I was in the wine store the other day not asking for help because I already know that all the least expensive wines are displayed on the lowest shelves so that you have to crouch down near the floor to read those descriptions and prices, which means you are in the way of customers who don’t have to get on the floor to buy wine. You just hunch a shoulder toward the shelf so they can brush past you in the narrow aisle like a tumbleweed on the prairie or boulder in a stream. Balancing on the floor with my purse on one shoulder and a South Moon Under bag in the other hand, I tried not to keel over while reminding myself that the average price Americans pay for a bottle of wine is $12.75.

I was reading wine labels when I found what I was looking for– a “crisp, dry, Sauvignon Blanc with citrusy notes” for $12.99, and walked up to the counter to pay for it. I gave my name to be sure the manager logged the purchase in on my account so that at some point in the future I would qualify for something undefined but good. A whole curated box of holiday wines, perhaps. Or publication of my next book—it doesn’t matter—just the vague promise of accumulating points for a bonus is enough to register every purchase.

The manager looked like my high school friend Jerry Ward, who decided to be a small-town doctor in Vermont at the age of 17 and then, lo and behold, became one. Very cute, with dark curly hair, expressive dark eyes. I thought we were chatting quite amiably when not-Jerry suddenly raised his voice and became very stern.

“Ohhhh no! Not you again!”

I thought he was still talking to me at first. Like he’d suddenly recognized me as that slacker English major who would never earn a discernable income. Startled, I looked up from where I’d been searching for my credit card.

“Oh no, you don’t!” he repeated. “You’re not going to pull this again!”

I realized then that although he was continuing to ring up my wine on autopilot, he was actually looking over my head at someone behind me.

I turned and saw a very scruffy older character who had obviously stuck a bottle of wine down his pants. The top of the bottle protruded from under his shirt above his belt like the creature Sigourney Weaver had to vanquish in Alien.

The man muttered a denial and made no move to extract the bottle from his pants. Only four of us were in the store at the time: me, the manager, a salesclerk, and the thief. We all looked at each other. Pulling the evidence from this man’s pants was a task none of us was willing to perform.

Since he denied the bottle was in there, and we were unwilling to prove it, we were in a kind of a standoff. Encouraged, our shoplifter started edging towards the door in mincing, scuffing baby steps.

Irate, the manager abandoned me and came around the counter. “Stop right there! Sir! You’re not going to get away with this again! You pulled this stunt last week! I’ve got you on camera!” The shoplifter continued to mutter his denial and shuffle toward the door.

I’m having a robbery, I thought, a bit excited at this development in my day.

Like one entity, equally helpless but braver as a unit, the manager, salesclerk, and I all began instinctively moving in a sort of communal shuffle of our own between the thief and the door.

The salesclerk announced loudly, “I’m calling security,” and I stood there while she reported to the authorities that a robbery was in progress. I was still standing there when they didn’t come.

“Good thing no one has a weapon,” I observed quietly to her, then wondered if that was true. What are the conceal/carry laws in Maryland, I wondered? Maybe the guy’s not lying. He’s not stealing wine; he’s stuffed a gun in his pants!

“Let me get you out of here, “the salesclerk whispered to me and quickly completed my purchase as the stalemate continued.

As I walked past the manager in this bizarre standoff, I offered, “Alzheimer’s? Dementia?” The situation was so bizarre that the possibility seemed warranted.

“No way,” the manager said, then added softly, “I’m sorry for this.” His apology felt intimate. Like an intruder had interrupted our family dinner. Or as if the conflict had made us teammates for a moment. Team Right-Side of the Law! Team Right versus Wrong.

Fortunate versus Unfortunate. Us versus Them. I edged on out the door.

I was back in the store a few weeks later—okay, a week later—and reminded the manager that I’d been there during the incident. “What happened?” I asked. “I noticed Security never came.”

“Oh, they came,” he said. “After you left. It was a big deal. He resisted arrest. They got him on a bunch of counts. That guy has been pulling this stunt all over this shopping center. He’s been banned from the entire place for two years.”

