Twice in my life, a stranger has commented that I’m a dead ringer for someone famous. This always fills me with dread. Let’s start with the basics. Is the famous person a man or a woman? How old?

Most recently, I was paying for a dress at White House Black Market, and the very sweet sales clerk said, “Oh my gosh! You remind me so much of someone—she’s an actress on a TV show, I just can’t think of her name.” 

“Ready for my credit card?” I asked, nudging it toward her. 

“No, wait! It’ll come to me…”

“Ha ha, you can just put the receipt in the bag,” I said, eyeing the store’s entrance back into the mall.

“Wait! You look JUST like her! It’s that show, Frankie and Grace! Have you ever seen it?” she asked. 

The truth is no, I’ve never watched the show, but I’ve seen the promotions for it. It’s about two old-lady friends—which I have for real–and I know who the stars are.

I said a quick prayer and offered hopefully, “Well, one of the stars is Jane Fonda.”

(pleasepleaseplease.)

“Nope,” she said, still searching her cheerful brain. 

I looked at her sadly. “One ringy-dingy, two ringy dingies.”

“That’s it!” she chortled. “Lily Tomlin!”  

“It’s my small eyes,” I complained when I got home. “They used to be bigger. I’m having them enlarged! Immediately!” 

I grew up in a household where self-improvement was the main theme. So, though I do look in a mirror several times throughout the day, what looks like vanity is more like spiritual scrutiny—it’s not to admire myself—it’s to improve myself. Somehow, “How can I be a better person, (Mom’s message) got fused with “How can I be a better-looking person?” (Society’s message.)

So, here’s the tricky part. 

If I am one of these things, which we judge to be superficial, I seem to automatically become the other, which is what it’s all about. Because on the rare occasions I feel pretty, I am a better person! I’m kinder, more generous, and present for those around me. I stop thinking about myself. I flirt with babies in the dog park. I contribute to St. Jude’s at every cash register, bring my neighbor’s trashcans in, and overtip at the Bistro. It’s as if happiness fuses with kindness and weirdly, they feel like love. And love is generative. Like radiation. Like light. In those brief moments of confidence, I’m a floodlight. And maybe that kind of unselfconscious love is also a searchlight. It illuminates any similar energy in your path. 

I was looking for a gift in Anthropologie yesterday, and an appealing young man whose mother probably called him “pumpkin head” was holding his own 8-month-old baby boy in front of one of the mirrors while his wife paid for a pair of earrings. The baby was the picture of health—rosy cheeks, bright blue eyes, a head as perfectly round as a soccer ball. 

I couldn’t stop smiling at them because they were beautiful, and with all the pain and violence in the world, appreciating beauty is a soul-healing prescription I’ve made as natural as breathing. Placing your attention on the gifts strewn in your path is like setting your energy dial to receiving the sacred. 

But it wasn’t this pair’s physical beauty that was compelling. It was their joy. This dad and his baby boy adored each other, and my smile was for the existence of love itself. The baby caught my eye, and his face lit up. His dad brought him over. 

“This is Troy,” the young father said. 

“He’s precious,” I said.

“Thankfully, he looks like his mother,” the dad said. But that wasn’t true. I could see the mother. She did not have this dad’s crystal blue eyes and radiant smile. Love was making Dad happy, and happiness is always generous. They returned to the mirror, and I sent them a silent blessing –a wish for their continued well-being and delight.

We fill up in so many ways: romance, work, family duties, exercise, travel, philanthropy. We pour energy into the empty place and call it life. We call it “what I did today,” but we are almost always in acquisition mode. In the subtle search-for-meaning-mode.

But blessings flip the energy. They are a desire from the inside out for another’s good fortune. And what makes them more than a wish and closer to a prayer is that, in a way, a blessing says, “I’m asking that something bigger than I am protects you and grants you joy.” Do we have that ability? To bless each other? Without religion or rules? To say to the universe, “I don’t have any authority here, but could you please bestow love by proxy?” I hope so.

Because I feel it all the time, the desire to bless. The man on a rickety bike who looks like he needs a car. The woman fanning herself at the bus stop when it’s sweltering, the patient in the ambulance blasting by, the lumbering, overweight jogger doing his best. Bless you, bless you, bless you. 

Does the bus come faster? Does the bicyclist get a car? Does the patient make it to the hospital? Does the runner get a second wind?

