My former boss Mike didn’t speak a word until he was three, his first words a complete sentence, pointedly addressed to a gushing relative.

“Put me down.”

I spoke earlier, I tell him, laughing. Not a complete sentence but a cry for help.

My mother had placed me on the center of two Jenny Lind twin beds, which she’d pushed together to appear as if they were a single full bed, thinking I couldn’t roll off either side while she was out of the room. This auspicious event took place in the tree-lined neighborhood of Webster Groves, St. Louis, Missouri, where I was born.

But after she left the room, the beds slipped apart, and I fell to the floor beneath them. When she returned, a quick peek beneath the white dust ruffle revealed a startled baby with the wind knocked out of her. I don’t know if I was studying the boxsprings above me or had turned to her voice, but at that moment, I said, ‘mama’ for the first time.

They say we remember little from before the age of three because we don’t have language to narrate our feelings or to give shape to experience. In those first years, we also exist in infant time. We have no concept of before, after, later, or momentary. Under that bed, I would have thought alone was forever.

Without meaning to, 36 years later, I’d inflict a similar experience on a child of my own.

Mr. Oliver and I wanted to get away by ourselves. Maybe because we thought we were supposed to want that—date nights, vacations without the three kids. Is it wrong that I don’t think we sincerely pined for these things? We enjoyed our lives. I was a writer, he, a naval architect, but without any examples in my life of how to be married before I got married, I was trying on everyone else’s suggestions.
So, we booked a weekend getaway to Buckeystown, Maryland. Not lying when I say I’m not a planner. My search filter must have been a highly non-selective “two-hour drive of home.” The little Inn appeared charming online, but note to self, zoom out, and look at the big picture before giving nonrefundable credit card info based on one photo.

We asked the parents of our two older kids’ best friends to take them overnight, then asked my mother to spend the night with Emily, who was about 16 months old.

We kissed her goodbye, made promises she could not possibly understand, and Mr. Oliver and I threw a suitcase in the Volvo and set off on our adventure. We were a little dismayed when we got to our romantic getaway and saw the discrepancy between what we had been anticipating and reality. Still, if you subtracted the graveyard and Shell station, it was a sweet place.

Our room was lovely, and that evening, we had dinner with other guests in the Inn’s dining room. Everyone was quite interesting, especially the woman with the short, curly brown hair and sweet smile, who announced with bright-eyed, good cheer that she was staying at the Inn because her home was plagued by Poltergeist. It made her by far the most interesting person at the table and almost the most memorable thing about our time alone. We enjoyed our obligatory sleep away from the kids we adored, then drove home to relieve my mother the following day.

When we drove up the lane, Mom met us on the deck. She had aged a decade. She looked like she did just after cataract surgery—her hair was wild, her face white and shell-shocked. Inside, there were weird tracks in the carpet.

Unbeknownst to us, Emily had sobbed inconsolably the entire time we were gone. All night. The tracks in the rugs were from Mom strapping Emly into an umbrella stroller at 3:00 am and trudging through the house in circles for hours asleep on her feet in an effort to comfort a grief-stricken baby.

That’s when I realized that Emly had been on infant time. We were not gone for the weekend. We were gone for all time. In an instant, we had ceased to exist, and not just her parents had disappeared, so had her brother and sister. Her entire family had vanished. Poof! Gone.

Is it wrong that I still want to make this right?
A friend with an addiction blog wrote recently of a mother who went into instant overdrive when her recovering addict son ran out of a medication that was nationally in short supply. Mom put on her superhero cape and spent every ounce of energy, influence, and concentration calling, searching, and beseeching until she procured the missing medication.

Change the names, and I’m that mother— and it makes me wonder, is motherhood an addiction? An irreparable, biological change in our DNA—a condition that once activated, we need to supply to feel complete? We can respect their privacy, their abilities, and their autonomy, but do we stop wanting to solve our kids’ problems, to heal them, protect them, ease their pain? Even retroactively?

Because apparently the passage of time is irrelevant. For me, motherhood is a condition of infant time.

Understand that I was, and am, an imperfect mother. But I don’t interfere in my kids’ lives. I respect distance and independence. I have facilitated and nurtured two of the three living on other continents for most of their adult lives because it is what they wanted. I have never in my life dropped by uninvited. Not once. I don’t even sit down uninvited. I don’t hesitate when asked for help, but I don’t intrude. I don’t assume they want to hear from me. But.

