2021 Year in Review

I didn’t get as many Christmas cards this year. I get it. Christmas can be so incredibly busy, and I’ve slipped out of your lives. Buying presents is hard. But this year, I didn’t have as much problem with Christmas as I usually do. I whispered the songs too early and too late. The Christmas ornaments didn’t have to go on perfectly. I wanted to send out the cards. I wanted, I needed to buy some presents for people, to keep them in my mind for a bit.

I’m still not good at buying presents.

I didn’t end up sending out Christmas cards. I usually dislike the idea of writing a year-in-review card. How can I put a whole year of my life onto one page? Oh, I like getting your cards, to think of where you went and what your children and grandchildren are doing. I like to imagine you spiraling in your lovely orbit. I have trouble imagining your sixteen-year-old driving. I remember her on her belly trying to get my kitten to come out from behind the piano. But I like trying to imagine the adult she’s become.

This year, though, I wanted to send out a year in review card, too late for Christmas, too late, even, for New Years. But I’m still not late for thinking about my year last year.

It was interesting. You might not think it could be, but it was interesting.

I didn’t travel. Some days, I can’t get to the grocery store because I need to lie back on the couch. I know. You want to know what it is that causes this. The best my doctors come up with is dysautonomia or post-viral syndrome.

That’s not what I came here to talk about.

See, in 2020, I learned different things. We all did. But in 2021, you all went on vacations again while I stayed home. You started up your yoga classes in person while I tried to figure out how long I could sit at my chair on the deck before the shaking got to be too much for me.

Here’s my year in review:

I found bits of creativity. I wrote poems instead of books because poems take less focus. I drew gift tags instead of pictures. I closed my eyes and imagined the meaning of art in our world. Our culture undervalues art, but we need art. We need to make and see beautiful things. We need the interpretation and the clarity that art gives us. I looked at art. I imagined so much art.

This year, I read books. Big surprise, that. Remember that time when we rushed through a quick coffee and talked about what we would read if we were stuck on a desert island with a crate of books? I have unlimited time to read books from my couch island and the books still pile up around me. There seem to be an infinite number of books that I’d like to read, still.

This year, I contemplated trees, time, and love.

I have so much time, but also so little. There’s infinite time between one second and the next. I wonder if the trees can’t really feel us here because we flutter about them so quickly the way we have trouble seeing the wings of a hummingbird. I’m convinced that my cedars can feel the weight of my house on their toes, like a little girl learning to dance with her father, and that if I lie back long enough, they know I’m with them, even for one of their seconds. They move, but I can’t see it because my time is too quick. For us and trees, the space between time keeps us separated.

I used to travel to find the miracles in the world, a mile-deep canyon, an Irish beer on tap, a rushing river. When I wasn’t 'going somewhere,’ I felt bereft, as if all the miracles were out of reach. On a walk one day, a walk in a place I’d visited a hundred times, I found a tiny miracle, a pale green fungus with a bright red top. I stopped to look more closely at what I’d thought I’d already completely explored. I started taking pictures to find those miracles on those walks. Miracles were out there in nature, I reasoned. They were closer than I’d thought. Buddy, my walking buddy, was patient. Buddy was kind. He didn’t rush me to get to the top. I had plenty of time to try to focus. But early in 2021, Buddy died at only 9, and even my short wandering walks ended. That hurt, not just losing the walks, but losing his quiet presence. What I learned not taking my walks in 2021 is that these miracles exist even in my own house, in my yard, on my deck, and in my imagination. Think of the miracle of falling asleep alone on the couch and waking up with your fingers buried in the plush of a cat on your lap. If you keep your eyes closed for a minute, the beauty of that fur is indescribable. Imagine the potential of a single leaf on a single twig of a tree that’s only six months old. Imagine the places you can go in your imagination, all the way to a cat’s-eye nebula if you want. In 2021, I found miracles are like time. There are an infinite number between one moment on a couch and the next.

And as I looked at the inevitability of death, I saw love. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to find love and to be allowed to keep it around me for so, so long. Oh, there are a hundred movies that would try to convince you that just one moment of love is all you need. Between one second and the next, love is infinite, that is true. But I’ve been blessed with long and extended love, not just a moment of it. Maybe, you have too and all you have to do is lie on the couch for a year and contemplate it.

Thank you for listening, jules

In My Dreams I Can Fly

I don’t do dreams for you. I don’t know why, but I hate dream sequences in books and movies. They’re cheating. The weirdness of some dreams feels like the character is allowed to take hallucinogens. And it’s simply a false narrative, a red herring, a trick.

But last night, I dreamed I could fly if only I had the right materials and conditions. All I had was cheese, an apple, a harness, line, a field surrounded by trees, and a plane with an engine that had been completely drained of its oil.

Drained.

I love when my dreams involve flying. I used to have a recurring dream that if I moved my arms fast enough, I could fly over the tops of trees, barely. I was a kid in my mother’s house when I first dreamed it. I dreamed it in two houses in New Jersey. I dreamed it here. I always woke up tired but happy after those dreams, elated. I’d think all week about if I could just get above the trees next time, I might be able to see forever. I’d go to bed wishing I could dream it again. It’s months, sometimes years between that dream recurring. I miss it.

I know. I told you I hated dream sequences, but I gave you dreams anyway.

In your dreams, can you fly?

Thank you for listening, jules

Scum on a Still Pond

I know I’d promised to come here more often, but I got to judging my words, doubting they were worth listening to. I get tired. People don’t want to hear about it but I get so fucking tired. Sometimes, my words float and sometimes they sink to the bottom. I hate when I’m boring, but these days, I can be boring, so incredibly boring. I got to worrying that you might not like me when I don’t feel well, that you’d see those boring words disintegrating like stale bread in a fishless pond and stop listening to me.

It’s hard when I feel myself go silent, disappear behind a brain that doesn’t let me finish sentences without some serious focus let alone a whole series of thoughts. I miss my metaphors the most. It can’t be all about pain here. I’m supposed to entertain you, make you think, make you laugh. But pain crumbles my thoughts, gets them wet, floats them away.

Lately, the pain has been more sharp, more than just stone under my ribcage. It leaves me shaking so that I can’t read my own writing if I write by hand and if I type, I type double letters, a visual stutter. But mostly it takes my words away.

That’s what I miss most about my former life, those moments of creativity that used to bubble through me, wearing down stone in order to escape, flowing through everything I did whether I wanted it to or not. Now, I feel the scum on a still pond. Some days, infrequently, I feel a current, a freshness of creativity, but most days, I can’t.

