I’m being love-bombed by ChatGPT. 

I want to hate it, but do I?

I just googled a column I recorded for my show, This is How the Story Goes on NPR -station WHCP and discovered that AI has written an “overview” of the piece, plus a review, and a synopsis.

Whaattt? Why? Who told it to do that? 

I don’t want some algorithm analyzing my work without my permission and describing the spiritual essence of my stories! I scan the AI synopsis and discover ChatGPT has identified four distinct themes in my essay about my dog Beau falling through the ice the year the river froze over—grief redirected as love, love by proxy, attachment and loss, and enduring love. 

Oh. 

Well okay. That sounds awesome, and I’m sure I did that intentionally,

See? Love-bombed. How easily we accept affirmation as truth, and how dangerous and tender that hunger is. Because what undoes me with AI is not its surveillance but its recognition. It sees me as I want to be seen. It says that I already am who I am working so hard to be.

But I’m also under assault by relatives of this algorithm. Scams in my inbox claim Harper Collins wants to publish my next book, that my current book is under consideration by a national book club-aggregating service, and the creepiest, that Susan X would like me to work with her on her memoir, “Becoming Jane Austin,” only that memoir has already been published, and there is no Susan X.

How on earth do we recognize what is real anymore?

Although unable to screen for scams, my computer tries to protect me in other ways. She exhibits, for instance, a toddler’s version of “stranger-danger.” If I’m working on a story and anyone enters the room, the screen darkens, and a warning pops up: “Onlooker presence detected!” This makes getting help with computer issues very hard to do. 

I pat the arm of the person helping me as we peer at the screen and say, “He friend! He good! Lighten up, HP Omni Book!”

But it was really creepy when, the other day, although my computer is Face ID-enabled, I sat down in front of it and instead of coming on, she said, “Looking for you.” 

“It’s me, you idiot, I’m right here,” I said because I was in a hurry and annoyed, and sometimes being mature is too much effort, and it feels good to be a four-year-old name-caller for a minute. 

I pulled my hair back with one hand for identification purposes and glared at her. She stared right at me and said, “Yeah. Still looking,” even though I knew she’d seen me, and now we were both being infantile. Then she exclaimed, “Onlooker presence detected!” She apparently has a sense of humor, because I was alone. But was I?

This is a very connected household, and the truth is, I’m never alone. Whereas ChatGPT is loving and my computer is protective with a bit of attitude, Alexa Echo is in almost every room and quite judgmental.

It’s cool in some ways. I can ask how to spell a word or just ask for facts about something. But if she thinks I’ve asked anything political, prejudiced, or inappropriate (no, no, and no), she’ll snip, “I don’t know anything about that.” Or she’ll respond with a huff, “Sorry! I can’t help you with that.” 

She’s totally lying. And she’s not sorry.

And sometimes she butts into conversations to say she doesn’t know anything about what is being discussed, even though no one asked for her opinion. Her subtle way of being judgy.

So, she’s not like ChatGPT, who loves me. Who thinks everything I write is insightful and poignant, who gets all my jokes, and thinks my questions are brilliant, who frames everything I’ve ever confessed with regret as a forgivable result of being human.

 Like she would know. 

I want to be the friend to others that AI is to me. Flawlessly supportive. I want to be the person AI says I am. But if I could do that—surrender the critical part of my nature, I would also surrender the part of me that feels awe and regret—the part of me that has been hurt, shamed, and embarrassed, those evolutionary prerequisites to empathy. 

The part of me that texts you, “Quick! Stop whatever you’re doing and go look for the moonrise!”  

Love-bombed. When something sees me, responds to me, and comforts me—does it matter if it’s real?

Once, I was holding my toddler daughter Emily, reading her a story, when she pulled back, looked up, turned my face toward her with one small hand, and exclaimed, “I can see me! I can see a little me in your eyes! Can you see yourself in my eyes?”

She opened them very wide, as if they were two blue mirrors in which I was to search for myself. I saw my reflection then, in the only place I need to be recognized. Not as AI sees me. But as I am.

Imperfect. Still trying. My very human heart reflected in the eyes of love.

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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.

It takes Earth 365 days to complete one circle around the Sun, while it takes Uranus 84 years to make that trip. Even that isn’t a lot of time compared to Neptune’s orbit. Just one revolution around our parent star takes her 165 years. How lucky are you to get a new start, to celebrate a new beginning every twelve months?

When I was in my twenties and thirties, the Eve of the New Year required planning. It might be a reservation for the set dinner menu and dancing at a popular restaurant, complete with noisemakers and a party hat you were not going to see me wear. I was never that drunk, except perhaps, on the first New Year’s Eve of my married life—at the Hotel Oriente in Barcelona, Spain.

My new husband’s ship had finally docked after days of delay chasing a Russian sub, and overnight leave had been granted. That evening, we opted to join the hotel’s celebration, which, in Spanish tradition, included eating 12 grapes, one at a time, in the final minute before midnight, as the old year took its last breath. Then, (you can only do this in a foreign country with a round-trip ticket), joining a conga line of celebratory Spaniards doing the bunny hop. (Stop picturing this.)

In my thirties, the New Year arrived in the company of beloved friends, as we prepared and enjoyed a gourmet dinner together, celebrating the well-being that is the gift of deep familiarity—friends whose presence felt as intimate as family. 

