Pandemic postcard #36: Thanks for the memories

This week's post comes a little early as we usher in this strange holiday season. I wish you all as happy a Thanksgiving as your current circumstances allow.

In 2010, I reflected on the most memorable Thanksgivings I'd had so far and was surprised to realize they'd all been in my 20s. What a difference 10 years makes. Today, I can easily remember how I spent  every single Thanksgiving from the past decade. This feels good at a time of life when my memory is supposed to be fading. 

It's 2011, the first of several in a string of Thanksgivings spent in San Francisco with my brother Jeff and his partner Kevin, both skilled and loving cooks. Such good food, such good company. On Friday, Jeff and Kevin treat Bruce and Natalie and me to a visit to the California Academy of Sciences. A butterfly briefly rests on Kevin's hand. He is the butterfly whisperer.

2012. I have lived in the Bay Area for seven months, decamping there from Idaho just after Dad died. The job I've moved here for is a disappointment, but I absolutely love California: the light, the people, the diversity. I am living a long-held dream of not needing to own a car, but I rent one to fetch Natalie at Humboldt State for her Thanksgiving break. We join Jeff and Kevin and Bruce for another memorable meal. 

Thanksgiving morning 2013. I am at the Oakland airport, nearly giddy with anticipation at seeing Tom for the first time in a few weeks. We share Thanksgiving with Jeff and Kevin and sleep at their place, since my Oakland apartment is packed up. The next morning, Tom and I pick up a small rental truck, meet a packing crew, and get on the road to Seattle, where I've rented an apartment to be closer to my love.

2014. It's just Tom and me this year. We take a morning train to Centralia, WA, and enjoy a leisurely midday dinner at McMenamins' Olympic Club, where the buffet is spread out over several pool tables. We retire to our room upstairs and take a long nap. It is a perfect day. 

Tom and I get two Thanksgivings in 2015. The first is in the Denver suburbs on Sunday, with Tom's brother Marty and his family and a bunch of people from the bar Marty owns. Tom plays his dad's old banjo. On Tuesday, Tom and I board Amtrak's California Zephyr at Denver's Union Station and ride over the Rockies for Thanksgiving #2, with Jeff and Kevin plus Natalie, who has flown down from Boise. 

Thanksgiving 2016 comes a few weeks after Tom's stem cell transplant, and it's just the two of us celebrating at Swedish Hospital. Considering that he had almost died from engraftment syndrome four days before the holiday, Tom is doing much better. I dial up Paul Simon ("These are the days of miracles and wonders ...") and Arlo Guthrie on Spotify, we eat the not-too-bad-for-hospital-food Thanksgiving dinner, and we are grateful. 

2017. I don't have specific memories of this holiday--my most recent one in San Francisco--apart from the warm embrace of family, of building a collaborative playlist, and of gathering around the table for another amazing meal. Of course, we watch Love Actually afterward. This will be Tom's last Thanksgiving. We don't know that yet, but after the wild ride of Thanksgiving Week 2016, I don't take anything for granted.  

2018. It's a weird year. Tom has been gone four four months. Kevin and Natalie both work in the plant-care field and Thanksgiving season means poinsettia distribution. We decide to make it easy on Natalie this year and meet at a rented Airbnb near Boise to mark an early Thanksgiving. I spend the actual holiday handing out food and socks at the Union Gospel Mission in downtown Seattle. 

2019. I have plans to see Natalie in Boise just before Christmas, my extended family in Chicago on December 24 and 25 (for the first time in decades), and Jeff and Kevin in San Francisco for New Year's, so I'm at loose ends on Thanksgiving Day. I consider a solo trip somewhere, but I stay home and make myself a simple dinner. I'm OK company, but I'm grateful that I'll be with family for Thanksgiving 2020. 

2020. Except I won't. And neither will most of you.  

Sigh. And yet, and yet. This past decade has shown me that a rich storehouse of memories and an attitude of gratitude can serve us well in times of loss. Meister Eckhart said, "If the only prayer you say in your life is thank you, that would suffice." And a day before he died, Tom mused to me, "Maybe just being grateful and happy is enough. So thank you." 

I'll leave it at that for now. I am grateful for shared Thanksgivings past, I look forward to making more memories in person with my beloveds in the 2020s, and I wish the same for us all. 

P.S. If you are new to Surely Joy, or even if you're not, you may want to revisit my post from this week in 2018, when I wrote, "This is a season of living while we wait to resume life." Those words, true for me in 2018, are true for us all this year. There will be better days--and yet these are the days we'll remember. 

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Pandemic postcard #35: Hindsight and foresight

You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been, 

A place that has to be believed to be seen ... Walk On, U2 

"Understanding the pandemic this week requires grasping two thoughts at once," Robinson Meyer wrote yesterday at The Atlantic. "First, the United States has never been closer to defeating the pandemic. Second, some of the country's most agonizing days still lie ahead."

We do seem to be at a pivot point. Clearly, we have several very dark months ahead, especially if the outgoing administration continues to impede an orderly transition of power, and if people gather over the holidays with the virus surging. At the same time, the good vaccine news of the past two weeks signals that by next spring, our long-sought "new normal" should finally arrive.  

How will we be different, as people and as a society? I revisited my first pandemic journal the other day--I'm now on volume three--and found what I'd written at the end of it, in mid-May, in the form of a letter to myself next May. 

Of "the things I'd love to see made manifest," one will happen for sure: We will "have a new president and leaders who are actively planning to manage future crises in a more proactive way." But I thought a vaccine wouldn't be "nearing production for widespread availability" until next summer, and we seem likely to beat that timetable now. The results of the upcoming Georgia special election will likely determine whether my prediction of health care for all--maybe via an Affordable Care Act expansion-- will happen in 2021. But thank goodness that the Supreme Court, even with its two-thirds conservative majority, doesn't seem inclined to overturn the ACA as we emerge from the greatest public health crisis in a century. 

Alas, as I write this, schools that had reopened are shutting again, and it seems unlikely that many will remain open this winter. But there's certainly hope that by spring, in-person learning may be happening anew. I'm not sure what to make of my prediction that kids might only go to class every other day; I guess that is for social distancing, and it may be happening in some places. Ever-shifting schedules seem like a hardship on families. Then again, many parents may be splitting their work time between home and office, so maybe it could work. And let's all have more art and music supplies!

Some more mixed news: Greenhouse gas emissions are down largely due to COVID, though this year's bad wildfires mean emissions aren't down as far as they could have been. And with car sales on the rise and people shunning transit, long-term progress could be marginal. We must find the will to make progress toward a healthier planet without the devastation of a pandemic. 