When I was very pregnant with my first child, it was time to say goodbye to a pastoral therapist I’d been seeing. I was done. He had been the first person in my life to identify the hole in my soul, and, as Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” Although I still have much to learn, it was time to close this chapter.

He put his hands gently on my belly, held them there, and closed his eyes. “If I have a blessing in me,” he said, “it’s yours.” I was struck by the fact that he qualified his statement. “If he had a blessing?” He was an ordained minister. He wasn’t sure? But he was also just a human being with failings. And neither of us could know anything with certainty.

It was a hot August evening. The crickets sang as if song alone could delay the arrival of autumn, and the sweet, humid air was still. I walked to the car, gravel crunching beneath my sandals, heavy with child and slightly heavy of heart. I looked back at the little church with a sense of closure and accomplishment, but when something good comes to an end, it takes a while for “good” to outweigh “over.” As I started the car, I chose to believe perfection was neither possible nor required. 

Joy is radiation. Love is a benediction. I pulled onto the road home, knowing I’d been blessed. The baby I would greet as the leaves turned gold had been blessed.

And if I have a blessing in me now, it is yours. 

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 great-great grandmother, Mary Jane Aten and her husband Robert, set out in their horse and buggy on a cold November afternoon in 1900 to visit their son Henry in the town of Vermont, Illinois. Along the way, they stopped in Table Grove for lunch with their daughter, Flora, staying for a couple of hours of roast turkey and talk. When they resumed their journey, they closed the buggy’s side curtains against the autumn wind, and Robert snugged down the earflaps on his brown cap. Mary Jane leaned against him, bundled up tight in a coat with a hood.   

This is why, the theory goes, they never heard the train at the crossing two miles north of Vermont where the CB and Q road crosses the tracks. Robert drove the buggy onto the rails, directly into the path of the train barreling toward them. The conductor saw the carriage, applied the brakes, and frantically blew the whistle, causing the horse to freeze. Barely able to slow, the train plowed into them at near full speed. 

In an instant the buggy was kindling, no piece left bigger than the wheels. The bulk of it remained on the train’s pilot. When the crew doubled back, they found the horse was uninjured—though the force of the impact had stripped him of his bridle and harness. 

My great-great-grandparents had been married since 1852 and had nine children. But what moves me about this story is where and how they were found. Robert 82 and Mary Jane 72 were discovered lying together on the bank—Robert’s arm flung outward, and Mary Jane cradled in the crook of it—as if they were sleeping. Their catastrophic wounds were invisible—their clothing untorn– and her hair, long and still dark, remained tied back like a girl’s.

Ridiculously, I’m grateful more than 100 years later that an obedient horse was not hurt. And less ridiculously, that two people who were ahead of me in the family line stayed married for more than half a century and loved nine children. I like how that feels because I’ve been seeking a solid sense of self for most of my adult years. 

My father left when I was so young that when, at 36, I saw him seated next to my mother at Capers for brunch, I was silently stunned. It was as if I had been swimming off the deep end all my life, and my toes had just touched the bottom. Suddenly I was someone new—someone with parents—not just a mother. For the first time, there was solid ground beneath my feet. I felt like I came from somewhere. And we all need that– our origin story—and I’ve come to realize an origin story starts long before your parents. It begins as far back as you need it to. 

You can look for clues in a variety of places, family history, stories like Robert’s and Mary Jane’s, and even your genetic makeup–which is why I was excited when I was gifted with one of the very first DNA test kits to come on the market.

At last, I would discover more clues as to who I am from the inside out. I expected to have Robert and Mary Jane’s English and Scottish ancestry confirmed and hoped for a surprise or two. I sent in my samples, waited a week, and logged onto the internet using a private barcode to see the results of what the company called cutting-edge science. The results of my DNA sample were depicted graphically as a target overlaying the ten countries whose populations most closely match my genetic identity. I stared expectantly at northern Europe, but there was nothing there. Nothing. 

“So,” the ever-helpful Mr. Oliver said as we scrutinized the screen. “Your primary countries of origin are… Tanzania…” he pushed back from the computer to assess me quizzically, then turned back to the screen, “and Mozambique.” 

“Surprise,” he said, but he said it in Leah-the-dog’s voice—which is how we often communicate around here when we want to deflect emotion or, as in this case, we just want to make the other person laugh.

