There are things I’d rather not admit to, but full disclosure will make us closer, so here goes.

I don’t understand the logic of washing your hands in a public restroom if you have to touch the faucet handle when you’re done.

I sometimes speak very harshly to Alexa, my interactive voice assistant. When she doesn’t answer fast enough or hears incorrectly, I talk to her as if she is very, very stupid and it feels really, really good.

I often advise friends who have missed a television show to “just stream it.” I have no idea what that means.

Thirty years ago, I took a course in “Transcendental Meditation.” Five years ago, I broke down and told someone my secret word. It was her word, too. Turns out it’s everyone’s word.

I believe I can make stoplights turn green faster with my mind.

Can to.

I understand what tidally locked means, yet I still don’t totally comprehend how it happens that the same side of the moon is always facing the earth. (Don’t tell me. I’ve already stopped listening.)

There is a website called thispersondoesnotexist.com in which AI creates faces that look totally real but are not. It’s only a matter of time before a client presents me with a story about a woman who logs on and sees her face there. I’ll wish I had written it.

It took years for me to learn to redirect a conversation to the other person. I found my own life so interesting it just didn’t occur to me to stop telling stories and ask about my companion. I know, I know. I can’t believe it either. (How are you doing?)

I tell the dog I love her and smother her with kisses while she yawns (dog language for “I’m not digging this”), but I don’t walk her in the rain or when I’m tired, I just let her out in the backyard and hope she runs around a lot.

I pray for my writing clients every single day—right after being grateful for them. This includes current and former clients I should have long forgotten by now. I think they would be shocked to know this.

When Mr. Oliver wants to make me laugh, he talks in the dog’s voice—it is high-pitched and breathy. It was my last dog’s voice as well. Oddly enough, it’s my son’s dog’s voice, too. No matter how distracted or annoyed I am, this cracks me up every time. Turns out dogs are hilarious.

If a doctor leaves me waiting in the exam room long enough, like a really really long time, I’ll climb down off the table and look in the drawers.

Sometimes, I’m just so sad, my heart is so heavy, I feel so misinterpreted, I just want to go home. Not home to my house, home-home. But I’ll wait till someone comes for me.

The city has put a really obnoxious parking sign smack in front of my house. Then, the city added a gigantic yellow bicycle symbol on the pole. Then they tacked on “share the road.” I have been contemplating digging it up and throwing it in the creek. At night, disguised. You can apparently go to jail for this. So, if it “goes missing” (air quotes), it most certainly wasn’t me.

When I go to lunch with friends and we split the bill, I don’t know why they ask me, “how much are we tipping?” I’m tipping 20%. You can tip whatever you want. One of my best friends doesn’t ask. She just always tips 100 % because she’s a better person than I am.

Until today, I thought my blood type, O-positive, was the universal blood donor. I just learned it’s O-negative, and I somehow feel like I have a gift I can’t give now.

Sometimes, I wish someone would adopt me. I miss my mother.

I just took my dog for a trial play date at a new kennel where I hope to be able to board her. I told her to play well with others and be kind. But I was actually talking to the two girls who led her away.

When I pray, I can’t get the words “thank you” out before a request slips in. “Thank you, and please.” Followed by “help.” It’s really difficult for me to tease apart what I am grateful for and what I long for.

But today, it is easy. I’m grateful 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.

 

Once, my father said, a little girl was watching her father mow the lawn. It was an early evening in June, and the air was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and the fresh cucumber smell of damp grass clippings. Fireflies drifted at knee level, blinking on and off beneath the magnolia branches. The little girl wore navy shorts, a striped tee shirt, and had a brown ponytail. “Just like yours!” my father said, giving mine a tug.

The man was just starting the last pass across the yard when he looked back and saw the little girl had dropped face down in the grass. He shouted her name and ran to her side. She lay still as death. As he carefully turned her over, ten bloody stitch marks bloomed across her chest.

The lawnmower had hit a croquet wicket someone had left in the yard. Shrapnel had shot like bullets from its blades, dropping the girl where she stood. 

My father often told me stories to keep me safe. Never play near a lawnmower in use, he said. His voice was deep and rich, like a radio announcer.

Stories to keep me safe studded my childhood with the dramatic indelibility of fairytales. (And they didn’t call them the Brothers Grimm for nothing.) Like once, my sister told me, a girl caught snooping in her older sister’s room without permission just exploded into flames. “Spontaneous combustion,” my sister said, eyeing me over her cereal bowl. “It happens.”

And one afternoon, when I got bored digging a hole to China in the wet sand on the beach and buried my leg in it from the knee down, a neighbor boy told me that was a torture method the pirates used. They’d bury you in the sand at low tide with just your head sticking out so you would drown when the tide came in. 

I imagined timing my breaths so I’d live. 

Vowed I’d never invade someone’s privacy. 

Or walk in front of a lawnmower in use.

It was my mother who told me my father was leaving. We were sitting on the pier, our legs dangling over the hot, splintery planks, our bare toes swinging above the green water, when she said, “I have something to tell you.”  We were facing west, towards Pumphreys Point, where the summer day had already surrendered to dusk. “Your father is moving to Baltimore.” He worked in Baltimore. And she said, moving. This didn’t seem like too big of a deal. 