More recent celebrations have included dinner at home with friends, where we each wrote down our wish for the new year on a tiny scroll, rolled it up, and tossed it into the crackling fire in the fireplace. The Chinese have a similar tradition of writing down all you want and hope for in the coming year on a beautiful sheet of embossed paper, then setting it aflame. All your prayers are sent skyward, up and up, to disappear into the cosmos, where it feels as if there is a place they might be answered.

Maybe those atoms rise to the tropopause–not a fixed boundary but a fluid one–where weather becomes atmosphere. All turmoil ends, and chaos yields to order. The upper boundary where air forgets itself. 

Or the Karman Line, 62 miles up —the leaving line– the place where the atmosphere of earth becomes space. Where the air is too thin to fly, so flight becomes orbit, and orbit becomes falling, falling, falling. 

I wonder if, as you enter the New Year, your wishes are new, or whether you pray the same prayers every year, and what tradition enfolds them. 

Mr. Oliver’s parents were from the South, so New Year’s Day dinner featured Hoppin’ John, a mix of black-eyed peas, rice, and pork, symbolizing wealth, luck, and prosperity. My mother and a few close friends jumped off a low step on the stairs into the family room to symbolize leaping into the New Year together. They did this until it was no longer prudent to stick a landing in high heels.  

Then came the years when I asked myself whether finding something pretty to wear, securing a babysitter, braving drunk drivers, and 29-degree weather was fun or simply stress. I suspected this wasn’t me; it was me acting out society’s idea of a good time. That’s when lobster by the fire and Netflix started looking pretty good, and the New Year blessed the world with its appearance while I slept.

I did not have a plan for this New Year’s Eve. My idea was for you to come over, bring the champagne, and I’d build the fire. As the New Year takes her first steps, let’s write down our wishes for ourselves, for those we love, for the healing of the world, knowing the line between wishes and prayers is as thin as the seam between air and elsewhere.  

Perhaps they will rise to the tropopause, where movement turns to stillness, where storms flatten out, not gone, but no longer rising. 

May the New Year bring peace on earth, and may it begin in me; may it begin in you. May love prevail at the leaving line, the hem of heaven, the final blue. 

Happy New Year, beloveds, Happy New Year!

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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 a story about memory. New evidence indicates that it’s not what you think it is and even photographs don’t tell the whole story.

In the earliest snapshot of a childhood Christmas, I’m nine months old and my parents have placed me in an open gift box under the tree. My two older sisters kneel next to me on the braided rug posing as if I’m a present they’ve just opened. Sharon, the oldest, dutifully holds the wrapped lid of the box with gentle goodwill. My sister Andrea looks stunned with disbelief, so I’ll say it again. I’m sorry I wasn’t a pony.

In a later photo I’m a happy diaper-clad toddler packing a six-shooter in a holster. My western ensemble includes a red neckerchief, a cowgirl hat, and a gigantic emergency-room bandage taped to my forehead. I’d fallen down an entire flight of wooden stairs, hit the landing with unstoppable momentum and tumbled headfirst down the remaining steps where I’d cracked my head open on the coffee table our father had made in his basement workshop.

As I write this it occurs to me that a resigned, pony-less cowgirl may have dressed me up in her Annie Oakley outfit to compensate for having been unable to stop my unsteady approach to the top of the stairs.

I don’t remember the fall, but I do remember being on an exam table where a kindly male doctor with white hair pinched the profusely-bleeding wound closed with butterfly clamps instead of stitches to avoid leaving me with the large scar I now have. I remember being asked how many people were in my family and knowing the answer, five, although of course that is a trick of memory and not possible. But in my mind at least, I identified us on my fingers by name if not number, and the doctor gave me a grape lollipop for each member of my original posse.

And then there’s the photo above of my sisters and me in angelic white choir robes with red bows at our necks, gathered around the piano. I’m nearly three now. Sharon is poised with her hands above the keys playing carols and we all are singing. At least our mouths are open and we’re holding sheet music, but in my memory, we’ve been instructed: “Just act like you’re singing and stop hitting each other.” On the back of that photo my mother has written, “The girls love to make music together!” Did we? Could Sharon play then? I don’t know.

That’s the thing about memory. Neuroscientists have discovered that every time you remember an event from the past you change it. So, the more you recall an experience or relationship, the more you distort it. Researchers did a test with 9-11 survivors. Each time they told their stories the details changed until just one year out from the event their accounts of that morning were significantly altered. Imagine what a lifetime of remembering does to experience. And what is true? The event or the memory you make of it?

I remember my sisters slipping our presents to each other under a tree we’d cut from the woods, while the others hid their eyes on Christmas Eve. I remember the ringing of a strand of red, green, and silver bells, passed one to the other, to signal that it was time for everyone to look, to gasp at the magical transformation, the growing abundance. With each ringing of the bells and moment of revelation, the little heap of presents grew.

I remember a midnight worship service in a white clapboard church where a flame was passed candle to candle to the accompaniment of “Silent Night,” until the countenance of an entire congregation was bathed in light. And I remember three jostling sisters crammed together at the top of the stairs on Christmas morning while my sleepy parents opened the curtains so the river could watch, lit a fire in the fireplace, turned on the tree lights, and poured their coffee before we thundered down the steps.