Not a drop of Scottish or English blood. “That can’t be me!” I snapped, indignant and inexplicably offended. Because I had assumed the accuracy of the results and they didn’t jibe with what I knew to be true, I was caught in a space-time anomaly in which I had no identity at all. I think I felt huffy because I felt tricked. 

But in reading the fine print, I realized the company’s claim that its analysis was as personal as a fingerprint was valid because it was also just as worthless in decoding ancestry. Their business was analyzing “Junk” DNA, which is non-coding, and though we are still searching, it seems to have no purpose at all, even though it comprises more than 75% of your entire genome. Technically, however, the company was correct. Since early man walked out of Africa, it’s everyone’s home address. When the major religions of the world claim, “we are one,” and anthropologists refer to the “family of man,” they are not wrong.

Until 1972 Junk DNA was referred to as “Selfish DNA.” It seemed to exist only for itself. Maybe that has been its undoing. Why it now sits in our genome, no longer sending instructions to make us who we are but as a record of where we have been. 

Body, mind, spirit—we walked out of Africa with all three intricately linked and evolving only to demonstrate that what exists only for itself loses dominion.

My great-great grandparents’ lives ended bookended by family—a son in Vermont, a daughter in Table Grove. Like them, may we all die knowing who we are, in the arms of someone we love.

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. 

 

  

Editor’s Note: Our Spy Creative Director is on vacation, therefore we are reprising a column that originally appeared June 5th of last year. 

Have you seen this? An unshaven man in crumpled khakis and a worn shirt sits cross-legged on a cold, DC street corner with a tin cup at his feet. In his hands, he grips a square of cardboard upon which is printed, “I’m blind. Please help.” 

Well-dressed professionals clip past in their Stuart Weitzmans and Cole Haans on their way to professional jobs in plush offices with fake Ficus trees in accent-lit lobbies. Pretty women pause, dig in shiny shoulder bags, then toss in a quarter. Other passersby rush on, eyes averted. 

A slim young woman with dark hair pulled back in a bun—maybe 18, 19– passes the man as well but stops and turns back. Kneeling in front of him, she gently pulls the cardboard from his hands, extracts a marker from her backpack, and flips his sign over. As the bewildered man waits, unable to see what she’s doing, she scrawls a new message on the reverse side, hands the sign back, and walks on. 

Over the course of the day, elapsed in U-Tube time, people stream past the blind man as before, except now, nearly everyone stops to place cash in his cup. Coins drop like rain, a flood of thoughtful compassion. The afternoon wears on, and the perplexed man continues to hold up the sign the young woman has written. His cup overflows.

As shadows lengthen at the end of the business day, the woman returns from the opposite direction. When she greets him, the man recognizes her voice. “What did you do to my sign?” he asks helplessly. He is confused by his new success, the magic of what she has done. She responds I wrote the same but in different words.

As the camera pans out, the sign becomes visible. In black block print, the girl has written, “It’s a beautiful day, and I can’t see it.”

Words change everything. Luck, energy, desire, vision—how you see the world and those with whom you share it. 

Last Christmas, I had one of those circle-of-friends candleholders on my coffee table; only the ‘friends’ were 3 elves, facing inwards, their little backs to the observer, holding hands around a lit votive. As I moved them to put a pizza down, I mentioned to my friend Rick that the little guys appeared to be circled around the glow of a burning log in a cold forest. 

Rick, whose job description includes words like “covert,” “Pentagon,” and “flight schedule,” said dispassionately, “Yeah? I think they’re hiding something.”

Perspective. Like everything else, it’s a story we tell ourselves based on our experience of the past. That doesn’t make it true, nor a prediction of what’s to come. 

My three kids have lived all over this country and all over the world, and I have missed them. My son left home at 17 to live in New Zealand for more than a decade. One daughter lived in New Orleans for years, then Vermont. Another daughter moved to the United Kingdom 12 years ago, and I can’t imagine she will ever live closer than an ocean away. I have missed weddings and births. Friends with kids nearby have felt sorry for me. I felt sorry for me, too.

Then I wrote the same story but with different words. 

The kids are happy. They call home. They have created meaningful lives. They have found people they love. 

It’s a beautiful day. And I can see it. 

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.