But the next day, in the murmur of conversations about the house, I overheard the word “divorce,” and that new information morphed to become the unsolvable conundrum of my existence to date. “If someone loves you, how can they leave you?” This is an equation my heart still can’t reconcile even though I understand intellectually that love sometimes means you must go. 

A brilliant writer and war correspondent, you might remember Sebastian Junger as the author of “The Perfect Storm.” In his new book, titled, “In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife,” he describes confronting his own death in the middle of a medical emergency. At that moment, his father, a physicist with no belief in an afterlife and dead many years, appeared to him as a benign, loving presence, conveying the message, “You do not need to keep fighting; it’s okay to let go.” But Junger had a wife he loved and two little girls he adored and found the invitation more appalling than appealing. He chose to fight, to return, to live.  

Once he has recovered, Junger tells his little girl that he loves her, but she is so very young he is uncertain that she understands what love means, so he asks her. Without hesitation, she answers, “Love means ‘stay here.’”

Twenty-seven years after my father left, I learned he had died. That, too, was hard to emotionally compute. That, too, didn’t seem possible. My grief was primarily for lost opportunity. With death, the door of possibility had closed. There would never be more between us. Or so I thought.

I reviewed our last phone conversation and felt good; I felt lucky because my last words had been I love you. Not so much an expression of tenderness as an acknowledgment of commitment. I knew I would stand by him as he aged and give him whatever help I could to the end of his days. If that wasn’t love, it was close enough. Love isn’t always a feeling. As he had requested, we scattered his ashes at sunset, where the bay meets the ocean. 

A decade or more later, having thought very little about him, I went to see an Intuitive, out of curiosity more than anything. I’m always open to what we don’t know about life, death, consciousness, and spirit. I hope to discover there is more to life than it appears, but I have no need to discover anything. 

The woman’s name was Allyson—heavy set, blunt cut brown hair, a sweet smile. She welcomed me into her home, and we sat on opposite sides of her desk. She knew nothing about me, not even my name, so to give herself time to get her bearings, she began talking in somewhat general terms about the current state of the world in astrological terms. I nodded, a little impatient. This was nothing I cared about. 

Then she abruptly stopped, looked up and to my left, and said, “Your father has passed, hasn’t he?” I nodded. “Well, he’s right here, and he’s making my heart hurt. I don’t know what he did, but he says you didn’t have his attention in some way. He says he’s still no saint but that he has learned, on the other side, what this has cost you. He is so sorry. He wants to make this up to you now.”

We talked for an hour as Allyson told me things about my life no one could possibly know. At one point, she said, “Your father is showing me a train station. He says you are about to begin a new age of discovery. Like you’re a train leaving the station.”

My car was hot from being locked in the sunny parking lot of Allyson’s townhouse. I lowered myself onto the leather seat and checked my phone to see that it had successfully recorded our conversation. Do you think you choose your parents? On the drive down Route 50 I thought I could make a case that you do, in order to become who you are. It’s a way of saying the things that have happened to you have happened for you.

Maybe my father leaving happened for me. Maybe every loss you have ever endured happened for you. What do you think? Help me figure this out. 

Because here’s what else happened. I make no claims about this experience. No proselytizing that this is reality with a capital “R” or truth with a capital “T.” Make of it what you will. 

My grandson had a Melissa and Doug Sound Puzzle he had left at my house. It is a wooden puzzle the size of a small placemat. The painted picture of a train leaving the station had been cut up into 8 shapes that make the sound of a train whistle when the child correctly places each piece back into the picture. There is a battery housed in the back. The sound is triggered by movement when the pieces are removed or replaced, or more accurately, the sound is triggered by the change in exposure to light. I had put the puzzle in the toy box, all the pieces snuggly in place, enclosed in the dark. 

But when I got home that day, as I entered the front door, the sound of a train whistle filled the room. I opened the toy box and took out the completed puzzle, all pieces in place, puzzled myself, at how that could have happened with no movement in the dark. 

Ten years later, whether the puzzle is in a drawer without the pieces, lying on a bookcase with the shapes all in place, upside down in a dark closet, or buried in a suitcase on vacation in England, the sound of the train whistle goes off when I think of my father, I am in need of reassurance, or asking for help. It makes me smile. If it’s not Dad, we’re going to have a good laugh about this someday. 

I always say hi, and I always add thanks. Because if someone loves you, they don’t leave you, even if their ashes are scattered at dusk on an outgoing tide, and the prevailing theory is they have died. 

My father didn’t need to tell me stories to keep me safe because there is nothing to fear.  

Love is the only story and love has no end.

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 upstairs office, where I write to you and review client manuscripts, has three huge windows overlooking the street. I often pause what I’m doing to gaze out over the sidewalk, which, I swear, makes passersby instinctively turn and look up. The energy of observation appears palpable, but it causes some pretty weird behavior.

Like quantum particles, these people live in a world of infinite possibility of being normal until they suspect they are being observed. Then, they freeze up in contrived configurations. Couples suddenly stare straight ahead: “That woman up there is watching us! Don’t look! Keep walking!”

Dog walkers get stuck at the boxwood hedge along the sidewalk, feel the vibe, and after studiously staring at the pavement, glance up apologetically and wave their bags. I wave cheerfully back. 

