With the Fourth of July this Friday, I’m thinking about justice, or the lack thereof, specifically about crimes I’ve witnessed and can’t prove.

Or committed and gotten away with…there’s that.

The worst of these always involve watching someone else be victimized. Like when my oldest sister got married and moved to El Paso, and my pretty 46-year-old mother and I drove cross-country to see her. Somewhere in Texas, in the heat of the desert, the car broke down. We were towed to a tiny town where there must have been a sign reading, “Welcome to Nowheresville, Sucker: Pay to pass ‘go.’”

The car had most likely overheated, but the technician at the only repair shop in town took one look at Mom and her adolescent appendage and insisted we needed a new battery. A very expensive one. Top of the line. Parts and labor. Otherwise, we weren’t leaving this town. Like, ever.

I was barely 14, but the reason I remember this is my mother’s impotent fury and my intense discomfort that in her frustration she might be impolite to the man ripping us off and hurt his feelings.

Geez, I know, don’t tell me.

She knew she was being lied to, and she also knew there was nothing she could do about it. She bought the unnecessary battery with money we could ill afford to spend. When the garage owner told her he would do her a favor, free of charge, and keep ours… (you don’t want this lady, you’ll get battery acid on your suitcases), she insisted he turn it over, lugged it to the trunk, dropped it in, and we hit the road.

Then there’s the drunk who totaled my car in front of our house in the dead of night when I was newly married. I was alone and sound asleep in our bedroom overlooking the street when the silence was broken by a massive crash outside, metal on metal, and shattering glass.

Disoriented, I ran to the window and saw my car heaved askew onto the sidewalk and another car in the middle of the road, its interior lights on because the driver’s door was open and the motor still running. I threw on a robe and ran out into the street, which was devoid of all signs of life at 3:00 a.m., and found a man sitting cross-legged on the pavement. He was trying to stand, having clearly collapsed as he got out of his car after impact. Muttering incoherently, he was attempting to scramble back in his car to drive away, whiskey bottles in evidence.

I really, really, really hope the first words out of my mouth were, “Are you all right?” Let’s believe that is possible.

His first words were “Wasn’t me!” In slurred monosyllables, he claimed someone else had been driving. Someone else had totaled my car. That rascal had run away.

That was when I saw that he had hit both our cars, bouncing off the first one to roll a few more yards down the street past a neighbor’s car, to total this one!

So, we went to court. And I told my story on the witness stand, under oath, thinking surely there would be some justice. But when the public defender asked me if I’d seen the moment of impact, although I desperately wanted to say yes, I had to say no. That oath thing is very intimidating. It just squeezes the truth right out of you. Because in all honesty, I had not seen the crash. I’d seen the aftermath 30 seconds later.

So, he got off.

I have to admit here, however, that I have committed crimes myself that could not be proven. When my middle sister went out on dates, I’d slip into her room and play with her makeup. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the brains to screw down her lipsticks after trying them and just jammed the tops back on.

Oops.

Wasn’t me! The real offender ran away.

So here we are approaching the Fourth of July, which is all about the freedom to seek an agreed-upon justice. An imperfect system because we are imperfect people. A system that is still evolving as we try to work out the kinks, make it as foolproof as it is beautiful—a system that lets us all say how we feel, hurt no one, educate, feed, and house the least among us with compassion and grace.

So many Americans died for this dream, this fragile vision. I just asked Microsoft Copilot how democracy can be saved. And it instantaneously provided a six-point answer that is detailed, thoughtful, and spot-on. It then added, “This is a tall order, but history shows that democracies can renew themselves, especially when people believe they’re worth fighting for. What part of this feels most urgent to you?”

“It all feels urgent,” I wrote back, “I have to think about it.” To which Copilot replied, “Take all the time you need. Big questions deserve deep thought. If you want to dig deeper, I’m here.”

I was contemplating the strange, seductive power of this artificial intimacy when it added, “In the meantime, here’s something to chew on: every time someone questions how democracy can be saved, it’s a quiet act of hope. And that’s worth honoring.”

Wow. Here’s to quiet acts of hope and those who gave their lives so that we might have that privilege. As Katharine Lee Bates penned in 1893:

America, America

God mend thine every flaw

Confirm thy soul in self-control

And liberty in law.