As for my vision of a life where "rest, creativity, community, and connection are paramount" and where work is less central to our lives, that still seems like a dream worth hanging onto, and one that we might be a little closer to than I'd imagined in May, before the murder of George Floyd. That horrific event and its cataclysmic aftermath launched a reckoning that continues to reverberate as we ponder our individual lives and our collective destinies. Why are we here if not to love life and love one another?   

This Thanksgiving season, I am thankful that we may soon be emerging from one of the darkest chapters of history. I love this quote from Pema Chodron: "Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know." In hindsight, we've all learned a lot this year, and with foresight, we may put some of it to good use.

Pandemic postcard #33: Loving the half-full of it

My sweetheart spent most of his adult life as a proud teetotaler. When asked about his aversion to booze, Tom would describe how he'd had too much to drink one night as a young man, and while it wasn't the first time, he decided it would be the last. Yet sometime in his last few years, he bought a bunch of drinkware and stashed it in the back of our bedroom closet.

Months after he died in 2018, I was still deep into the long work of sifting through Tom's stuff: dozens upon dozens of boxes of old receipts and legal papers, shelves full of compact discs (he'd made a living first in radio, then in choosing music for businesses), and bags stuffed full of promotional items, trinkets, and tchotchkes. When Tom discovered something he liked--be it a Justin Trudeau bobblehead, home plate-shaped doormat, "Enjoying My Coffee" bumper sticker, or a movie about the criminally forgotten songwriter Doc Pomus--he'd order it in bulk, keep one for himself, and give the extras as gifts, except sometimes he’d forget about them. 

That’s how I came to find the six “half-full" glasses. Designed for the eternal optimist, only the top half of the glass could be filled--the bottom half was sealed off--so it would automatically be at least half full. I wrapped up the glasses as Tom’s last gifts to us, and when Tom's children and their mother and her husband and my daughter and I gathered on Christmas morning, we drank a toast in Tom's memory.

It's been a half-full week for America. After two years and $14 billion spent, the 2020 U.S. presidential elections has essentially ended in a draw, and there's a 50 percent chance you are disappointed by the results. We've now been more or less evenly divided for decades and there's little indication how--or when--we'll break the deadlock in Washington, D.C., never mind between the blue metros and the red retros.   

For many of us, our thirst remains unslaked. We'd dreamed so long of a resounding rebuke to the mean, fear-mongering, self-centered bully who has held the presidency these past four years. Amid this year's reckoning over racism, we were sure tens of millions of Americans would turn out as never before to vote for love and justice, and we did. But anxiety and dread were on the ballot, too, and their appeal was just as powerful to folks who may be feeling more half-empty right now.

And so here we are, pretty much where we started, except the kinder candidate has apparently prevailed in the presidential contest. Given all that Joe Biden has endured in his life, it's little surprise that he's bearing this time of uncertainty with patience and calm, and that is what our battered country needs now and over the next four years. While we will not fully realize the changes many of us would like in these divided times, at least our nation can rejoin the world community and make progress on the margins at home, especially for the most marginalized.

At a post-election vespers service the other night, my minister told the story of a couple in the church he served early in his career. Long unable to have children of their own, they finally became parents, but their daughter was born with developmental disabilities. They chose to love her and raise her as if she were perfectly and fully human, and so she surpassed the life expectancy and limits she'd been dealt. Likewise, my husband spent his last decade living with multiple myeloma, yet Tom's glass was always at least half full, and often spilling over the brim as he threw himself into passion projects like launching a community radio station in the last years of his life and embracing a new romance despite previous disappointments.  

Half of America feels wounded over the election results, while the other half are saying "meh," but it doesn’t have to be that way. In this time of mingled disappointments, as we continue to deal with COVID-19 and a faltering economy, may we choose to see possibility over peril, lift repair over despair, and--knowing the infinite promise of this country--declare an end to our hostilities. Together, let's raise a glass to freedom and love the half-full out of this broken, beloved nation.  

 

Pandemic postcard #32: In search of a clean slate

Last week, I promised a story about what I was doing on November 9, 2016. I'm pretty sure that whatever happens next week, it won't be any weirder than what I lived through four years ago, both because this year's election may take a long time beyond Tuesday night to resolve and because Tom had his stem cell transplant the morning after the last election.

 

The 2012 election was one of only a few in my adult life that I wasn't working in either a newsroom or for a campaign on election night. I felt at loose ends and nervous about the results, so I went to a movie. I was one of a handful of people who attended a showing of Argo at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. I stopped in the restroom afterward and heard two women sharing the news that President Obama had won re-election.  

 

When someone gets a stem cell transplant, their immune system is wiped clean and they are home-bound for many months afterward, so Tom and I thought a movie date night sounded like the best way to spend election night 2016, too. We were staying at a hotel near the hospital, and we walked a few blocks to see Moonlight. The night held lots of promise: We’d had a Black president for eight years and we’d soon have a woman in that role. Love and demographic destiny seemed ascendant in America, and Tom would have a new lease on life the next morning.   

 

I knew something was amiss when we left the theater and walked toward a bar on the next corner. Several people were crying on the sidewalk outside, big-screen TVs flickering in the windows behind them, swaths of red slashing across the maps. Despite being far behind in the polls, Donald Trump had won several key states where balloting had already closed. Yet the night was still relatively young for those of us on the West Coast. Things could change. 

 

When we got back to the hotel, I tucked Tom into bed so he could get a good night’s sleep. I stayed awake a few more hours and saw more states—and ultimately the election—called for Trump. Dazed, I climbed into bed and slept badly before waking Tom for our pre-dawn appointment with the transplantation team.  It was a strange morning for everyone, but it was also a relief to have something to take our minds off the news, at least for a few hours. And for Tom, this was the first day of the rest of his life, however long that might be. We still had that fact to celebrate.

 

Six months post transplant

Tom's stem cells gave him about 15 months of remission before the cancer came back in early 2018. Running out of options, we began a clinical drug trial that didn’t go well, one that saw Tom in and out of the hospital for blood transfusions and other interventions. In June of that year, we got married on Tom’s 62nd birthday, our family crowding into the hospital room to wish us well. It was another day of possibility and within days, Tom’s doctor sent us home for a brief honeymoon.