“What did you do with the wine down his pants?” I asked, eyeing the bottle I was buying. The manager rolled his eyes, and we laughed about how that bottle was a goner, about all the inadequate ways one might have rehabilitated it. Ha, ha, ha, we laughed together as he slipped my purchase into a bag. I handed not-Jerry a credit card, looked at the bottle I was buying, and wondered, not about wine but about the man who needed to steal it.

About how little space there is–none actually– between us and them.

About what we conceal and what we carry.

 

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 eldest, ever-practical daughter, who has made England her home, where she and her husband are raising their two boys, 6 and 7, wants to know what I want for Christmas. She is organized and dutiful. She will have all her gifts ordered and delivered to every family member in North America weeks before December 25. She could run a Fortune 500 company or perhaps a small country.

I’m in awe of this kind of efficiency. I’m also squeamish.

I don’t like thinking about what I want for gifts, looking up links, sending suggestions that will make the life of this person I love so much easier. I feel like I’m placing an order.

I try to flip this around. “What would YOU like?” I ask. “What are the boys into?” When I was visiting this summer, the boys were racing their bikes up a backyard ramp at breakneck speed in order to sail over their father’s prone body lying in the grass on the other side. Sort of an extreme trust-fall experiment. That made me squeamish, too.

“I’ve already bought your gift for them,” my daughter says. “I’ll send you a link so you know what you got them. Don’t worry. They’ll know it’s from you. I put your name on it.”

But it’s not from me.

I understand her thinking. She doesn’t want money spent on stuff the kids already have or that she doesn’t need. She returned the ring light I sent in what I thought was a burst of genius gift-giving during the pandemic within minutes of opening it. She simply had no use for it. She texted the news as I rode an escalator to the second floor of Macy’s. I cried in Sheets and Bedding.

“But what can I get them?” I protest. I want every gift to be personal, meaningful, and a surprise. She is, however, wearing me down. Plus, our roles are reversed now. I’m not in charge. Remember how you used to say, “You’re not the boss of me?” to friends and siblings bossing you around?

That ship sailed to England 15 years ago.

So, determined to be thoughtful, I start poking around on the internet for toys, and I find myself distracted from my mission by stuff for myself! A subscription to “The Atlantic!” To “Smithsonian!” A soft new robe! Woah—here’s a link—maybe I’ll just flag this one.

But the process is a little like Christmas when I was 14 and told my mother I wanted a record player and a hair dryer. About a week before Christmas, I found both waiting to be wrapped in the spare room. Exactly what I wanted.

I was so depressed. Might as well skip Christmas. Who cared?

Gift giving and receiving is pressure. I get that. It’s just that when you are inspired it’s the best feeling ever. Generosity is at our core. Some of the best gifts in my family history prove that.

Best gift surprise: shortly after my parents divorced and Mom and my sisters and I were still adjusting to the change, my older sister and I rushed downstairs Christmas morning to find we’d each been given a cat. My sister’s gift was a classy white Persian kitten. Mine was a giant striped alley cat who’d been around the block a few times—doing God knows what. Probably time in the joint. How Mom had found, purchased, and kept two cats a secret from us, I’ll never know. I’m sure she was compensating for our father’s absence.

Dad’s gone. How ‘bout a cat?

Best gift ever: My daughter-in-law entered my life shortly after I sold a book to Penguin Random House. That new-family-member Christmas, I still didn’t know her well. When I opened the gift she had made me (made me), I cried. It was a framed piece of original artwork. She had excised a phrase from my book’s dedication to my children, Audra, Andrew, and Emily, in calligraphy onto a background pattern so subtle that I initially didn’t recognize what it was. “My first and best stories,” it read. When I looked carefully at the background, I realized she had somehow laid the inscription over a collage of images of everyone I love. “My inspiration now and always.”