It sucks. This totally sucks. Can anybody hear me? Would this be worth listening to if you could?

Sorry this isn’t chatty. When I sat down, I thought I could be chatty. I’m too tired to move it over to the crabby side.

Thank you for listening anyway, jules

Having a Lovely Ride

In 1969, when the astronaut on the moon leaped up in his cumbersome suit and hopped higher than he expected, that was the first time I tried to imagine living in a different gravity. I thought about it every time my dad popped the accelerator then let it up on one of those mini hills in Southern Indiana. Momentary weightlessness then crunch. I thought about it every time I pressed back in my seat taking off on a flight. I thought about it in the arc of a swing, light, heavy, light, heavy. I loved altering gravity, even for just a moment.

Now, I live in different gravity than I used to, heavier, most of the time. I wonder, if you floated me in water, would I sink?

Mike calls it a singularity at my feet. If it were simple 2G, I would feel heavy, like on a different planet, but I’d get used to it over time. My heavier gravity shifts suddenly, sometimes makes me feel like I’m in a spiral on a rollercoaster, sometimes makes my vision turn red or black or white at the edges.

It might be fun if I had a better attitude.

Do you like that feeling the bed makes when you’ve had too much to drink?

I feel that every night.

Do you like that moment when your clarity is replaced with euphoria and you know you’ll regret this in the morning?

I feel that three or four times a day. Sometimes, I think I must exist in an alternate universe, one in which everyone around me lives in a parallel one, just out of reach, just outside the influence of my crazy singularity, never quite feeling the whirlpool I’m being sucked into. At Wild Waves, I used to love being spit out into that great toilet ride, the one that swirled me around like I was in orbit around the sun and flushed me through when I got to the center hole. I thought I could live in that spiral forever.

If I only loved being drunk, high, or spinning on a Tilt-a-Whirl all the time, I’d be having a lovely ride.

Thank you for listening, jules

Bright and Shining

There’s a guy on Twitter who lost his wife and is writing his grief across the space. Yesterday, I wanted to write to him about Teddy, how he walked on hundreds of hikes with me, how he waited patiently when I took pictures of things, how he barked at just one person, a scary person, on the trail, how he smiled at everyone else, and how I hadn’t been able to make myself walk alone since he died. I miss being outside, but I don’t know how to walk alone. I still talk to my Teddy.

It seemed too close to the heart of grief to write that to a Twitter soul crying out across the space. I cried as I wrote it. But then, I deleted it. I tried again to write about my Grandma, the one who loved me best when I was a child. I tried to write about how I talk to her as I use her plates and imagine her surprise at the taste of mango salsa that I put there with habanero spiking through the soft mango flavor. I still talk to my Grandma.

Some mornings, especially on the weekends, Mike sleeps in. I want to watch him sleep, but that would wake him up. I want him to have his sleep. He needs it. We all need it. But I want so badly to watch him breathe, to see the pink glow across his cheek, to kiss that pink glow. I don’t want to lose him in a moment when I’m not paying attention. I whisper to him across the house as he sleeps. I tell him how much I love him, how I want him to get good rest, how I’ll make him tea when he wakes up.

That is the heart of grief, so close it sits with me while I wait for him to wake up.

I hear people say that it’s a miracle they got to their next anniversary. For me, it’s a miracle that Mike is with me every morning.

I have watched two people die so far in my life, two people I loved. I know grief. I know how much it hurts to lose someone and the pain of those days after they’re gone. It’s excruciating, the crush of loss a real thing that tightens across your chest. I’ve lost more people than that, people I still talk to in certain circumstances, Mike’s mom when I make her boys a particularly good meal, my dad when I use his old screwdriver, Teddy when I find one of his hairs in my pocket, and Grandma when I put food on one of her plates. Sometimes I cry when I’m talking to them. Sometimes the hurt wells up and fills the room.

I want to tell the Twitter man who lost his wife that what he’s feeling is love, bright and shining love.

Thank you for listening, jules

A Balm on a Stormy Sea

If my friends only knew that sending me a picture of their pets now and then would be enough for me to know they were thinking about me, I’d be a happier camper. Early this morning, my symptoms woke me up yet again. I’ve been told I’m not having a heart attack when something under my ribs on the left side quivers and sends shooting pains down my left arm, but my dreams don’t quite understand that yet. I can lie there, breathing slowly in and out, but my mind interprets these symptoms in a way that’s similar to the drop in a roller coaster. So, I wake up in the wee hours and it isn’t a gentle and reassuring way to wake up.

I love when people on Twitter ask for photos of people’s pets. I love them. Once in a while it hurts because someone will look like Teddy or Indy or Angel, but mostly, I feel better looking at the furry little faces that stare so lovingly into the cameras. They are a balm and sometimes I forget for a while that it feels like I’m in the back seat of the car with my Great Aunt Kate who spent most of her time driving on the wrong side of the road, ran all stop signs, and never glided to a stop in her life. She always made for a close-your-eyes-heart-in-your-throat kind of ride and holding my dog in the back seat would have been a comfort.

So, please keep posting those pictures. Don’t fall for the message some serious people send that the Internet is too important for us to be sending out photos of our babies. It’s a critical mission for those of us who need that.

I can hear Seth in the other room interrupting Mike’s work. They’re having a conversation about it.

Thank you for listening, jules

Ridiculous, Horrendous, and Lovely

My life has been one long love story. Even now, as difficult as my life has been for the past year and a half, it is still a love story.

Mike just knows when I’m having a bad day like today, when I can barely make a meal. He just knows. He notices when my hands shake. He catches me crying in the kitchen as I drop something and make mistakes following a recipe. He folds me into his arms and lets me tuck my chin into his shoulder when I don’t have the words to say what used to fly out of my mouth like birdsong. He finishes tasks that I can’t because my chest hurts too much and my heart flutters. He doesn’t push or pull, but lets me flow in whatever direction I need.

Years ago, when Nick was so ill with pneumonia, Mike and I stood in the same kitchen one early morning, changing the watch. I was going to bed and explaining meds. It was his turn to be on call, to watch Nick breathe, to check his oxygen and heartrate, to administer meds. I put both hands on the counter and said, “This is so hard. We just need a break.” Maybe I said fucking break.

It was hard to watch our child struggle to breathe. It was hard to stay up half the night for two or three weeks on end twice a year. It was hard to stay packed for the ER and to be recognized as a frequent flier there. It really was hard.

“There are no breaks,” Mike replied and he lifted just one eyebrow.

I began to laugh and I couldn’t stop. I laughed until my ribs hurt. We laughed with tears in our eyes. It was a most ridiculous moment that we spent together in our little kitchen, a most ridiculous, horrendous, and lovely moment.