In fact, I’ve begun to know people by their dogs—Mary has twin dachshunds, for instance, who can’t really be walked (short legs, high curbs), so she puts them in a stroller in sunbonnets, just their little brown snouts poking out, which has caused at least one baby-loving tourist from Delaware to recoil.  

There are power walkers, “No! Who said you look silly?” and those squadrons of tourists who, until last year, sped by on Segways, always in groups, as if to say, “Don’t judge. This is not weird! Lots of us are doing it.”

But it was weird. Not enough of us were doing it. 

It just seems that anyone going that fast should be making an effort. This is now true of the city’s newest offering: electric scooters. I’ve been thinking about this. Does “scooter” refer to the vehicle or the person riding it? I mean, if I say, “Do you bike?” would I also say, “Do you scoot?” And if I say, “Are you a biker?” would I also say, “Are you a scooter?”

But when the traffic beneath my window is nonvehicular, I try to transmit fleeting goodwill. We are all born with a sixth sense—our most exquisite means of perception– allowing you to receive and send flashes of intuitive insight. It’s that awareness that someone is looking at you or about to call. That you should turn left at the next intersection when you’re lost. Thoughts, and their accompanying feelings, are a form of energy and I am endlessly curious about the possibilities. 

There are young mothers in groups of two and three pushing plump babies in red strollers, and I beam them the message, “Pay attention, pretty mamas. These are the best days of your life– you will not pass this way again.” The mothers are often followed in the afternoon by grandmothers pushing the same strollers, who clearly do know the transitory nature of our days.

I admire the platinum shine of a middle schooler’s ponytail, the gray-blue of my neighbor’s new running shoes, the stoic efforts of the parent lugging the 30-pound toddler who has had a meltdown. “You are all so beautiful,” I think to myself. “Live long and prosper! Wheels up! Carry on!!”

 I imagine the man with the long beard who walks by leaning on his cane every morning at 10:00, tossing it aside unneeded, the runners from the local high school getting a second wind, running in unison until they are running to the same beat of their hearts. And you know what? With every good wish deployed through the air, I’m the one who is transported without effort. I am the one who is blessed.

We are a people, a nation, a tribe, a collective, a family of man intricately connected on energy waves you can’t see. Here’s the magic. If you think it, they sense it. If you feel it, they know it. We are all sender/receivers, but love is a ricochet. 

Can you feel it? 

Can you feel it now?

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

 

I’m at JT’s for my weekly workout and we’re catching up on what’s transpired in the week since I saw him last. I plop down in the chair next to his desk and draw my feet up to sit cross-legged.

A friend has shown me “before and after” photos of her friend, who had a minor procedure done under a local anesthetic that smoothed out her jawline. I point to my face, then stretch my cheeks back with my palms. “She looked like this! It was amazing!”

He snorts. “That’s ridiculous. Why would anyone do that?” I point to my resting jawline, raise my eyebrows, cock my head.

“I don’t even see those things until you point them out. Stop always pointing them out.”

I look at him sadly. He will never understand. I suggest he add face yoga to his gym offerings just to make him crazy and to delay the start of my workout another minute.

“Face yoga! What’s that?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. It’s a thing. I show him a video. There’s a book, too.”

He rolls his eyes, and I smile at him, mentally casting through last week’s events one more time to see if there’s anything else new in my life to share, although after a year of this, I’ve come to realize these few minutes of story-swapping do not mean I’m special in any way. JT is everyone’s confidant. Confessor.
“Does everyone tell you their secrets?” I ask.

He looks immediately cryptic. “I know some stuff. I hear stuff for sure. Who am I going to tell? I’m a vault. Men are vaults.”

I think about this. Men are vaults, as a rule. But… I once asked him whether my friend Carey, who works out twice as much as I do, lifts more than the 17-pound free weights I struggled to get over my head for the 45th time.

I could never reveal such personal information, JT said, simultaneously shaking his head as he took the weights from me.

We would gossip, but we don’t know any of the same people, except Carey and she’s such an upright citizen there’s not a lot to say. So, I tell him things I’ve learned recently that are actually far more interesting. Isn’t the best kind of sharing pressing a piece of wonder into another’s palm? Passing on something you’ve learned? Something of the gob-smacked variety? I hope so because every time the world stuns me with her beauty, with yet another meticulous miracle, I think of you.

“Did you know that a blink is .25 of a second?” I ask. JT is immediately suspicious. This is a man who pays with cash.

“How do they know? Who measures that?”

“And that in that space of a blink,15,000 new stars will be born, and 300 old stars will explode?”

“No, they won’t. Says who?”

“And 15,000,000 rogue planets will form, drifting through space untethered to a star? Just drifting, lonely, and dark?”
He looks skeptical and grim. JT’s daughter just graduated from high school and leaves the family orbit in a few months. She is on life’s precipice—her horizon is limitless. He shows me her photo from last weekend’s senior prom. She is absolutely stunning in an emerald dress draped like silk.

The stable planetary system that has been JT’s life for the last 18 years is losing a heavenly body; the circular orbit will become elliptical at best, I know. These things happen so gradually. The way the moon is easing away from the earth an inch and a half a year. Then, in one moment, the inevitable will happen. There will be a tipping point—when the earth will be forced to relinquish her embrace.