Did you know that for most people, by the time your kids are 18, you will have had 93% of all the facetime you will ever have with them? That’s a factoid I don’t love.

Sometimes, I’ll be holding an avocado at Whole Foods or crossing the Bay Bridge and I’ll be overcome with a visceral sense of emptiness, a longing so pervasive it feels almost existential but it’s not. It’s simply a hunger for the kids. I’ll realize it’s been a while, and I just need to lay eyes on them.

My son adopted a rescue dog that came up from some floods in Texas. Nala was a new mother, a beautiful mixed breed with a sweet face, soulful brown eyes, and 8 puppies when they found her. But her caretakers took her puppies away, spayed her, and adopted her out. To this day, she tenderly carries balled socks to a safe bed in the corner of the living room. She gently tugs them out of my son’s hands as he walks by, forever retrieving and nurturing the babies that so inexplicably disappeared.
And they do disappear. As kids grow up, they are gone long before they leave.

I will never be who I was before having children because, in motherhood, there is no after, later, or momentary.

There is only always.

Happy Mother’s Day, beloveds. Happy Mother’s Day.

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 the story of how I didn’t become what I might have been. And for once I’m not talking about my effort to be a fully evolved spiritual human being. (I look at that this way: not dead, still time.) I’m talking about more concrete aspirations. 

A more versatile voice, and I might have been a singer-songwriter. (Sorry, everyone in my dorm. Sorry, Carole King…Carly Simon.) But I didn’t major in music; I majored in drama. I intended to become an actress who could inspire empathy and goodwill on the screen, but several early experiences derailed that ambition. 

Freshman year, I was cast as Gloria, a young, fresh-faced international model who later reveals she has worked as a prostitute and is rejected by her boyfriend. The play was The Sign in Sydney Burstein’s Window. In the scene where Gloria gets dumped, she reads a note to that effect, then uncaps a bottle of fake pills, downs them all, and fake dies. 

Unfortunately, the male upperclassmen in the cast started a contest with the stagehands to see who could substitute the most graphically suggestive note for my stage prop. I needed to look like I’d just been rejected by the love of my life for the audience, but I was such an insecure people-pleaser that I felt I had to simultaneously acknowledge my castmates’ creativity where they were doubled over laughing in the wings.  

I switched majors. 

Which has me wondering about how you became what you are.  

I graduated from college with a BA in English on a Sunday in May, got married that Friday, and was immediately transported to Norfolk, Virginia, where the Lt. junior grade I had married was shipped out to the Med a month later for the better part of a year. Searching for work in this lonely universe, I discovered my degree was virtually worthless. Only two questions were relevant at every interview: 1) How accurately and fast can you type? Answer: v–e–r–y…s-l-o-w-l-ee and 2) Are you a Navy wife? The prevailing theory being that Navy wives would follow transferred husbands out of state in short order. 

Eventually, I was hired by a real estate company as their receptionist-switchboard operator primarily because I made an impassioned speech to the woman interviewing me about how much I loved work. Pile it on! Pay is secondary. Pleeeease. Give me something to do. I made work sound like a religion I was advocating or a drug I needed. Thinking about it now, I have this picture of myself prostrate on the carpet of the agency, grasping Dixie Donohue by her ankle during my interview, but I’m sure that’s not true.

What I remember most about the job, besides chirping, “Goodman, Segar, Hogan!” into the phone incessantly, was that there was a short in the switchboard, and every time I plugged in a call, I got shocked. No one cared. 

After moving back to Maryland, I entertained the idea of applying to graduate school to become a therapist, but there were too many therapists in my family, and it felt copy-cattish—besides, who needs a license to listen? To search for insights?

 Ha ha. That’s a joke, all you therapists. 

(We know that’s called coaching.) 

Ha ha. Still joking, all you coaches. 

Really, so many people needed representatives of both professions during the pandemic you couldn’t even get an appointment. You don’t need to know how I know. 

Okay, I’ll tell you. I can’t even get an appointment now. I just tried and got an email saying, sorry, as of yesterday, I’m fully booked. Yesterday! Timing is everything, as you’ll see. 