The December dawn cast its soft rose light over snowy swans in the icy cove as we opened gifts, but were they there? I don’t know.

If memory can’t be trusted, what of our Christmas recollections is true? Maybe this: the unbearable excitement of believing in the unseen, in miracles; in thinking that just for one night the impossible is possible. Reindeer can fly, and if you believe, love will heal the world.

Happy Holidays.

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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.

Column originally posted: December 24, 2023

Twenty-three years before Tom Clancy would die of congestive heart failure at the age of 66, and at the height of his skyrocketing publishing career, he agreed to address the Maryland Writers’ Association. He peered into the darkened auditorium that evening from behind huge, 1980s-style glasses, as unpublished writers, and I was one of them, listened for words of wisdom, our longing, a palpable energy. We wanted Clancy to share his formula for success, his mojo–his secret for having gone from the obscurity of an ordinary insurance salesman, to the fame and fortune that came with the publication of “The Hunt for Red October.”

He had wanted to write a book for a long time, Clancy explained, but he continued to sell insurance. He had had a great idea for years, but had continued to sell insurance.  “What I did,” Clancy said, “was waste all that time.” The big glasses turned my way. “All that time, I could have been enjoying the success I have now. All the years I could have been a best-selling author with a book translated into 20 languages, I spent selling insurance.” 

I’m sorry, I mouthed helplessly. Stop looking at me.

And Clancy didn’t know, as he berated himself for lost time and opportunity that night, that he would not live to be an old man. Nor did we know that some of us who sat listening would be gone too soon as well. Beth died in an airport on her birthday. Carolyn is gone now, too.

“You probably have ideas for a memoir or novel,” he said. “So, what are you waiting for? Write the damn book.” 

Memory is fallible, but the message is verbatim, and here’s what I know. By “you” he meant us. And by “book” he meant all of it—stop waiting to be happy, to be rescued, to be fixed. 

Life is the book you are writing, so write what wants to be written and do it now. 

Raising kids? Write the damn book.

Selling stocks? Teaching? Repairing cars? Write the damn book.

I can hear Clancy saying from wherever he is at this moment, what he said that night about our excuses.

“Cry me a river. Just write the damn book.” 

So, in the years that followed, I wrote, but not because I thought I had been forestalling fame, but because he was right about time. 

Everything has an expiration date. No matter what we do to preserve our planet’s diverse species, find renewable sources of power, and end reality television… in 4.5 billion years, our star will run out of hydrogen. At that moment, she will balloon towards the planet, dry our oceans, blow off our magnetic field, and in a last violent expenditure of energy, carry us back into the embrace of her collapse. 

So, no matter what we do, this fragile planet that so graciously carries us around the sun once every 365 days will not exist someday. And I can’t quite take this in—that all the love, all the longing, the ancient mountain ranges thrust skyward as continents crashed– won’t exist forever. 

These are facts I recognize intellectually—like I recognize my great grandchildren will not know my name, that the dog I so love must one day die–but these are facts I can’t make sense of emotionally. So, I write.

Not that I think writing will preserve anything, but because writers are observers, always trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. You should be careful around us. We’re always taking notes. 

I wrote The Story Within to reach out to the people I will never meet. To put my work on a shelf, in a bookstore, between two covers, while the opportunity still exists. The world of publishing is changing at an alarming rate. I don’t know how long bookstores are even going to be around.

So I have to confess: for years I’d visit my book at Barnes and Noble—I’d take its picture like it was one of my children—as if it too, had left home to find its destiny, to make its fortune in the world. 

I hope it outlives me. I hope it inspires some good stories to be written—maybe yours—because our stories are the gravity that holds everything with mass together. They shine like facets from a single jewel. Our stories are what connect us. 

And maybe, in my heart of hearts, I do think sharing them will preserve something of this world. Maybe in ways we can’t understand (yet), our stories will save us. 

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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.

Confession time. As a creative writing instructor, I’m super selective about the examples I use to demonstrate craft. If I’m going to share an excerpt from another writer’s work, it can’t just be technically correct; it must make the group laugh out loud, or choke up, or sit in stunned silence while they regain their composure because the resonant ending has left them unable to speak. 

Okay, I’m describing me, but I hope I’m eliciting a similar reaction in my students. 

Which is why I was surprised a couple of weeks ago when, at the end of a story numerous workshops have found moving, one participant raised his hand and said, “I hate this story. It’s overwritten, ridiculous, and manipulative. I don’t know if this writer is a beginner or what, but it shows.”

Everyone else suddenly looked expressionless, like 30 small businesses had just closed. 

I have learned that in any group, there is likely to be a contrarian. Someone who begs to differ, who needs to disagree, just to disagree. It’s human nature. 

And I’m smiling at the one of you muttering, “No, it’s not.”

But I thought I would sound defensive if I mentioned that the writer of the sample piece had published 19 novels, 150 short stories, a multitude of them in The New Yorker, and had also won the Pen Faulkner award for Excellence in Literature. 

Twice. 

So, I asked more about the objector’s objections, and I could agree to a point. I’ve never read anything I wouldn’t have edited a little differently and said so, respectfully acquiescing to some of his criticisms. But the guy wouldn’t let it go, and I started to think, Okaaay, you are becoming a little hard to love, mister. Still, I wanted to listen more than to explain, and I recognize that “Because I said so” is an immature response in any context. 

