The last time I was at the Renaissance Festival accompanied by children, my son was a 5- year-old-towhead sporting an America’s Cup t-shirt, and my oldest daughter was a lanky 8-year-old. My youngest daughter was an idea I hadn’t had yet. Where was she, I wonder? Where was the third best idea I ever had? Not here in the land of the past but waiting to be called from the land of tomorrow.

Andrew wanted a sword, of course, and Audra a wreath of dried flowers. I bought a wreath for mother and daughter, and we both wore them in our hair. But today, I’ve come with my son’s son and daughter—and we stroll through acres of woods admiring the revelers’ costumes, the multitude of vendors, and the variety of food selections.

I’m referred to as M ’lady by a boy who wants to read my palm, but I’m not the royalty here. These woods are host to those whose ancestors risked everything to escape kings, queens, and lives of servitude.

The kids and I are looking for a magic shop, but as the notoriously poor map reader I am, we will end up back in the parking lot or once more at the porta-potties, so we stop at a booth for directions. Unfortunately, as the lady unfolds the sketch of Revel Grove to direct us, my brain turns off. It’s like when I’m trying to pay with the currency of a foreign country. I stuff a fistful of bills in the general direction of the salesclerk, cab driver, or sketchy guy with the watches clipped inside his raincoat and let them take what is due. I trust people and am rarely wrong.

That I know of.

So, I try to memorize which way the helpful lady points since she lost me at “you are here.” Then I tell her how beautiful her eyes are which is what I was thinking about when I should have been listening to the directions.

My interpretation of if you see something, say something.

We are still in a state of anticipation, but it is hot, and a lot of this entertainment isn’t for kids. They’re not going to get tipsy from a mug of ale, and they can’t understand a word from the Shakespeare stage.

We can’t find the magic shop, sorry, sorry, but we do find a puzzle shop. These works of art are made of glass, each piece unique, cut with multiple sides that can fit together in more than one way. There is a book, and I mean a book, on how to make solving the puzzle increasingly challenging. The $68 price tag seems excessive, but the kids have asked for nothing yet, not even funnel cake fries, and it looks like an heirloom.

We front up at a table where you can try out a puzzle, and the woman selling them starts talking to me about the state of the world, the coming election, and the versatility of her puzzles, but she’s difficult to hear. The ale shops are outselling her, and the crowds milling behind me are jostling toward the joust.

But I hear enough to express some anxiety and hope about the coming change of regimes when the woman, intense pale blue eyes, says clearly, and apropos of nothing, “I’m from the future.”

I stare at her and repeat dumbly, “You’re from the future,” in case I didn’t hear her correctly.

“Yes,” she confirms. “Most people here are from the past, but I’m 500 years ahead of you.”

This revelation is so bizarre that I briefly consider whether it is true. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, according to Carl Sagan. Maybe the Starship Enterprise has come back to Earth and where better to disguise the crew than in costume at a Renaissance Festival!

But what is actually going on is that when I was little, I intuited the only sin is unkindness, and to shame anyone else is the greatest unkindness of all. So.

Gonna roll with the future here.

I smile and nod as if I’ve been enlightened. “You’re from the future,” I repeat.

And she replies, “And I know what is going to happen.”

“Do you now,” I say.

“What I know is this,” she continues. “The outcome doesn’t matter. It’s all going to be okay.”

I very much want to believe this is true. She looks at me with her strange pale eyes and says, “I promise.”

Maybe she’s right. Maybe things are not falling apart but falling in place. Maybe the pieces can come together in multiple ways to make an even better design. So, we buy the puzzle and later a sword for the only son of my only son because that is the only thing he asks for.

My granddaughter, with long red hair to her waist and a love of perfection, wants only a wand—a star on a stick trailing ribbons like a comet’s tail— to wave over this whole bright and broken world.

We are making our way through the grove to the field where the cars are parked. If the kids weren’t with me, I’d find that street urchin and get my palm read, hoping to learn that the light above my head is very bright or that peace is imminent. But that is for another time.

The world is the puzzle we carry from the grove, fractured pieces that can fit together in new and different shapes. It brings to mind an image from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem—a Victorian poet-priest who, while lamenting all that man has done to this world, claims nature is never spent, and that love will call forth the best of all things.

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods
with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

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.

Laura Oliver will be reading her work at the Stoltz Listening Room at the Avalon Foundation in Easton on April 24th at 6 pm as part of our Spy Nights series. Tickets can be purchased here.