 

It was a risky gift, with Tom’s white blood cell counts still low, yet it was one we embraced. On the fourth night at home, after Tom collapsed twice while trying to get to the bathroom, I knew the honeymoon was over. He died in the hospital two days later, but not before his children and their mother had a chance to visit with him on what would be his last night on Earth. We'd hoped to go home with hospice care the next day, but that was not to be.  


 

I miss Tom every day.  I have no idea what he would have made of what we’ve endured as a nation in 2020, and I am especially grateful that his final months did not come amid COVID-19. But I understand that his brother, who lives in a swing state and usually votes Republican, will vote for the Democrat this time. “This one is for Tom,” he has been saying, and this gives me hope. All of us alive in 2020 have seen our ability to bear the unthinkable bend to the breaking point—and when it comes to discarding old opinions and habits that no longer serve us, breaking free is an act of courage. 

 

There will be no election night movie for me this year; I'll be working for my county elections office as a drop-box attendant. Your vote is your voice, so if you haven't yet made your voice heard, please do that by Tuesday. 

 

Visualize what it will be like to have a clean slate for our nation. I'll see you on the other side.    

Pandemic postcard #31: Waiting to exhale

My phone ring tone has been the same for a very long time, "Right Here, Right Now," the upbeat 1990 song celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall and authoritarian regimes in Europe. I've lately thought about changing it since there definitely are other places I'd rather be than in the middle--is this the middle?!--of a pandemic and a bonkers election season. But then there's the line that keeps giving me hope, the one about "watching the world wake up from history ..." 

 

We are on a cusp of a new dawning. You can feel it, right? (You've already voted, by mail or in person with early voting, yes?) America has occasionally flirted with a meaningful reckoning over the kind of country we want to be, but we've never quite made the commitment. But this year, amid the manifold crises of 2020, it feels like Decision Day is finally here.  

 

Of course, Decision Day will take a while. Folks have been voting for a few weeks, and we may not know the results until well into November. Meanwhile, I want to know: What do you plan to do on November 4 and beyond, regardless of the election results? I asked this question on Facebook the other day. A few folks answered with notions of day drinking, shopping for flights out of the U.S., and watching riots on TV. I sympathize with the long-simmering stress that those replies belie.

A little escape, for a day or a week or more, was a common theme. Meg and Joan, who've been especially active this campaign season, say they plan to finally take a day off. Frances says she'll either be glued to the TV, "or I might be in the mountains for the day breathing deeply knowing politics and the virus are not there." Eileen reports that she'll be on her first vacation in several years, newly retired Joanne is on a personal retreat exploring a possible relocation, and Elaine mentions the possibility of "a COVID-cautious trip to see friends and family."  

 

Some folks admit they may be adrift, uncertain what they will do, which is such an understandable response given the vast emotional energy we've put into surviving four exhausting seasons of The Trump Show. Others mention the importance of routine. Carol, a doctor, will continue to heal the sick. Felicia will keep up pro bono legal aid work to help small businesses navigate the pandemic "and a recession that is likely to get worse before it gets better regardless of election outcomes." As he has every day since 2013, Joe will get up early and take a music-fueled walk (and knowing Joe, with every step, he'll be thinking about what he can do next to help his friends and his community).

 

Everyone knows that no matter what happens, there will still be plenty of work to do, as activists and humans. Nonprofit executive Rene has a staff meeting planned for 9:30 a.m. November 4 "to help us remember EITHER WAY that much, if not all, of the work we do will carry on." Dennis says he'll continue to advocate for the world he wants to see for his children and brand-new grandchild. "First though I will hug and play with that little boy and be comforted and inspired by his smiles," he adds. That answer made me smile, as did Nathan's, who notes he'll be celebrating his daughter's first birthday the day after the election and working to protect the election results. 

 

Fellow longtime blogger Tom says he'll continue to metaphorically chop wood and carry water. Kristen has been volunteering to monitor election irregularities and misinformation, and Katherine will start a new discussion group the week after the election, pairing chapters from the book Becoming Better Grownups: Rediscovering What Matters and Remembering How to Fly with episodes of On Being With Krista Tippett. (Of course I am signing up for that.)  

Theresa and Diana and David plan to continue to cultivate joy through cooking and music. Rebecca will seek balance through caring for family, "doing what is in front of me to do," and "finding energy in intentional interactions and the random encounters I experience with people ... I have to hold on to my belief that what weaves us together is stronger than what would pull us apart."

I say amen to all of this.

 

As for me, here's how I envision how my November 4 will look: I'll wake up and spend no more than a half-hour getting the latest news. (I'll set a timer.) I'll write in my journal. I'll take a long walk and spend some time near Puget Sound. I plan to avoid the news for most of the day, but I'll check in for an update by late afternoon, and I'll attend a webinar on advancing the National Popular Vote. Night will come early, and I'll end the day at an online vespers service with my faith community. Beyond November 4, I'll continue working to write the change I want to see in the world, here at Surely Joy and also through a revival of my circa 2010 project, Write the Change. 

 

It won't be long now. In a few weeks, we will know whether a majority of Americans have collectively decided to reject division and build beloved community. We are waiting to exhale and yearning to breathe free, yet the reality is things are going to be messy for a while. 

 

The biggest task ahead of us may be making sure that no one gets left behind: definitely not the people of color who have been waiting far too patiently for this time, and also not the white people who may be hurting because they've lost a false idol. Few people are irredeemable, and almost everyone deserves a lifeline. It is time for us all to thrive, time for us all to joyfully wake up from history.

 

Next week, I'll share a story about what I was doing the day after the last election. No matter what happens in 2020, it won't be any weirder than what I experienced in 2016. Until then, be well and remember: rest is fuel.   

 

Pandemic postcard #30: Repair > despair

The name I chose for this blog in 2014 has given me pause many times over the past few years. Henry David Thoreau insisted that "surely joy is the condition of life," and I still believe that to be true. Yet in 2020, another perspective on joy has been far more resonant for me: Brother David Steindl-Rast's affirmation that joy is "the happiness that doesn't depend on what happens." 

 

I will be digging deep into this latter idea over the next few weeks. Next week, I want to explore--with your help--what you plan to do to pursue joy (or at least equilibrium) in the days and weeks after the election, especially since it may take a while to see a definitive resolution. This week, I want to lift up the idea of repair. 

 

These are not easy times for people who believe in justice, fairness, and equity. Just this week, we've seen confirmation that the Supreme Court has become wholly politicized, both in the speedy nomination and anticipated party-line vote to seat a new justice and in the current court's ruling that allows a premature halt to the 2020 Census. These are decisions that will erase people, endanger health, and enrich corporate America. 