Did you know that different parts of your brain light up when you quietly feel into things that make you happy as opposed to things for which you are grateful? Try it. Stimulation of different parts of the brain initiates a subtly different feeling. Happy is a gift you asked for arriving just as requested! Yay!

Grateful is the surprise that blows you away.

Grateful feels better.

We had several Christmas traditions growing up, and one was the reading of “The Littlest Angel” around the fire on Christmas Eve. In the story, a 4-year-old cherub is having difficulty adjusting to heaven. He sings off-key, whistles irreverently, and constantly tumbles head over heels in the clouds. He swings on the Golden Gate, his halo is usually askew, he’s late to choir practice, and his white robe is grubby. Called before the Angel of the Peace to explain his mischief, the Littlest Angel confesses that he is homesick for trees to climb, brooks to fish, soft brown dust beneath his feet. He’s sorry he’s a disruption, but there’s just nothing for a 4-year-old boy to do in paradise. Yes, it’s beautiful, but so was Earth.

When asked what would make him happy, he asks for one thing: a small wooden box he’d kept under his bed, and lo and behold, the box appears. Suddenly, the Littlest Angel is the model of decorum. His behavior is impeccable.

Soon, heaven is abuzz with the news that a baby is about to be born, and the archangels are gathering their gifts. The Littlest Angel has nothing to offer until he remembers the box. It is all he has, all that he loves. He slips it among the magnificent, gilded presents of the other angels at the foot of the throne of God, then recognizes too late what a shabby and worthless offering he has placed amidst the glory. Mortified, he tries to retrieve it just as the hand of God moves over the mountain of gifts and chooses his to open.

Inside the box are two perfect white stones found playing on a muddy riverbank with his friends on a long-ago summer day, a butterfly with golden wings, and a sky-blue eggshell from a nest in the olive tree next to his mother’s kitchen door. At the bottom is a worn collar from a dog who had died in absolute love and infinite devotion– all keepsakes from the life he so loved.

The cherub hides his eyes in grief and humiliation, and then suddenly, the voice of God rings out, proclaiming his to be the most pleasing gift of all.

The box begins to glow, then shine with a brilliant light, blinding the heavenly hosts so that only the Littlest Angel sees it rise up, and up, and up until it becomes a star in the celestial firmament. The star heralding the birth of the baby, leading everyone home.

I come by my unreasonable desire to give meaningful gifts honestly. I spend all week trying to make something beautiful for 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.

 

 

Human beings claim to be the only species on the planet capable of feeling awe. I’d add to that distinction an amazing capacity to hold contradictory beliefs and experiences simultaneously. 

The Trinity comes to mind. 

That we will laugh again after a devastating loss.

That we are divine in origin yet hurt each other every day.  

That light is both a wave and a particle. 

A lot of things in my life feel contradictory, such as irreparable rifts with people I love. Case in point: Aren’t “love” and “irreparable” contradictory?  

And the election feels like this to a lot of us. People we are related to, people whose company we enjoy, and people we respect did not vote as we did. And that feels contradictory. How can I like you so much and not think the same way? It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s easier to accept a difference in spiritual beliefs than this political one. Wait. It is a difference of spiritual beliefs. And it’s not easier. And ironically that’s what brought my ancestors and perhaps yours here in the first place. 

In visiting a first cousin who lives in England last summer, I discovered that her husband, a research historian with time on his hands, had documented our grandmother’s family tree back to the Mayflower. Our 10th great-grandfather, Francis Cooke, and his son John, had boarded the Speedwell, which set sail with the Mayflower on August 5, 1620, but Speedwell leaked so badly they had to turn back for refitting. Both ships set out a second time, with Speedwell leaking so badly that again, both ships turned back just 100 leagues past Land’s End, and Speedwell was sold. Twenty people returned to London, but eleven passengers from Speedwell boarded the Mayflower. (Ultimately, the leaks proved to have been sabotage by sailors trying to escape their year-long contracts.) Francis and John entered Cape Cod Harbor on November 11, 1620, so I’m guessing they participated in the first Thanksgiving. In 1621, however, Thanksgiving was simply a meal shared with the Wampanoag to celebrate a bountiful harvest.

