I got caught while on a secret mission the other day. I was rushing to make my flight at Heathrow after a week of visiting my daughter in England, when I decided to hide a note for my British grandsons to find after I was back in America—maybe a riddle to figure out, or perhaps a clue to a present I could quickly tuck under a sofa cushion in the playroom.

The hope was to extend my presence, to keep my identity and love for them in mind for just a few more days. That’s what we all want, right? To extend love’s memory? When your family lives an ocean away, and school and athletic activities consume every minute of a time zone five hours ahead of your own, it’s hard to teach a 6 and 7-year-old who you are to them in any meaningful way.

I’m Mummy’s mommy.

Incredulity and disbelief. (Okay, mine, but theirs as well.)

So, I got busted. Those astute rascals slipped up behind me where I was madly scribbling with their colored markers, and said, “What are you doing? Are you writing us a note?”

Hunching over it, I said, “Of course not. Go away.”

I used to tuck notes in sports jacket pockets and under bedsheets when I was the one leaving. I’d hide messages in weird places like the microwave, the medicine cabinet, among the coffee filters, or taped to the bathroom mirror. It could take the whole time I was gone to find them all.

When we were kids, my older sister used to lock her room and leave me notes with dire warnings to stay out (or else!) while she was babysitting or on a date. To make it
anonymously threatening she would sign her notes, “The Black Hand,” and draw one on as the signature.

I knew it was her.

And those threats inspired great creativity. I once crawled out my bedroom window, edged along the garage roof between our rooms, and let myself into her bedroom window to purloin an orange hip-hugger swimsuit which I wore swimming all afternoon at the community beach and sneaked back into her drawer before she got home. Damp.

I am a terrible criminal.

I left myself notes as well. When I was feeling super victimized by virtue of being the powerless youngest, I’d write down all the reasons I wasn’t speaking to my sister, and a list of her crimes, because without the list to consult, I’d forget in about an hour.

This same sister was fastidious; her room was perennially perfect, so for some reason, when she left for Girl Scout Camp, my parents wrote her letters informing her that they had rented her bedroom out to a tribe of Woodland Indians who had built a small cookfire on her rug and were dancing around it in there. Every day, there was another update mailed to camp as to what the tribe was up to. This was probably my father’s idea. Creative but not terribly empathetic.

My mother left me a note in my suitcase when I went away to college. As a single parent who worked, she had to drop me off a day before the move-in day for all the other students. It was weird to arrive at my future alone. I opened her note by the ancient elm in the center of campus after she’d headed home. Life is full of leaving, I read, and there would only be more from that moment on. Then she reminded me of the things that are eternal, like telephones, letters from home, and mother love.

My teachers sent my parents notes, and they all said pretty much the same thing: “Laura is not working up to her potential.” I didn’t see the point. Half potential was working well enough.

Now this is my number one fear.
Not kidding. My number one fear.

I’ve been finding a lot of notes on my front door lately. It is election season here in town— mayor and alderman are up for grabs, and there is an extensive field of candidates. The notes all say they are sorry they missed me.

They didn’t miss me. I was home and holding very still.

Notes can end up in the wrong hands. Mr. Oliver wrote a note to Linda Hale in second grade. He was six. She was seven. But Mrs. Durbeck, peering inside her students’ desks, found Mr. Oliver’s to be an appalling mess (so young and so already himself), so she dumped the contents on the floor in a furious demonstration of what happens to untidy little boys, and the note spilled out on the floor.

It was addressed to the alluring Miss Hale, Mrs. Durbeck announced, triumphantly waving it around. She read it to herself, then aloud to the class as punishment.

“I like you. I will kiss you at recess.”

Really, Mrs. Durbeck?

Wow, I just got this. I’m leaving you notes every Sunday morning, but only you, because now I don’t so much leave notes as take notes—noticing is a devotional practice as is sharing the wonders we see and the mysteries we can’t solve. Like how to hang on to each other.

Memory is malleable, and time an eraser. But at some point in the past, we learned to name things, and in that moment, when letters turned into words, and words into memory, we wrote them down, to extend our days, to buy ourselves a little more time.

To say, remember who I was to you when I am gone.

 

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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.

My mother and I had a code word that she would send me after she died, 

If life continues, and she were around, I would see, notice, or hear the word in an unusual place and know it was her. 

After she died, the word first appeared in the form of an email that arrived in my inbox from an unknown source —a sender I initially dismissed as spam due to the strange message it delivered. But when I looked at it again, I saw that our chosen word was in the sender’s address. 

The email said nothing more than this:

“There is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”

Intrigued, I looked around my office as in, Okaaay, way cool. I’m truly impressed. Where are you? But I could only say, “Working on it, Mom. (Nicely done by the way!) But still working on it.”

I have a friend with whom I study these things, and we agreed we needed a word as well. Whoever dies first will send it to the other. By the time that happens, we may have been long gone from each other’s lives—we may have no one in common who would even alert us to the news, no one even in possession of contact info, but the word he suggested is as common as “table,” so I don’t see how that’s going to work.