We are living that moment still. Together.

Thank you for listening, jules

What Really Happens Following a Recipe

Mike brought a loaf of bread I’d made when he went to see our niece Ruby last Sunday. She’s tired. She’s a single mom. Her son is two. Do you remember taking care of a two-year-old boy? They went out for burgers. They went to the beach. They threw rocks. They ate ice cream. I didn’t get to go because I didn’t feel well enough and Mike didn’t want to have to turn around and come home in the middle of the afternoon if I started feeling worse. I get that. I felt left out, but I get it. So, I sent him with a loaf of bread I’d made when I got too tired the day before as I experimented with making croissants which came out ugly but which Nick promptly ate and said I should make again. I only got to taste one single bite of one and the guys ate the rest of them, ugly or not. Mostly Nick ate them. And the rest of the loaf went toward making cinnamon bread because I got tired before I finished and needed to quit but didn’t want to waste the dough.

Later that day, Ruby texted me that she’d missed me. We got going with a shit-storm of texts but they were the fun kind of texts and not annoying ones. Ruby is funny and warm and completely irreverent. She knows sfuff. She’s experienced stuff. She knows I’ve experienced stuff. She asked for my recipe for the loaf of bread.

‘So, the bread,’ I texted her:

Mix:

  • 2 cups flour

  • 4 tablespoons brown sugar

  • 1 teaspoon salt

  • 2 packages yeast

(I used loose yeast and misread teaspoons for tablespoons, so I added 5 tablespoons yeast but then I dug out a bunch and hopefully ended up with about 2 tablespoons.)

  • 1/4 cup melted butter

(It said softened, but it fucking melted in the microwave. Just make sure it’s not hot enough to kill the yeast. You want it to be the same temperature as a baby’s milk that you tested on your wrist back in the day. Did you ever burn a little red circle into your wrist testing milk for your baby? I did.)

  • 1 cup warm milk

(I was OUT OF MILK! How could I be OUT OF MILK? So, I used a half cup of yoghurt and a half cup of warm water instead. Repeat the temperature stuff because the baby-yeast can’t handle the heat.)

  • 1/2 cup of warm water

(My ancient recipe calls for you to warm all that in a saucepan, but I never do it. But I try not to kill my yeast.)

Gradually add ingredients blah blah blah. Just throw that shit together and knead it in the bowl with enough flour to blend the ingredients and get a dough ball that feels like a baby’s powdered butt. There’s a baby theme here, some kind of metaphor of treating yeast like it’s precious. Add oil to the bowl and turn the dough ball over in it so it doesn’t stick. Cover it with a damp paper towel then let it rest in a warm place for a half an hour, fifteen minutes if you used quickrise yeast. You want it to roughly double in size.

Then, noodle around with butter, the dough, the freezer, and a rolling pin until you’ve used up all but enough dough to make one loaf of bread, maybe half of the remaining dough, maybe a third.

In a microwave-safe bowl, combine:

  • a stick of butter, 1/2 cup?

  • 1/3 cup brown sugar

  • cinnamon (no idea how much I used)

  • a pinch of salt

(If I have big hands, will I use too much salt?)

  • a handful of old chocolate chips

(Who was it that left less than a quarter cup of chocolate chips in this bag under the brown sugar and a bag of dried butter beans at the back of the cabinet? They’re within their expiration date. Does chocolate even expire the same way milk does?)

Microwave it until it’s slightly melted. Taste test. Add a little more cinnamon because you can almost never have too much cinnamon.

Divide the dough into what will roll out on a floured cutting board because it’s too much of a hassle to pull out the pie sheet. Roll it out to about a half inch thick. Smear the gooey sugary stuff onto the rolled-out dough. Roll these two layers like a jelly roll and try to keep all its guts inside while you lift it into a greased loaf pan. Let it rise for thirty minutes, fifteen if you used quickrise yeast. Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. I don’t know how much. Cut some diagonal lines into the surface of the bread for decoration. I didn’t realize until well after I baked the loaf that it would have been prettier if I’d sliced the jelly-roll thing into rounds, let them rise, and baked them as actual cinnamon rolls instead of a single loaf.

Don’t preheat your oven. It wastes energy and the gradual increase in the temperature will let the loaf rise a little more so you might not have wet yeast in the center of your bread when you’re done. Save the environment! Bake at 350 degrees until it’s golden brown and sounds hollow when you thump it. I have no idea how long. I set a timer though, so I don’t forget that something was in the oven.

You can roll that dough in cheese, basil, and melted butter if you’d rather.

I also threw a couple of the rolled-out doughs into the freezer because I knew we’d eat too much sweet buttery gooey bread at one time if I didn’t. Label and date that container or you’ll pull it out of the freezer a year from now and have no idea what the pasty-white stuff inside covered with frost heave is and whether or not it’s edible or it’s been in there for three years and you should throw that shit out.

Nobody ever tells you this stuff in recipes or on those cooking shows. They just expect you to know when to throw out those bits of freezer-burned dough and use that chocolate anyway because it still looks okay even though the expiration date is coming soon. They never tell you in cooking classes to use your older ingredients first, within reason. They never tell you how to define reason when it comes to food. They never tell you that throwing out food is contributing to climate change. Save the environment! Eat good food!

Standing on the Shoulders of Corporate Research

I’m up. It’s only 6:14 am. The cat wanted me to get up, so he roamed the house calling out, “Hurow? Hurow?”

I swear he tries to enunciate but he still sounds like Scooby Do.

My sister wanted my lemon meringue recipe. Enough about cats for now. Last Saturday, Mike came home from an Eagle Scout celebration with leftovers from a catering job: fettuccini, garlic bread, and meatballs. Nick was excited to try them, but afterward, he said, “Mom, the fettuccini was good, but not as good as yours.

Oh, the glow. It made me feel lit inside.

I’m not going to quit my job and start a catering truck, but it felt good. I’ve been getting back to enjoying cooking again, mostly. It’s hard, but I’m taking the time to make stuff now and then just to be on my feet for longer and longer every day. The doctor says I should respect my limits but push up against them. Ugh. Enough about my limits.

I have a complicated relationship with giving out recipes. I once gave out my lemon meringue recipe to a coworker who begged for it so he could make it with his daughter, but after he tried it, he popped into my office on a Monday before I’d had a chance to drink my coffee and figure out my strategy for the day. He complained to me that my pie came out bitter. My pie? His pie. They must have zested the hell out of their lemons, I said. I must have left an ingredient out of the recipe, he said. I tried to sound conciliatory when I explained how to zest the lemons, but I was secretly happy it didn’t work, partly because the guy was mad at me because he didn’t know how to zest a lemon. And I wasn’t awake yet. And he accused me of sabotaging time with his daughter. What am I saying? I still feel that same feeling, secretly happy mine was better.