“And 30 black holes will form in the space of your next blink,” I add as he puts away his phone with his daughter’s photo. Then, to change the topic from black holes, which steal even hope and memory, to something brighter, I say, “But space will expand 527,250 kilometers.”

“Nobody knows that for sure. Come over here,” he says and hands me a resistance band.

Who’s resistant, I’m thinking.

But I’ve been where he is, and I still wrestle with the knowledge that change is the only constant. Not good news, not bad. Just news. Every time someone leaves, there is an adjustment, a reconfiguring of the remaining bodies in the system. Gravitational forces respond in kind to increased distance.

The kids leave home, and you relearn who you are. Grandchildren are born, and you relearn who you are. Friends leave your orbit, and you relearn who you are.

People love and forgive you, and you relearn who you are or become a new star entirely; you burn hot and blue.
A galaxy that can no longer produce stars is called a Quiet Essence. In astronomical terms, it is an epoch, but in life, it is a choice I don’t intend to make. I want to light up my world with new experiences and understanding to the end of time.

To the end of my time.

I step into the resistance band and pull it just above my knees. “People who are lying tend not to blink,” I tell him. “But here’s a fact: over the course of your life, you’ll blink 650 million times.” I blink so he’ll know I’m telling the truth.

After my workout, I leave him looking at his phone again, maybe at the prom photo of his beautiful daughter in the green dress.

He is far from the era of Quiet Essence, but I turn back and look at him through the glass door as I leave. Traffic is heavy on Forrest Drive, and I want to get home in time to call my first-born daughter. The one who lives in Woking, England. The one who travels through this galaxy 3,000 miles and five hours ahead of me with every turn of the earth. The daughter, who, like her brother and sister, I held as close as the moon for a time.

“Don’t blink,” I whisper to myself as I head down the stairs.

It is difficult to see.

Don’t blink.

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

I didn’t know what to do about Mr. Oliver. He refused to believe in the Pet Psychic. The short-lived show on Animal Planet had me laughing, too, but I was trying to keep an open mind.

“Look at her,” he hooted as I stared at the television transfixed. Consuelo, an animal telepath, was communicating with Miss Piles, a pony who had bitten her owner. The previously docile horse wouldn’t allow the man to touch her, and Consuelo had been consulted as a last resort. The Brazilian telepath sat on a hay bale in the pony’s stall and communed with the animal.

“She’s saaaad, dahling,” Consuelo relayed to the owner. “And she’s maaaad!” The psychic turned raised eyebrows to the barrel-chested man in the red ballcap holding the pony’s rein. “She wants to know what you did with her baby.”

The owner flushed a bright pink, shuffling around in the barn straw to avoid the accusing stares of Miss Piles as well as Consuelo.

“Sold him,” he muttered.

Consuelo didn’t translate tone of voice, but narrowed eyes indicated she was clearly the pony’s advocate. “Miss Piles says you took her baby too soon and in front of her. That was excruciating, but she feels better now that she’s told you what’s wrong.”

And bitten you, I thought.

“She could say anything!” Mr. Oliver exclaimed, unmoved. “Who’s to contradict her? The horse?”

But what if she’s right? The ramifications are enormous. Not just that animals have feelings but that they have thoughts and opinions. To explore this, I googled “Does your dog love you?” The search resulted in:

“Does your dog love you BACK?”
“Does your dog love you more than itself?”
“Does your dog love you if he sleeps with you?”

I double-checked to be sure I had typed “dog,” … but I guess that’s the point.

In graduate school, I read a short story by Amy Hempel illuminating the animal-human sensibility that broke my heart. It was about Koko, the most famous of the western lowland gorillas who had been taught to communicate with researchers using sign language.

Born in the San Francisco Zoo on the 4th of July, she’d been initially named “Hanabi-ko,” which means “Fireworks Child” in Japanese. By the time she was a year old, she was KoKo, and her caregiver, Dr. Penny Patterson, had taught her over 1,000 signs.

The Christmas KoKo was 12, she asked for a cat, so researchers gave her a stuffed toy cat, but she wouldn’t play with it and kept signing, “Sad, sad, sad.” My theory? She was signing “sad” only because she couldn’t sign “lame.”

So, for her birthday that year, researchers brought her a litter of kittens and let her choose one as a companion. She picked a soft gray and white kitty she named “All Ball,” carrying it everywhere, even trying to nurse it, nurturing it like any human mother would nurture a child. As

KoKo became increasingly renowned for her language skills. Popular Science reported that she was so psychologically human she could use language to lie. Their example? Once, she ripped a steel sink from the wall, and when her startled caretakers discovered the damage, KoKo pointed at All Ball and signed, “Cat did it.”

Am I the only one who knows that wasn’t a lie but a joke? I think it’s hilarious. It grieves me that researchers assumed her similarity to us was the ability to deceive when in fact, she was demonstrating the best of us, the ability to make another laugh.

Sadly, six months later, All Ball was hit by a car. When Koko learned of the kitten’s death, she relentlessly signed the only words she had for grief: “sad, “frown,” “cry,” “bad,” “trouble,” and the heart-breaking, “Come baby, come.” She hooted in the manner of lowland gorillas in distress, a sound much like human weeping.

Koko joked, nurtured, loved, and experienced the pain of loss as any human would. Was she the exception or the norm?