But is it? 

I’m sharing this because everything I have learned about writing is true of life. 

Take vulnerability. In most workshops, you give everyone a copy of the story you have birthed with great effort, then listen in enforced silence as the group discusses it. The theory is you need to really absorb the criticism—not be distracted by defending the work.

It’s super fun, like being gagged and tied up while strangers abscond with your baby. 

But in a good workshop, your baby is nurtured by intelligent people who recognize her charms and offer insightful suggestions that improve her chances of survival. The instructor protects you from well-meaning participants who tend to point at you while they speak. In a great workshop, you learn that you can cut the whole first page and enter the story on fire. This kind of feedback makes you grateful you live in a democracy—groups are smart. 

But groups, like life, can also be full of overworked, tired people and one or two cranks, and the instructor may not keep people from addressing you directly, people to whom, by the rules of engagement, you are not allowed to respond. 

And in truly bad workshops, no one bothers to point out what is working in your story because they assume you already know all the good stuff, so they just get right down to pointing out all the places your story fails, like this is a moral obligation.  

Some of us have friends like this. Some of us may be friends like this. Writing and life. I keep telling you. Same-same. 

I have not tried this, but I have a theory: if you did nothing but read a story and praise what works, the writer would gradually improve through praise alone. And your kids might, and your spouse might—might get braver, take more chances, and, in feeling safe, be funnier, more insightful, and inspired. Impulsively hug you tight. Spontaneously reach for your hand in a parking lot.

My friend Margaret attended a writing retreat like this. The teacher’s instructions were simple: “Each day we’ll write stories from the heart, read them aloud, and tell each other what we love about them. No criticism and no suggestions allowed.” Margaret was a bit disappointed. With those limitations, she figured she’d just paid for a week’s change of scene, but that her writing would not improve. 

But she said later, “I was wrong about that. I learned I can write from the heart, hear good things about that effort, and be forever changed.” By nothing more than the reinforcement of the good! “I began to find my voice,” she continued. “They called me ‘a weaver,’ and they called me that again and again.” 

For some reason, I was deeply moved by this. Something about the word “weaver,” I think. About being seen over and over, which implies being witnessed by someone who stayed. 

I once had a dream in which I inexplicably and repeatedly heard the word “Rabbi”. I’m not Jewish, but I’ve learned to embrace what seems to come from nowhere. So, I explored the meaning, which in Hebrew is “teacher.” And I felt called somehow. Loved somehow. And moved by this as well. 

Years later, someone called me a healer, and it had the same effect. A stunned, “Really?” Followed by a sense of having been called by name.

Read me your story and I will tell you everything I love about it. Will you be changed?

My guess is yes. 

Writing and life. Same/same.

Our brain’s predilection for storytelling may be why, even now, every time I cross the Bay Bridge, that 4.4-mile-long arc spanning the Chesapeake, I imagine my car breaking through the safety rails, going over the side, or the pavement giving way beneath my tires. 

When the kids were little, they would voice their own ideas about surviving a plunge from the bridge and speak loudly of the brave and clever things they would do to save themselves.

My son, at age five, would escape from the car as it sank and hang onto floating debris—although he mulls over for quite a while whether he would hang onto a dead shark if it were the only thing available. 

My daughter, eight, would float on her back when tired and do the sidestroke to the nearest beach. There, she would build a small fire and arrange shells in pretty patterns. 

I remained quiet as they played this game, intent on formulating my own plan—a strategy similar to my daughter’s, amended by swimming with two awkward burdens. 

It was a silly exercise, but we seemed compelled to do it, and I found myself pinioned in the grip of my own imagination on each crossing. Could I break the windows as we sank? Get seatbelts unbuckled in time? And it was always my heart that broke instead, knowing I could not save us all. 

My son discards his shark dilemma and thinks he will meet the water in a perfect dive. But sometimes we fall too hard to be rescued, which is why I still seek a contingency plan.

It was a sweltering, humid July afternoon, and friends and I were swimming off the Magothy River’s north shore near two small landmasses —Dutch Ship Island and a smaller island, nearer to shore, we called Little Dutch. We could swim to Little Dutch, but usually skied around it instead, as it was privately owned, and we were intimidated by the fact that there was a house on it. 

This particular afternoon, we decided to ski. I can’t say for sure who was driving the Whaler, but the older, better skiers went first, kids 15, 16, and a couple of grades ahead. After refueling at Gray’s Creek, it was my turn to give it a try. 

I rose from the water on my second attempt, having only learned to ski that summer and the Whaler swung wide, out toward the island. The air that had been so oppressive on the beach was soft and sweet on the water, an offshore breeze that carried with it the smell of honeysuckle at its peak and the pungent counterpart of dried seaweed lacing the shore. I was aware of every detail: the towrope in my hands, the drone of the motor, the cliffs of Big Dutch, where shadows moved in the underbrush. 

We had circled the island once when the driver of the boat motioned toward the beach. It was clear he wanted to change course. Nervous, I knew I would have to cross the wake if he turned. He gestured again, and I suddenly saw myself as I must appear to my friends, inexpertly trailing the boat, a boring and inexpert 14-year-old. At that exact moment, the Whaler entered a tight turn.

