the nature of limitations and love. Love of the kids, perhaps, more than the fish—but again, it may not matter. Love isn’t a need-based scholarship.

It was a pretty dining room with a fireplace in the next room visible from the cherry table and chairs under double windows, but as it was seldom used, no one else was aware of  Mr. F’s demise. The next morning, however, when I again slipped downstairs for my coffee, I peeked in the bowl where a fish had been floating, to see Mr. Fish swimming around submerged three inches underwater.

I’m stunned every time I lose someone I love—no matter how sick or how old, which must mean we actually never expect death, no matter what we say.

And it never fails that within a day or so of hearing news of a loss, I find myself thinking, “If I searched the whole world over…every continent and country, every mountain and valley; if I boarded a plane and flew to every corner of the earth right now, surely, I could find the person I lost. As if death doesn’t mean gone, it means elsewhere.

That thought experiment always ends with the realization that there are some things in this world you can’t work hard enough to earn, seek long enough to find. But maybe there are things available to us we have not attempted because we have deemed them too small, too frivolous—as if the creator of 100 billion galaxies can be too busy.

The stories of my youth and the rituals of my Methodist upbringing are permanently embedded in my mind and heart. In this season of Easter, I think of Mary Magdalene. Her grief, her devastation, her astonishment to find the boulder rolled away from the entrance to Jesus’s tomb and it empty.

I can feel her confusion and incredulity when she sees a man walking toward her whom she first mistakes for the gardener– with no idea he is Jesus until he calls her by name.

“Mary! Don’t you recognize me?”

And I can imagine her joy because, in my own small way, I have felt it, too, for people I’ve loved, lost, and found again. For miracles—which are neither great nor small, but absolute.

“Mary! You know who I am. Tell everyone.”

Our fish didn’t survive long after that—just three days, as I recall.

But he did live.

And I’ve waited 30 years to tell everyone.

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.

How could anyone who loved school as much as I did hate the idea that life itself is a school? And how can someone who was a Safety, for goodness’ sake, be such a bad student? Shouldn’t I be thriving on learning new things in a giant earth classroom with you, my teachers, and classmates?

I’ve moved up to the front row because I can’t see over John Houser, and I would be sitting next to Chris, if the seating chart was alphabetized, but he died. So did Sally. Which boggles my mind and breaks my heart. But then, we’re all going to die, and as Richard Dawkins says, that makes us the lucky ones because most people are never going to be born. The number of possible people allowed by our DNA outnumbers the stars in the universe. So, we are the privileged few who overcame stupefying odds for the privilege of being here to learn and to grow together, and lately, I’ve been confronting a new challenge.

One of my friends from adolescence and I have nearly the same birthday. He’s a doctor in Vermont now, but we made a pact a while back to connect every year on that date, and because he’s a doctor, he always asks about my health. I like this. A lot. It’s different than when your regular friends ask you how you’re doing. When my friend asks me, he listens intently with his head cocked to the side, like he’s meditatively gripping either end of a stethoscope around his neck, and then he offers thoughtful suggestions. Expert medical advice from the boy who went to camp Wanga-Wanga every summer, perennially assigned to the Sioux cabin with Wet-Wet Myers. (A popular class in Life School is “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.”)

We had a great catch-up this morning because even though this is my writing day, I wanted to make room for this ritual. “Work-Life Balance” is one of the classes I’m repeating in Earth School having failed it for many years. Okay, forever.

There are fewer and fewer of us in this class, and I’m starting to panic. Everyone else has graduated to “Having Fun in the Here and Now!” They are across the hall laughing, planning yet another field trip while I’m still scrubbing the blackboards in “There’s Work to Do,” which is the super-fun prerequisite to “So You’ll Never Retire.” To get into this class, it helps to have been raised by parents with a strict, probably Scottish, work ethic that prescribes work every minute, save every penny, and wear pretty underwear in case a bus runs over you.

Fun is for superficial people with no depth who don’t clean their dinner plates even though clearly that practice feeds starving children in Africa.

This upbringing is difficult to unlearn. It promotes “doing” as opposed to “being,” which I honestly consider a huge waste of time. I’ve equated productivity with happiness and work with worth, unfortunately. And please don’t tell me to breathe. We all breathe. I don’t want to breathe your slow way or stop to smell the roses. If I do smell the roses, I’m probably going to write about them.

You see the problem here.

So, of all life’s teachers no one wants to get stuck with Jealousy– a tough-love instructor I know well. She teaches “The Grass is Always Greener.” This is a trick class, but I fall for it every time! I know that my envy of friends who now are in recess until they die—which could easily be another 30 years—(30 years of recess!!)  serves no one. And I’m not sure it’s even genuine because I love what I do and who I do it with (that would be you).