I’ve read about animals’ exceptional intelligence and emotional lives for years, and we learn more all the time– how birds show affection, how curious cows are, how octopuses play pranks, dream, and hold grudges. And, of course, how animals grieve. A mother whale carried her dead calf for a thousand miles, unwilling to let her go. Is there a parent of any species who can’t relate?
I think there will come a time in the history of this planet when horseracing, dog racing, laboratory testing, slaughterhouses, circuses, and zoos have been vastly humanized or are things of the past.

The good news? I think KoKo was the norm. Bad news? Time is of the essence. Because Koko was the norm.

In the documentary “The Parrots of Telegraph Hill,” a homeless musician begins caring for a flock of wild South American parrots in San Francisco. No one knows where the birds came from, and Mark Bittner, a lost soul himself, begins feeding the flock. Over time, he names them and learns their individual identities, the most vulnerable being Tupelo, a cherry-headed conure who has become so frail he feeds her with a syringe and cradles her in his arms on walks.

One night, Mark is reading in bed when he suddenly feels an overwhelming sense of gratitude emanating from the bird, radiating towards him like heat, a wave so distinct, so intense, that it interrupts his attention on his book, as real as if someone had whispered, “I have something to tell you.” He picks Tupelo up and holds her gently next to him in bed as he continues to read. Eventually, he puts both the book and the bird on the floor so he can sleep. But as he sets the bird down, he feels a new rush of emotion flowing like a river straight from the bird to his heart.

Regret. And resignation.

In the morning, he discovers her body, and it is Mark who is filled with regret– that he didn’t understand the urgency of her message, “I must leave now,” and that he didn’t hold her longer.

The Pet Psychic has been off the air for years, but I was intrigued by the telepath’s most impressive gift — helping animals who have died communicate with their grieving human families.

Thank you,” they said. “I know you loved me,” they assured us. Thank you so much for my life.”

Animal or human, it seems what binds us is forever.

And real or not, the pet telepath healed broken hearts. The message between all creatures–

great and small, bright and beautiful—was universally the same. Love and gratitude.

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 former boss Mike didn’t speak a word until he was three, his first words a complete sentence, pointedly addressed to a gushing relative.

“Put me down.”

I spoke earlier, I tell him, laughing. Not a complete sentence but a cry for help.

My mother had placed me on the center of two Jenny Lind twin beds, which she’d pushed together to appear as if they were a single full bed, thinking I couldn’t roll off either side while she was out of the room. This auspicious event took place in the tree-lined neighborhood of Webster Groves, St. Louis, Missouri, where I was born.

But after she left the room, the beds slipped apart, and I fell to the floor beneath them. When she returned, a quick peek beneath the white dust ruffle revealed a startled baby with the wind knocked out of her. I don’t know if I was studying the boxsprings above me or had turned to her voice, but at that moment, I said, ‘mama’ for the first time.

They say we remember little from before the age of three because we don’t have language to narrate our feelings or to give shape to experience. In those first years, we also exist in infant time. We have no concept of before, after, later, or momentary. Under that bed, I would have thought alone was forever.

Without meaning to, 36 years later, I’d inflict a similar experience on a child of my own.

Mr. Oliver and I wanted to get away by ourselves. Maybe because we thought we were supposed to want that—date nights, vacations without the three kids. Is it wrong that I don’t think we sincerely pined for these things? We enjoyed our lives. I was a writer, he, a naval architect, but without any examples in my life of how to be married before I got married, I was trying on everyone else’s suggestions.
So, we booked a weekend getaway to Buckeystown, Maryland. Not lying when I say I’m not a planner. My search filter must have been a highly non-selective “two-hour drive of home.” The little Inn appeared charming online, but note to self, zoom out, and look at the big picture before giving nonrefundable credit card info based on one photo.

We asked the parents of our two older kids’ best friends to take them overnight, then asked my mother to spend the night with Emily, who was about 16 months old.

We kissed her goodbye, made promises she could not possibly understand, and Mr. Oliver and I threw a suitcase in the Volvo and set off on our adventure. We were a little dismayed when we got to our romantic getaway and saw the discrepancy between what we had been anticipating and reality. Still, if you subtracted the graveyard and Shell station, it was a sweet place.

Our room was lovely, and that evening, we had dinner with other guests in the Inn’s dining room. Everyone was quite interesting, especially the woman with the short, curly brown hair and sweet smile, who announced with bright-eyed, good cheer that she was staying at the Inn because her home was plagued by Poltergeist. It made her by far the most interesting person at the table and almost the most memorable thing about our time alone. We enjoyed our obligatory sleep away from the kids we adored, then drove home to relieve my mother the following day.

When we drove up the lane, Mom met us on the deck. She had aged a decade. She looked like she did just after cataract surgery—her hair was wild, her face white and shell-shocked. Inside, there were weird tracks in the carpet.

Unbeknownst to us, Emily had sobbed inconsolably the entire time we were gone. All night. The tracks in the rugs were from Mom strapping Emly into an umbrella stroller at 3:00 am and trudging through the house in circles for hours asleep on her feet in an effort to comfort a grief-stricken baby.

That’s when I realized that Emly had been on infant time. We were not gone for the weekend. We were gone for all time. In an instant, we had ceased to exist, and not just her parents had disappeared, so had her brother and sister. Her entire family had vanished. Poof! Gone.