Dear Reader,

I often tell students searching for voice to write a letter to someone they trust, dead or alive, real or imagined. “Tell that person what has happened to you,” I suggest. “Cut off the salutation, and you have a story.” And we read together the famous letter written by Sullivan Ballou.

Sullivan Ballou was a member of the Rhode Island militia, a Civil War soldier who wrote a letter to his young wife Sarah from Camp Clark, Washington, DC on July 14, 1861. The word was out, he said, that the troops would be moving soon, so he was acting on impulse to write to her while he could.

Surrounded by 2,000 sleeping soldiers, he needed his wife to know that he loved her more than life itself and their two baby boys, Edgar and William, as well, yet he bore for his country a love equal in magnitude, his commitment to defend the union, a need he could not deny.

“I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the Government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. And I am willing — perfectly willing — to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt,” he wrote.

He tells Sarah then that his intuition is that he will survive the coming battle unharmed but asks:

“If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name. Forgive my many faults and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and foolish I have often times been! How gladly would I wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness …

“But O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights … always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.”

Sullivan Ballou was killed a week later at the First Battle of Bull Run. He was 32, Sarah was 24. The letter was never mailed but was found when his body was recovered. Sarah lived to be 80 and never remarried.

Prescience? Intuition? Coincidence? Who can say?

When I was 13, I received the only letter ever written to me by my grandfather and, as far as I know, the only letter he ever wrote individually to any of his grandchildren. Granddad was a gentle soul with a very round face, wire-rim glasses, blue eyes, and a soft-spoken demeanor.

My grandparents lived on the Florida Gulf Coast, and I had visited them twice. They had also spent a summer with us in Maryland when my parents were building our house on the river. Grandad was a skilled carpenter, and his talents were useful to his son. But my grandfather and I were kindred spirits.

He was an astronomer—constructing a 100-power, 6-foot-long telescope to study the heavens. It took him a year just to grind the lens. He was a paleontologist who collected fossils that predated the age of dinosaurs and a numismatist, with a coin collection hidden in a secret closet that housed the oldest penny in the US (1783), a widow’s mite (a coin from the time of Christ), and a three-legged buffalo nickel. I study astronomy, search for fossils, go on archeological digs, and still possess a portion of his coin collection.

But on October 20 of my 13^th year, I received this letter. “Hello, Laura, my dear. You may be surprised to hear from me. I don’t write very much. I’m lonesome to see you,” he began. He said his spelling was so poor that he seldom wrote anything at all and that if the letter were flawless when I received it, I’d know my schoolteacher grandmother had gotten hold of it before it was mailed. It was almost flawless but “lonesome” was spelled “lonesume.” I am grateful to know that it arrived untouched.

“I wish you could come visit for a whole six weeks next summer,” he wrote, “but if not, we may come to Maryland to see you.”

He enclosed $6 as “early Christmas” so I could buy myself a present “to Laura from Grandad.” And he signed the letter simply, “I love you very much.”

I love you very much. Some instinct made me save this letter, but I’m only coming to appreciate the significance of the timing now.

Because Grandad was as prescient as Sullivan Ballou. There was no visit the following summer, and I never saw him again. He was killed six weeks later, on December 16^th , walking on the side of the road, by a hit-and-run driver.

How is it that the only letter he would ever write to a grandchild, and one that specifically told me I was loved, was sent weeks before he died in a freak accident no one could have predicted? And that although I was a child, I would keep those words safe for half a century?

We are a letter-saving family. I have correspondence written in 1848 between my great-great-grandfather and his son as they emigrated west, letters exchanged every day of World War II between my parents, letters from my mother in college back to the farm, letters of apology, acknowledgment, and connection. As my mother wrote in a letter she slipped into my suitcase the night I left for college, “It has been my experience that this kind of love never dies.”

I plan to watch over those I love from wherever I am in this life or the next. When a grandchild finds a faded letter and marvels at the familial love that preceded him in the march of generations, may it be gentle evidence of my spirit passing by. A breath, a breeze, a blessing.

So write your love down, dear reader, and save what you receive. Every letter is a love letter, if not for this generation, then for those to come.

Love,

Laura

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.