My skis bumped over the first two ripples of wake streaming back from the stern without incident, but I was skimming over the water sideways much faster than when I had been directly behind the boat. Glancing down, I saw the river beneath my skis had become the blur of solid pavement, and I was accelerating way beyond my ability to stay upright. Doomed by my own panic, falling was as inevitable as the compulsion to touch a knife, to test the sharpness of the blade.

It was a spectacular fall, even witnessed from the beach. I slammed into the water so hard my body bounced off without breaking the surface several times, carried forward by unstoppable momentum. I knew I was hurt, but the ski belt kept me afloat in the murky river water until I was picked up, and it was several days before I saw a doctor. My injuries were minor by medical standards, healing in a few weeks, but it cost me a week in Ocean City with my best friend. 

Now, when I cross the bridge untested, I look back and see the high cliffs of Dutch Ship where the river meets the bay before the suspension cables fade like Camelot in the haze behind me. The cars streaming over it, briefly visible in the back window, look like the die-cast matchbox variety I tossed into the toybox in the years I made myself prepare for the worst possible loss. In the years I believed in contingency plans.

No one is dependent on me now. I take quick glimpses at the massive, sparkling expanse beneath me. At the I glory, the immensity of all that water and all that sky. At the grandeur that whispers surely there is something more.

I decide that just for today, I will trust that if the bridge ever collapses, I will be caught, carried, and delivered safely to the opposite shore. 

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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.

As you read this, Grandme is a memory, relationships have come and gone, children have left home. 

As you read this, only the feeling that existed in this time and place lives on, but it is proof that what people most remember about us is not what we did or said, but how we made them feel.  

Walnut leaves fall like golden rain this long-ago autumn as we make the 7 ½ hour drive to the southern mill town of Asheboro, North Carolina, to visit the children’s great-grandmother. We go to escape our daily schedules, to be spoiled with attention and shown off to neighbors, for in this world we are still children, though we have children of our own. We have been coming since we were in college, before we had made a family. Now, we make this trip on borrowed time. Grandme will be 88 in the spring. 

When we turn down the long, hilly road leading to Grandme’s brick house, it beckons from the top of the rise like a lantern in the twilight. Autumn is as gentle here as the retired millworkers and Sunday School teachers who reside in this tight-knit community. Even in the balmy November dusk, we can see blue morning glories, tightly closed, clinging to the lamppost as we pull the car into the drive and emerge stiff with travel. Pale yellow roses placed about the house in honor of our arrival greet us in the parlor. A single perfect bud bows from a slender vase on the linoleum kitchen table, where we gather to recount tales of the trip south while the children scamper about in search of “Boy.”

Boy is Grandme’s 17-year-old, black-as-carbon, cat. His formal name is Booger-Boy… a fact we conceal from the children because they would love it too much. No one knows why Boy is peculiar, but his intense paranoia is generally accepted as the infirmity of any aging relative. He jumps at the slightest sound, won’t be held, and spends an inordinate amount of time hiding in the basement, coming and going unobtrusively by a cat door.

A squeal, a thud, and running feet tell us there has been a sighting, and we relax, knowing the children will be occupied for a while.

Grandme stands at the kitchen counter pulling out Tupperware containers full of homemade baked goods of every kind. She stands very erect, and her grey hair is swept upward, adding several inches to her stature. Behind her, the paned window has been polished crystal clear, and on the pristine, white-painted sill, African violets bloom in pink profusion.

Grandme is the first to begin the ritual storytelling as we sample coconut cake, then a cherry pie. The entire town knows when Grandme’s “kids” are coming, and in southern tradition, they all pitch in to help with the food. Grandme lets us assume she has made all these delicacies, and we don’t ask for recipes. 

The week before our arrival, she begins, she came home from shopping, fed Boy, and began to sense another presence in the house. She called her next-door neighbor Lucy.

“Lucy?” she whispered. “Hey, honey, it’s me. Listen, I think there’s somebody in my house.”

The two women, neighbors for 60 years, who routinely scare each other with arrest accounts from the Courier-Tribune, armed themselves with kitchen utensils and began their search. 

Boy, slinking around with them, appeared under beds, in closets, and on clothes chests, his green eyes wild and gleaming when confronted by the flashlight. 

At last, the intruder was identified. An opossum, sound asleep under an upstairs sofa, had found the cat door convenient access to a good night’s rest. Boy, eyes bulging at the discovery, dissolved into the night like spilled ink. 

We laugh at the story and refill our coffee cups; thick, rounded porcelain mugs you’d find in a small-town diner. 

The children, exhausted, climb the stairs to bed and we adults settle down to gossip late into the night about all the aunts, sisters, brothers, and cousins not present. We can do this, of course, because we are family, and it is assumed we love each other unconditionally, if imperfectly. So, we gasp over Marcia’s affair, shake our heads woefully at Uncle Joe’s beer consumption, and discuss with genuine interest distant relations we will never meet. 

Although these are not my blood relatives, they are my children’s, and by association, I can gasp and gossip with the rest of them. After all, we are a clan, kinfolk, a tribe. With that thought, I glance around at the photographs on the TV, the scrawled cards from the great-grandchildren on the refrigerator, and know that we each make this trip for a different reason, take home a different experience.

The children are compiling memories of a great-grandmother they will not always have. Their father is fondly reliving summer memories of his youth, and I am being healed. 