Is it wrong that I still want to make this right?
A friend with an addiction blog wrote recently of a mother who went into instant overdrive when her recovering addict son ran out of a medication that was nationally in short supply. Mom put on her superhero cape and spent every ounce of energy, influence, and concentration calling, searching, and beseeching until she procured the missing medication.

Change the names, and I’m that mother— and it makes me wonder, is motherhood an addiction? An irreparable, biological change in our DNA—a condition that once activated, we need to supply to feel complete? We can respect their privacy, their abilities, and their autonomy, but do we stop wanting to solve our kids’ problems, to heal them, protect them, ease their pain? Even retroactively?

Because apparently the passage of time is irrelevant. For me, motherhood is a condition of infant time.

Understand that I was, and am, an imperfect mother. But I don’t interfere in my kids’ lives. I respect distance and independence. I have facilitated and nurtured two of the three living on other continents for most of their adult lives because it is what they wanted. I have never in my life dropped by uninvited. Not once. I don’t even sit down uninvited. I don’t hesitate when asked for help, but I don’t intrude. I don’t assume they want to hear from me. But.

Did you know that for most people, by the time your kids are 18, you will have had 93% of all the facetime you will ever have with them? That’s a factoid I don’t love.

Sometimes, I’ll be holding an avocado at Whole Foods or crossing the Bay Bridge and I’ll be overcome with a visceral sense of emptiness, a longing so pervasive it feels almost existential but it’s not. It’s simply a hunger for the kids. I’ll realize it’s been a while, and I just need to lay eyes on them.

My son adopted a rescue dog that came up from some floods in Texas. Nala was a new mother, a beautiful mixed breed with a sweet face, soulful brown eyes, and 8 puppies when they found her. But her caretakers took her puppies away, spayed her, and adopted her out. To this day, she tenderly carries balled socks to a safe bed in the corner of the living room. She gently tugs them out of my son’s hands as he walks by, forever retrieving and nurturing the babies that so inexplicably disappeared.
And they do disappear. As kids grow up, they are gone long before they leave.

I will never be who I was before having children because, in motherhood, there is no after, later, or momentary.

There is only always.

Happy Mother’s Day, beloveds. Happy Mother’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.

 

 

This is the story of how I didn’t become what I might have been. And for once I’m not talking about my effort to be a fully evolved spiritual human being. (I look at that this way: not dead, still time.) I’m talking about more concrete aspirations. 

A more versatile voice, and I might have been a singer-songwriter. (Sorry, everyone in my dorm. Sorry, Carole King…Carly Simon.) But I didn’t major in music; I majored in drama. I intended to become an actress who could inspire empathy and goodwill on the screen, but several early experiences derailed that ambition. 

Freshman year, I was cast as Gloria, a young, fresh-faced international model who later reveals she has worked as a prostitute and is rejected by her boyfriend. The play was The Sign in Sydney Burstein’s Window. In the scene where Gloria gets dumped, she reads a note to that effect, then uncaps a bottle of fake pills, downs them all, and fake dies. 

Unfortunately, the male upperclassmen in the cast started a contest with the stagehands to see who could substitute the most graphically suggestive note for my stage prop. I needed to look like I’d just been rejected by the love of my life for the audience, but I was such an insecure people-pleaser that I felt I had to simultaneously acknowledge my castmates’ creativity where they were doubled over laughing in the wings.  

I switched majors. 

Which has me wondering about how you became what you are.  

I graduated from college with a BA in English on a Sunday in May, got married that Friday, and was immediately transported to Norfolk, Virginia, where the Lt. junior grade I had married was shipped out to the Med a month later for the better part of a year. Searching for work in this lonely universe, I discovered my degree was virtually worthless. Only two questions were relevant at every interview: 1) How accurately and fast can you type? Answer: v–e–r–y…s-l-o-w-l-ee and 2) Are you a Navy wife? The prevailing theory being that Navy wives would follow transferred husbands out of state in short order. 

Eventually, I was hired by a real estate company as their receptionist-switchboard operator primarily because I made an impassioned speech to the woman interviewing me about how much I loved work. Pile it on! Pay is secondary. Pleeeease. Give me something to do. I made work sound like a religion I was advocating or a drug I needed. Thinking about it now, I have this picture of myself prostrate on the carpet of the agency, grasping Dixie Donohue by her ankle during my interview, but I’m sure that’s not true.

What I remember most about the job, besides chirping, “Goodman, Segar, Hogan!” into the phone incessantly, was that there was a short in the switchboard, and every time I plugged in a call, I got shocked. No one cared. 

After moving back to Maryland, I entertained the idea of applying to graduate school to become a therapist, but there were too many therapists in my family, and it felt copy-cattish—besides, who needs a license to listen? To search for insights?

 Ha ha. That’s a joke, all you therapists. 

(We know that’s called coaching.) 

Ha ha. Still joking, all you coaches. 

Really, so many people needed representatives of both professions during the pandemic you couldn’t even get an appointment. You don’t need to know how I know. 

Okay, I’ll tell you. I can’t even get an appointment now. I just tried and got an email saying, sorry, as of yesterday, I’m fully booked. Yesterday! Timing is everything, as you’ll see. 