The celebration had no religious context for the first couple of years, then it occurred to the grateful they should be thanking the divine. That annual tradition continued informally for over 200 years until President Abraham Lincoln issued an official proclamation in 1863 designating Thanksgiving as our annual national day of gratitude. A day all the states were to stop and give thanks in the middle of a war to dissolve their union….

And in what feels to be a further contradiction, this same President had signed off on the largest mass execution in the nation’s history not two years before, hanging 38 boys and men who fought for their tribal lands in the Sioux Uprising. It was the day after Christmas 1861. The decision and the vision defy imagination.

Even more contradictory, Lincoln commuted the sentences of 262 similarly convicted warriors, studying the evidence in each man’s case and absolving them one at a time. 

We had united in arms to free ourselves from a monarchy only 88 years before, yet here we were already in the middle of a Civil War, half of us trying to break that union and half to preserve it. During this time of contradictory alliances, even within the same family, Lincoln freed the slaves, executing one minority and liberating another.

Human beings are complex, which means humanity is complex. How could it be otherwise? We are driven by neural wiring, hormones, cultures, personalities, the damage we carry, maybe by the very stars under which we were born. 

Your nose is pressed against the glass of now, staring through the present at a future that is yet to be determined. In quantum physics, we could say we are in superposition, which is a phenomenon where an object (the future) has the potential to occupy multiple different states at once, but the object’s actual state is unknown. It’s everywhere and nowhere. In essence, anything could happen because the future is only a wave of could-be. 

  Although we do not understand why, observing the wave collapses the wave. The wave becomes particles— the stuff of matter, the stuff of which stars are made, we are made, and from which everything we call future follows. 

Consciousness is creative. Attention is a powerful tool. Where will you place yours?

How many miracles have you experienced in your life? Every one of them, by definition, contradicted circumstances. The impossible happened! Inexplicably, against all odds—from no way, a way appeared. 

Mom used to look at me when I was grieving over a loss and say, “Life is long.” Other times, presented with the same situation, the response was, “Life is short.”  And both were true.

The rift in our nation has a lot of people satisfied that we have corrected our course and others struggling to believe we are going to be okay. I stand in remembrance that we have healed once before, when the red and the blue were the blue and the grey. I’m in awe.

Place your attention on truth and hope, beloveds.

The future is in superposition. 

Collapse the wave.

 

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.

If you were walking your labradoodle on the other side of the avenue, I’d look like I’m just staring at the ground, perhaps listening to a book on Audible, perhaps “James,” by Percival Everett, which, if you haven’t read it yet, stop reading this immediately and go get a copy.

I’m actually praying over a dead squirrel. And before you say “just” a squirrel, consider that he has hidden 10,000 acorns in the last six weeks and will remember and return for 90 percent of them. Next time you’re searching for your cellphone, a little respect, please. Ask a squirrel.

I can’t tell what got him. It seems squirrels have only one successful predator: cars. But he’s perfect. No visible trauma. It looks like he’s sleeping—his eyes are closed, his little feet are relaxed, and his tail is a gray plume on the dry maple leaves.

“I am so, so, sorry, squirrel,” I whisper.

I hope it looks like I’ve just paused for a moment so Leah-dog can sniff the Bachner’s boxwoods while I actually stand there and pray that death didn’t hurt or scare him and that he is scampering through the oaks in heaven with his squirrely ancestors.

But truthfully, I’m also grossed out.

Why is it that things that are perfectly fine when alive become instantly unnerving when dead? The minute the spirit leaves the body, it becomes something else.

I had to drive to Cambridge last week to record more episodes of “This is How the Story Goes” for NPR station WHCP. It’s over an hour’s drive through fetching farmland, big sky over big fields, but a lot of big things had died on the side of the road. Things that were cute when animated and scary when vacated. A raccoon, several deer (one just a fawn), a fox, a possum and several squirrels. And I’m speeding by at 65… okaaay, 75 mph, praying a dead-animal prayer for each, including for a bag of mulch that had fallen off a truck and only looked like something dead.