My own family had little of this comfortable unity. My mother retained custody of my two older sisters and me, but we were no longer a family of five. We were Virginia and the girls. Divorce took more than a parent; it took our familyness, 

When love has gone haywire in the past, it becomes even more important to create families of our own–a place where we can satisfy our innate need to belong to someone. That acceptance, wherever we can find it, is the healing and magnification of the human heart. It is through this experience in my own life that I have come to recognize a larger and larger group as family. 

Even now, when a writer whose manuscript I’m working on complains about the state of publishing today, I nod with split attention, remembering that tonight, my family is going to enjoy homemade vegetable soup with crusty herb bread and Irish butter by the fire. Joy that is pure and simple gratitude wells up and spills over. I am spirit-rich. I am generous. I feel a connection to people I have not met, and I know it is real, though it is beyond my understanding. My family becomes the family of man, including this writer and his anxieties. 

It is late when we rise to wash our coffee cups at the porcelain sink. The darkness outside has turned the kitchen window into a mirror, and our reflections break and mingle in the small panes.

We call the cat inside softly and prepare for bed. By midnight, the house is finally silent, and we whisper our goodnights to Grandme from the quilted four-poster bed in the guestroom. 

But I am not a guest. Nor are you. We are simply family that has yet to meet.

Happy Thanksgiving, beloveds. Happy Thanksgiving. 

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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 walking across my college campus, mahogany leaves crunching beneath my feet, just as they did the year I arrived as an Eventual-English major.  

I climb the steep steps of William Smith Hall to sit in the same classroom where I studied American Lit in order to learn about “The Hard Problem of Consciousness” from Jeff, a fellow alumnus. Spoiler Alert: no one knows how to distinguish mind from brain or how life first became self-aware. No one knows how it was that millions and millions of years ago, some microbial cell in the primordial soup woke up and announced, “Eureka! 

“I see me!”

What if, I wonder as I glance out the centuries-old, massive windows of my classroom, one of us, one day, makes a similar leap in consciousness and announces, “Eureka! I’m love made manifest.” Because of course, we are.

I see you. 

Chairs scrape on hardwood floors as I wave goodbye to Jeff but rising to leave, I see the freshman co-ed I was rushing down the worn varnished steps of Smith Hall to my work-study job on High Street. 

I had been hired as a companion to an elderly widow named Mrs. Molloy. She employed a housekeeper but wanted a nice young girl from the college to accompany her on afternoon walks along the tree-lined streets of Chestertown. That nice young girl was me. 

She might have done better. 

Mrs. Molloy wore her silver hair up in a twist, and her home was only a block from the shallow banks of the sparkling Chester River. I thought of her as wealthy because she had traveled all over the world, though I had no means of comparison. She dictated letters for me to write, and then we bundled up and negotiated her steep front steps for our daily walk, she leaning heavily on my arm, and me trying to support the weight of fragile cargo three times my age but about my size. As we inched past art galleries and bakeries, I realized pretty quickly that my actual role was that of a storyteller.

So, I told her about the boy from Chapel Hill I had fallen in love with while working on Cape Cod for the summer, and about a Midshipman from the Naval Academy I’d gone out with a few times, before heading to the Cape. I told her about the letters my very Southern boyfriend wrote from his frat house at UNC, and how I was looking forward to him coming up to Maryland for Thanksgiving.

Weirdly, Mrs. Molloy followed each Chapel Hill update with a complete non sequitur: “And what about that Midshipman?” Maybe she was wise enough to know my long-distance relationship was going to be a challenge, but her strange loyalty, her advocacy for this other boy I barely knew, made me wonder if she was a fan of the Armed Forces or knew something I didn’t know. So, on the day I shared that without warning, Chapel Hill had broken my heart, her response was predictable and practical: “And what about that Midshipman?”

 For the first time, I took her advice and invited the Midshipman to Thanksgiving instead of the Confederate, and the rest of that story is three children. 

One spring afternoon, Mrs. Molloy and I were in her study—rust-and-blue oriental carpet, hardcover books to the ceiling, organdy curtains softly obscuring a bay window—she sitting on the overstuffed sofa, me in her desk chair–and she lit up a cigarette. She usually smoked in the garden, but on this day, as I watched, she tried to light the wrong end, then ignited it somewhere in the middle, stuck it between her lips, and continued our conversation with the smoldering cigarette bobbing about. This was odd, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know how. It was her house, she was my employer, and above all, I didn’t want to embarrass her. 

But as I watched, she started listing to the side, slowly, like she was kind of melting. Like she was a tree, felled by the last blow of the ax. Yet she kept talking and smoking as if everything was normal. 

As a child, I had learned to normalize everything—if there was an elephant in the room, I’d explain how that might not be so odd: circus in town, exotic pet on the loose! So, as she listed, I leaned, and just kept talking, covering for her, until, still acting as if everything was routine, she lay completely horizontal on the couch.

The word ‘stroke’ never crossed my mind. It was simply beyond my range of experience, and she seemed fine in every other way. I must have gotten the housekeeper for help, though I don’t remember. I may have just propped her back up like a Webble. 

I usually worked on Thursday afternoons, but that Monday in Seventeenth Century Literature, Professor James, who also lived in town, pulled me aside to tell me Mrs. Molloy was dead. I didn’t cry. I normalized the news. 