Finally, I applied to a pastoral counseling program at Loyola, and the week I received my acceptance, I got a call from a magazine for which I’d been freelancing, offering me a full-time staff position as associate editor. 

You can always go to school, but to be offered an editorial position 10 minutes from home working on a glossy magazine? That was a rare opportunity. And I guess once I started editing, feature writing, essays, memoirs, and fiction were not far behind. Instead of a Master of Social Work degree, I pursued a Master of Fine Arts. 

And I never looked back. Until now.

I have frequently pictured my life like gold coins cupped in my hands and sometimes I think about what I have spent them on. There are a limited number, and I think about the ones that slipped through my fingers unspent and about how to spend what is left. 

I wonder if I was always meant to write and you were always meant to do what you have done with your life, and our routes were planned, guided, or influenced in some way. I wonder if, from a bird’s eye view, it would have been evident at every turn we were moving closer together—even on opposite sides of the same mountain. I wonder if you were nudged at every fork in the road so that no matter how circuitous your path, you were always going to arrive where you are at this moment. Were you prompted at each intersection? Turn right on Franklin Street. Take Route 302. 

Why did that magazine editor call the very week I was sending my tuition to graduate school? She changed the trajectory of my life in that instant. Instead of listening to stories, I began sharing them.

And because of her, I found 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.

 

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.

Last night, I was walking my dog Leah when I ran into my neighbor Tom also on dog duty. He’s the exemplary owner of a sweet golden retriever. He carries healthy dog treats and two bags. I own an untrained maniac who wants to dismantle squirrels and is willing to dislocate my shoulder to do so. And I’m a one-bag risktaker. We merged duties, walking into a burgeoning spring together. White dogwood laced our route, pink tulips, and Spanish bluebells graced neighbors’ yards as we passed.

Tom is my hero, although he doesn’t know it. He’s a pediatric surgeon—he heals the most vulnerable among us—and because I’ve been there with a hospitalized 4-year-old, I mean his patients’ parents. But we also have the same questions about life, and I’ve found the greatest connectors of souls are laughter and curiosity. And, okay, dogs.

I’d just given a talk at Washington College on some things I’ve learned over the years about the acquisition of happiness (which can pretty much be summed up as your brain is driving that bus), but which Tom points out is included in the Declaration of Independence. We have the right to pursue happiness anyway. We were not promised the right to possess it because no one can guarantee joy. Or can they? I want to tell Tom that Martha Washington said, “I’ve learned I am as happy as I decide to be.”

But I forget to tell him that because down at Old Woman Cove, my unruly terrier has spotted a squirrel she can’t live without. 

A man in worn blue jeans and a gray hoodie passing by offers helpfully, “My dog caught one, you know.” 

I look at him in horror. “I thought that couldn’t happen.” 

“Caught him by the tail,” he says, “and did this.” He mimics shaking his head back and forth vigorously. 

Geez, I think. A squirrel can leap 20 feet and run 20 mph. They’re so smart they fake-hide nuts to fool other animals who would steal them. (My pup is aquiver now zeroed in on a fluffy gray tail.) 

“So,” Tom asks as we walk on, “where do we find happiness?” 

At the moment, I don’t know. I’m struggling with the question myself–rarely fully present, on a perpetual quest to understand what lies behind the illusion of loss, the stage we call life on which we act in relationship. But I do know happiness comes from a life of meaning, a life with purpose. “You have that,” I tell Tom. “You save children.” 

“A lot of professions have mandatory retirement dates,” he presses. “Where is happiness going to come from then?”

From family? We both bemoan not having enough time with our grown kids. 

Learning makes me happy. I study quantum physics, neuroscience, and paleontology. I go on archeological digs. I took a class in Near Death Experiences and the Nature of Consciousness– another way in which I pursue happiness—looking for evidence of life after life. 

I take an ongoing special interest class in astronomy as well—and it occurs to me that maybe I’m searching the heavens for heaven.

Case in point, we stop in front of my house because I’m about to attend a lecture on zoom. In March of 1980, college senior Peter Panagore went ice climbing on the world-famous Lower Weeping Wall in Alberta, Canada. A 1000-foot rockface that weeps waterfalls in the summer but becomes frozen rivers of tears at 50 degrees below zero. The appeal of ice climbing is that it requires you to be totally present, but without the right equipment, Peter and his climbing partner became trapped on the wall overnight. Overcome by exhaustion and hypothermia, Peter died on the side of that mountain.  

Those long minutes on the other side of existence as we know it, before Peter was resuscitated, changed the trajectory of his life and his ability to feel joy. He went on to Yale Divinity School. He’s written a book; there’s a movie coming out. 

I’m intrigued, I tell Tom, by the commonalities revealed in the research on near-death experiences—commonalities which include encountering an unconditional love of inexpressible depth and being enfolded in an intimate knowledge of everything we have ever done devoid of judgment.  

We aren’t so much forgiven as understood. 

I realize as I speak that I’m looking for that here. Unconditional love, intimate knowledge without judgment. I get glimpses for which I’m profoundly grateful. 

You know who you are.

I’m watching a squirrel digging up one of the 10,000 nuts she buried this fall. Her memory is astonishing. She’ll find 90 percent of those not stolen. Pursuit of her right now would make my dog very happy. 