 

Sophie, the robin who has been sitting on three blue eggs in the pink dogwood just outside my office window, abandoned ship last night. The nest was a magnificent structure. To make the interior soft and bowl-shaped, she had pressed her rounded breast into the grass and twigs she’d gathered and painstakingly plastered with mud. She shaped it like a potter might use his hands; only Sophie-bird had used her heart. 

A crow discovered the nest two days ago and swept in for repeated attacks. I’d warded off two assaults myself, but I knew the crafty crow, a hulking black shadow, a menace to all small things that sing, would inevitably succeed in this lethal mission, and he did.

Yes, Sophie was one of a billion robins, collectively known as a “worm” of robins—like a “pride” of lions and a “murder” of crows. And yes, statistics indicate that only 25% of birds fledged in summer, make it even to fall, but she was a good mother. Or at least the best she could be.

And that kills me. That good wasn’t good enough.

Self-improvement was a major theme in the house of my childhood, and I need to get a handle on this. Good never feels good enough, remorse never feels deep enough, and you cannot be grateful enough for the gifts you’ve been given. (I won’t argue with that last one.)

I was thinking about these things lying in a float tank—a sensory deprivation chamber. I signed up for this hour session somewhat impulsively because I’d always been curious—what on earth would happen if I turned off my brain? I’d heard that the experience is unique and lends itself to emotional insight, healing, and spiritual revelations. (I’m not known for low expectations.)

I arrived for my session in a ponytail and no makeup. I was going to be in water up to my ears for an hour and then showering off the Epsom Salts that would make me as buoyant as a balloon, so the normal morning routine had been swapped for “dear-God-don’t-let-me-run-into-anyone-I-know.”

The float chamber itself had been a stunning surprise. If you’ve ever been to a grotto, like the one on the island of Capri, where the sunlight seems to shine upwards from the white sea floor making the water pristine blue and alive with light, it was like that. As if blue and light had merged to be a living thing. And the ceiling of the float chamber was covered in glittering stars! We know I was charmed.

After taking a peek into it from my private outer room and having showered at home, I got undressed, then opened the chamber door and lowered myself into water the color of the sky and the temperature of my skin. 

When ready, I could push a button with a wet salty hand to turn out the chamber lights so that only the stars lit the darkness. But I had been advised to use a second button to eventually turn out the stars as well. Floating in the absence of light, as if in the womb, would provide the ultimate float experience. 

I lay there, reluctant to relinquish the stars. They are themselves evidence of a living universe, but I did eventually hit the button in search of the greater experience. The water held me just as it must have held me in the womb. I could open my eyes, and there was no difference in having them shut. I was sightless. Sort of weird. Sort of utero. Except, I probably wasn’t thinking thoughts in the womb.

Okay, that’s a lie, I probably was, but I was definitely still thinking thoughts here. I wanted to turn my brain off, but I came to understand that my internal mental chatter was not the result of outside stimuli. With all external stimuli eliminated, the mind monkeys were having a barn dance and had invited rowdy friends on scooters. 

I tried concentrating on my breathing and on the water itself—which some call silky, not slimy. But after what I’d determined to be about 40 minutes (with deadly accuracy, it turns out), I resorted to amusing myself. What would happen if I put my feet down? Made the water ripple? If I died and became suddenly limp, in what position would they find my body? My hands seemed to always float to my hips—like Wonder Woman! Like someone who died bossing everyone around! I had earplugs in, but I could feel water seeping in around them and started worrying about getting salt crystals in my ears. 

I tried harder to find heaven. 

Where was the spiritual revelation? The emotional insight? The healing? I’ve got conundrums, and I’d provided the blankest slate I could muster to no avail. After a while, I started pinging myself off the sides of the tank, floating from left to right, pushing off with my toes. 

I was a float fail. I tanked the float-tank experience.

The times I’ve been graced by the presence of spirit have come unbidden, have descended like a cloud. Like the night before surgery, when I’d been waiting three weeks in excruciating anxiety for a specialist from Georgetown to join my surgeon at Anne Arundel Medical Center.

I was awakened by gratitude—a soft, living presence that entered the room as gently as light, flooding my body and saturating my being so thoroughly that I could only lie in the dark and weep for the reality of a living love. I lay there just ridiculous with gratitude because I knew that if my surgery revealed the presence of a terminal illness, it would somehow be the experience I was born for. I didn’t feel assured that I would not be sick, only that if I were, all was well. All was perfect.