Finally, I applied to a pastoral counseling program at Loyola, and the week I received my acceptance, I got a call from a magazine for which I’d been freelancing, offering me a full-time staff position as associate editor. 

You can always go to school, but to be offered an editorial position 10 minutes from home working on a glossy magazine? That was a rare opportunity. And I guess once I started editing, feature writing, essays, memoirs, and fiction were not far behind. Instead of a Master of Social Work degree, I pursued a Master of Fine Arts. 

And I never looked back. Until now.

I have frequently pictured my life like gold coins cupped in my hands and sometimes I think about what I have spent them on. There are a limited number, and I think about the ones that slipped through my fingers unspent and about how to spend what is left. 

I wonder if I was always meant to write and you were always meant to do what you have done with your life, and our routes were planned, guided, or influenced in some way. I wonder if, from a bird’s eye view, it would have been evident at every turn we were moving closer together—even on opposite sides of the same mountain. I wonder if you were nudged at every fork in the road so that no matter how circuitous your path, you were always going to arrive where you are at this moment. Were you prompted at each intersection? Turn right on Franklin Street. Take Route 302. 

Why did that magazine editor call the very week I was sending my tuition to graduate school? She changed the trajectory of my life in that instant. Instead of listening to stories, I began sharing them.

And because of her, I found 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.

 

Laura Oliver will be reading her work at the Stoltz Listening Room at the Avalon Foundation in Easton on April 24th at 6 pm as part of our Spy Nights series. Tickets can be purchased here.

Last night, I was walking my dog Leah when I ran into my neighbor Tom also on dog duty. He’s the exemplary owner of a sweet golden retriever. He carries healthy dog treats and two bags. I own an untrained maniac who wants to dismantle squirrels and is willing to dislocate my shoulder to do so. And I’m a one-bag risktaker. We merged duties, walking into a burgeoning spring together. White dogwood laced our route, pink tulips, and Spanish bluebells graced neighbors’ yards as we passed.

Tom is my hero, although he doesn’t know it. He’s a pediatric surgeon—he heals the most vulnerable among us—and because I’ve been there with a hospitalized 4-year-old, I mean his patients’ parents. But we also have the same questions about life, and I’ve found the greatest connectors of souls are laughter and curiosity. And, okay, dogs.

I’d just given a talk at Washington College on some things I’ve learned over the years about the acquisition of happiness (which can pretty much be summed up as your brain is driving that bus), but which Tom points out is included in the Declaration of Independence. We have the right to pursue happiness anyway. We were not promised the right to possess it because no one can guarantee joy. Or can they? I want to tell Tom that Martha Washington said, “I’ve learned I am as happy as I decide to be.”

But I forget to tell him that because down at Old Woman Cove, my unruly terrier has spotted a squirrel she can’t live without. 

A man in worn blue jeans and a gray hoodie passing by offers helpfully, “My dog caught one, you know.” 

I look at him in horror. “I thought that couldn’t happen.” 

“Caught him by the tail,” he says, “and did this.” He mimics shaking his head back and forth vigorously. 

Geez, I think. A squirrel can leap 20 feet and run 20 mph. They’re so smart they fake-hide nuts to fool other animals who would steal them. (My pup is aquiver now zeroed in on a fluffy gray tail.) 

“So,” Tom asks as we walk on, “where do we find happiness?” 

At the moment, I don’t know. I’m struggling with the question myself–rarely fully present, on a perpetual quest to understand what lies behind the illusion of loss, the stage we call life on which we act in relationship. But I do know happiness comes from a life of meaning, a life with purpose. “You have that,” I tell Tom. “You save children.” 

“A lot of professions have mandatory retirement dates,” he presses. “Where is happiness going to come from then?”

From family? We both bemoan not having enough time with our grown kids. 

Learning makes me happy. I study quantum physics, neuroscience, and paleontology. I go on archeological digs. I took a class in Near Death Experiences and the Nature of Consciousness– another way in which I pursue happiness—looking for evidence of life after life. 

I take an ongoing special interest class in astronomy as well—and it occurs to me that maybe I’m searching the heavens for heaven.