Happy Birthday, America. Happy Fourth of July.

 

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.

 

 

 

One summer afternoon, before I’d entered first grade, I climbed a rickety metal stool near the kitchen sink and discovered a lemon meringue pie resting on the Formica counter. With my mother tapping away on her typewriter in another part of the house, I touched a tentative finger to one wavy peak. It gave way like sea foam— soft and without substance —a sweetness that dissolved on my tongue.

In my effort to disguise my crime, more and more meringue disappeared until the puffy white cloud had disappeared, and the lemon filling shone like a yellow sun. To evade punishment, I blamed the cat, whom I feared —a Siamese ankle-biter who would not let me love her.

My father’s response required creativity, and my mother allowed it. I’d lied, and exposure of my character was deemed a just consequence. He explained it like this: for the entire month of June, he’d report to everyone what I’d done. As I stood beside him, gripped by one hand, Mrs. Uebersax next door, our mailman, and the clerk at the local package goods store all had to hear what kind of person I was. A little fibber, it turns out, who will eat the meringue off your pie.

As intended, it was humiliating but in an intriguing kind of way. Those who listened looked down at me politely at first, then their expressions became inexplicably compassionate and a little worried. I didn’t know then that my days with my father were numbered. That within five years, he would have another family, and we would rarely see each other.

Fast forward 30 years, and I am a young mother, receiving the news my dad has had both a heart attack and a stroke at the wheel of his car near Pocomoke. He is assessed in the emergency room, treated, and transferred to Intensive Care in a Baltimore hospital. I have not seen him many times in my adult life, but I know I should visit.

I have no sense of direction, and this handicap adds to the stress. Possessing no inner compass, no guidance system, I’m often lost; my instinct for which way to turn is invariably exquisitely wrong. So, finding my way into the city is a stressful ordeal, and on my way to Intensive Care, I turn down the wrong hall. It’s like driving around a bend on a dark road and coming upon the scene of an accident. From a curtained alcove, someone is wailing like an animal in pain. The source of the noise is not the person who is injured or sick but the loved one in attendance. There are footsteps, as if that person is pacing. I am transfixed.

Most of the anguish is pure sound, but as I listen, arrested, words form. I hear a mournful “Nooooooo” and then a chillingly adult voice wailing, “I want my mommy back.” I am horrified to be inadvertently present at such a personal moment, and yet, it is hard to move away. No one knows how someone else suffers, what raw grief sounds like. When that kind of pain comes for me, will mine sound the same?

I hurry back down the hall praying that the grief-stricken relative will be comforted. I imagine my prayer rising like heat from hot asphalt, with hundreds of others, every day, up through the ceiling, then through the roof of this hospital, and I hope that somehow compassion serves a purpose. I would describe what I’m doing as evoking an energy, and I’d use the term “universe.” All my adult life, I’ve tried to replace God the Good Father with something more likely.

In the sitting area near my dad’s unit, I wait until I can see him. Fifteen minutes every hour is the rule. I leaf through a magazine, not really reading the stories until a photograph abruptly catches my eye. A small boat is pictured on a black-and-white river, a river indistinguishable from the one of my youth. With my next breath, I’m not in ICU, hoping not to be fatherless. I’m a child in the presence of the father I want only to please.

He sits beside me in the stern of a drifting rowboat, a brown-haired, blue-eyed man in his thirties. It is dusk, and we have been exploring secret creeks and hidden coves. Honeysuckle and seaweed scent the air. As the dying light coalesces around the red-embered sun, he restarts the engine and turns us towards home. The stern plows deep as the boat accelerates, then planes and levels off, the cove ringed by shore lights that candle the horizon. They flicker and flame– house lights and porch lamps. They could be fallen stars carried like flotsam to shore.

I can’t hear my father speak unless I turn my head sideways. The rush of air whips his words into the night. I’m unprepared, therefore, when he puts my hand on the tiller, scooting over on the seat to let me steer. Stunned to be guiding the boat by myself, I see the entrance to our cove and, in the distance, our pier. I keep the bow aimed precisely, my whole being locked on our landmark as if we might fly off the edge of the world should I fail.