We part, and I go inside to log onto my class. Peter recounts the story of dying on the side of a glacier years ago. He describes the love that enfolded him, the difficult choice he made to come back to this life.

I wouldn’t want to leave if I could find that kind of love here. It would make dying so much harder. 

But Peter found it there, which has made living so much harder. After all, nine out of 10 people who have been clinically dead utter the exact same six words upon regaining consciousness. The exact same six words.

“Why did you bring me back?” 

I listen as he shares his experience of the love that awaits and the search for happiness in the here and now. He meditates to stay present, has a yoga practice. I mull that over—the mandate to remain present when the future is such a beguiling mystery. Yours, mine. Ours.

More than once, both in high school and college, I was told by boys I was dating that I think too much. Which I interpreted as, “Shut up and kiss me.” 

But maybe it just meant, “Come back from wherever it is that you go. Be here now.”

Be there, then. 

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.

If the house catches fire, I’ll knot my twisted bedsheets together and scramble to safety from an upstairs window. Plan B? Jump to the mulberry tree after rallying the family for evacuation. If the pilot has a heart attack… if the brakes on the car fail…you get the idea. From the time I was in elementary school I have strategized the means by which I will save my family if disaster strikes. Tidal waves, earthquakes, collapsing bridges—there’s a plan.  

In novels and short stories, it’s called “saving the cat”—the moment when the protagonist–who may have some pretty overt failings, redeems himself by running back into the burning building to rescue the cat. But when I was 8, I learned you can’t plan for these events. You have to already be a hero, and if that’s what you’re made of, the moment finds you. 

Summer was stir-fry hot. My older sister, her pretty friend Patty, some neighborhood boys, and I were crabbing off the end of our pier while our collie, Beau, kept an eye on us. Normally, we combed the seaweed for doublers within wading distance of shore or searched for unwary crustaceans clinging delicately to the pier pilings. But this time we’d procured chicken necks and that’s where the trouble began.

The smell of creosote baking in the midsummer sun, the saltwater breeze off the river, and dragonflies flitting about in the beachgrass all conspired to create what could have been a typical July afternoon. There were more kids than crab nets, so there was the usual jostling at the end of the pier as we tied thick twine around each boney crook of chicken, securing the other end to a piling with an untoward number of knots before tossing the bait in the water. I’m not sure, but I may have been vain about my knot-tying. I may have thought they were exceptionally tricky or tight. Someone, my father or perhaps a Girl Scout leader, had taught me to tie a slipknot, a bowline, a half hitch, and a square knot.  

Ernie, or more likely, Reese, peered over the end of the dock where we had several lines dangling and yelled, “Doubler! Give me the net!” We clustered shoulder to shoulder as he began gently tugging the string, inch by slow inch, towards the surface. The crabs, which had started the ascent as mere murky outlines, were now crystal-clear just inches below our own rippling reflections. An 8-inch hard shell with a softy attached. With one quick scoop of the net and a flip of the wrist, Reese had the pair scrabbling in our rusty bucket. The chicken neck lay on the splintery dock, a bony hook on a homemade line. 

In that split second, before anyone could stop him, the enterprising Beau lunged between our legs and swallowed the chicken neck whole, the string still secured to the piling. Six kids shrieked with excitement at the new development as the dog began to take huge, panicked gulps of the string in an attempt to finish it off now that the chicken was stuck in his gullet. We desperately tried to unknot the twine as the distressed dog retched but the string had gotten wet, then dried in the sun. That chicken neck might as well have been soldered to the piling.

As we realized we couldn’t pull the chicken out, and no one had a knife, what had been exciting was fast becoming an emergency. 

Suddenly, the resourceful Patty fell to her knees, grabbed the string as close to the dog’s mouth as she could get, and started to chew. Time slowed as the dog gagged, Patty chomped away, and the rest of us stared, silenced by the gross ingenuity of this development. The sun beat down, the dragonflies danced for their lives with only a few months to live, and after an intense minute, the string gave way. The dog polished off the last couple of inches with a happy bark, and we erupted in a rousing cheer.

It has taken me years not to live as a strategist. To cross the Bay Bridge, admiring the sparkling shimmer beneath the span shadows instead of wondering how long I can float on my back when the guardrail gives way. 

I don’t know if this daydreaming was a hope for attention or a childish savior complex. Or perhaps it was where a child’s mind goes who, for good reason, has learned she has absolutely no control over what happens to her. Who has learned that fear is a required course in childhood, but fun is an elective. Who has learned to prepare for the worst because no one’s coming. But for all my preparation, research shows heroes don’t stop to plan or to reason. They act instantaneously and intuitively on an innate urge to serve. The good they do is instinctive.

I hope if the moment ever presents itself, I save the cat. Or the dog. Or someone’s baby or an old man with a cane. I want to cure Juvenile Diabetes, to end addictions of every kind. To feed the starving on a global scale, foster abandoned children, bring laughter to the sad of heart. 

But I think most of us don’t get the opportunity to save the cat. Instead, we have to live with the cat. Long days and unremarkable years of loving in the most ordinary of ways, steadfast and unacknowledged. Commuting insane hours on the beltway to provide for a family, repeatedly rising on sleepless nights to soothe fevers, and one day, reminding the parent who named us of our name.

 If you were loved this way, by anyone, may you be inspired to love this way in kind. That will make heroes of all 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.