Dead things grieve me unreasonably. Me of all people! I don’t even believe in death as an ending—not even as a change of address—only as a change in accessibility—for now. A change in mass, vibration, and visibility. Death blindfolds us to a greater reality. How will I get your attention, say the people who still love you from the other side of now. But love doesn’t go anywhere. At least not anywhere that it can’t come back from instantaneously upon request.

I’ve only seen two dead people, the most recent being my mother. That experience was less unnerving than numbing. Having been called by the staff of her assisted living facility and informed she was “actively dying”—a horrible term, but I’m not sure I have a better one—I had tried desperately to get there before she left for parts unknown. I had wanted to see her off, to hold her hand, to be there for her last breath as she was there for my first. To say thank you one more time for everything in between.

But I was minutes too late. Minutes. The midnight call, a lazy security guard at a locked facility, a red traffic light, and an inattentive nurse, all conspired to thwart a timely arrival.

So, when I rushed up the stairs and into my mother’s room, only her body was there. The figure on the bed wasn’t her, and she wasn’t nearby. This may be only because of the opaque nature of my own soul; maybe she was standing right there, saying, “It’s okay, Laura, my brother Ralph showed up! My big sister Lenora! Then Mom and Dad invited me to come with them, so I have to go–will check on you later.”

Maybe. But while I gazed at what had been my mother, I sensed no one in the room at all.

I sat down and tried to take it in. That she was gone. That I had missed her time of departure. That I was an orphan. That the person in the bed I’d left earlier that day was a body now and that person and body are not the same thing.

I called a funeral home, sitting on a straight back chair in the silent room. It was after midnight and the holiday season. All available employees were out on other calls. Couldn’t say when they would get there. Probably hours into the night—maybe by 2:00 am or 3:00 am. Maybe by 4:00.

I sat by her side for another hour. The whole facility was silent. Sleeping. Dreaming. Christmas garlands still draped the doors. Holiday lights twinkled on Christmas trees in the hall. Classical music played softly in the dimly lit room. Silent night, holy night. Lonely night.

Total privacy, no one coming or going, and Mom so thoroughly absent. The assisted living facility had supervised this transition a million times, and I had overnight guests at home who would be waking soon. It felt as if sitting there served no purpose. So, I left.

I left. And I feel bad about that now. Really bad. What on earth was I thinking? Of course, I should have stayed, protected her no matter how tired I was, how numb. Is this why I am so grieved by everything that dies now?

When I was a child, Mom told me that the moment she knew, deep down in her bones, that we are not our bodies and yet we live on, was the moment she saw the body of her own mother. The minute I saw her, I knew she wasn’t there. It wasn’t her; she had left, yet she was in no way gone.

Left and gone. Not the same thing.

Know this as sure as you know the name that I gave you.

 When it’s my turn, I won’t be able to leave if even one of my kids is in the room. So maybe I’ll do what Mom did and leave while they are at a stoplight, sleeping, or putting a baby to bed.

And I’ll say to them what Mom must have said to me as I rushed to her side that last night—

 Love you. Have to go.   

 Will be in touch.

 

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.

 

 

When I was little, when you were little, there were some specialized forms of torment a friend or older sibling could indulge in that were extraordinarily irritating —by design.

Like this move: pinching your cheeks, wagging your face back and forth, while exclaiming, “What a pretty little pony face!”

Was that a thing? Or did that just happen to me?

It was a real ninja move– sort of an endearment but a painful one. And what is a pony face anyway? The result of wearing a ponytail? I’m looking in the mirror…could be.