He nods at the channel markers, where their lights rock in the current. “Keep green to starboard heading out, but red on your right going in.” I squeeze my eyes shut to memorize these instructions, then overcorrect the tiller and the boat swings wide. I look up at him, panicked, but he corrects our course with a smile. “Remember this,” he calmly instructs the girl he is leaving, the one who still struggles to find her way.

He leans down so I’ll hear him.

“‘Green to starboard’ will take you anywhere you want to go on the river. ‘Red, right, returning’ will always be all you need to get home.”

Happy Father’s Day.

 

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.

My dog Leah can see a squirrel at night and people approaching a mile down the road, but she can’t see herself in the mirror. I hold her up to it, and she acts as if the mirror is repellent. She’ll look anywhere else.

This is how I feel about Zoom. I’ve never wanted to teach online and now I have to. It’s like being forced to look into a mirror for hours at a time. It’s demoralizing for the non-photogenic and I’m wondering how old you must be to not care how you look in mirrors and photos. (I mean, other than clean.)

Whatever the age, I’m not there yet, and apparently, I have the same aversion my dog has seeing my own image.

It probably started when I was working at the Chesapeake Boatman Magazine, and the editor, Mike, saw a photo of me tossed on my desk. He was visibly startled. “Whoa!” I remember him saying as he looked from me to the photo. “Never let anyone take a picture of you.”

And just like that, I had learned something about myself I hadn’t known. Thanks, Mike.

Later, I was made aware of the difference between being beautiful (as is my friend, Dar) and in being “no slouch,” as I once heard my boss refer to me. He and an advertiser had been commenting to each other on the loveliness of our receptionist, Mary. “Oh, and that’s our associate editor, Laura,” I heard him say as I walked by. “She’s no slouch.” Which I interpreted as “That’s our associate editor, Laura. She is good at standing up.”

For the record, I still excel at this.

Committed to promoting the non-superficial, my parents put no emphasis on how my sisters and I looked at all, except they did make a big deal about the fact we looked like each other. As if we were, perhaps, more appealing as a set. Virtually every photograph of us in our youth is a stair-stepped group shot.

What’s interesting is that you share the exact same number of genes with your children as you do with your siblings—1/2. So, your chances of having children who resemble you are about the same as having siblings who resemble you. In my case, siblings are batting 100 and children zero.

But no matter how you feel about being photographed, there is something profound about having another person in the world who resembles you. I had a writing client who was adopted, and in writing the story of giving birth to her first child on a stormy Caribbean night, she observed that with the arrival of her baby, she was meeting her first blood relative. The first person in her world who might look like her. I was undone by that.

As my mother aged, she loved looking at herself in photos and continued experimenting with her appearance. One day, I went to her assisted living facility to pick her up, and she came cruising down the corridor behind her walker, looking like Maverick. “Whoa. Mom. Where’d you get the aviators?” I asked.

“What? Oh, these?” she responded airily, touching her shades, “I found them. “How do I look?”

Like a thief wearing Top Gun’s sunglasses?

And one Saturday, I knocked on her door and Groucho Marx opened it. My mother had taken note of a younger woman with lovely brows in the facility’s dining hall one evening and inspired, had gotten her hands on a marker of some kind and drawn two thick black lines above her real eyebrows. It was startling. We stared at each other, me shocked and trying to mask it, and her waiting for a reaction to her new look. I went into her apartment and pretended she appeared normal while strategizing ways to wrest the marker from Maverick.

There is a whole behavioral science called Mirror Talk. You repeat affirmations while gazing at your own reflection. This supposedly raises self-acceptance and self-love. Apparently, we are hardwired to feel love and compassion from faces and eye contact. Even our own.

So, I wonder if I stand here gazing in the bedroom mirror and say, “You are photogenic!”  I will believe it. And in so doing, become it? What if I say, “You are doing the best you can? You are living out your soul’s plan?”  A researcher did note that there is a difference between an affirmation, and a prediction. “You are so smart” is okay; “It’s all going to be fine” is not.