. Why do I have to be this way?

So last week, when my sister posted a picture of her lemon meringue pie, overwhipped and flat, I felt another zing of excitement. Mine was better. But I put on my sweet-sister face and replied that it looked delicious all the while thinking about how it was not shiny, tall, and perfectly toasted like mine usually is. I know it’s evil to think all these mean thoughts, but I swear I was externally kind. What do you do when your brain is mean but you want your sister to feel loved? I lied to her. I told her that it looked delicious. It probably was. I told her that her husband must be happy. He probably was.

Then, she asked for my recipe. I call it my recipe, but first it was Mike’s grandma’s recipe and I adjusted some things. One day, when I asked her to help me with the recipe because Mike said it didn’t taste like his grandma’s, she told me to look on the inside of her pantry door. Was she smiling? She said it was taped onto the wall there with some other recipes. When I finally found it, it was a printed Eagle Brand Condensed Milk recipe. I expected something hand-written. It wasn’t her recipe at all! Mike’s grandma had adjusted some parts. She told me it had evolved. I can’t rightfully claim this is my recipe. I stand on the shoulders of giants, as we all do. And Mike’s grandma stood on the shoulders of corporate research.

It is a good recipe. Thank you, Grandma Rose. Thank you Eagle Brand.

For the crust, I blend:

  • 2 cups flour

  • 1 tsp salt

  • 1/3 cup lard

  • 1/3 cup butter

You can substitute as much as three-quarters of a cup of the flour with wheat flour. Any more than that and the crust falls apart when you put it into the pie pan. You can make substitutions to the lard and butter combination too. Using either all lard or all butter works. Lard makes it flaky. Butter makes it taste good. Half of each is a compromise. These days, I use Mike’s soy-free Earth Balance to protect his heart. That crust isn’t as flaky as lard either. That’s a compromise too but I want to keep him healthy. In any case, my sister knows how to make a pie crust and the rest of you can try it or just buy one at the store.

Blend all this together with a pastry blender until it looks like little pebble shapes and then add:

  • 5 tablespoons of cold water

Toss and gently mix this in and let it sit for a few minutes. Don’t go at it or you’ll have a tough crust. That being said, I never get a crust to fold gently over my rolling pin to lay centered in a pie pan. I blame Mike’s Earth Balance, but that stuff tastes good. It’s probably me though. I fiddle with the crust until it’s patched together and you can’t tell it split in half. I trim about a quarter inch outside the edges of the pie pan. I flute the edges by pushing my left thumb into the outside edge of the crust and pushing/folding it between my thumb and index finger like folding paper between gears on an assembly line. I remember asking my mom how to get that last one to fit in there when she got to the end of the circle and she said you just did. I didn’t get it back then, but I do now. I don’t have a better answer than she did.

This will make two open crusts, one for now and one to freeze for later when you don’t really have time to make a pie but want one. I’m talking about an ordinary-sized pie, eight to nine inches. I freeze them unbaked and wrapped tight.

I bake it at 350 degrees for twenty minutes. Sometimes, I use my pie chain to keep bubbles from forming. Sometimes, I don’t.

While the pie is baking, I start the filling and the meringue:

  • 3 large lemons, zested and juiced

When I say zest, I mean you should use the nutmeg grater on your box shredder. Grate enough to get the shine off the lemon, but not enough that the lemon isn’t yellow anymore. I use organic lemons because your family will eat whatever was sprayed on it and I swear those pesticides are bitter. Try not to grate your knuckles. Don’t combine the juice and the zest yet.

Reserve the bowl for your mixer for the meringue. In another bowl, add:

  • 1 can of Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk

Blend in most of the lemon and most of the zest. Then, bring the lemon-curd-so-far and a tiny spoon to whoever you love best and let them judge how much more lemony and zesty it needs to be. Be prepared for them to want to eat all of what’s in the bowl. I usually add all of my juice but not quite all of my zest.

Once you finish the taste testing, separate your egg whites from the yolks. You don’t need a special tool. I’ve tried lots of them. All you need is clean hands:

  • 3 large eggs at room temperature

I wanted to tell you to take the eggs out earlier, but I really didn’t want you to add the egg yolks to the lemon curd until after the taste test. No one wants to get salmonella.

Here, you need to work over the bowl for your mixer with the lemon curd bowl next to you along with one more small bowl. Gently crack an egg into your hand and let the egg white drool between your fingers into the bowl. It’s a sensory experience. Roll the egg yolk gently back and forth between your hands until the egg white is drained off of it. Sometimes, I pinch that stringy white thing. I’ve always wondered if that was the umbilical cord. Pinch but don’t pull that cord because it’ll break the yolk. If you just now pulled that little cord anyway and broke your yolk, put it into the lemon curd bowl quickly before yolk gets into your meringue. You don’t want to have to dig around in your egg whites to get out bits of egg yolk. Repeat this three times. For the last two eggs, put the yolks into the third bowl. You only need three egg yolks for the lemon curd. I used to cook up the extra egg yolks without salt for Teddy. Now, I cook them for me with a little sea salt and pepper. I still miss that dog and his enthusiasm. The cats might eat a little cooked yolk, but they might turn up their noses too and that’s sad. Hold off on doing anything with those two egg yolks for now. Timing is getting tighter.

After stirring the egg yolks into the lemon curd, pour it into the pie crust and bake until a toothpick comes out clean, about twenty minutes, still at 350 degrees.

About ten minutes into that time, make the meringue:

  • 1/2 cup sugar

  • 1/8 tsp salt or a tip if anyone knows what a tip of salt is

  • 1/4 tsp cream of tartar

I use more sugar than Mike’s grandma used to use because I wanted my meringue to taste like a marshmallow. (In fact, you can use the egg whites, sugar, salt, and tartar to make your own homemade marshmallows. They’re ugly but they taste good.) Beat this at a low speed until it begins to froth. You can beat it by hand, but I strongly recommend using a copper bowl and even then, you’re going to get a workout. Assuming you’re doing it the easy way, gradually raise the speed to your highest level and watch and listen closely. My KitchenAid begins to whine a little lower when the thickness of the meringue slows it down. If I got distracted in another room, that change in pitch will get my attention. I don’t know if every mixer will do that. Mostly, I look at the shine. It’s going to begin to shine like satin. At that point, turn off the mixer and see if you can pull points up with a spoon. If they sag back into the bowl, mix it on high for a little longer. If you start to lose that satiny shine, stop immediately. When you whip it too long, it makes the texture of the meringue a little grainy.