Then there was the setup. On cross-country road trips, Mr. Oliver’s sister, only 13 months younger, relentlessly whispered, “You’re stupid.”  in the backseat, her voice inaudible to their parents. This could be ignored the first few times, but by Oklahoma, this stealthy maneuver required a punch in the tormenter’s slender bicep which was met by a satisfied and very audible, “He hit me!”  (Followed by a whispered, “Gotcha,” as her brother was admonished from the front seat of the car.)

But this form of harassment could break the most disciplined among us–having every statement out of your mouth repeated. These exchanges degenerated quickly.

Talk about irritating!

Talk about irritating.

See?

Eventually, the victim would attempt to turn the tables, announcing with a triumphant smirk, “I’m an idiot,” waiting for that sentiment to be echoed, which, of course, it wasn’t. There was only one idiot in the room at that point.

The original repeater of language was Echo, an Oread, a mountain nymph in Greek mythology. Zeus had ordered the loquacious Echo to distract his wife Hera with conversation while Zeus pursued earthly pleasures. Hera figured out the subterfuge and to punish Echo for her role in the deception, Hera deprived the nymph of speech, leaving her only the ability to repeat the last words of others.

Later, when Echo fell hopelessly in love with Narcissus, she couldn’t tell him. Unable to speak, she watched him fall in love with himself. Over time, her inability to express herself caused her to fade away, to shrivel into nothingness, until all that was left of her was a disembodied voice.

A real echo is a disembodied voice with a different origin story and message.

When we were little, there was a place above the marsh where, if you called out over the grasses and cattails, the red-winged blackbirds, and the heron’s nest, you could hear a faint echo of your voice. No scientific explanation (a high bank on the other side) could make the phenomenon less than cool. Less than super cool. And eerie.

And a hundred and twenty-five years ago, when my grandmother was a girl, she too found an echo. At the northeast corner of the pasture of her father’s farm—near the wooded hill they called the Lost Eighty, she and her siblings could yell or even talk normally, and their voices would come back loud and exact.

Intrigued, the kids set out to find the source of the echo. For years, they searched the Lost Eighty for the one particular tree or knoll that repeated their words, but they never found the source of the magic.

Why? Because it’s everywhere. In one form or another, whatever you send out returns to you. Your life itself is an echo, an energy rebound. This means that in a world where you clearly have no control, you still have a choice.

You can choose what you think and the feelings those thoughts generate. You can choose the words you write, speak aloud, and the energy you share.

The primal brain, the reptilian brain at the base of the ancient brain stem, is ego-centric. It interprets everything as inner-directed. This is why when you spontaneously stop to help the man who has dropped his keys, you feel good—as if someone has helped you. It is why you will never feel good repeating gossip or bad news. You will internalize only unkindness. You will feel only despair.

So, in a world you can’t control, choose what you say and choose what you do. In the words of Rachel Stafford:

Today, I will choose love. Tomorrow, I will choose love. And the day after that, I will choose love. If I mistakenly choose distraction, perfection, or negativity over love, I will not wallow in regret. I will choose love until it becomes who I am.

Becomes who I am.

Who I am.

You can’t save the world, but you can help the lost tourist from Delaware, the elderly man who is confused at Target’s self-checkout, the stressed-out mother with the crying toddler who clearly needs to go ahead of you in line.

You can give a 100 percent tip to your waitress. And you can say thank you even for the losses you can’t understand, because panic is a five-letter word but so is trust.

So is trust.

So is trust.

You can wallow and ruminate. You can note that it’s getting dark earlier. Or you can remember the sun will continue to rise.

When it feels as if all that was good has been buried, know hope is a seed.

Be the light.

 

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.

 

 

When our mother turned 60, my sister living in Virginia, secretly drove up for the celebration and hid in my coat closet. Mom thought she was just coming over for a birthday dinner with her Maryland daughters. When she opened the closet to put her jacket away, my hidden sister leaped out, yelling “Surprise!”

Not our finest moment. Mom practically had a heart attack.

I mean, really. She had to sit down.

Surprise affects our brain chemistry with noradrenaline, a hormone released when we are startled, and the fact that surprise intensifies emotion by 400 percent may be why I remember not only this, but another long-ago winter night I would not recall otherwise.