I actually don’t agree with this. I think predictions are their own form of spiritual alchemy. Light is both a wave and a particle until observed. Let’s collapse the wave with attention; give intention form.

I will be your mirror, and you will be mine. That’s what stories are, right? Reflections of each other?

Look into my eyes.

Angels attend you. You have much to do, and you have time.

You are racing towards joy.

Love leaves no one behind.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

What’s worse than spotting a quarter-sized spider on the ceiling above your bed as you turn out the light?

Instantly switching the lamp back on to discover he’s gone.

How will you know in the morning he didn’t crawl out the window? The idiotic scenario your half-asleep partner tried to sell as you high-stepped on the mattress clutching a paper towel?

Each itchy red bite on your shoulder will have two tiny punctures, not one.

Spider-fun-fact.

When I was about six, and we still lived at Barnstead, the house my parents built by renovating a barn, there were plenty of creatures that bit, stung, or were just generally gross when hopping across the wide wood planks of my bedroom floor at night. Knowing the distinction was a matter of experience in which we kids took pride. When the neighbors invited cousins from Baltimore to visit (kids with very white feet, who called minnies “minnows”), those interlopers got more side-eye than sympathy upon shrieking, “I got bit by a bee!”

“Bit by a bee,” we’d repeat with an eye-roll.

The first time I was bitten at the Barn I was about five, playing out by the white wood rail fence that led down to the river. I’d seen a soft tunnel of mounded dirt and had decided, as one does, to poke a stick in it. Only a few inches down, I encountered a soft gray vole. Delighted with my find, I picked the creature up, and it promptly sunk its tiny, beaver-like teeth into my thumb. I yelped in disbelief—unable to reconcile my harmless intentions with the unwarranted aggression. I ran back to the house to show my mother my wound, but she barely glanced from the kitchen sink. She was seldom alarmed if you still had a pulse.

Our cat was a biter, too. Kimmie was a demented Siamese who liked to hide under the Early American sofa skirt at bedtime, lying in wait for bare, little-girl feet to make a run across the braided rug for the stairs. She’d streak out from her hiding place, wrap her front legs around the closest bare ankle, and sink her teeth in, back claws thrumming and latched on with the diabolical tenacity of an ankle monitor.

We talked about the possibility of being bitten by a snake; there were plenty of them in the pasture and pine woods (and one in the clothes dryer), and I often wondered if I’d actually suck the venom out of my sister’s leg should such a crisis arise or alternatively, thank her for her model horse collection and take off for the house.

But the worst biting incident was our own dog and one of the neighbor’s visiting cousins. Stormy was a German Shepherd pup named for my father’s dog as a boy growing up in Illinois—the loyal companion who, badly injured, had waited for Dad to return home from school to die.

My mother was walking our Stormy on a leash, on our own beach, when a little girl visiting from next door, crossed the property line uninvited, rushed up to the dog, and reached out to touch his face.

Startled, not yet thoroughly socialized, and perhaps protective of my mother on the other end of the lead, Stormy instinctively snapped at the child, leaving a bite just below her eye.

Chaos ensued. Face wounds bleed a lot. The neighbors threw the wailing child in a car to make a mad dash for the hospital; the fan belt broke, it was a hot July afternoon, and I don’t know how she finally got there. Pretty sure she needed stitches, and we needed a lawyer we didn’t have when her parents sued. We needed money we couldn’t spare when they won $600 and a demand that our dog, on a leash, on his own property, be put down.

I would come to see my mother cry three more times before I was 12, before we moved from the river. But the first time you see a parent cry is the worst, I think.  When they took Stormy away, Mom told me he was going to police school, but she wouldn’t let me see her face when she said it.

It’s a funny thing how mothers will literally throw themselves in front of a moving train to save their child, but there is less written about what a child would do to save her mother. To make her happy. To never see her cry again.

She might take on a profession she would not have otherwise considered. She might live in a town she’d rather leave. She might live her life on a river and always wonder about mountains. She might marry a young man with the right stuff Mom approved of and wonder what happened to the bad boy with the six-string guitar and gold Mustang. The boy leaving for Scotland who wanted her to skip college and come with him.