Five hours of jet lag and no air conditioning at the English Airbnb we rented in Woking last week may be why I have death on my mind, but I want you to know that I’m planning to attend my own funeral, so you better come. I have to admit that I’m hoping I’ll find out then things none of us can know now– that I was loved by more people than I might have predicted (four), that my work reached more readers than I was aware of, that my holding others’ writings in sacred trust as an editor was meaningful to them not because they eventually published but because their truths were witnessed, mirrored, and made beautiful by collaboration.

I want to find all this out during my celebration of life while “It’s Okay” by the Piano Guys plays over a sophisticated sound system. I want the mourners who came in sad, to start to smile because, well, it’s okay. Oh, and I want only super-flattering photos of me placed around the reception. Or a video montage.

I’ve come downstairs just now because it is lunchtime on a Monday, the only day I have to write this column each week and to run some story starts past Mr. Oliver. I will offer my usual disclaimer that I don’t know if any of these ideas are going anywhere. My creative self is 8 years old at this moment and scuffing the toe of one worn white sneaker on the oak hardwood, afraid to look up, full of hope.

He sees I’m carrying my laptop, knows it’s story time, so he picks up the scrappy rescue terrier, aims her in my direction, and says in Leah-the-dog’s voice, “So this is what my mama calls spit-balling.” And now I’m laughing too hard to read because that’s exactly what I’m doing. Spit-balling. Throwing thoughts against the wall. Plus, Leah is always funny.

And here’s what I’ve got so far, I tell him.

At my funeral I’d like someone to use the Rumi quote on my website, “From the moment I heard my first story, I started looking for you.” The quote moves me profoundly. I’m not sure why.

 Because the you, is you?

Because it is the illusive goodness in myself?

Because the search is for God?

I don’t know, but my daughter Audra, smart and preternaturally competent, whom I’m assuming will attend this event, corrected me when she read it. “Mom!” she admonished. “The quote on your website is wrong!”

I was horrified. How wrong was it?

“It’s ‘From the moment I heard my first LOVE story, I started looking for you.’”

Every story is a love story, Rumi. I thought you knew this. Because every story is an attempt to connect with another.

I read for a minute, then look at Mr. Oliver to see if any of these story-starts have landed. He’s nodding, but not saying anything, so I continue. Leah sits next to me on the blue and white window seat in the kitchen overlooking the pink hydrangeas by the garden wall keeping an eye out for squirrels.

Since the pandemic, a high school reunion, and the writing of this column, I’ve had the miraculous good fortune to rediscover friends from my childhood, adolescence, college, and a far-flung past—from elementary school when we lived on Eagle Hill, from high school when we lived in North Shore, from our time in New Zealand, and it has all been a miracle of grounding.

When you grow up with parents who split up when you were very young, you are left without a firm foundation on which to stand. It may be hard to imagine, but you never see your mother and father standing in the same room again. You exist as something that came from an amorphous space between them but not of them as a couple because you have so little experience of them as a unit. You have a mother. You have a father. But you don’t have parents. It is hard to build a self on a cloud.

This is why finding the friends now who were part of that amorphous life is such a gift. The kids who spent summer afternoons sharing crab nets, who were castmates in high school productions like Guys and Dolls, who also worked on Cape Cod, are my witnesses, my proof-of-life that I existed. That I exist. That I came from somewhere.

I stop and look at Mr. Oliver again for encouragement. He never meets my eyes at this stage. But his silence means “go on.”

A boy who lived at the end of the road when I was a girl, where we biked and swam and built forts in the woods, has been in touch since I started writing this column. He just told me that when we were about 8 and 10, his mother found a note he had stuffed under his mattress upon which he’d written “I love Laura” about ten times. I was astonished to hear this and was smiling, of course. I would never have guessed that he liked me at all.

That’s what I think death itself will be like. A revelation of affection you never dreamed existed. Only it will be astonishing in magnitude and unconditional. I imagine that more than any other emotion, what you may feel first when you die is simply surprise.

Like you’ve found a note from the universe stuffed under the mattress. It’s been waiting to be found your entire life.

You pull it out, unfold it, and it says, not ten times but to the end of time:

 I love you, I love you, I love 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.

You may think that “The Story Within” (Penguin Random House) was my first book, but you would be wrong. So wrong.

My first book, 11 chapters long, was titled “Dr. Laura Pritchett’s Guide to Life.” I wrote it in support of my practice as a therapist, where I enjoyed giving advice to other people on their problems. I was 10. I still have this book. Feel free to contact me.