 

There is abundant cause for despair, which is exactly why we need to believe instead in repair as the greater good--the higher power--that will pull us through these next few months. Hope is a muscle. Here are a few examples of repair as hope in action: 

Voting is a mighty act of repair. While the agents of despair would like to keep poor people and folks of color from exercising this basic right, the angels of repair are doing whatever they can to encourage everyone to vote--and to safeguard those votes. The Solutions Journalism Network is tracking good-news stories about the election, such as how the nonpartisan Poll Hero Project has recruited tens of thousands of young Americans to be poll workers amid the pandemic that has kept many older poll-working veterans home. 

 

Tomorrow, volunteers with the Vote Forward project will mail 15 million hand-written letters to fellow Americans who vote infrequently, urging them to make the effort this year. We are seeing indications of a truly massive turnout.   

 

Last Monday, we marked Indigenous Peoples Day. Just as 2020 has been a year of heightened awareness of systemic racism dating back 400 years, it's also been a year of more fully recognizing how our founders displaced the people who were here first. We can't remake the past, but we can acknowledge the full history of where we live--and we can also consider paying rent to recognize and honor this connection. I made a donation to Real Rent Duwamish this week, and I will make it a goal to begin small, symbolic monthly rent payments by next October. 

 

Earlier this year, as the pandemic began to unfold, the federal government basically told the states and local governments that "you're on your own." It's one thing for progressive coastal states to step up and act in such times, but I was inspired by this program from The Harwood Institute highlighting how two red-state communities--Clark County, Kentucky, and Jackson, Mississippi--took that edict to heart and worked to be sure their citizens were safe, fed, and housed. "Now is not the time to go to the corner and hoard resources," said Von Gordon of the William Winter Institute in Jackson. "Hope has really emerged in people continuing to show up" and "be authentic about their fears and the challenges," added Beth Willett Jones of the Greater Clark Foundation. 

 

Finally, as a society, we must continue to recognize the reality that America was built and is still being sustained with the physical labor of people who were literally enslaved (in centuries past) or who are working essential jobs for insufficient pay to this day. We can do many things to help repair this, from supporting microbusinesses owned by marginalized people and ethical small businesses that do right by their employees to electing people who will fight for livable wages, robust benefits, student loan debt relief, and strong safety nets. 

 

Many of us have been working very hard this year to raise our own awareness and advocate for changes we want to see. I said earlier in this post that I want to hear what you plan to do on Nov. 4 and beyond to give voice to your values (and also, frankly, to take care of yourself and your loved ones as winter descends). Please share in the comments or send me an email; the best address for that is sidewalk206 at gmail dot com. I look forward to hearing from you, and I'll share some of your thoughts in next week's post.

 

Pandemic postcard #29: Turning into my dad

Today is my father's birthday, and if all goes well, my brother and his husband and I will be toasting Dad's memory on a San Francisco beach, not far from where we scattered his ashes. Dad has been gone almost a decade, but--as I wrote a few weeks ago--my parents' memories have been strong with me this fall. I miss them both as much as I ever have, and I think I may be turning into my dad.

I know that many women worry they'll turn into their mother, but that was never going to happen for me. Like many mothers and daughters do, we clashed during my adolescence, and I was just starting to know and appreciate Mom as a fellow adult when she died at age 62. By then, I'd been away from home for eight years.   

Dad was also 62 when Mom died. That's the same age my husband, Tom, was when he died in 2018, and the same age my stepchildrens' maternal grandfather was when he passed on. I'm just a few years shy of that mark, and as 62 looms ever closer, it hurts to be "losing" a year the way we are in 2020. 

Yet it's likely I'll live far beyond 62, as my dad did; he was 87 when he passed away in 2012. He lived long enough to see my ill-advised first marriage end, and to see me meet a good man and marry again, and to see my brother find a loving partner, and to spend lots of time with his only grandchild when she was young. At the end of his life, he gave me the sacred experience of helping a loved one have a good death. Today, on his birthday, let me tell you a little more about my dad. 

Sparrow, #14

Byron Fanselow started out a little guy, and his nickname was "Sparrow," but he still played baseball and basketball. His high school yearbook reports that he was usually laughing. After graduation, he grew several inches, so his nickname went away--until the 1970s, when Dad (and my brother and sometimes I) became "Fonz." Thank you, Happy Days, for helping America finally learn how to say our last name.

Dad went to Illinois Tech for mechanical engineering, then he joined the Navy near the end of World War II. After that, he became a salesman--the natural job for someone with his personality. He started out selling windows and went on to rep several metal building companies in the Midwest. He was offered a transfer to San Francisco but wound up taking one to Pittsburgh instead so he and my mom would remain reasonably close to their families in Chicago, where most of my extended kin still live.

For a short time when I was in elementary school, Dad had an office in a downtown Pittsburgh high-rise, which was fun. But usually, he worked from home and on the road, calling on clients across the Mid-Atlantic states, eating lots of dinners at Howard Johnson's and racking up plenty of points at Holiday Inns. He loved to travel and he loved meeting people, and my brother and I both found careers that incorporated those things.  

Dad worked on commission, money was sometimes tight, and Mom loved to shop. She meant well; she loved to give people gifts, but she'd lose track of what she'd already bought, so we always had lots of stuff but never much extra money. Mom went to work at a fast-food place to help send me to college. That's where she had her first fall, on a slick floor at Wendy's. I took the call on the hallway phone in the dorm my freshman year at Ohio University. Mom had broken her hip, and soon after that, she got cancer, too. I doubled down at school, maxing out my course loads so I could graduate in three years.

Thankfully, Mom beat lymphoma and she and Dad were able to travel a bit. They went to Tokyo and Hawaii mostly for free with all those points from Holiday Inn. But her hip replacement hadn't healed especially well, and one day, her cane caught on the top step of the basement stairs. She fell and hit her head, and we had to let her go. Dad was heartbroken at the loss of his wife of 37 years, and I cannot imagine his grief, even after losing the love of my life. But he'd go on to live another two-and-a-half decades, most of them in a healthy, happy retirement.

You're probably wondering by now: How am I turning into my dad?

I find myself cracking really bad jokes. For example: On my camping trip to Olympic National Park this summer, I arrived at Rialto Beach first thing one morning and found three bored teenagers sitting at a picnic table, ignoring the Pacific Ocean. I tried to get them excited. "It's going to be a great sunrise!" I said. "Too bad we're on the wrong side!"