Surprise may also be learning’s secret sauce. Each new piece of information is a surprise that enlarges my world, and what pleases me even more is that once I possess a new interesting fact, I can share it.

(Did you know that research shows the scent of women’s tears lowers aggression in men? Tears drop levels of testosterone. But the response is only generated by tears of emotion, not watering eyes from cutting onions.) If only men could be exposed to the tears of every mother, wife, sister, and daughter before the order for ground troops. How many tears need to be shed for world peace?

The surprise of new information opens up the brain like the dome of an observatory. Did you know that when dinosaurs reigned, they were looking at a different sky? It takes the Earth approximately 230 million years to orbit the center of the Milky Way, so in their heyday dinosaurs roamed the other side of the galaxy. The arrangement of stars overhead was not what you see now. In fact, in the sky they saw, Saturn had no rings, but it kind of didn’t matter.

An asteroid called K2 was heading their way.

Surprise…

One of my first surprises was not as dramatic as the obliteration of most species on Earth, but it was life-altering. In first grade at Lake Shore Elementary on Mountain Road, where there was no lake, hence, no shore, and not a mountain in sight, I met a six-year-old classmate named Becky. One day I asked Becky where she lived, and being a six-year-old, she drew the map to her house in the air. We were standing in front of the brick, one-story school in sight of the flagpole. “You go out the school driveway and do this,” she said, making an upside-down L-shape turn to the left with her finger.

I was not only surprised, I was stunned.

That couldn’t possibly be correct. Because to get to my house, you drove out of the school driveway and turned right. I simply had no paradigm in which anyone lived in a different direction or neighborhood other than my own.

As insignificant as that exchange with Becky seems now it was my first revelation that the world was bigger than my experience of it. That not everyone lived on my road or inside my head. That not everyone sees the same sky.

Surprise.

Not long after that, I saw surprise in action at home. It had been snowing all day, and we’d been stuck in the house—dusk fell early, by 4:30 or so. It must have been just before Christmas or Mom’s birthday in February. It was certainly the season of gift giving. She had built a fire and closed the cream-colored curtains against the stone-gray twilight. Dad had gone out in the bitter cold several times—perhaps to bring in firewood or to brush snow off the car.

Having grown up on a farm, gone to college on scholarship, and put all their money into building Barnstead, the contents of my mother’s jewelry box were sparse, and luxuries were few. Mom owned necklaces made of cowrie shells my father brought home from the war in the Pacific, her college sorority necklace, and a locket that held their photographs, but little else, and nothing of value.

I was constructing a house made of pop cycle sticks and Elmer’s Glue at the maple dining room table when my father casually asked my mother, “Think the snow has stopped?

“Turn on the flood light. Take a look,” he suggested.

I put down the glue and ran to the picture window, too. The floodlight beamed down on the yard from what had been the hayloft. If you looked up into the light as the flakes swirled down, it was as if you were inside the storm.

Mom flipped on the switch, pulled the curtain aside, and gasped. A smiling snowman stood caught in the glistening spiral of this blanketed landscape. Instead of sticks, his arms had been sculpted in front of him, and a diamond ring sparkled in his cupped snowy palms.

Surprise.

Saturn will not always wear the icy diamonds that encircle her now. Most planetary rings last a mere 40 million years. My mother’s ring is gone, as is Barnstead, as is childhood, as are the parents who made me.

What has stayed with me is the delight and surprise of learning something new.

The world will always be bigger than my experience of it. But each time I discover another piece of her magic, I will come looking for 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.

 

 

 

 

 

A friend of mine was wondering aloud the other day whether her kids would ever appreciate all she was doing for them, and I assured her they would. “Absolutely, without a doubt!” I proclaimed, adding, “When you’re dead.” I based this on my own experience but it’s not a prediction about my own legacy. It’s that I’ve come to appreciate a relative now whom I did not love while she was alive.