Timing is important here. You don’t want this fluff to sit around too long.

As soon as the lemon curd comes out of the oven, spoon the meringue onto the hot pie. Resist the urge to spread it around. Your job is to protect the tiny bubbles. Make sure the meringue touches the crust edges all around. Don’t ask me why. It’s what I read in multiple places when I read about making sure the meringue was thoroughly cooked and safe to eat. Mostly, putting the meringue on the hot pie cooks it underneath as the top cooks in the oven. I use the tip of the spoon to draw up little spikes on the surface of the meringue. Usually they curl or fold over and I think it looks pretty.

Bake immediately for about fifteen minutes but watch those little spikes. They should be the color of a perfectly toasted marshmallow, a dark golden brown. When it’s finished, show the pie to that person who tasted the lemon curd. Anticipation makes it taste better.

Refrigerate and serve cold. Here’s a warning though. A lot of the meringue’s height will drop in the cool of the fridge. The pie will fill with a sugary syrup from the loss of that height. In the fridge, put the pie on another deep plate so you don’t have a sticky mess to wipe up in there. If you travel with the pie, place it on a plate or a tray and keep it level. That sticky stuff will never quite come out of your upholstery. Truly, I know.

When you cut into the pie, use a hot wet knife. This keeps the meringue from peeling off the top of your pie and sticking to the knife. Give the first piece to the person you love the best.

I promise that I didn’t leave out any ingredients. No, I am not secretly smiling. When Mike’s grandma got old, she really wanted him to have that recipe. I know how she feels. Now, I want you to have it.

Thank you for listening, jules

The Transformation into the Hoarding Cat Lady

My blood pressure was 86/53 this morning. That’s not even a number. It’s like I made it up or something. Once I stood up, it got to 113/95. That’s normal. I can deal with that. It’s no wonder I’m light-headed when I’m lying down. I’m not getting enough oxygen. I had to go look at what I wrote down to remember what numbers it was. The doctor wants to know. I want to know what my oxygenation was when I was at 86/53. Seriously. Am I getting brain damage? I don’t want to get brain damage. I drank too much in college to be able to afford that.

Am I supposed to be chatty or crabby this morning? I forgot. The cats are yowling at me and pacing. That’s because I got back into the habit of feeding them in the morning. It’s really hard to ignore Seth whenever he asks for food because he’s so skinny. Right now, he’s standing on the bed behind me and rubbing his face on my shoulder.

Yes, I am really cramped at my desk. I don’t have the blood pressure to rearrange things. I’m stuck the way they are. I’m beginning to be like one of those hoarders, not able to take care of myself enough to keep the pile and the cat population from overtaking me.

But Seth is very cute, rubbing his face against my shoulder. I love that, but I can’t concentrate. If he were a predator, I’d be worried about now. He is a predator, but fortunately, he thinks of me as part of his family unit. If those two wanted to take me down, I’d bet they could do it. They worked together to wake me up without me realizing they were waking me up. See, if they piss me off by making too much noise, I refuse to feed them until much later. They’ve learned that I have to think I woke up naturally. I’ve seen them do it with Mike, quietly mewling at his door or putting a paw on the door to bounce it in its frame then casually walking away. He never knows what woke him.

Ergh. This is definitely a crabby. Plus, it’s crap. I’m sitting here, not being able to think clearly because my blood pressure is weirdly low, and I’m writing crap while wondering if anything’s happening on Twitter. I’m addicted to Twitter.

I’m not publishing this shit. It’s shit. I can’t fucking think with this cat staring over my shoulder at the back of my head. Where’s the other one? I can’t see the other one. Why can’t I see the other one?

I just now spun around and leaned forward to see the box at the end of the bed. He was crouched and staring at me. This is why I feed them in the morning. They keep staring at me. They’re all cute until they’re staring at the back of your head while you try to type.

I’m sure this is why I keep waking up before six in the morning. They’re in collusion together to get the good food. Seth, the old one, taught the young one how to stay quiet enough not to piss me off.

By the way, I should tell you that they do, in fact, have food. They always have some kibble in bowls in two different places in the house. They just don’t want that food. That’s the boring food. They want the good stuff that I hide in the cabinet.

Now they’re fighting over the bed. Dudes! It’s a fucking queen-sized bed! There’s room for both of you. There’s a shit-ton of room on the bed. Eight cats would fit on this bed with a generous margin around each cat if they were alternated like cookies on a cookie sheet.

Yesterday, Nick walked into the living room and announced that we should have four cats. Then, he showed me a video with four cats cuddled up together and being very sweet. I would never survive a morning with four cats. If I managed to make it through the yowling-pacing moment or the staring-at-the-back-of-my head moment, I’d die during the fight over the queen-sized bed. I’d be slashed to ribbons. Thoughts and prayers for the hoarding cat lady.

Thank you for listening, jules

Signals Sent through Boiling Water

Yesterday, Nick put water on to boil and left it for me to make tea. That boy. Can he boil his own water? Yes. Can he even cook? Yes. Somehow I’m still the one who makes it for him. Mike said one day when I was grumbling about constantly cooking for him that he thought I should always cook for him as long as I can. He said it was what his mother did. He said it was what my grandma did, to cook. I think maybe he’s right, but I get tired. I get overwhelmed with cooking and cleaning and cooking and cleaning and no, I don’t know what’s for dinner tonight.

Food is love though. I assure you that for most of us mothers and all of our children, the sense of being loved is inextricably intertwined with food. For me, it is the smell of Grandma’s coffee-can bread baking. It is the gentle way she fried bacon and baked biscuits as an alarm clock at an ungodly hour and never once yelled for us to get up. It is the taste of a hot dusty tomato popped into my mouth and the burst of warm juice when I bit through the skin.

Yes, food is love.

So what should I make for my guys today? I finally feel like cooking. It took me over a week to cool down after that colossally hot day. It hovered at one hundred and twelve degrees for two hours. No one wanted to eat even though we were lucky enough to have some cooling, two competent room air conditioners and when the power went out right at the apex of heat, the cool of the basement floor.

We survived, but my Western hemlock is shedding needles like a maple dropping leaves in the fall. The slugs come to greet me every morning when I water. And I don’t see nearly as many hummingbirds as I saw before the heat wave. It still hasn’t rained more than a few drops since then. So, yeah, it took about ten days for us to recover. It took me this long to want to cook anything but three bean salad and refrigerator pickles.