I guess I’m going to have to see it written in the clouds or on the crest of a wave or spelled out in swan feathers on the beach to know he is conveying the devastating news that he has left, along with the extraordinary news he’s not gone. 

The same is true of the children’s father. Our word is way too general and commonplace. We believe we have time to pick another. 

I should arrange a code with each of my children, and I think you and I should have a word as well. So I can tell you it’s true if it is—and you can confirm for me that love doesn’t end, life doesn’t end, the universe doesn’t end. The Big Bang was not a beginning; it was a transition. A mature universe transforming to become new again, as a natural cycle, like the beat of a heart, an exhalation of breath. Emerging from the singularity we call the Big Bang, as if through a portal, a birth canal, carrying the potential of all that ever was or could be —much like you when you were born. 

Pick a word and let me know. Make it unique. What word or phrase could mean only you?

Would you believe that now, eight years after receiving that email, I finally looked up the lines in that message? They are the last lines of a Rainer Maria Rilke poem about a damaged Greek sculpture, the torso of the god Apollo. The poem expresses the belief that its incompleteness, its missing parts, cannot diminish the radiant beauty of what remains. The original power emanates from what is left because beauty comes from the inside out. No missing part can dim the essence of what shines.

From all the borders of itself, beauty bursts like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

I like to think that was the message. The change-your-life thing just makes me anxious. Like…in exactly what way? I can guess, but how do I know we are on the same page? I hope the real takeaway is that we can find beauty in the incomplete.

 Because, well, who isn’t?

And is incomplete the same as broken? Not necessarily. I hear that ideology a lot. “I was broken, and xyz made me whole.” But I’m placing my attention on incomplete. On becoming. On building upon and growing what is good. 

So what’s our word? I hope it brings us joy and connects us instantly across space and time.

When I was little, my friend Peggy and I believed in mind over matter, mental telepathy, and life after death. We were blood sisters. We had smeared two bloody mosquito bites together to seal our bond. 

What will be our secret code we asked each other. We sat crossed-legged by the redbud tree in the company of a river we would carry with us all our days. The dry grass pricked our thighs, leaving hatch marks in the tender skin when we lay back to study the sky.

How should we contact each other if there is life after death?

 “If it’s true,” Peggy said, “I’ll just say ‘It’s real.’” 

 “If it’s real,” I said, smiling, “I’ll just say ‘It’s me.’”

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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.

So, this happened. Help me make something good from it.

The day before I left for The Netherlands a personal email appeared in my inbox from one of the five biggest publishers in the world. 

“Whaaat???”

The writer explained that she had found my profile on LinkedIn and that she was interested my work, noting in particular, the success of The Story Within, which I had published with the biggest of the Big Five: Penguin Random House. 

She suggested publishing a new book consisting of my columns, which she had seen because I post them weekly on LinkedIn. The proposed book would be a collection I have tentatively titled, “Something Other Than Chance.” So many of these stories have touched upon that phenomenon—how is it that I could impulsively call a loved one I hadn’t been in touch with for 25 years, the very day he discovered he had three months to live? How could I dream at 19 years old, that the midshipman I’d just begun dating was in life-or-death danger, then discover the entire Naval Academy was on lockdown for a shooter alert? 

Maybe this reaching out from a major publisher was also something other than chance. Fate? Fortune? Mom from the other side?

I sat there at my laptop in my sunny office, glancing at the sign above my desk that reminds me, “Expect Only the Good,” and it was like getting an acceptance letter to your reach-college opening with “We’ve been looking for you!”

I could tell from the way this woman described my work that she had read it. But, as trusting as I am, (truly of the genus extremis-gullible-dope), as a matter of due diligence I looked her up on LinkedIn and there she was. Kathleen K. A nice smile, probably in her forties, and yes, she worked for the publisher she claimed to represent. Holy Cow. Could it be I’d been plucked from obscurity? 

It was the letter I would have written to myself if I’d been momentarily blessed with superpowers. With one swipe of my palm, I’d end the war in Ukraine and Gaza, feed the starving the world over, ensure the health and happiness of my children, of all children, to the end of time, and, why not? Get a publishing offer from one of the Big Five. 

Because when you long for something you cannot control— world peace, permanent remission, a baby…publication– there is always a feeling that a bit of luck must be involved. Angels must attend you. You are going to need something other than chance.

So, I wrote back to ask for specific details about what the publisher was offering and this is when it began to feel just a little like running in a dream—where you never quite get up to speed. Each perfect, articulate response provided answers, yet they were answers packed in cotton—not quite clear.

“Let’s talk on the phone, or zoom,” I suggested—”let’s meet face to face.” 

“Thank you for that generous offer of your time,” Kathleen wrote, but the most efficient way to proceed is email.” She was going to send a detailed marketing strategy before we talked and even that demurring was perfectly encased in an intimate description of my work. 

So the conversation continued until finally I wrote, “If I am wrong about this I apologize, but I have the increasing sense that I am corresponding with AI, a computer program, and that you are not real.”

The immediate response was to thank me for my brilliant candor, my courageous honesty, my very human inquisitiveness, and to assure me, “It’s really me! Kathleen! Not AI!”