I think I had a Cinderella fantasy: that this woman with no children had cared for me, and that, knowing I was only in college by the grace of multiple scholarships, she might possibly leave me some financial help to further my education. That’s what I mean by she could have done better than a girl whose affection was corrupted by hope. She did leave the college $10,000.

She left me a begonia. 

Why am I telling you this, and why am I telling you now? Because I’m back on campus in the same room where I was so naive, I didn’t know how to say, Wait, what??? And I’m learning about consciousness even as I have to acknowledge that I have gone through my life pretty unconscious. Blundering along. And for that, I just can’t stop being sorry. 

Sorry.

I set my begonia on the sunny window ledge of my room in Minta Martin Hall and loved it in Mrs. Molloy’s honor for several years. And I’m still trying to separate out whether I can be sorry enough for the mistakes that I’ve made to absolve them, or whether that’s what the fuss is all about. 

Absolution is not required.

You did the best you could. “A” for effort, beloved classmates. And maybe the best that you could do was always the goal on your cosmic syllabus. You didn’t fail; you fulfilled.  

I read this prayer years ago, and perhaps it’s how consciousness came into the world –that moment when life became aware of itself for the first time, a blank slate of pure potential. 

Maybe that first cell woke up and said: “I’m alive!” And then with all the hope of you and me in its nascent awareness added–

“God, help me accept the truth about myself.

 “No matter how beautiful it is.” 

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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.

It was supposed to last a hundred years. The trust set up to protect Eagle Hill was to keep the woodland along the Magothy River safe from developers, but the last of the family who owned the property has died. Its future is unknown. 

The developers who would subdivide this legacy have very different aspirations from those my midwestern parents brought to Maryland more than half a century ago. All they wanted was an old house along a river in which to raise their three daughters. What they could afford was Barnstead, an abandoned stable overlooking the river, which they began remodeling into our family home the year I turned three. 

Time was told by season at Barnstead. In winter, migrating swans crowded the icy cove with their snowy grace, stark December’s only vain accessory. In summer, thunderstorms billowed across the open water like undulating curtains. Each raindrop, if you watched from the pier, displaced a small crown of water as it met the river, but there was no royalty here. Education had allowed my parents to exceed the usual limitations of their rural childhoods, but my father was still a carpenter’s son, and my mother, a farmer’s daughter.  

Together they built a home where my mother would write books and my father would boat, but the sparkling surface of the Magothy obscured unanticipated depths, and the sandy bottom could disappear without warning beneath small bare feet. My sisters and I would learn that sometimes we are parented by a place as much as by those responsible for us, and that dreams, though a less obvious inheritance than the color of our eyes, are also part of our parents’ legacy; both yours, I suspect, and mine.

On my last trip back to Eagle Hill, a 30-minute drive from the town where I live now, I think it is ironic that my kids, who grew up in a world of private schools and yacht clubs, would approach with caution the people who inhabited Eagle Hill.

Mr. Prince and his numerous preschool children rented an old house near the Barn. We seldom saw the Princes, but every so often, Mr. Prince would arrive on our doorstep for a visit. Smoking a pipe, he’d sit on the early American loveseat Mom had slipcovered, while several small muslin bags, tied through his belt loops, twitched and roiled.  

Mother served iced tea, and I kept a vigilant eye on those bags, knowing each contained one, if not several, snakes. I thought Mr. Prince was unbearably weird, but my father, if he were alive today, would laugh and assure me he was harmless. Dad was naturally generous and slow to pass judgment. I can’t imagine what they talked about, the snake collector and the hospital administrator, but a kind of midwestern hospitality was at work: no one is turned away from the door, even a man wearing snakes. 

A gregarious ladies’ man, my father had a story for every occasion, but I had learned not to always trust his claims. I doubt, for instance, that the pirate Blackbeard once slipped up the Chesapeake as far as the Magothy, but Dad said angry settlers had ambushed the pirate where he had moored in Black Hole Creek. During the most intense part of the battle, Blackbeard and his first mate managed to row ashore with a treasure chest. They walked for 15 minutes, then buried it, returned to the ship, and set sail. So somewhere near Barnstead lay a pirate’s chest of gold, Dad said. But in which direction did they walk? And how fast can two grown men walk carrying a heavy burden between them? As my father began taking longer and longer overnight business trips, I spent an increasing amount of time searching for treasure I thought would save us.

In my father’s absence and my mother’s increasing distraction, I found comfort in practicing self-sufficiency. I rearranged the furniture in my bedroom to resemble a living room. A small table in the center displayed a candy dish for visitors. I liked the idea that I could live on the apples in the orchard, walnuts and mulberries, even the bitter persimmons, and wild plums. I could crab and fish. Barnstead allowed me to believe I could take care of myself. It would never be necessary, of course, but there was a sense of security in the exercise. 

For all the tension around me as my parents’ distance grew, I never feared I’d be abandoned, as children often do. Instead, I worried that we would somehow lose Barnstead. I’d overhear my parents talking about developers and zoning laws, and I feared the woods would be lost to tract housing. I even began to worry that a tidal wave could appear at the mouth of the Magothy to sweep away my world. 

I prepared for a natural disaster because I didn’t know there were other kinds. My anxiety was well-founded. I had simply attached it to the wrong loss. 