I find myself wanting to talk to everybody. I'm sure the pandemic and living alone are driving this, but when I see other humans, especially in person but even on Zoom, it's sometimes hard to contain myself. I genuinely miss people at this point. Dad was the same way. I think he was happy living alone--he never had a serious romantic relationship after Mom, that I know of, and he knew how to entertain himself. But the longer he was alone, the more he missed seeing people, and that manifested in wanting to talk a lot when he saw them.

Dad in 1993

What I most admired about my dad was his curiosity about everything. We always had plenty of books around, of course, plus stacks of newspapers and magazines. Dad had no serious lifelong hobbies other than photography, but he'd get interested in something--astronomy, astrology, CB radios, ice cream making, magic tricks, meditation, computers, physics--and he'd learn all he could (or all he cared to), then he'd move on to something else.      

Dad did get downright cranky for a while in the early 2000s, when he started watching too much Lou Dobbs on CNN and briefly, alarmingly, became rabidly anti-immigrant. Fortunately, this xenophobia didn't last long, since it clashed with his moderate politics and his liberal Christianity.

Dad ultimately developed dementia and had a rough last few years, though the course of his disease was fairly swift. The cognitive reserve theory suggests that people who spend a lifetime keeping their brain active may die faster once in the later stages of dementia, and that mercifully seemed to be true for Dad. Unfortunately, his sharp decline came at the very same time I had soul-taxing political work and a teen daughter and a marriage that was showing some strain. I'm adopted, so it's anyone's guess what my fate might be in the brain health department, but the heartache of Dad's final few years is gradually fading for me, and I am not afraid.

I am not afraid. I think that's something else I got from my parents, and something I've tried to pass on to my daughter. Love was our family's default position, and Mom and Dad showed it in their volunteer work, in their friendships and family ties, and at the ballot box. And they showed it to each other; they had a rule that they'd never go to bed holding a grudge. 

Although things are unsettled in our country right now, I believe that love and reason and liberty and justice will prevail, though perhaps not without a fight. I miss my parents, but I'm not sorry they're missing this--and I am grateful for their legacy of valuing love over fear. 

Thank you, Dad. You too, Mom. Keep sending those good vibes, for we surely need them.

My parents on their Havana honeymoon.

 

 

Pandemic postcard #28: Will write for tips

Update: I have taken down my Patreon page as of April 2021. If you'd like to support my work, you can check out more recent posts at Surely Joy's current site, where you'll find a tip jar. Thank you for valuing creativity and the written word.

It's Friday morning, and word has arrived that our First Couple have confirmed cases of coronavirus. Could this year possibly get any weirder? 

It seems like a month ago already, before this latest news and before the raucous debate, but I actually turned down a job this week. After a summer coming up short in my search for work, I was glad to finally have a job offer, especially with the CARES Act federal unemployment assistance long gone and my state unemployment pay ending soon. But something didn't feel right. 

I would have had work for about five weeks this winter, monitoring tests in school classrooms--a job I did a few years ago, too, but that was before COVID. Would the work even happen, with most schools still closed? Then there were the logistical hoops I'd be jumping through to take and keep the job: fingerprinting at a time when it's nearly impossible, weekly COVID tests, heavy-duty PPE requirements. All for a short-term, minimum wage gig with no benefits. 

I finally realized that I'd applied for the job out of fear--of making my rent, of ever working for a wage again. I wound up turning it down out of hope for something better.

Of course, it's a marker of privilege that I can do this. Plenty of people are taking whatever work they can to make ends meet from week to week, despite the threat of a disease that's disproportionately affecting working-class Americans. Many people don't have savings to use in an emergency, never mind during a few lean months. I have savings I can dip into if I need to (and I’ll need to).

Most of all, though, I realized that I want to focus on doing what I do best (and what I'd done my entire adult life until most of my work vanished in March): make a living with words. For seven months, I've been writing these pandemic postcards--essentially a weekly column--to try and make sense of these times, but I have been writing them for free. Not so long ago, before Craigslist and social media decimated local journalism, someone with my background could land a job writing a column or human-interest stories. Those opportunities are rare these days, yet I know I ought to be paid for at least some of my writing. 

That's why--although Surely Joy will remain free (and ad-free)--I've decided to set up a page on Patreon where, for $3 a month, you can let me know my work has value to you. I know this may be a big ask at a time when we are all being asked to contribute to the usual member-supported media outlets plus maintain subscriptions to major journalism organizations that are doing critical work--but if you have $3 a month to spare to support my experiment in crowd-funded punditry, I'll be grateful.

The $3-a-month tier is my "You like me" level. Pledges of this amount can really add up in my small-footprint micro-economy, and I will write at least one patrons-only post each month at Patreon for folks who pledge that amount. (Here's a sample.)

People who pledge $9 a month ("You really like me") will also get access to some behind-the-scenes peeks at my notebooks and work in progress (like this). And because I sense that some of my readers would love to pursue a more joyful, intentional life, I offer the "You want to be like me" tier, which is $27 a month. For that level of support, I will be your personal creativity coach. We'll talk at least once a quarter about how you'd like to live more fearlessly and creatively. I'll encourage and question and inspire you (and you will do the same for me). 

Surely Joy will never be all I do, and that’s OK. I love to interview people and write feature stories; I just finished my first one since March, an article for 3rd Act magazine about how musicians are weathering the pandemic. I like to edit and I have some possibilities in that area. I fervently hope to be working back at the ballpark next year. It’s a seasonal, minimum wage job, too, but I enjoy the fans and the people I work with.

But the writing I do here feels important--to me and, I know, to some of you. We are in historic times, and I am trying my best to make some sense of them while also lifting up my original reason for this blog: the practice of living a simple, beautiful life and of pursuing joy, described by Brother David Steindl-Rast as "the happiness that doesn't depend on what happens." Joy is more essential than ever as we work hard to make real the world we imagine. And today, we might even permit ourselves a bit of schadenfreude while wishing the Trumps a speedy recovery. Or not.    

Thanks for reading this far, and for considering a pledge. It is an honor to write for you. Let's continue to navigate these strange times together.

Mural at Olympic View Elementary School, Seattle

Pandemic postcard #27: The book of Ruth

My mom loved the old saying that "you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." As a kid, this didn't make a lot of sense to me; I'd wonder why I would want to catch flies at all. I was more interested in lightning bugs and praying mantises and caterpillars--critters I could catch, watch a while, and release. (Unless I forgot the release part, which I did once in a while. Sorry, bugs.)