It’s a rite of passage, I guess. Coming to be grateful for your parents’ influence. Realizing parents cry, mothers’ hearts break. That you will one day want to protect the one who protected you.

When I was newly married and very young, I used to imagine that my husband and my mother were both drowning, and I could only save one. I agonized over my choice.

I know, I know. Who does this???

I felt this was a test I had to pass—a question to which I had to know the answer. I felt as if I had to break my heart open to see who resided there.

I am less black and white these days, and the heart’s occupancy and weight restrictions are without limitations.

No matter who resides there now, dear reader, no matter how many people you love and how many love you, for all of us, there first was a mother.

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.

 

 

 

Can you feel me staring at you as you sleep? You are as still as my pink robe tossed at the foot of the bed. You are not even dreaming by the look of it.

I’m gazing at you with more intrigue than resentment, although that may be a lie. Not only are you sound asleep, oblivious to my scrutiny, but you were unconscious 30 seconds after your (stupid) head hit the pillow.

Sorry. That was immature.

I’m tired, and I’m envious. And I’m ascribing to you all kinds of virtues that may be unwarranted. It just seems as if you should have at least a few things to worry about, be mentally replaying at least a few cringeworthy moments.

I love the warmth of your shoulder near mine, but let’s face it. That head doesn’t contain much except “come,” “treat,” and “squirrel,” in reverse order. I’ll take you for a walk in the morning and try not to disturb you as I turn over.

The primary reason I can’t sleep is this persistent ache in my left glute, for which I’m trying various remedies. A spinal injection and a month of intense acupuncture haven’t helped enough, so I’m thinking about massage, which I’m afraid I will love too much.

In search of additional sleep remedies, I’ve been asking friends what they do to fall asleep. My friend Joe doesn’t monkey around with the mind monkeys—he goes straight for the drugs. Unisom is his friend.

A guy in the waiting room at acupuncture swears the key is counting backward from 498. I like that he has a specific starting point that clearly is no one else’s.

Till now.

I want to ask him why we are using 498, but he already has his shoes on and is heading out as I’m heading in.

My friend Haley has recently discovered a sure-fire method: seeing how many words she can make from a single word. She is way too excited about this.

Like monkey-mind. There’s key, monk, on, oink, din, mind, in, dim. Are you sleeping? Like  gratitude. There’s read, it, are, rate, great, dear, due, rag…still awake.

So, I’ve come up with my own method. It’s making a list of what if’s?

If I’d been the first-born girl instead of the last in my family, I would have no girl skills and standards at all.

If I had not gone on a blind date when I was 19, I would not have my three children. I’d have other children, no doubt, but who wants those?

If I had married my sophomore-year boyfriend, Will, I’d have been a widow at 55.

If Sue D. hadn’t majored in drama the year I majored in drama, I would not have changed majors.

If I had not had an offer to work for a magazine the same day I was accepted to graduate school in pastoral counseling, I’d have been a therapist, not a writer. And yes…I do question whether there’s much of a difference, you memoirists.

If I had not volunteered at the SPCA, my solitary heart would not have been rescued by the warm body sleeping belly up in my bed.

But backing the camera up, if my 10^th great-grandfather had not transferred passage from the leaking Speedwell to the Mayflower in September 1620, I might not have been born in America.

If the planet Theia had not hit proto-Earth with a glancing blow 4.5 billion years ago, we would not have seasons and a moon.

If we didn’t have a moon to slow us, an Earth day would still be 19.5 hours as it was a billion years ago.

No full moons, Harvest Moons, Wolf Moons.

No moon rivers.

If I had gone to visit my mother more when she was in assisted living, perhaps I’d sleep better at night.

How many words can I make from regret?

How many from love?

Some words are indivisible.

Like me, beloveds. Like 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.

Note: On June 5 Laura Oliver and Andrew Oliver will be reading stories as part of the Spy Night Series at the Avalon Theatre. Doors open at 6:00 pm

I leave at 3:20, having not yet taught myself to check the traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge hours before any intention to cross it, and so, already marginally late to my college reunion—and this is a big year for my class—I am stopped bumper to bumper. It takes me an hour to creep along the next six miles to the bridge for no reason other than rain and rush hour on a Friday. I have another hour to drive beyond that.