My paternal grandmother was perfectly nice to me, yet I didn’t like her. I may have been channeling my mother’s disapproval of the way my grandmother wielded money for influence. (There is a reason my father christened his new cabin cruiser, “Windfall…”). So, perhaps I was my mother’s unwitting proxy, something I wouldn’t wish on any grandmother. Even one who called me “Sugar Girl” in a high, quavering voice and inexplicably smacked her lips. A lot.

My grandmother was not big on just sitting around. Case in point—in her late 70’s she and her older sister got summer jobs as chambermaids at a resort in Watch Hill, Rhode Island just for something to do. But by the time she was 85, my widowed grandmother was a resident of an assisted living facility in Florida (isn’t everyone?), and I could tell she was bored at Mease Manor. I wanted to help her find a new project, so in a moment of inspiration, I asked her to write down her life story. What was it like to grow up on a farm in the foothills of the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks at the turn of the last century?

Sugar Girl had struck gold.

My grandmother wrote out her entire family history painstakingly, flawlessly, in long hand, in black ink, then wrote out two more volumes so that each of my sisters and I could have our own leather-bound,140-page book detailing her life. She recounted the death of a beloved little brother when she was 9, and he was 7, praise for the Native American doctor who would only come and go from his house through the window, and her grief at the runaway horse accident that killed her father at the age of 44.

She structured each book on a linear timeline, but on the back of each page, she wrote a stand-alone anecdote in red ink. I had to admit that was pretty creative, and I stumbled on an anecdote this morning that made me newly appreciate her. (Long dead! I point out to my friend as evidence that recognition of service is often late in arriving.)

My grandmother had 10 brothers and sisters, all of whom made pets from the farm animals. There were over a hundred chickens to choose from at any one time, along with twenty barn cats, lambs, horses, and pigs. It grieved my great-grandfather every time the kids adopted a pet because he knew the animal was doomed to either die or be sold. He also didn’t want dead animals buried in the yard near the house, so he told the kids that all burials had to be along the fence on Cloud Hill.

There, they staged elaborate services, decorating a considerable number of graves with flowers and broken dishes and singing to the deceased every song and hymn they knew: “Get on Board Little Children,” “Barbara Allen,” “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder.” All pretty standard fare for kids until I read this.

My grandmother had a little gray kitten she loved and carried everywhere. “I gave him a grand time,” she said, until one day a cow stepped on him and he was dispatched to Cloud Hill. She writes that the kids gave that cat a proper burial under a June midwestern sky, when the blackberries were ripe and the corn green in the fields. But she wanted to mark his little grave with something special so she could always find him again, so the hill wouldn’t claim him.

Down by the creek, she found a beautiful rock to use as a marker, but it was too heavy, and she was too little to carry it far.

Wanting to keep this memorial private, she hefted this stone alone and lugged it several yards before she was forced to drop it, but a few days later, she returned to drag it a bit further up the hill. Trip after trip, she recovered the stone from where she’d hidden it in the tall grass, determined to carry out her mission. And here’s where she found me and touched me across time.

It took her all summer to get that rock to the kitten’s grave. She dragged that stone a few feet at a time for three months. I really, really like the girl who did that. I wish I had known her. I am making her acquaintance now.

And I remember that feeling. If you love something as a kid, you don’t love it a little. You love from horizon to heaven. A love as big as the sky.

Because you loved that way then, are there moments you can access a love that size now? Childhood is the place you stored the years you believed in magic, leaped without looking, and took on kids bigger than you to defend someone smaller.

Childhood is where you first knew your omnipotence. If I work hard enough, I can do anything I want to do, be anything I want to be.

I can get this stone to my kitten even if it takes me all summer. Even if it takes me to the end of time.

At 85, writing from her Florida apartment, my grandmother wondered if there was any chance that rock was still at the top of Cloud Hill.

She’s been gone many years; perhaps the stone is gone, too.

But as long as someone else knows the story, it’s there.

 

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.