Eventually, I understood the saying as my mother intended it: You can influence more people by being pleasant and kind than by being bitter and sour. My parents lived that idea. Mom and Dad were both easy-going, low-drama people for the most part. They had a strong religious faith, but they also revered reason, and they weren't afraid to change their minds. They were Eisenhower Republicans from the Land of Lincoln until Vietnam and Watergate made them reconsider their loyalty to the GOP. 

 

I've been thinking about Mom and Dad a lot this week as we mourn a famous woman of their generation who shared my mom's first name. Ruth Bader Ginsburg also shared my parents' devotion to the common good and to finding common ground. The late justice was rightly hailed as a liberal lioness, yet she was no firebrand. When, as a young litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union, she brought cases before the then-all-male Supreme Court, Ginsburg didn't frame them in terms of "women's rights" but of equal rights. And although she supported a woman's right to end a pregnancy, she favored legislative reforms to safeguard access to reproductive healthcare. She correctly foretold how the sweeping Roe v. Wade decision would ensure pitched battles over the issue for decades to come.

 

One of the RBG quotes I've seen most often this week is this reminder: "Fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you." As David Cole, current national legal director for the ACLU, wrote this week in The New York Review of Books, "Her dissents did not aim barbs at the majority, but instead coolly, painstakingly, and effectively dissected the ruling’s errors, and often placed her emphasis on areas of agreement and avenues the majority decision left open." She was able to dissent without being disagreeable, and she famously was close friends with her opposite on the high court, Antonin Scalia. 

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg consistently chose honey over vinegar. When she died a week ago just as Jews prepared to observe the High Holy Days, Jewish theologians noted that the timing made her a Tzadik, a person of great righteousness. I'm not sure what this makes Mitch McConnell, who refused to take up President Barack Obama's nomination of a Supreme Court justice more than seven months before the 2016 election, yet who now seeks to swiftly confirm a third lifetime appointment for a man who lost the popular vote four years ago and seems likely to lose it again on November 3. Calling on another religious concept, I'd like to think that karma will eventually have an answer for the likes of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, but I'm not sure where that leaves us this fall.

 

"The problem for America, as for many other democracies at this point in history, is this is not an even match," Robert Reich wrote in The Guardian this week. "Those who fight for power will bend or break rules to give themselves every advantage. Those who fight for principle are at an inherent disadvantage because bending or breaking rules undermines the very ideals they seek to uphold."

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg became an icon, but it wasn't a role she chose. Like Thurgood Marshall, her life and work were grounded in principle as she fought to make sure everyone's equality was recognized under the law. Is there still time to make this election about that fundamental (if yet-unrealized) American value? And if nakedly unchecked authoritarian power prevails--even as it is being dismissed by a majority of voters, many of whom are already casting ballots--what happens next? 

 

Our news feeds suggest we're about to find out. I miss my thoughtful and moderate parents. Part of me wishes they were still here to see what they would make of this circus--and another part is grateful they didn't live long enough to experience it--but their legacy of valuing love over fear remains strong with me as I seek to chart a course of nuance, reflection, and hope in these darkening autumn days. 

 

I also take heart remembering that my parents were people who were never afraid nor ashamed to change their minds. Just as my folks eventually turned against Nixon, I am sure others like them have finally seen enough to put country over party.

 

Rest in Power, Justice Ginsburg, and thanks for all you did--and the way you did it.       

 

Pandemic postcard #26: Practicing for winter

It's been nine days since I've been outside for more than about five minutes. Six months ago, I stayed home on March 13, the day the seriousness of the pandemic really hit home in the United States. But once I knew that it was safe and even smart to continue walking outside every day amid COVID-19, I did exactly that, every morning--until the middle of last week, when the air quality here in the Northwest became too dangerous to venture outside.

The first few days of the air-quality quarantine were the worst, but as I heard more about what was happening in Oregon, I could not feel anything but gratitude for what I have: for the roof over my head, for food to eat, for breathable air inside my apartment--and for plenty of time to read, think, and learn. I've had that all year, of course, but making the best of this homebound week-and-a-half, I've leaned into it a bit more.

"I am fortunate because I have been able to spend my life in the study of the world," says Alma Whittaker, the main character in Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things, which I read with uncharacteristic speed over just a few days this past week. Indeed, that is why I became a journalist: because I am curious about just about everything. I, too, am an avid lifelong student of the world, and while I may not be getting paid for my curiosity very often these days, I can indulge it more than ever.

Online conferences, webinars, classes, lectures, and concerts have helped me get through these past six months, and I've taken especially great advantage of them during these recent smoky days. Since last weekend, I've attended three online church services, a real-time film screening and post-movie discussion, a lecture on the presidential race, a virtual walking tour of Seattle's Denny Regrade, and a "Moth"-like program of stories about the pandemic and the fight for racial justice.

I have relished personal connection, too. A college classmate has convened a Zoom happy hour every few weeks, and it's been fun catching up with a fascinating, opinionated group of folks, even if everyone but me is in the Eastern time zone, ready to raise their glasses when it's still mid-afternoon in Seattle. I've talked with a few friends on the phone, including one whose daughter-in-law is the acting ranger on one of the hardest-hit forests in Oregon. I haven't seen anybody in person since my last shift volunteering at the food bank two weeks ago, but I don't feel as isolated as I might.

It sounds like the rain will start tonight and we may have clean air again sometime tomorrow. I look forward to walking outside and to opening my windows again.

Autumn arrives in a few days, and lately, it's always been a season of introspection for me, ahead of our long, dark, wet winters in Seattle. I know this pandemic winter won't be easy, but after the past nine days, I feel better prepared for the many months of interior life ahead.

 

Pandemic postcard #25: The next right thing

It's funny how books and ideas show up at the right time. I've been doing a lot of camping this summer, mainly because it's the one kind of travel that feels low-risk during the pandemic--until this week of hellfire, that is--and also because it is cheap and it gives me lots of distraction-free time to read. For a recent trip out to the Olympic Peninsula, I brought along Plan B, one of Anne Lamott's collections of essays about faith that had been on my bookshelf a long time. I thought I remembered picking it out of a Little Free Library, but a receipt buried in its pages revealed that I actually bought it at National Airport in Washington, DC, on March 19, 2008, when I would've been on my way home from a national bloggers' conference. 