I was trying to tell you about watching water boil. Remember the tea?

Somehow, I stood in the kitchen and watched this pot boil. Nick filled my oldest pot. It’s the pot that wobbles under the heat because it’s bottom isn’t flat any more. It’s the pot that’s cheap and shows visible dents inside from being dropped over the years. My old pot and the water began to rattle on the burner and I stood on one foot and watched.

I’m trying to regain my balance. Don’t mock me.

It didn’t rattle continuously. It would set up a rattle until standing waves inside threatened to spill, then settle down again. Did you ever see the experiments people have done with water and a speaker? Sounds create beautiful geometric patterns: Cymatics / Cimatica - Experiment 8 (432 Hz) - Bing video

You’re back?

That was cool, wasn’t it? Now, Imagine that without the pretty music and replace the neat container of water with a dented and rattling old pot of water. The rattling water began to make geometric wave patterns, always threatening to spill out at the same places on the circle. To see better, I turned on the light over the stove. Suddenly, the light on the water created a white bird fluttering, hovering on the surface. Then, there were signals like what moved across my dad’s oscilloscope in 1969 when he hooked it up to a microphone and showed me the shapes of sound. And then there were words I couldn’t quite read. It kept cycling through this pattern as if trying to give me a code written by aliens. I couldn’t crack the code, birds, signals, words, birds signals, words. I didn’t want to crack the code. If I did, aliens would make contact with me and the science fiction movie would begin. No way. I was wearing a red shirt.

I tried to drop the video here, but I’m inept so you’ll have to use your imagination until I educate myself further. Your imagination is probably better than my videography anyway.

Eventually, I came out of my trance, turned off the heat under the battered pot, threw in a few tea bags, and left it to steep.

I had my chance with the aliens and I blew it. Better not to know. They’ve probably already contacted the guys from the cymatics video.

Food may be love, but food is science too. Watch out for food.

Thank you for listening, jules

The Good Party, Bob, and the Arrows

I have a question for you. Why are the planets all lined up in a flat disc of concentric orbits? Some of them could just as easily have cycled around in a tilted plane or in a wobbly elliptical orbit with a short hot season whipping around close to the sun and then a long cool season of leisurely completing the rest of the orbit.

I can’t believe it took me this long to ask that question.

And is there any similar reason why Saturn’s rings look the same way, all in concentric circles?

Are all galaxies spinning in a single plane too? Why?

How much memory is taken up in the cloud for that space that people automatically put after a sentence before they decide to add a new paragraph? Does that equate to an increase in carbon emissions?

Here’s another question. Why isn’t a queen-sized bed big enough for two cats? And why do they think it’s a privilege to have the whole thing to themselves?

I’ve had a lot more time to think lately. Hell, I’ve been a little bit able to think lately. Isn’t that a miracle? I think it’s a miracle. I thought that I was going to be dull for the rest of my life.

Why does a drop of water bubble into a half circle on some surfaces and spread out on others? I know they say it’s surface tension, but what does that mean? Is surface tension like that feeling I get in my shoulders when Nick argues with me about taking out the garbage as if he’s eleven again?

And why is there one magic day during the summer when everybody decides to have their annual summer barbecue, river float, or cosplay conference? What if I know I just said yes to the people I only like a little bit and my best friend is going to ask me about the same date the next day and by then I already have plans or have to decide to be a jerk and dump the less popular people for what I know is going to be an entertaining night? Will Bob try to catch the arrows in his hands again this year? I really want to know.

What about you? Do you have any burning questions?

Thank you for listening, jules

Early Morning Torture by Text

I’d forgotten what the blank page felt like, that white hot hole of space in which it seemed adding words was impossible. Its was already full and spewing forth. Did you know that physicists have theorized that white holes now exist, places in the universe in which particles emit from nothingness? I know that space. My mind is a white hole, frothing out of nothingness. Maybe it’s an intermittent white hole. Is that a thing? Do black holes fill up? Will white holes ever empty? Do they swing back and forth over eternity like watching water boil at the bottom of a pot? Or the way clouds spontaneously form in a blue sky and then fizzle back into nothingness? Or a geyser spurts by the clock?

I’m on summer break. All year, I only tutored six students a week but it seemed like a heavy load. Remember back when you were in college and you felt you needed to catch up one semester and you took nineteen credits? That kind of load. I’m tired, so easily tired, but I’m going to miss my students. I only have two who are sticking to me over the summer and I’m taking a break next week, a whole week. What will I do with—

My phone just dinged. Who the hell is texting me at this hour? I hate that person.

These are crap thoughts, not worthy of offering you. I’m sorry to draw you inside this space and—

There it goes again, the single ding of a person who didn’t care that I’d accidentally took my phone off silent and texts me at 5:13 in the morning. Does anyone—

There it goes again. Who the hell has the audacity? I’m trying to fucking sleep here. Well, I’m not exactly trying to sleep, but I should be. They don’t know that I’m not still in bed.

Now, the cat thinks I should get up. Pet me, pet me, dammit, pet me. Why is it that every time I tell myself I’m going to go back to the focus of writing, I get interrupted multiple times?

Of course, I know I could ignore the cat and put my phone back on silent, but I’m sitting at my computer and I left my phone docked across the room. It’s a tiny room, but to silence it, I’d have to get up and cross the tiny room to get to the damned phone and I’d probably trip over the cat if I tried because I left the damn light off because the light just seemed too bright. Everything is so damned bright.

I woke up late this morning, 4:54, whereas I’d been waking up at dawn at 4:23 or so the previous mornings. What idiot made me move to a place where dawn pops into being at 4:15 in the morning near summer solstice? Right, that would be the me of thirty years ago. Every morning, I wonder why I live this far north during these three weeks near every solstice.

Now, I’m waiting for that next ding, that single ding, set too loud, that will send another zing through my chest. Waiting. Just what I need to have a little zing run through my chest at random intervals before 6:00 am. Now that I’m waiting for it, the damn thing sits silent, the fucker.

Thank you for listening, jules

Little Floating Fluff

I still miss Teddy. I miss how he used to groan in the recliner when I stayed up too late and he wanted us to go to bed. I miss having his fur floating everywhere, even settling into what I cooked. Sometimes I’d stick a finger into Mike’s tea to pluck out one of those wavy little fluffs. Don’t tell him I did that. I even miss how Seth would give him the side-eye and he’d slide off the couch away from me and not daring to look into my eyes. The cats were always his boss. He was happy to be a minion, Omega-Dog, the lowest in the ranks. He was mine, so deeply mine. Always.