Case in point, we stop in front of my house because I’m about to attend a lecture on zoom. In March of 1980, college senior Peter Panagore went ice climbing on the world-famous Lower Weeping Wall in Alberta, Canada. A 1000-foot rockface that weeps waterfalls in the summer but becomes frozen rivers of tears at 50 degrees below zero. The appeal of ice climbing is that it requires you to be totally present, but without the right equipment, Peter and his climbing partner became trapped on the wall overnight. Overcome by exhaustion and hypothermia, Peter died on the side of that mountain.  

Those long minutes on the other side of existence as we know it, before Peter was resuscitated, changed the trajectory of his life and his ability to feel joy. He went on to Yale Divinity School. He’s written a book; there’s a movie coming out. 

I’m intrigued, I tell Tom, by the commonalities revealed in the research on near-death experiences—commonalities which include encountering an unconditional love of inexpressible depth and being enfolded in an intimate knowledge of everything we have ever done devoid of judgment.  

We aren’t so much forgiven as understood. 

I realize as I speak that I’m looking for that here. Unconditional love, intimate knowledge without judgment. I get glimpses for which I’m profoundly grateful. 

You know who you are.

I’m watching a squirrel digging up one of the 10,000 nuts she buried this fall. Her memory is astonishing. She’ll find 90 percent of those not stolen. Pursuit of her right now would make my dog very happy. 

We part, and I go inside to log onto my class. Peter recounts the story of dying on the side of a glacier years ago. He describes the love that enfolded him, the difficult choice he made to come back to this life.

I wouldn’t want to leave if I could find that kind of love here. It would make dying so much harder. 

But Peter found it there, which has made living so much harder. After all, nine out of 10 people who have been clinically dead utter the exact same six words upon regaining consciousness. The exact same six words.

“Why did you bring me back?” 

I listen as he shares his experience of the love that awaits and the search for happiness in the here and now. He meditates to stay present, has a yoga practice. I mull that over—the mandate to remain present when the future is such a beguiling mystery. Yours, mine. Ours.

More than once, both in high school and college, I was told by boys I was dating that I think too much. Which I interpreted as, “Shut up and kiss me.” 

But maybe it just meant, “Come back from wherever it is that you go. Be here now.”

Be there, then. 

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.

 

Laura Oliver will be reading her work at the Stoltz Listening Room at the Avalon Foundation in Easton on April 24th at 6 pm as part of our Spy Nights series. Tickets can be purchased here.

If the house catches fire, I’ll knot my twisted bedsheets together and scramble to safety from an upstairs window. Plan B? Jump to the mulberry tree after rallying the family for evacuation. If the pilot has a heart attack… if the brakes on the car fail…you get the idea. From the time I was in elementary school I have strategized the means by which I will save my family if disaster strikes. Tidal waves, earthquakes, collapsing bridges—there’s a plan.  

In novels and short stories, it’s called “saving the cat”—the moment when the protagonist–who may have some pretty overt failings, redeems himself by running back into the burning building to rescue the cat. But when I was 8, I learned you can’t plan for these events. You have to already be a hero, and if that’s what you’re made of, the moment finds you. 

Summer was stir-fry hot. My older sister, her pretty friend Patty, some neighborhood boys, and I were crabbing off the end of our pier while our collie, Beau, kept an eye on us. Normally, we combed the seaweed for doublers within wading distance of shore or searched for unwary crustaceans clinging delicately to the pier pilings. But this time we’d procured chicken necks and that’s where the trouble began.

The smell of creosote baking in the midsummer sun, the saltwater breeze off the river, and dragonflies flitting about in the beachgrass all conspired to create what could have been a typical July afternoon. There were more kids than crab nets, so there was the usual jostling at the end of the pier as we tied thick twine around each boney crook of chicken, securing the other end to a piling with an untoward number of knots before tossing the bait in the water. I’m not sure, but I may have been vain about my knot-tying. I may have thought they were exceptionally tricky or tight. Someone, my father or perhaps a Girl Scout leader, had taught me to tie a slipknot, a bowline, a half hitch, and a square knot.  

Ernie, or more likely, Reese, peered over the end of the dock where we had several lines dangling and yelled, “Doubler! Give me the net!” We clustered shoulder to shoulder as he began gently tugging the string, inch by slow inch, towards the surface. The crabs, which had started the ascent as mere murky outlines, were now crystal-clear just inches below our own rippling reflections. An 8-inch hard shell with a softy attached. With one quick scoop of the net and a flip of the wrist, Reese had the pair scrabbling in our rusty bucket. The chicken neck lay on the splintery dock, a bony hook on a homemade line. 