A dozen years doesn't seem so long in the course of a lifetime, but at this point, 2008 feels like many lifetimes ago. By 2008, I had been heavily involved in politics for much of that decade, thus the invitation for the all-expenses-paid weekend of training for progressive bloggers. I gladly took the trip, but I was actually trying to back away from politics at that time, turning my attention toward a three-quarter-time contract job with a favorite client that had hired me to extend the then-still-new tools of blogging and social media to communities doing important small-d democracy work. It felt like I was living a calling. I was as happy as I have ever been in my professional life.

 

Yet within a few months, I'd pivoted back into politics. An opportunity had arisen with my state Democratic Party for a job I'd sought a few years earlier. We were on the cusp of electing the first Black president and maybe Idaho's first Democratic member of Congress in many years, too. It felt like the right decision at the right time. Although the job turned out to be heartbreaking on many levels, I don't regret taking it. I did some good work and I was able to share the historic 2009 inaugural with my daughter and some dear friends. Still, I wonder what might have happened had I stayed on the contract gig with my all-time favorite client.

Fast-forward to 2020. Once it became clear that most of my pre-pandemic freelance work was gone, I began looking for a full-time job, focusing on things that could feel like career capstones, or at least really good fits for me. By late July, I was demoralized: I'd come close on a few opportunities, but rejection is hard, and I was ready to give it a rest. Then I saw one more possibility--from my long-ago favorite client, for a lightly advertised job that seemed as if it had been written with me in mind. I applied and immediately got an interview. I was sure it was meant to be.

But after a few weeks passed with no news, I learned that the job had gone to a Black man, a talented young writer. And honestly, that is how it should be. The organization's central focus is on helping communities face up to racism--something which, although I have a heart for the work, I have no lived experience. (Of course, I know that better in 2020 than I ever have before.) I was crushed, but I understand that things usually happen--or don't--for a reason. I was ready to move to New England for this job, for one thing, and maybe that simply wasn't supposed to happen because I love the Northwest and my family is on this side of the country. 

Now it's September, and I've given up trying to find full-time work, at least for the time being. Too many people are looking, and I am older than most of them. But I am too young to retire, so I have to find ways to make ends meet--likely some combination of freelance and seasonal work, which is what I've done much of my working life, anyway. 

This brings me back to Lamott's book. As best I can tell, I read part of it on my cross-country flight, then forgot about it for 12 years. Still, it had survived many moves and lots of serious book-winnowing missions, so I was keeping it for a reason. Plan B finally found its way into my tote bag last month and I read most of it in one afternoon while camped near the Strait of San Juan de Fuca.

 

Early in the book, Lamott explains how, two years after her mother had died, she still hadn't scattered her ashes because she was mad at her mom and keeping her remains stashed in the closet seemed like fitting punishment. She was also deep in grief about the turn our country had taken since September 11, 2001, especially the unfounded decision to make war on Iraq. Then one Sunday, Lamott's pastor preached about how, in a time of war,  

... now was not the time to figure everything out--for instance who was to blame. It was not the time to get a new plan together and try to push it through. It was the time to be still, to center ourselves, to trust what we'd always trusted in ... 

Lamott writes how, taking these words to heart, she was able to quiet herself and her harsh, scary, "thinky thoughts." She took long walks. She sat in prayer and meditation. Then she found a photo of her mom that she hadn't seen for a while, and she just knew: It was time, and "scattering her ashes was the next right thing."

Those four words. "The next right thing." It feels impossible in this moment to know what awaits us with the election and its aftermath, or when COVID-19 will be over, or the trajectory that climate havoc will take. Long-term plans feel impossible; there are too many x-factors. But as individuals, we can know the next right thing, whether it's something small, like working to get out the vote or checking in on a loved one, or embarking on some really big change we've truly thought through a while. Intuition is not impulse.

As I finished this post, I read a new piece in The Atlantic that blames America's poor pandemic response on failures of intuition, comparing our situation to that of ants following one another into a death spiral. I want to make clear that when I talk about the power of intuition, I'm talking about how we can use it on a personal level--not as a guide for public policy, where science and reason must prevail. But in our own lives, I know we can be guided by intuition--on following that invisible thread, those few feet of headlights you need to make your way home, even when you can't see where you're going. (Thank you, William E. Stafford and E.L. Doctorow.) 

In some ways, this has been the hardest week of the pandemic for me. The news of the world is unrelenting, and mostly grim. Smoke-choked air means I can't even enjoy a long daily walk, which has been the one constant in my life since March. Of course, that is a small inconvenience compared to the loss of life and homes up and down the West Coast. My heart goes out to the people working on the fire lines and in the fields. May they be safe. 

Let the rains come soon, and justice, too. Meanwhile, I will try to remember that rest is fuel--and sometimes it is definitely the next right thing.

P.S. To those of you who get Surely Joy via email (thank you!): Please check out the web version of this post--click on the headline--for Loosen Loosen Baby by Aly Halpert, a musical meditation that has been pure soul balm for me since I first heard it at church earlier this year. I like to sing along. I've also included a beautiful video from Leon Bridges that was featured at our congregation's vespers service just a few nights ago.

 

Aly Halpert · Loosen Loosen

Pandemic postcard #23: The suburbs

This week's post comes from my 2017 book Surely Joy, for which it served as the final, then-unpublished essay. I've never posted it online, but--over the past two weeks, listening to the disparate visions of America presented by the two political conventions--I started thinking about my experience growing up in suburbia, which I captured in this essay. I live in the city again, but my recent time in a Seattle suburb showed me how much things have changed since my childhood.

I'll be taking a break from posting until after Labor Day. Please be well and enjoy the fleeting days of this weird summer. -- Julie

My parents were two city kids who’d hailed from Chicago, a Cubs fan and a White Sox partisan who somehow got together. Like most white folks of their generation, they moved to the suburbs after Dad came back from the big war. Unlike many, they never became afraid to venture back into the city: for ball games, traveling Broadway shows, and even to see Billie Holiday sing in a little club on the South Side.    

Dad’s company transferred my parents to Pittsburgh when I was four, and while I grew up in a suburban subdivision so lily-white it was actually named Plantation Place, I knew people of color. My favorite memories are of Zola, the woman who ran the inner-city preschool where my fair-skinned mother volunteered once a week, where Mom was known as “the brownie lady” for the pan of treats she brought along every Tuesday morning. One time, Mom and Dad invited Zola and her husband to dinner.  We all ate on the side porch of our home, and the four adults laughed there late into the night. The next day, I learned from a neighborhood friend she would not be allowed to play at our house anymore. 