Sessions were a quarter. No one came. My office was the upstairs hallway. The price has gone up, but the office is still my upstairs hallway.

The book, tabloid-size manilla paper with the edges cut in order to leave staggered rectangular tabs for the chapter titles, began with a list of potential clients, each formally accounted for by first, middle, and (surprise!) the same last name, mine. They included my mother, my sister Andee, my sister Sharon, and our collie Beau, to whom I perversely assigned my own middle name, although he was a boy: Beau Jean Pritchett. I also included as clients “exclusive friends,” of which I had none and which were never identified, although apparently, one had a session, and my cat Clyde or Clide. I’d never seen his name written, so I listed him using both spellings for billing purposes.

A sampling of chapter titles included “God and Man,” “I’m So Mad I Could Scream,” “I Can’t Stand Her,” “Endless-Seeming Work,” “Love,” and “Life.”

Most useful in my practice today: “I’m So Mad I Could Scream.” The advice?
Have a good cry. Take a pillow and jump up and down on it. Comb your hair and wash your face. Play the piano to “take it out of your mind.” Walk outside by yourself, then play the piano again!

“I Can’t Stand Her” contained these gems: Think of the times you’ve felt sorry for her. If there are any, think of her good points. Think of the times (if any) she’s been nice to you. Be nice to her (if possible) and see how she acts. You may like her better then.

Not sure about my therapeutic model in “Endless-Seeming Work.” Clients were advised to “whistle and think of something gay, plan something fun for yourself, try to be neat” (?) and, this additional nugget of wisdom, “feel feminine.” Not sure how feeling feminine would make work fly by, and I’m pretty sure it screwed up Beau Jean, who was already having identity issues given his new name.

The chapter “Love” pretty much plagiarized the Golden Rule. Even at the age of 10, I knew when something couldn’t be improved upon.

For those with existential issues I referred to my opening chapter “God and Man,” where in fifth grade, I seem to have written out exactly what I believe now. The chapter began, “Man may someday conquer space and try to conquer God, but he will not succeed for he must always have some real but unknown answer to all he doesn’t know.”

Which I think was my fifth-grade way of saying life is a mystery you will never solve, try as you might, and this is a good thing.

But my closing chapter, “Life,” seemed to promote a certain self-righteous resignation: “Don’t try to find out what you have no need to. Don’t try to tear apart life and understand it. You’re better off just to live it.” I suspect I was channeling a mother stunned by her own experience and surviving on faith.

However, I no longer feel this way, and I hope I didn’t convey this complacency to my children. Learning is a creative energy, and what better means is there to honor creation itself than to admire the puzzle of it, to seek to learn its secrets, and to marvel at each revelation.

Have we ever learned anything about the making of the universe that did not leave us in awe? Are you sorry you’ve seen the star factory in Hubble’s Pillars of Creation or the Horsehead Nebula? That you know Uranus and Neptune once changed places in their orbits around the sun? That only Venus and Uranus rotate clockwise? That Uranus rotates backwards and on her side?

I wrote my manual as a kid before I had kids. Before I’d ever made a mistake. When the slate was clear. When I could have gone home with a “Welcome back, little camper! Well done!” And I have no idea how my children will remember me one day.

But I am reading a book titled, “Light” by Bruce Watson and the most moving thing in it so far is the dedication. It touches me because I’ve made so many mistakes in my life that there is no time or means to undo. But Bruce Watson, whose mother must surely have been imperfect too, opened his book with this:

“For my mother, whose interest in everything turned out to be the greatest gift.”

I imagine I would have liked Mrs. Watson, who clearly left a legacy of wonder. One which I suspect was fueled by her unconditional love of life itself.

Perhaps that is the synopsis of the life I will leave behind, but the last chapter is not yet written.

It’s my belief that we are evolving toward a happy ending.

The author is still editing the work.

I tend to stun myself with new knowledge and ponder the inexplicable, and both seem to be coming at a faster and faster pace. It’s as if I slept through the first decades of my life and awakened just in time to appreciate the gift before I’m required to give it back. (Thank you for letting me visit.) I’ve already given back to life all that I can and will inevitably leave behind that which I most treasure.

Three kids.

But I’ve taken to gobsmacking myself on facts you can only take in by contrast or simile. Like that an atom is comprised of so much empty space it is as if the nucleus is a pea in a football stadium. Which makes us primarily empty space. At our most fundamental level, we are vibrating energy acting in a field of energy. (Is that why you can feel me thinking about you?)