I’m good at immediately accepting the things I can’t change without handwringing or complaint, which is true tonight. I ease forward a few feet to escape the Barker Paint Company van and turn up the music. The smell of weed emanates so virulently through closed windows I’ll be high before Centreville if we remain in these lanes neck and neck. I glance over, and the driver smiles, raises his eyebrows, and nods laconically. The minutes I could be reuniting with my class are evaporating. I put a book on Audible and wait it out.

When I arrive an hour and a half late, in the pouring rain, the building is locked. I can see my classmates inside, sitting at round tables, wine and appetizers before them, listening to a speaker, but the door won’t budge. This is starting to feel dangerously like metaphor, and my equanimity is cracking. I mutter, “Maybe I just wasn’t supposed to be here tonight,” but I say it with a self-pitying pout. Aware of this, I circle the building looking for another way in, knowing that, too, is metaphor for my college experience; only my exclusion then was self-imposed.

Eventually, I find an open door and there is someone to greet me with my nametag on a lariat. I slip into the nearest seat, gazing longingly at the bar and caterer’s spread behind the speaker. The shrimp cocktail looks fresh, and a glass of Pinot Noir wouldn’t hurt. I look around the room and can identify no one. The only person I might recognize, my boyfriend from freshman year, I know immediately, isn’t here. He is six foot 4. He’d stand out even sitting down.

When the speaker concludes, everyone rises and mingles and that’s when I start to recognize classmates. Debbie’s kind eyes, Paula’s megawatt-Midwestern smile. I’m casually looking for my friend, and anyone I ask says, “Oh, he was just here!” As late as I was, perhaps he thought I wasn’t coming. I keep looking.

The greatest thrill is to look up and see my freshman-year roommate for the first time since graduation. She was a better friend to me than I to her and that has grieved me. I was a loner and had never shared a room in my life. I don’t know if I literally drew a line down the middle when we moved in, but I may have.

She looks exactly as I would imagine and has the same ready laugh. She got married at 39 and had a baby at 45, she reports. We do the math to see if we should introduce him to my youngest daughter.

“I hear you became a writer,” someone says. “I remember you wanted to be one,” and I say, “I have been lucky. That’s a dream that came true.” At the expense of other dreams, but I don’t add that.

I continue to ask for my friend. “He was here a second ago,” I hear again. “He’s wearing black.” A minute later, I hear, “He was over there by the doors. He’s wearing gray.” See how fast our witnessing becomes perspective, not fact? Was he here at all?

Everyone else has come for the entire weekend, so they are going to reconvene at a bar on High Street to get the party really started. I am driving home—back across the rainy bridge. I won’t be back for the game tomorrow. I have seen what I wanted to see, experienced, and discovered what I longed to know. We are okay. We turned out all right.

And as I drive back, I realize I’m not at the bar tonight because I’m still a non-joiner—a writer who observes as she participates–whose picture was somehow omitted from our yearbook, so there’s no record of me having been here though one of my professors attended my wedding. Why didn’t I drive to Florida with Paula on Spring Break? Go to more parties? Cheer at lacrosse games?

We are who we were, I think, as I hit the bridge. But shouldn’t life have changed us? Are you now who you were then?

My missing friend calls me the next day. “Where are you?” I ask, not “Where were you,” because that doesn’t matter now. Once again, I’m quick to let go of unchangeable loss. “I was late,” I explain, “I drove for hours, but I came, and I looked for you.”

“I’m in Connecticut,” he says, “I had to get outta there. Too many old people.”

We laugh. Exchange updates on our families. I ask about his wife, their kids, and how they spend their days. We plan to meet next year though we may not. Anything could happen between now and then.

Reencountering the past leaves me wistful. You never know when you see someone, whether you will ever see them again. Only our future selves recognize last times as last times.

But I am smiling as I write this, and I know what I would have said had I joined my classmates at that High Street bar. Had I been someone I’m not.

I would have raised a glass and hugged the person closest to me. I’d have said,” I’m so glad that I came tonight, I’m so happy to see everyone!”

And I would be thinking: because in spite of myself, you feel like my family.

And I wish that I’d known 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.