I am in the lying liars’ dressing rooms at South Moon Under, then I walk down the street to Anthropologie. Ever since they changed the lighting, running some kind of warm, magical illumination behind the mirror, I’ve looked suspiciously better in everything I’ve tried on. Then I get it home, and it’s an entirely different animal. One that I should take back, but often just give to my younger daughter, who looks good (for real) in everything. I like to think this is because I am innately generous, but I suspect it’s because I’m innately lazy.

The mirror was telling the story the store needed me to believe–genius marketing for the gullible– and, lazy or not, I have always been that. 

For instance, two contradictory claims floated around my high school, and I believed both.

Everyone is doing it.

No one is doing it.

I’m talking about Driver’s Ed. You knew that, right?

Here are some other claims I heard then that I’ve come to doubt:

1.  No one actually laughed
2.  You’ll be glad someday

As I grew up, the questionable claims didn’t disappear; they simply learned to sound wise.

1. I’m not the same person now as I was then 
2. Life never gives you a loss you can’t bear
3. Everyone else has it better. 

(In fact, everyone does have it better. I’m sorry.)

And lastly? That you will always feel what you feel now.

I have come to believe this is the most deceptive claim of all because there will come a time you need to cast off the line that has held you here in order to sail into what’s next.

We spend our lives attaching and investing in maintaining those attachments. I was at an office party last year at which each member of the staff introduced themselves by introducing their spouse and announcing how long they’d been married– apropos of absolutely nothing. 

Suddenly, I was aware of how often we are defined by the state of our attachments. And yet, no matter what those are, when it’s time to go, we need to let go—to loosen our grip on those here, to reset our GPS for there.

The last day of my mother’s life, she was unconscious, but I believed she could hear me, so I talked to her—telling her what a good mother she had been, how loved she was, reading her own poetry aloud, poetry she had once written, “is me, inside out.”

But when I mentioned the name of an old love, I saw her flinch as if to move from a flame. I knew then it was time to tell a new story. Not a review of who she had been, but a picture of what was to come. Memory was a tether. Imagination could set her free.

We are learning, however, that memory underlies imagination in a powerful way. Many of the brain regions that allow you to recall the past are the same brain regions that allow you to imagine your future. In fact, researchers say that until a child has acquired memory, he is unable to imagine at all.  

So, I began to paint a picture of what might lie beyond that hushed room in her assisted living facility, making it as safe and welcoming as I could imagine. 

“I’ll never want you to go, but I don’t need you to stay. You could be home by tonight,” I whispered.

‘You could be laughing at the dinner table with your mom and your dad. He will have come in from the fields just to wrap his youngest in his arms. Your older brother will be there, too, home from the war, so tall and handsome, and he’ll hug and protect you, and apologize for having been a tease because he will truly know how to love you better now. 

By tonight, you could be sitting on the quilted bedspread watching your pretty, older sister get ready for a date. You could walk down the road to thank the elderly brothers who, when you nearly died from stepping on a rusty nail at the age of five, carved crutches just your size so you could walk again. 

And you will walk again—no wheelchair– but strong and true and beautiful. 

You can stroll down to the creek where you hid an old dress in the reeds and secretly taught yourself to swim. Look! The sun is slipping low in the western sky, the sycamore shadows are long on the pond. Honeysuckle is sweet in the air.  

Listen! Your parents are calling you.

We are learning how the brain works, how memories are made, even how to un-remember. But there by her bed, I could only give my mother my sense of what is to come based on the experiences that have created my imagination. 

But maybe that was the best evidence possible of the mother she’d been to me. Because the world I assured her was waiting, transcended love’s need to stay here.

And she left, without a word, that very night. 

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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 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