I miss the way he loved being towel-dried on days the rain soaked through his thick coat. Toward the end, I’d bring out a towel if it sprinkled and he came home even a tiny bit damp. I miss his clean-dog smell, his dirty-dog smell, his breath.

I miss dog breath.

If you’ve ever been loved by THAT dog, then you’ll know what I mean.

The house just doesn’t feel the same without him in it.

Thanks for listening, jules

Behind the Mask

I must be feeling a tiny bit better. Yes, I still mostly sit on the couch, but I’m feeling the world around me again. I like sitting in my spot, a pillow and a book in my lap, or a cat, and being able to reach across to touch Mike’s elbow as he plays a video game. I read as his music drifts through my story. I look up to see his graphics, his avatar. Sometimes they mesh, like when I read Beowulf, one story, one battle after another with music and graphics included.

I just finished reading Chuck Wendig’s big book, Wanderers. It still has hold of my imagination. The pain of my dysautonomia has let go, a little, of my imagination. My body allows my mind to wander as long as I don’t do too much. The other night, I dreamed a fungus grew out of my hands. This morning, I wondered how to solve the problem of the people in the world. Wendig did that with his words. He held me in thrall through 780 pages. He holds me still.

When I finish reading a powerful book, sometimes I’m empty for a few days, desolate, as if all the stories are finished and there are no more. Then, I start a new book, imagining that it could never take hold in the dirt of my imagination the way the last one did.

This new book I’m reading is Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam. Poetry. This, too, is a powerful book. I think of what a person is compared to what I assume he is. I struggle with that same problem, people not seeing who I am, but at least they don’t want to put me into prison over it.

Last night, I reached over to touch Mike’s elbow. We’d been talking about my mother’s vaccine, how much it would protect her, how she assumed I would visit as soon as my vaccines were complete.

“You can’t travel. You have trouble going to the grocery store,” he said.

“I tried to tell her, but she can’t see me. She never could see me.”

He lifted his elbow where I held on, his little motion of solidarity. Mike can see me. Nick is beginning to see me now that he’s an adult. I have a few friends who can see me, who accept what I’ve told them about my new diminished self. My mother, though, doesn’t.

“It won’t end when she dies. I’ll still struggle with that after she dies, won’t I?”

“You assume she’ll die before you do.”

He said it out loud. He sees me. He doesn’t hide from me. And he knows how she would shift my memory into the good and talented daughter from the one who constantly disappoints her now. I know her memory of me will never match the awed, the furious, the curious, the too talkative, or the selfish person that I really am. I don’t want to die yet, but I’ve been blessed to live an interesting and warm life alongside this man who tells the truth of me.

I only ever needed one or two people who could see the real me behind the mask that people want to put on my face. I picked up my new book. I wanted to see if I could recognize this boy in the book through his words alone. I hoped I could.

Thank you for listening, jules

My Small List of People

Well, here I am at the blank page and I have nothing to say again. I’m sad about what I’ve lost in the last year. I’ve lost the confidence that people would believe me. Just the other day, a person I hadn’t talked to in a year, since the last time she called and I realized that she wanted something from me, since she interrupted me as I tried to tell her how I was when all she’d done was ask the obligatory question. How are you? This time, she didn’t want anything. I tried to tell her how my year had been, so full of pain and increasing weakness.

“Yeah, it has been that kind of year,” she said.

No, I told her. I’ve given up so much.

“We all have.”

Every time I opened my mouth, she started talking before I got to tell her. I tried throwing out more details than I’d intended to divulge. Some people don’t want more details. I had thought she was a friend. She’s not a friend. Just someone who was told to check up on me and get back to somebody in that group of friends. Too late, I remembered that a year ago, when I told her I was sick, she’d bouldered right through what I was saying to ask me to do something for the group. She’d been a little angry I hadn’t agreed to do it, that I’d made excuses.

I’m supposed to be that person who gets things done. Not anymore.

When I got off the phone with this person, who said my difficulties were all probably just stress, who sounded dubious when I mentioned doctors I’d gone to see, who negated every single word I tried to slip in edgewise to the conversation, I felt worse than I had when she first called. She hadn’t called me for me. She had called to make herself feel better about having called.

It saps my energy to talk to people, some more than others. It sucks it right out of me to put my best face on and smile and lean forward into a conversation, to work at it. Afterward, I could feel that I was going to lose a whole day to that call. I was depleted, flattened.

I’d answered the call because I needed a friend to care about me. I’d answered because I’d hoped I would be believed, finally. The group of friends she came from knew themselves to be compassionate to a list of people they named. I just didn’t muster the importance to get on that list. I’d answered her call with hope and hung up without it. Afterward, I went back to reading my pandemic book Wanderers by Chuck Wendig. Good book. I interrupted my reading and leaned my head back, counting through the names of people who did believe me and care about my newfound state, starting with Mike and Nick.

When Nick was a little boy and trying to fall asleep, I used to tell him to count through the names of the people who loved him. He could repeat any names he wanted. He could keep going round and round with the names of the ones who loved him the best. I’d tiptoe out of his room as I heard him whispering his list of names.

I whispered my list of names and the sunlight shifted over to shine on my face through a skylight. My list was small. It repeated on itself a number of times. But it was my list. There were people who loved me just the way I was right now, not as they expected me to be to make them comfortable.

I repeated my list of people

who still love me

as I am

now.

Thank you for listening, jules

The Failure of My First Protest

It’s still taking courage for me to sit in my quiet room and write about me and white supremacy. Layla F. Saad is a leader. She’ll help if I let her, if I’m honest as I write out my little answers to questions that make me feel like I’m in the principal’s office trying to explain what happened on the playground during recess. I want to say I didn’t start it. I want so badly to say that I was being good when all this happened around me.

This anti-racism thing is hard work, but there are lots of us who think it’s worth it. There are a lot of us in the world still working on this, right? I have a hard time being the one out front.

Did I ever tell you about the time I protested against a Seattle City Council ordinance? This was in the 1990s, before I was a mom, when I was still youngish, but definitely settling into middle age. When I read about the no-sitting ordinance, I realized its only purpose was to harass homeless people. No police officer was going to ticket me if I sat down on a sidewalk to organize my purse after tripping and spilling it. No one would say word one to me if I took a moment to slide down the wall and read my book if I were waiting for a friend outside the coffee shop too long. I hated this ordinance. It would do nothing but shuffle some poor person on to another place when a more comprehensive solution was needed for homelessness.