In that split second, before anyone could stop him, the enterprising Beau lunged between our legs and swallowed the chicken neck whole, the string still secured to the piling. Six kids shrieked with excitement at the new development as the dog began to take huge, panicked gulps of the string in an attempt to finish it off now that the chicken was stuck in his gullet. We desperately tried to unknot the twine as the distressed dog retched but the string had gotten wet, then dried in the sun. That chicken neck might as well have been soldered to the piling.

As we realized we couldn’t pull the chicken out, and no one had a knife, what had been exciting was fast becoming an emergency. 

Suddenly, the resourceful Patty fell to her knees, grabbed the string as close to the dog’s mouth as she could get, and started to chew. Time slowed as the dog gagged, Patty chomped away, and the rest of us stared, silenced by the gross ingenuity of this development. The sun beat down, the dragonflies danced for their lives with only a few months to live, and after an intense minute, the string gave way. The dog polished off the last couple of inches with a happy bark, and we erupted in a rousing cheer.

It has taken me years not to live as a strategist. To cross the Bay Bridge, admiring the sparkling shimmer beneath the span shadows instead of wondering how long I can float on my back when the guardrail gives way. 

I don’t know if this daydreaming was a hope for attention or a childish savior complex. Or perhaps it was where a child’s mind goes who, for good reason, has learned she has absolutely no control over what happens to her. Who has learned that fear is a required course in childhood, but fun is an elective. Who has learned to prepare for the worst because no one’s coming. But for all my preparation, research shows heroes don’t stop to plan or to reason. They act instantaneously and intuitively on an innate urge to serve. The good they do is instinctive.

I hope if the moment ever presents itself, I save the cat. Or the dog. Or someone’s baby or an old man with a cane. I want to cure Juvenile Diabetes, to end addictions of every kind. To feed the starving on a global scale, foster abandoned children, bring laughter to the sad of heart. 

But I think most of us don’t get the opportunity to save the cat. Instead, we have to live with the cat. Long days and unremarkable years of loving in the most ordinary of ways, steadfast and unacknowledged. Commuting insane hours on the beltway to provide for a family, repeatedly rising on sleepless nights to soothe fevers, and one day, reminding the parent who named us of our name.

 If you were loved this way, by anyone, may you be inspired to love this way in kind. That will make heroes of all of us.

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 born on St. Patrick’s Day, so today is my birthday. A lot of people wear green and get drunk on my birthday, but this celebration was a less boisterous, intimate gathering. A dozen friends had gathered in the living room of our white stucco four-square, and one of my sisters had driven quite a distance to attend. Locust logs flamed in the fireplace. Platters of smoked salmon, goat cheese, and bruschetta had been arranged in the dining room, and 100 white votive candles glowed softly on polished surfaces throughout the house. As a surprise from my family, nearly 50 photos depicting key moments in my life had been selectively scanned and those images rotated in no chronological sequence on the TV screen near the front windows. 

One moment, I cradled babies, newly born—the next, gripped diplomas, newly acquired. One moment, I was a three-year-old in a stair-step pose with my older sisters, and in the next, I smiled from a cinderblock hallway in my freshman dorm with a classmate I’d just begun dating.  

As I recall, Willy and I were headed to a Kappa Alpha party that Saturday night, where we would find the frat house smokey and dark, the floor sticky with beer, the bassline blasting from corner speakers with such intensity that every exchange of words required a tilt of the head as if to kiss or be kissed, a close leaning in, lips to ear. All evening, this ritual elicited a smiling nod in response, then a quick pull back from each other to independently survey the room again. By the time we left, the K A’s and their dates were competing at beer pong, our hearing was temporarily impaired, and I had been excruciatingly not-kissed at least 30 times.  

That night must have been a somewhat important occasion because Willy had walked to Reid Hall to pick me up instead of just meeting me at the frat house. He wore a sports coat and tie. His blond hair hung long to his jawline. Fine-featured, a head taller than I, he looked like a guy who surfs in Malibu all summer and attends Princeton in the fall, which he was not. He also looked like the product of an exclusive Baltimore prep school, which he was.  