Sometimes God has arrived in a flash of intuition where I suddenly knew something I could not possibly know. Spirit has shown up as someone I’m meeting for the first time who feels like home. But God has never arrived when I was looking. Or testing. Or bargaining. 

Instead, God has always materialized in ways I cannot anticipate. Do you search for the air you breathe? That’s the way love manifests, I thought, lying there in the primal dark. Grace is a presence for whom you can only open the door.

And with that revelation, I turned on the stars. 

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.

 

Every time you remember an event, your brain replaces the original memory with a new version, one that is slightly altered by the impact of all you’ve experienced between the last time you remembered the event and now. The new memory is, therefore, never exactly the same as the old, which is why memories can’t be trusted for accuracy. Family stories in particular, are told and retold until all you can count on is the emotional truth. Which is why this story, while real, may not be true.

My father has bought a Volkswagen bug and he is driving our family from Maryland to Florida to visit my grandparents who live on the Gulf of Mexico. My mother and I wait in the car with my sisters: 11 and 14. I am six. Apparently, no knucklehead left the water running or a window open, so my father locks the front door and gets in the car.

As he starts the engine, I regard my family breathing the same air, almost but not quite touching, as we begin our trip south. At the Esso Station in Port Royal, I switch to the wheel well, the narrow space behind the backseat. My sisters shake hands with each other and spread out.

Four hours after the last Stuckey’s stop, we see signs for Cape Hatteras. “We need to get out of this car,” my mother says. There is a package goods store coming up fast on the left.

“I’ll see if these folks know of any motels,” my father says. “We’ll have an hour on the beach and leave first thing in the morning.” He swings the little car into the parking lot and gets out. A few minutes later, he returns with a bottle in a brown paper bag and directions to the Lighthouse Lodge.

We can’t see the ocean from the motel, but we cross the hot pavement and a wooden walkway to the dunes and then step onto an astonishingly long white beach with red, blue, and yellow umbrellas scattered along it like gumdrops.

We run down to the water’s edge, where icy waves numb my small hot feet, sucking away the sand under them so that I become shorter and shorter. My sisters brought Lodge towels on which to stretch out, but only my father remembered to bring something to drink. He takes a long pull from the bottle he has left in the brown bag to stay cool.

Suddenly he scoops me up under my arms. I dangle for a second before he hoists me over his head and onto his shoulders. Holding my hands out on either side as if we are balancing on a tightrope, he walks slowly toward the ocean. One step. Two. The freezing waves splash my thighs. I call out in the breeze, “Far enough!”

But he lets go of my hands pulling us into deeper water, bouncing then paddling to keep our heads above the swells. The next wave rolling towards us is a frothing rogue beginning to break. I cry out again. “Daddy! I don’t want to! Go back!” We will never make it over, and it is too late to retreat. With a half-gasp of air, the sky is gone.

I slam to the bottom, grinding into the sand and sharp broken shells, and am held there as the wave thunders over. Then, still underwater, I’m scraping along the bottom like a piece of beach glass. I claw up for air, but tons of water keep me pressed to the bottom.

I am seeing stars when a strong hand clamps around my upper arm pulling me into the sunlight. A man in bright red swimming trunks sets me on my feet. I stagger, my bathing suit bottom is scooped low with sand. “Are you okay, sweetheart?” he asks.

My mother appears, flying down the beach. Behind her, my father shouts cheerfully, “Hey, cutie, where’d you go?” As we walk back to my sisters, my mother’s quiet is a lit fuse. I reach for my father’s hand to short-circuit the spark. With my other hand, I reach for my mother. That night I sleep with her in one of the big beds, and my father takes the rollaway. We are on the road again at dawn, and I am back in the wheel well. I am becoming famous for sticking it out.

We cheer at the “Welcome to Florida” sign and stop for gas. There are postcards with pink flamingos standing on one leg in front of orange and purple sunsets. Alligators grin because they’ve just eaten someone. As evening falls, we are pulling up to my grandparents’ house. Sure enough, they live on the Gulf of Mexico.