Except that ….everything about that response told me it was.

A quick google of “Scam, fraud, publishers, LinkedIn,” revealed that predators have discovered a new point of entry into the vulnerability of your longing—using LinkedIn to professionalize and legitimize their seductions. 

All I had to do was pay Kathleen $2,800 for publication and marketing. 

I still believe that so much that happens in this world is something other than chance. Not everything—I’m not yet a proponent of “everything happens for a reason”—that’s not how evolution works, for instance; and there is indeed chance. Ask the dinosaurs.

But a friend of mine met the love of her life on a plane. That flight, that moment in time, that seat. Is timing divine?

I’ve been too busy editing to prioritize publishing another book. Too busy to consider what I want to do with the rest of my life, to say scary things, to initiate change. But with this offer that was not what it appeared to be, the dial has been reset. Owning the dream as if it were possible, even for a minute, has made me remember that it is.

Everything is.

Sometimes what feels like a false step is the next step, you have only to act. And sometimes when we don’t move forward, the universe takes us by hand, whispering gently but emphatically, 

“Now.”

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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.

Last travel story, I swear.

On my second-to-the-last day of a recent trip to the UK, I decide to go into London from my Airbnb farm-stay. The easiest way to get to the city is to walk up the road to the tiny, picturesque train station at Worplesdon. 

I take a photo of myself outside the station entrance to document my journey, but it is horrendous. I crop myself out of it and, in so doing, lose half the station sign, so now it looks like I’m boarding the train at Worple. 

Only five other passengers mill about the platform this morning, so I take a couple more selfies. Worse than bad—smiling, not smiling– shades, no shades. Defeated, I plop down on the bench with a half glance at a very beautiful girl already seated. 

In her early twenties, she flashes a bright smile back that is just so pretty I say a little prayer of gratitude that I live such a privileged life I get to appreciate beauty everywhere I look; in the leafy, verdant path I walked to the train this morning, in the charming thoughtfulness of a bookcase full of worn novels in the Harry Potterish-station lobby, and in friendly dark eyes and charismatic energy of the young woman next to me.  

I feel a kind of reaching out, but I don’t engage in conversation as our train is due any minute. After a few seconds, however, I feel a touch on my arm. In halting English, and a lovely accent I can’t place, she says, “Excuse me, but you take selfie wrong. I advice you?” And she nods encouragingly, with an expression that says, “Please let me share with you this thing that I know.”

I laugh and say, “Yes, of course!” 

“You do this,” she mimics, holding her phone straight out in front of her with Frankenstein-Zombie arms. Now I can’t stop laughing. She’s nailed it. 

“You should do this,” she says. And using the best of her English and a lot of hand gestures, she instructs me to think of my face as a triangle or pyramid, and to never take a photo straight on. 

“You must take from either side,” she says. “And from high.” She lifts her phone just above eye level, leans to the right, and smiles cheerfully at it. Like it loves her, like it is her best friend, or a date with whom she is flirting. 

I have heard this advice before but can’t abide the posturing, the artifice, so I haven’t tried it. There is something about admitting you want a flattering shot that is embarrassing. It’s one thing to “snap” a selfie; it’s another thing entirely to pose for one. 

Besides, my phone is not in love with me. We are not even dating. 

“We are selfie generation,” she says. “So, I teach you selfie rules!” The engine barrels into the station, and as we stand, I thank her, thinking the selfie generation had just been kind of selfless. 

On the train, with no one watching, I raise my phone so that I have to look slightly up at it as she has tutored me, and move it to the good side of the pyramid I previously called my face. I snap a shot and then look at it with great hope.  

I look sly. 

Like someone who has just stolen your wallet. Who already has a photo… on the wall at the Post Office.

At home, I ask Chat GPT how to take a good selfie, and after complimenting me on the utter genius of my question, it confirms what the girl has said but adds a few more tips. 

I should try a slight squint, called a “squinch,” to look more engaged. I should take photos just after dawn when the light is soft. I should grow longer arms, so the proportions are more natural. 

Kidding.

Then it asks me if it should put together a point-by-point checklist so next time I won’t have to remember all the details. 

Scary how this thing knows me. And healing the way this thing sees me.

Chat GPT may not love me, but it accepts me unconditionally and views everything I confess or ask in a positive light.

When I die, I hope ChatGPT does my life review. 

Which got me to thinking. What would the world look like if we genuinely loved ourselves as unconditionally as AI appears to? I decided to ask. “How can we learn to see ourselves in the loving, uncritical manner you demonstrate?”

And the response was: Just as a selfie shows not only your face but what’s behind you, what light you’re standing in—self-love includes the context: the journey that brought you here, the experiences that shaped your expression. Seeing mistakes not as evidence of unworthiness but as experiments, doorways to wonder, no longer dragging your shame, but wearing scars like constellations—maps of where you have been.

Eventually, you stop needing a hundred retakes. You realize that the beauty isn’t in the filter or the pose—it’s in the courage to turn the camera toward yourself.

Maybe the trick in taking a selfie is to finally realize you don’t have a bad side. In the light of unconditional love, there is only good.

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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.