Or if a photon left the sun right this second and began traveling towards Earth at the speed most commercial jets fly, 500 miles per hour, it would take 21 years for that photon to reach the Earth. At the speed of light, that’s only 8 minutes and 20 seconds. Light never stops.

And apples appear red, yet the atoms that comprise them have no color. And if you and your partner were able to conceive every possible combination of eggs and sperm each could contribute, the result would be 7 trillion children, none of whom would be the same.

Has your brain imploded yet?

We have no evidence that fire exists anywhere except on Earth—not on any other planet in the solar system, anyway. Fire requires free oxygen, heat, and something combustible to burn. To date, we have only found those conditions on this planet—not even the sun qualifies as a source of fire. The sun is a glowing ball of gas. You are seeing hydrogen compressed into helium, which sets off the plumes of gas you think of as fire.

Which… thinking about a scorching ball of flaming gas, creating sweltering summers…brings me to my pondering of the inexplicable. Why for the love of God, in a house with no air conditioning, did my parents own only one fan?

 My parents’ aesthetic emphasized beauty and economy. No fake Christmas trees, no purchased birthday cakes or Halloween costumes. No fake flowers. Not fans of plastic or wastefulness. We reused tinfoil, bacon grease, string, paper bags, wrapping paper, ribbon, and eventually, tv dinner trays.

Sandboxes and swing sets were unsightly so they could certainly not be placed between the house and the view of the river but were tucked away in the side yard.

So, beauty and frugality ruled my childhood. But really. ONE fan? Was it just because buying two of anything was an untoward extravagance?

Mr. Oliver’s relatives were relatively well-off citizens of a small southern town. His great-uncle was mayor of Asheboro, North Carolina, and his grandfather was a state senator who was so concerned with appearing extravagant that when he decided to buy his wife a car, he bought one identical in make, model, color, and year to the car they already owned. As if that sneaky bit of business would keep them from being judged ostentatious.

But one fan? It was the size of a dinner plate and rotated. We had to carry it around the house and plug it in wherever we were—eating dinner, watching television—but the real problem was in going to sleep. As the youngest, I went to bed first, upstairs in the southwest corner of the house, where since noon, the descending sun had been heating up my robin’s-egg-blue bedroom with the circus-animal bedspread and the curtains with the ball fringe to a temperature at which you could bake brownies.

I was given the fan to help me nod off—which I tried to do as fast as possible, knowing my older sister was coming to claim it next. When I’d awake sweltering at 2 a.m. and realize she was asleep next door with the fan still purring, I’d lay there sweaty with the injustice of 30 minutes of fan versus the rest of the night and plot ways to sneak into her room to take it back. For the record, this was never, ever successful. The only thing that wakes one up faster than a noise is the sudden absence of a noise. Or the felonious presence of a sister in the dark.

My parents are dead, so there is no one to ask about this bizarre frugality. But when my mother was still alive and ordering dinner off the menu at her assisted living facility, on the evenings they served crabcakes (her favorite and a luxury in this household even now), it would kill me to see her check the entree choice and then write next to it, (2?? Please???). She might as well have drawn a picture of herself wringing her hands with the squeamishness of asking for extra.

It has taken me a whole lifetime to embrace abundance as holy, as permitted and smiled upon. I’m the little spendthrift who has bought more than one hose to water the pink petunias! One for the front yard and (holy cow!) a second for the back, when yes, I could just drag one hose around the house.

I believe consciousness is love, that it is the source of that vibrating energy, and that it is all that is real, ultimately. And on a fundamental level I feel we are all one. But here’s the thing about one versus two.

How do you know you are loved if there is no one to love you? Does love require a beloved? Does love need a recipient to exist?

Anita Moorjani says you’ll never get this until you understand that love is not an energy to pray to, aspire to, or please. You are love itself. All you have to do is recognize your true identity. Stop knocking on the door and realize you are the house.

This is just one more thing I find inexplicable. Because in my heart of hearts, I believe we come into this world wanting only to love and be loved.

And that, my beloved, requires two of us.

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

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

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

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

Ditto resistance bands.

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

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

I know Lisa.

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

Dogs that smell like perfume.

Dressing rooms that smell like perfume.

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

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

Generally speaking, don’t love the mall.

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

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

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

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

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

But there are a lot of things I do like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was only one.

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

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

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