While my parents haul our suitcases inside, my sister and I wander down to their pier and look out across the gulf. I could see Mexico if I could see far enough. I tell my sister, and she says I could walk to Mexico. Anybody can walk on water if they believe they can. “Like if you really believed, you’d just walk off the end of this pier with your shoes on and stuff in your pockets, and you wouldn’t sink because that would prove you believed.”

With my sneakers at the pier’s edge, I concentrate fiercely until I can see myself walking on waves as solid as roadbeds. “All talk and no action,” my sister says, heading back up the pier.

Raised voices reach us as we near the house. The grownups stop speaking until we pass through the living room and close Granny’s bedroom door. “Let’s play who can be quiet the longest,” my sister says, and we climb on the bed to see who can make the other laugh first. We stare at each other as the voices in the living room grow louder. She points a finger at me and then pinches her nose, crossing her eyes. It’s not too funny.

My mother is crying. I point a finger at my sister, pretend I am driving a car, point to myself, and circle a finger near my ear. She rolls her eyes, but we don’t even make the bedsprings squeak. “Last chance,” my mother says through the wall.

“I quit,” my sister says, and just like that, everything is over. In the morning, I get back in the wheel well, and by 8:00 am, we are headed home.

My father begins to sing “Charlie on the MTA.” “Oh, he never returned, no he never returned, and his fate is still unlearned.” The words are sad, but the tune is catchy, and my mother joins in. My parents’ voices sound better together than either does alone and
I wish my friends could hear them. I would say, these, these are my beautiful parents. Because I am watching them, I don’t see the police car behind the overpass. My mother spots it first. “Slow down!”

My father squints quickly in the rearview mirror as the patrol car slams onto the highway, lights flashing, siren wailing. I know we can’t afford a fine, which may be why my father does not take his foot off the gas. He looks in the mirror again and turns to my mother. “Florida cop, Ginny. He’s got no jurisdiction out of state.” He glances from her face to the road and back again. Up ahead, a sign says, “Georgia State Line, One Mile.” The siren is louder. Louder still.

He smiles his slow smile. The one she has told me makes her say yes, every time she means no. “We can make it, Ginny; I know we can.” They look at each other forever and ever, and I hold my breath.

She twists to glance back over the seat. The police car is gaining ground but in the distance, a sign says, “Welcome to the Peach State.” Turning back to the road ahead, my mother sighs, and my father whoops. He slams the car into fifth gear, and we are outlaws gunning for Georgia.

I close my eyes and imagine walking on waves to Mexico. I think maybe one person believing in something just isn’t enough. But if two people believe, anything is possible.

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 at a dinner party this weekend, and bizarrely, all four women at the table had endured the same emergency surgery. We each had a story. Pretty sure mine was the worst.

My tale begins at Hever Castle, Anne Boleyn’s family estate 30 miles southeast of London. Mr. Oliver and I were visiting our eldest daughter and her family. We had decided to do a little sightseeing that morning when I felt suddenly odd but in an indefinable way. 

The 13th-century house and gardens proved to be a distraction for a couple of hours, although I was becoming vaguely more uncomfortable. Even so, I was absorbed by the framed letter Anne had written to King Henry the 8th the night before her beheading. Knowing she was going to die, she transmuted all the rage, injustice, and terror into unconditional love. I got it. Maybe because I was feeling increasingly ill, I could empathize with the feeling that when you can no longer save your body, you can save your soul. The only room to stand in was compassion and forgiveness. I felt a new sympathy for Anne and a bit of envy that she was at peace. The fact that I was now envying a dead person should have been a clue that something was seriously wrong. 

By that night, I was in so much pain, I asked to be taken to a hospital where I was examined by what is known in the UK as a Junior Doctor. Young and very pretty, she failed to perform the one test that would have quickly led to a diagnosis and sent me back to our rental with a charming shrug.

A day later, still feeling awful, I hauled my luggage to Heathrow and boarded a United Airlines flight back to the States alone. I struggled to lift my overpacked suitcase onto the scale at check-in, to hoist my carry-on over my head, and to endure the 8-hour flight. 

I landed at BWI after dark, where my son met me at baggage claim and drove me home in a blinding thunderstorm. I don’t think I mentioned feeling ill. I hauled my luggage inside the musty house and bumped it up the steep wooden staircase to the second floor. There, I threw worn clothes in the hamper, delighted in a warm shower, and laid down. (Hello, my own bed! Hello my pillows!) It was midnight by then, and I felt dreadful, but I was home. I arranged myself on top of the covers, fully clothed, and waited to die. If I didn’t, I’d make a doctor’s appointment in the morning—whichever came first—didn’t care. 