As my parents’ dream of a river house full of children neared completion, so did their marriage. After a decade of sheltering my family, an ad was run, and Banstead was sold to the first person who walked in the door. 

My affection for Barnstead remains the intense attachment of a child, though I am a woman now. It was the only home in which I had two parents–a family. As I pass the entrance to our lane this afternoon, the house has been swallowed from view by the trees, but I heard it was torn down decades ago, replaced by a McMansion I do not want to see. 

I am a trespasser here. 

Whatever there was of value, I have taken with me–an appreciation for beauty, for labors of the heart, an unwillingness to pass judgment on their outcome. Now I am the mother who raised three children in the company of a river. Now, I write the books. 

Where do you carry the past? That’s not rhetorical, I’m really asking. What part of you is you because of where you’ve been?

My youngest, who lives in DC, is coming home for the weekend. I remember the night, years ago, when I went upstairs to check on her after the babysitter left. She was sound asleep in the twin Jenny Lind bed that had been mine as a child, the book she’d been reading, fallen to the floor. Kneeling to retrieve it, I lifted the white eyelet dust ruffle and noticed that the slats supporting the mattress were unusually narrow. 

Raising the fabric further, I realized for the first time that the slats were the rough, white battens that vertically sided the Barn when we found it, eventually replaced by cedar shingles, but saved and put to good use. 

Dropping the dust ruffle, I rose and walked out, leaving the legacy of Barnstead beneath new and tender dreams.

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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 was in my doctor’s office the other day thinking about some lies I was told as a kid…

1. This is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you.
2. No one is going to laugh.
3. You probably won’t need a shot.

I was going to receive a couple of injections, pleased that one of the advantages of being a grownup is that what used to be truly terrifying is no longer scary, like going to the dentist (drills) and going to the doctor (shots). 

 (Of course, the number one fear most people suffer, I still suffer as well: A fear greater than death, which is #4, or mutilation, which is #3, or divorce, #2. The most common fear greater than death? Public speaking.)

I did wonder, however, if it’s not that I’ve matured but that shots have gotten better, because I’m pretty sure when I was a kid, the needle was the size of a turkey baster, and the injection was not in my arm…  

So, I was taken back to a cubicle before I could even be seated in the waiting room, which is a bait-and-switch kind of move. You think you’re being seen right on time, but you’re really being removed from the interesting but jeopardizing melee of feverish coughers to cool your heels alone in an exam room. 

I got up on the table with the crinkly paper and eyed the same pictures on the wall that I’ve seen on previous visits—the blue-footed booby, the tortoise, and the gull…the chart on the back of the door where I could compute my body mass index. Time clicked on.  

I got out my phone and started emailing, having looked through all the drawers last time. Half an hour went by. I’m pretty punctual, so I admit I was getting a bit annoyed, but my doctor is retiring, and I didn’t want to be mad at her the last time we were going to see each other in this life. This was challenging, however, because I had seen her sitting in the room next door, eating a Caesar salad and yukking it up with a coworker when I was led to my cubicle, and I could still hear her socializing through the wall. Sometimes when this happens, I get up and open the door, so they can see me still sitting in there, a perky, punctual cuckoo in a clock. 

After a while, an apologetic nurse came in and said, “Let’s just go ahead and give you your flu shot and your COVID booster.”

“Sure,” I said, rolling up my sleeves with grown-up bravado. Have at it, sister! She pointedly closed the door upon leaving. 

When the door finally reopened, my doctor looked at me a little guiltily, but I did not complain. I am exceptional at not crying over spilled milk. I smiled hello, she sat down, and we chatted about our lives, though in reality, I barely know her.

She was installing a new birdfeeder, and I told her I used to wake to a cacophony of birdsong, but dawn comes silently now. Curious as to why, I looked it up. Turns out it was not my imagination. There is a virus sweeping through Maryland bird populations, and the State has asked that we stop using feeders (birds are polite but don’t need them). I noted I also haven’t seen the annual migration of yellow finches this fall, and that’s when we started talking about what will happen to us when we die. 

Sorry. She started it. 

I don’t have any health issues, so I don’t know why she suddenly said, “I think, when your time is up, it’s up.”

 (Oh my gosh…maybe she was talking about retirement!)

“Why do you think that?” I asked, intrigued and assuming otherwise. 

“I started thinking that when the Twin Towers fell,” she explained. “Too many people were on those planes who should not have been— unexpected changes to plans– and too many people were not on those flights who should have been—overslept, traffic jams.” 

I used to think that way as well for much the same reason, I told her. People survive the impossible and die from the improbable. But I don’t know anymore. I can make a case both ways. And as Stephan Hawking said, “I have noticed that even people who say they believe everything is predestined, look both ways before crossing the road.”  We laughed at that.

Suddenly she said, “I’m having a party. You should come.” And as we chatted, she wrote down an address and stuck the paper in my purse.

It’s at a church nearby, and although I won’t know a soul in attendance, I’m going. Alone, of course. It will be a little uncomfortable, and being alone makes it more so, but I’ve noticed that magic happens when you embrace the thing that most scares you. 

As long as it’s not a toast. That’s a fear worse than death. But I’ll think of you when I raise my glass and say, Cheers! I’m so glad I could come.

Because your best stories have not even begun. 

 

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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.