My hair fell halfway down my back then. I wore a purple print dress with tiny flowers on the bodice, an empire waist, and three-quarter-length sleeves–-a little like a short version of something you’d wear to a Renaissance Festival. I wouldn’t buy it now, but I felt pretty in it that night. Smiling into the camera for all time, we were both 18 years old with the springy, untried optimism of foals.

Standing in my living room, I studied the face of the boy in the photo, his arm pulling me close by the waist in casual ownership, electric with innocence, wired with excitement for the evening ahead, and questioned whether what I recall of that long-ago night is even true. Neuroscientists claim that every time we remember an event, we distort it, and nothing is as unreliable as eyewitness testimony. I took a sip of my wine and wondered where he was at that moment and whether he planned to attend our next college reunion. The photo rotated abruptly, and Willy disappeared.

Researchers who map memory have shared another revelation about the way the brain works: twenty percent of the population is plagued by an inexplicable sense of loss. That yearning is explained as a wistfulness for something those affected can’t identify, something they quite possibly never had, something that perhaps doesn’t exist. It’s just the way we’re wired. 

It’s not at all a form of depression. I’m happy and laugh all the time. My life is good. But a sense of waiting has haunted me since the beginning of memory as if something is arriving that will round out the emptiness I suspected only I harbor until the revelations of this new research indicated I am not alone.  

One morning, about a week after encountering the image of Willy and I, arms forever about each other in a dorm hallway, my college alumni magazine arrived in the mail, and I read that Willy had died the previous spring. How could that be? What was I doing at the moment he left, I wondered? Waiting for a red light to change? Praising a fledging writer’s work? There was no mention of a wife or children, and that grieved me. Lymphoma was the thief of his days and I imagined he suffered. That grieved me, too. 

It had been decades since that college party, that relationship. After graduation, I never saw Willy again, and most likely, never would have, yet holding the alumni news in my hand, my morning coffee steaming in the other, I felt an unreasonable sense of loss that the possibility of ever seeing him again no longer existed. Maybe that’s just another facet of the longing that shadows this perfectly good life. Where there is longing, there is hope. For what, I don’t know. 

Sometimes I just want to go home. Only I am home. 

I didn’t know the man Willy became; I only knew the tender-hearted boy who walked me back to my dorm that night. I think it was a Maryland fall, a crisp night with leaves crunching beneath our feet as we crossed the campus arm in arm, but perhaps it was winter, and the stars were icy, the leaves long gone. Or perhaps it was March, and we’d been at a St. Patrick’s Day party. Those facts are lost and don’t matter now. 

What does matter is that love entangles us. What does matter is that if, like quantum particles, we remain in contact across all spacetime with those whose hearts we’ve touched even once, there is no need for longing in the present or in the house of memory. 

Because nothing can be lost. In the quantum world, this long-ago evening, and your life as well, have both happened and have yet to happen.

Which means somewhere there still exists a beautiful boy, a girl with an unlived life, the arrival of all you are waiting for, and a night starry with possibility.

Laura Oliver will be reading her work at the Stoltz Listening Room at the Avalon Foundation in Easton on April 24th at 6 pm as part of our Spy Nights series. Tickets can be purchased here.

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 used to mention my age to salesclerks when shopping for clothes or makeup, but I stopped when they stopped being fake-surprised. 

As a remedy for this disappointing turn of events, my dermatologist suggests unappealing procedures such as sandblasting, peeling, and electrocution—so when she offers a new procedure involving injections with no downtime, I’m all in. It can take six months to see any improvement, however, because this is not filler. It’s a process that tells your collagen to get its giddy up.

My trainer, JT, rolls his eyes. “Why?” he moans. “You don’t need to do this.”

Sitting cross-legged in the chair next to his desk, I’m trying to explain why I want to look better and why there is a massive bruise on my left cheek. 

“The doctor had ’Before’ and ‘Way-Way-Way-After’ photos,” I explain. “On her phone. That meant they were real.” 