At 9:00 am the following day, I lay on the crinkly white paper of an exam table, and my very American doctor plunged his fingers deeply and quickly into my abdomen in a rebound test to see if it hurt. I yelped, he nodded with satisfaction and told me I had a ruptured appendix. “Go get an MRI to confirm it,” he said, “then come back here.” 

I walked slowly back to my VW and drove myself to the radiologist, where I’d have to be worked into the schedule. Sagging against a chair, I waited my turn. An elderly lady in a wheelchair was taken back. Someone with a broken wrist was called. I wondered if I should explain (again) to the receptionist that my appendix was leaking toxins into my abdomen—and maybe in this one case belly trumped broken bone—but I didn’t want to be rude. Americans do one thing nearly as well as the English. We queue. We are not line jumpers. We are very democratic about waiting our turn. I like us for this. 

Eventually, I was called back. A kind radiologist said, “How are you doing?” then quickly looked from my face to the screen in front of us and said, “Never mind, I know how you’re doing. You’re one sick girl.” She then showed me the shadowy rupture and the little leaking river of poison.

Having confirmed that my appendix had ruptured sometime between feeling odd at Hever Castle and now, I drove back to the doctor to get a referral for surgery, then drove myself two miles to the hospital. Upon arrival, I wondered if I could make it from the parking garage to the entrance. I decided to try valet parking for the first time and pulled up in front. But the valet wasn’t there.

Somehow that was the first unfathomable obstacle I’d encountered. I stared at the empty podium where he usually stands all zippy-helpful, got out, and looked around. Perhaps he was behind a pillar having a smoke. I walked into the hospital. “I need surgery. I can’t find the valet,” I said, as mystified as if they were hiding him. A kind and intuitive volunteer in a pink smock held out her hand. “Just give me your keys,” she said, and a wheelchair appeared. 

Up on the surgery floor, I was offered a landline at the intake desk to contact a friend or family member. I called my son at work in Baltimore. 

And that’s when I lost it. The instant Andrew said hello, the dam broke. Abruptly I could no longer speak. I tried to choke out my story, but it was such a terrible story I couldn’t articulate it. I think the only understandable thing I said was, “Andrew, it’s Mom.” And all I heard, all I will ever hear in memory, was, “I’m on my way.” 

I lost it at the sound of the cavalry.

 Why is love our undoing? Why is it that love breaches our defenses when no obstacle could? Later, he said the call was horrifying. I was unrecognizable. 

The surgery was a success, but I was hospitalized for five days. I guess it was a close call. But was it?

I wonder if the end is written into the beginning. I’ve fallen through ice on the river as a child, and been held underwater so long by a breaking wave at Cape Hatteras that I could only feel detached surprise that this was how I was going to die. 

I’ve been fired upon by someone with a rifle while exploring the woods with my best friend as a girl. We dropped to the ground in a hail of gunfire as tree bark exploded shoulder-height around us, then stood up and ran. Did the shooter think we were deer? We were 14. We were lucky. Or were we?

If my time of departure is on a calendar somewhere, already marked, it means I only have to drop my resistance to love. How much I love will equal my reluctance to leave when it’s time to let go, so I parse it out. I think I live avoiding heartbreak which is such a waste because I know deep in my soul there is no end to avoid. It’s safe to go all in. I won’t be leaving; I’ll just be walking into another room of the same house.  

So, I could die today, tomorrow, or decades from now. All I ask of grace is that I find the courage to live a life I don’t want to relinquish. All I ask of Love is that I get home first, where I’ll be waiting for you. 

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

 

I was expressing a desire for more meaningful friendships years ago when a therapist I was seeing suggested I meet another client of hers with a similar longing. She thought we might become friends. 

The no-pressure way we would meet in this arranged marriage was in a small group working on mother issues. I actually didn’t think I had any of those but attended anyway to meet the potential friend. 