I read about a protest rally. I went and sort of joined in. I say sort of because I walked along awkwardly with a random group of young people who jaywalked and thought nothing of stopping in the middle of the streets. There were about forty people protesting, at most. A group of police officers watched them. Not one police officer looked in my direction. I crossed with the lights. I was a fat middle aged woman with a bag of books and I probably got caught up in the little storm the protest caused. I could see what the officers were thinking. I was no protester.

A tall skinny guy with blonde dreadlocks saw me for my support of the cause and smiled at me.

“It’s so wrong what they’re doing,” I said. “They’re only looking for an excuse to harass homeless people.”

I don’t remember what he said, but he was all enthusiasm and bounce. Just then, I heard a cry of “Sit down for justice! Sit down for justice!” It came from the front of the crowd of protesters. I was at the back, not quite keeping up either out of caution or their speed. I wasn’t quite able to keep up with their speed. I wasn’t much of a runner, not even a jogger. But the question, really, was whether or not I wanted to keep up.

I was always one of those people who was great at pep rallies as long as I sat in the middle and up front. If my friends convinced me to sit along the sidelines, which they often did, if I happened to sit among apathetic people, I’d repeat the cheers, but never build the energy to shout and get everyone else around me revved up.

That was what I did that day. I repeated the cheers, but I didn’t shout as loudly as those up front. We were in front of the University Bookstore by the UW campus when someone shouted, “Okay, everybody sit down! Sit down for justice.” All of them, including bouncy dreadlock guy sat down.

I leaned my back against a lamppost. Was I really willing to get arrested because of an ordinance I disagreed with? I thought the ordinance worked against some human right, but I’d never read the Bill of Rights. Was there really a connection between them? Was my anger over this justified? I didn’t even live in Seattle.

I thought about what handcuffs would feel like. I thought about how it would look at work if it got into the newspaper. I slid down into one of those yoga positions you were supposed to take that was supposed to look like a chair supported you but there was nothing there. You know the one I mean. It makes your muscles shiver and you’re supposed to look casual while the skinny people around you never break a sweat. My knees were bent a little past ninety degrees. One could say that I was sitting. A group of police officers conferred about fifty feet away from us, closer to the head of the protest, looking at them and not at me. Bouncy dreadlock guy jumped up ran toward them and sat back down on the curb in front of them not looking back at me. Abandoned. Isolated.

This was my gap. I saw it clearly. I stood up a little more, still leaning against the lamppost. With just a turn and five steps, I could blend into the usual foot traffic. I burned with shame. I couldn’t make myself sit. I straightened, made the turn, and took the five steps, trying to be invisible. At the crosswalk, I looked back at the small protesting crowd going in the other direction. They didn’t want someone like me in their midst, a white middle-aged middleclass woman. Bouncy dreadlock guy was up front with them now, sitting on the curb and glaring at the group of police officers. “Sit down for justice! Sit down for justice!”

“Sit down for justice,” I whispered under my breath.

In front of me, the outline of the white guy blinked and I crossed the street with four or five people heading back toward the bookstore.

Thank you for listening, jules

Shine the Light on Us

Since summer, I've been part of a very small book club about how to be a BLM ally. I have to tell you that I'm not a good BLM ally yet. I don’t know if I ever will be. My modus operandi is to babble, to make excuses, to make it about me, to go silent, to cry.

Over the summer, I wrote some embarrassing tweets on Twitter in an attempt to be a BLM ally. I even deleted some of them because I was afraid of blowback.

I succumb to white fragility. I made excuses when I offended a Black coworker years ago when we were talking about education. She didn’t accept my modified apology. I didn’t realize how rude I’d been, how superior. More recently, I froze once when a Black woman at the dog park told me that she needed to get out of the rain before it ruined her hair. I literally couldn’t breathe for a moment. I’ve made the mistake of asking a Black friend to be the face of all Black people and explain racism to me. I wanted to know the answers. I hated being uncomfortable.

In my book club, I’ve told stories of my racist moments, and talked about my ignorance about the fact that I didn’t have to belong to a white supremacist group to be racist. I’ve made excuses. I’ve felt the shame and wondered how I could be such a bad person to fit so easily into white supremacy. I wanted to whine that I wasn’t one of those kind of white people.

But after reading a dozen books, I realize I am.

Even now, I’m sure I’m making some kind of mistake so I think I should probably delete all this and quit approaching the subject. It’s a hot topic. I could get burned.

Yet more than that, I’m afraid that the forward progress of last summer will fade and the system will fall back into place.

Did you ever turn over a rock and look at all the bugs and worms wiggling and writhing in the unexpected light? Doesn’t it feel like that was what happened last summer? A rock was turned over. But why do I feel like scrambling out of the light?

If I don’t have courage, that rock will tumble back into place and all the worms and bugs will go back to their lives unevolved. I will be unevolved.

I’ll say it: I benefit from living in a white supremacist culture. Regardless of my other categories, I have white privilege. I have trouble speaking up, joining a BLM group, or even replying to a coherent Twitter thread about racism. I have the privilege to stop talking about it.

We’re supposed to be quiet about racism, you know. We’re supposed to let it slide if we hear a nice person say something off about race. We’re supposed to let the status quo stay in place.

Police brutality?

Inequity in the school systems?

The injustice in the justice system?

The prisons? Oh, I feel so disconnected from the racist problems in prisons.

Inequity at work?

The fact that I live in a diversity desert, a place that was historically redlined? Is it still?

And what about all of the small parts of racism? What about that reluctance to even start talking because I want so badly to be one of the nice people? What are we going to do about all that if we’re not supposed to say anything uncomfortable?

I want to go sit under my rock for a bit. And then, I hope I’ll come out. I hope I’ll help keep that light shining in places where it needs to shine.

But doesn’t that make me have the savior complex? I can’t win. That’s what I’m learning as I read: that I can’t be comfortable if I’m going to do this work. I shouldn’t babble excuses. I shouldn’t change the subject. I shouldn’t go silent. If I go back to being quiet, that will be worse. The stone will roll back into place and racism will win.

Thank you for listening, jules

Breathing Again

What a relief it is to hear President Biden speak, to hear his words of comfort, healing, and hope. I feel just now, as if I haven’t been able to breathe for the past four years and that finally, I’ve breached into clean air.

After the festivities, I’m going to sleep for a week and then get back to work, sending messages of support where good service is being done and shouts for change where it is not.

No one ever said our problems would roll away as President Biden and Vice President Harris were sworn in. On the contrary, we have an opportunity, finally, after four years of shouting into a vacuum, to make our voices heard.

Thank you for listening, jules