But it’s just hard to be sitting here at my desk as the sun shines outside my window, and I don’t have time to take the dog for a walk. Then, when I do take her for a walk, I see your plane to Portugal passing overhead, and I’m not kidding; I feel left out and left behind.

So, is it possible to long for something you don’t actually want? To envy others’ lives because you imagine a satisfaction greater than your own, that may or may not be real, but the pain is real?

Is FOMO a class I can pass? If I stop passing notes, distracting my neighbors, and talking while the teacher is talking?

I live in a state of constant revision, because the plot keeps changing when it comes to my own desires and because I really do want to learn to be a better person. As Maria Popova says, we don’t fully know what we want because we are half-opaque to ourselves.

Yet we are the lucky few who got to attend this school—to grow together—to study at each other’s houses, and to ask for help. I need yours.

How often is it true that something we didn’t want ends up enlarging our lives in an unimaginable way?

Be my undoing.

Teach me to play.

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.

The first time my mother brought my father home to the farm, my grandmother said of this charming college classmate in the yellow sportscar, “He’s either the worst thing that ever happened to you or the best.”

“He was both,” my mother confided from the far side of that marriage.

Here’s what I learned from my dad:

The inability to breathe when you fall from the top of the swing set is called “Having the wind knocked out of you.”

To keep from spilling an overfilled cup of coffee you are carrying to someone across the room, do the counterintuitive thing: run with it.

To take the hook out of a sunny’s mouth, stroke its fins toward its tail.

Put sand on a sea nettle sting and baking soda on a bee sting

If you find a spider in the wood pile, look for a red dot on its belly. The bite of a black widow can kill you.

But daddy longlegs don’t bite.

Mud daubers don’t sting.

Walnut leaves under the rugs repel the dog’s fleas, and you can teach a crow to talk.

Pick up a crab where his back flipper hinges to the shell.

Volkswagen Beetles feature the trunk in the front.

I learned very little else, but after he died, Dad taught me that neither life nor love end, arguably one of the best things that ever happened to me.

*****

My mother taught me how to tie off a sewing needle and hem a skirt.

To grease a cookie sheet and crack an egg.

To value education.

That I’m a Pisces, Sagittarius rising.

That vinegar will make my hair shine.

That supper must include meat, a vegetable, a starch, and flowers on the table.

That books are to life what dessert is to dinner.

To brighten the house with lights on rainy days.

To do things that are scary—to build houses for the poor in Appalachia with a group of teenagers you don’t know, audition for a play when your knees are shaking. Speak up when you’re scared, sing when you’re terrified, protect the vulnerable.

To believe in miracles.

To read when you are lonely, write when you’re confused.

Write when you’re in awe.

(Awe is grateful with a mix of beautiful.)

When you are empty, give something away.

To make all birthday cakes from scratch and Halloween costumes by hand.

That there is power in prayer and voting is a privilege.

To recognize the metaphor in virtually everything.

******

My oldest sister taught me that a boy should think you are beautiful but not know why.

That listening is an act of generosity.

My middle sister taught me that the Beatles were a band

That hip huggers were cool

And a secret code to knock on the wall between our bedrooms at night. Pay attention. You will need to know this: One knock meant yes, two meant no, three meant I love you, four meant I hate you, and five meant come into my room.

*****

Somebody taught me that I think too much, talk too much, have no sense of direction but have a high pain tolerance, and promptly respond but seldom initiate.

Almost everything I think about myself, I absorbed from someone else. I’m still learning what has value and what to put in the discard pile.

*****

What’s your story, and who told it to you? You really need to know this because if you repeat the story you were told about you long enough, your story becomes the teller of you.

So, here’s what I’ve learned about you. (Check for accuracy.)

You like to read.

You are quick to laugh. (I love that about you. It’s my favorite thing.)

You want to love; it’s your nature. You’re very smart, and because you are smart, you are trying not to despair.

You fear for those you love and would do anything for your children.

You really want to believe there is no reason to be afraid.

You are a little uncertain of your great-grandparents’ names.

You have stories to tell, and you think it would be awesome if others could hear them.

You know, or suspect, you have been touched by grace.

You want to be remembered, but if you are only immortalized in the way your children show up in this world, or the abiding passion with which they love their own children, that’s enough. 

And you will be sad to leave this life not because you think this is all there is but because that’s how you will say to the world, “This was beautiful, and it mattered.”

You believe in life everlasting more than you don’t, or you wouldn’t be here.

You are hoping I will convince you, and I’m trying.

Listen closely.

(Three knocks.)

******

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.