He is dumbfounded but entertained once again, by the confidences shared each week before my workout. And that’s when he tells me I’m making a big mistake going to see a performance of Shen Yun, the Chinese dance company with the colorful ads (curiously devoid of content) that claim to be preserving China’s ancient culture before Communism. “Propaganda,” JT says, referring to both my bruise and the upcoming performance. “You’re so gullible! You’ll believe anything.”

“I don’t believe you,” I say, smiling. ”Blows that theory.”

I actually know nothing about this organization, but the ads depicting leaping, whirling dancers in neon-colored costumes have made me curious. I’ve always wanted to go. Tickets are expensive but these were a gift. “Life changing!” one man exclaims in a promotion. “Transformational!” a young mother gushes.

Life-changing and transformational get me every time. As if whatever my life currently is, I’m always on the search for something more.

That’s how our brains work. As soon as we receive the thing we long for, we want something new, something else—a psychological fact often pointed to with disapproval, but I don’t think seeking more is a moral failing. I think it’s more likely creative energy at work. Or curiosity, which is holy.

Or evolution. Life begets life. Creation is irrepressible, always reaching for an improvement, an adaptation that better serves, and I think that is as true of us spiritually and emotionally as it is physically. 

Longing is innate and eternal. You don’t ever get done.

Until eternal is eternal. Maybe heaven is a state of being in which you finally want nothing more. 

“You do this all the time,” says JT. “Don’t waste your money on this performance and stop showing me those poochy places on your jawline. He gets up and motions me over to the cable pulls. “You’ll follow anyone. You’re a duckling to a duck,” he says. 

“Right behind you,” I say, trailing him, but he doesn’t get it. 

So, we go to see Shen Yun. I’m excited despite JT’s dire warnings. Once seated at the Hippodrome, the dances are a swirling combination of unnaturally bright yellow, lime green, vivid pinks, sky blues–the dancers lighter than air—they make you wonder why ballerinas bother to dance on pointe. 

The program is as beautiful as advertised, although there is a lack of variety or diversity of any kind. The costumes change primarily in color. The intensity, pacing, and moves— same, same, same. If you’ve seen the windmilling arms and leaps of the promotions, you’ve seen the show. I begin to feel as if I’m eating cotton candy. Something feels off. A robotic male and female host, with the plastic smiles of beauty contestants, narrate the show. I lean over and whisper, Are we in Stepford? 

A huge screen behind the dancers (a patented technology) allows them to seem to dance into a three-dimensional background of temples, gardens, and sky, seamlessly transforming from real dancers to a digital representation that flies into the clouds and disappears when, in fact, the dancers have dropped like lead down a trough behind the stage, scurried to the wings in order to pop up again later stage right. 

Suddenly, this giant screen takes on an unexpected role: the promotion of Falun Dafa’s religious-political ideology. The pastoral background dissolves, and an announcement appears. “We deny the myth of atheism and evolution!” 

The screen returns to a pastoral background as conservative morality tales unfold, depicting the idea that we arrived fully sprung from a divine being created to dance; then the message reappears. 

“Resist the myth of atheism and evolution!” the screen exhorts the audience again. 

“Told you!” JT says when I confess how unsettling this was.

When the performance is over, we are streaming out with the crowd, and a woman stops me to ask what I thought of the performance. I tell her the dancers’ skills were impressive. This is true. That’s when I look behind her and see a TV crew with production lights set up. “Would you let me interview you on camera?” she asks. In the mirrored wall behind her I see the bruise on my cheek is still concealed. Will I look better in a few months? Will I be better? Any kinder, smarter, more generous? Transformed?

I really want to go home. I think she should come with me. Everything I’ve just seen makes me want to whisper, “Blink twice if you need help!” And I want to get to the elevator before the 500 people behind me. Plus, I don’t want to assure anyone else that what I’ve seen is life-changing. Because it wasn’t life-changing, and yet life is always changing. 

And that’s the good and the bad news. The tender, painful blessing. We may be descendants of the divine, and maybe we were born to dance. But evolution is not an ideology to deny or believe in. 

It’s an inevitable fact. How do I know? 

Because I got exactly what I wanted. To see the perplexing spectacle that is Shen Yun. 

And I leave, as I live, looking and longing for something more. 

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.

Laura Oliver will be reading her work at the Stoltz Listening Room at the Avalon Foundation in Easton on April 24th at 6 pm as part of our Spy Nights series. Tickets can be purchased here.