We had all been told to bring a stuffed toy that somehow represented our personality. I’d made an aspirational choice, a guileless puppy for whom unconditional love is a dog specialty-of-the-house. As we gathered that first night, sitting in a circle on folding chairs in the therapist’s office, other participants were holding their avatars as well. Representatives included a stuffed kitten, one giraffe with big soulful eyes, a little raccoon… Everyone seemed to have selected a mammal of some kind, including the woman I’d identified as my potential new friend. Mary was lovely, but lovely isn’t necessarily friend material. 

That’s when I glanced directly across the circle and locked eyes with a tall, stunningly beautiful woman who was staring specifically at me. Her expression was one of invitation—a look of intense hope and bossy possibility. It was the kind of stare that makes you glance over your shoulder to see who is standing behind you, for surely that’s the person for whom it is meant. If hope could be brash, if somehow an invitation could be a demand, that was the look.

Conservatively dressed in black slacks and a pale blue turtleneck, she sat clasping a green and brown frog with huge bulgy eyes. It was the only amphibian in the room. I thought, “That frog is the weirdest choice. That frog is hilarious!” And for me, both in friendship and romance, laughter is the love that binds. Two hours later, although I’d come to meet Mary, I left with plans to call Margaret.  

Margaret was seriously yet invisibly ill, which trumped mother issues all to hell and back. And we became good friends though Margaret already had a small infantry of friends wanting to help her kick an insidious invader at least long enough to see her children grown. Which she did until she didn’t. No one can outrun a bullet forever. The point being I’m beginning to think it is true. There are people in your life whom you are destined to meet, even when you come to the party to meet someone else. Or you’re late. Or at the wrong party. 

Whether you love them or leave them, stand by, or stand by them, may be the only choices you get to make. You only get to determine how that person is going to be in your life. Meeting, with a thousand potential outcomes, was a given from the day you were born. 

It’s comforting to think I can’t miss the people bus. I can’t be on the wrong side of the street or late when the bus pulls away from the curb. I simply can’t miss running into the person who will alter the course of my life in a significant way because if I do, fate is going to make us board the same Delta flight a day later or wander down the same aisle at Wegman’s—even if it’s decades in the future in a distant town. 

In my early twenties, I dreamed seven people were sitting around a large rectangular table discussing who was going to take what role in my life. “I’ll be the father,” “I’ll be boss,” “I’ll be the blind date she marries,” “I’ll be the elderly neighbor who leaves fresh camellias on her back steps every morning when she’s a lonely young bride whose husband has deployed to the Med. 

I was watching this strategizing session without sound so I’m inventing the dialogue. But I knew they were divvying up relationships—passing around scripts as if in a play. Later I wondered, is it possible this is how it works? 

The last time I saw Margaret, she was still gorgeous, sitting up in her family room while those who cared about her slipped in one at a time to say goodbye. Margaret was unable to speak by then but seemed to understand everything going on around her, and in typical Margaret fashion (universally and lovingly acknowledged to be opinionated and often critical), she had plenty to say; she just couldn’t say it. 

I sat down next to her when it was my turn, leaning over the upholstered arm of her chair, and tried to speak for both of us, but I was in a foreign country without the language. As I recall, I opened with a comment about what I was wearing (gray sweater dress, suede boots) and what I guessed she’d have said about it! Margaret kept gesturing emphatically. Kept slinging her hands outward as if to say, “What? Wait! Do you believe what’s going on here? Say what I need you to say!” Be who you promised you would be to me before we were born. 

And I could only think, But I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. 

I think I said I will miss you. I will love you always. But I was so utterly lost I might have said, “See you Thursday.”

If I could talk to her now, I’d say, “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be your friend. Thank you for aiming frog at puppy. I was adequate in my role, but if you give me another chance, I’ll be so much better. In the years since you left, I’ve learned a little more about what I might have given. Let’s go back to the table—let me pick a different script.” In reality, I feel that way about everyone, not just Margaret. About everyone. 

I wonder if before you were born, there was a table and everyone you would come to know in this life was seated at it volunteering to play a role: “I’ll be the brother who teaches him to play acoustic guitar,” I’ll be the sister who becomes a dentist,” “I’ll be the daughter who demonstrates parents control nothing,” “I’ll be the therapist who finds her a new friend,” “I’ll be the young mother who dies too soon.” 

It took us a long time to get here, didn’t it? But there was never any doubt we’d arrive. 

Since you are reading this, I must have been at your table, yes? And you, beloved, must have been at mine. 

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.