I loved the woods and meadows and creeks of southwestern Pennsylvania, the same landscapes that inspired Rachel Carson. But I was drawn to the city, and as soon as I got old enough to travel on my own, I’d take the trolley to downtown and a bus to Oakland, where the colleges and museums and rock clubs were. I’d wander for hours on foot, up Forbes and Centre, imagining what it would be like to have an apartment in a neighborhood full of people who didn’t necessarily look or think like me. 

It took decades, but I finally had that experience when I lived in Oakland – the California city, not the Pittsburgh district – just before it became nearly as unaffordable as San Francisco. I hit the apartment jackpot in Oakland, with a quiet place near Lake Merritt where I rarely saw or heard my neighbors. Yet my daily life was rich in diversity, from my commute aboard the packed buses and BART trains to the shops and bodegas along Grand Avenue. 

From there, involved in a long-distance romance, I followed my heart to Washington state. I didn’t want to live with my sweetheart, both because I like my own space and because he lives in the suburbs, so I chose a gritty section of north Seattle where recently arrived refugees live amid university students who can’t afford anything near campus. Sirens wailed and homeless people howled into the night beneath my first apartment. After two years, I found a quieter place to live a few blocks away.

But as soon as I moved to Seattle, I began spending many nights at my sweetheart’s home. Without a car, this involved a short bus ride, then a mile walk … alongside a creek, up winding roads, with blackberries ripe for picking in late summer and tall trees everywhere. Although it was mere miles from my address in the city, it felt like a world apart. 

Circumstances evolved and I ultimately moved in with Tom. By then, I’d noticed something else about his town: Although white people are the majority, this is a place of many languages, colors, and faiths. Families of all kinds are here, some fleeing oppression abroad, others rejecting Seattle’s rocketing rents. Our town is home to shopkeepers and hair stylists and ride-hail drivers from all over the world, living among folks – not all of them Caucasian – who’ve been here for generations.

All across America, the lines between the big city and the suburbs are blurring. Mosques and churches and synagogues and Zen centers are on the same stretch of road. Kids who are learning English sit in every classroom. My neighborhood has a block party every year, and everyone comes: lots of new young couples, many of them mixed-race, their impossibly beautiful little kids chalking up the street. The tattooed-and-pierced community college prof running for city council. The middle-age-guys’ garage band. The sailing ship captain who serves as the MC. His wife, a traveling volunteer nurse, who wrangles the kids’ activities. 

The Asian-American woman leading a drive to save a local patch of undeveloped forest. The Latino guy from a few blocks over who recently moved to town and just happened by. The white lawyer-singer-songwriter and her black bass-playing husband, who’ve had Tom and me over for dinner. 

This sort of scene makes some people anxious, eager to return to a mythical, monocultural America that never really existed. But many, probably most of us, like it this way. Across our differences, we want to strive for that more perfect union because we know life is better when everyone feels welcome and everyone belongs. I miss the thrum of the city sometimes, but if I can live in a suburb – a village, really – where neighbors can eat and laugh and sing together well into the night and look out for each other by day, that is a place where I want to be.

Pandemic postcard #21: Summer reading report

All my life, I have dreamed of having endless time to read, and I've always figured I'd need to wait until retirement for that dream to come true. Then 2020 happened. I have had plenty of time to get lost in a book these past many months. 

Here's a selection of books I've enjoyed so far during the pandemic. All are available via The Optimist, my online independent bookstore at Bookshop.org, and if you enjoy Surely Joy, it'd mean a lot to me if you'd buy a book, any book. Your purchase will help me...and small bricks-and-mortar bookstores, too. As I write this, Bookshop.org says it has raised nearly $6 million for indie bookshops. I'm still working on my first $25. Still, every little bit helps, especially now that the CARES Act unemployment pay is gone.

So without further begging or ado ... 

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. This book captivated me from its first pages, where Odell describes one of her favorite parks in Oakland. (I know it, too.) Odell's mission is to help us pay attention, not to the endless clatter of commerce, but to our heart and soul's delight. This is my favorite book of the year so far. 

The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl is part memoir, part travelogue, part meditation on loss. We can't justify distant travel this summer, but we can travel via books. Hampl ranges widely in this volume, from Iron Curtain-era Eastern Europe to Montaigne's France, but I was most captivated by the trip she took closest to home on the upper stretches of the Mississippi River. Like Odell, Hampl understands the inherent value of day-dreaming and drift.

The Vanishing Half  by Brit Bennett. "I've been reading too much non-fiction this summer," I told my daughter. "I really want to read a novel." So this was a birthday gift from her to me, fitting because this is also a story about family love: in our families of origin, families of choice, and families lost and found. It's also timely with its themes of racial and gender identity.

The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea. This had been on my to-read list a long time, and it was the very first book I was able to check out of my local library once it reopened for curbside service last month. Urrea, who spent a few decades researching this satisfying historical novel, has a knack for creating big, well-drawn casts of characters. I look forward to reading the sequel to this, too, as well as The Devil's Highway, Urrea's nonfiction book about U.S.-Mexican border culture. The latter should be a good companion to something else I read earlier this summer, On the Plain of Snakes, a warts-and-all love letter to Mexico by Paul Theroux.

Old in Art School by Nell Irvin Painter. The author is best-known as an acclaimed historian (The History of White People), but she always wanted to paint, so she chased that dream into her 60s while also looking after her elderly parents, who lived 3,000 miles away. An inspiring, illuminating look at one woman disregarding ageism and racism.

The Cactus League by Emily Nemens. One of two fine baseball novels released this year, both written by women. Nemens turns an unassisted triple play with her debut, deftly wrangling multiple plot lines, indelible characters, and strong sense of place. I also enjoyed The Resisters, an anti-authoritarian tale by Gish Jen.

Becoming Wise: An Inquiry Into the Art & Mystery of Living by Krista Tippett. The On Being Project created a new position this summer, Audience Editor. I wanted it so bad, but I'm sure they've hired someone brilliant to help amplify the project's mix of thoughtful voices and practical wisdom for tumultuous times. I've been an On Being fan forever, listened to this on CD when it came out a while back, and recently revisited it via a copy in a Little Free Library.

Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon. I bought this when it came out last year, then it sat on my shelf until May. It was time...and it still is.

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chodron. Another book that merits re-reading, with short chapters that share Buddhist wisdom on how to sit with uncertainty. 

Atlas Obscura Explorer's Journal. I used this for what turned out to be Volume One of my Pandemic Journal. (I started Volume Three last week.) It's too big to use as a travel journal, but it was perfect for documenting the weird inner journey that is 2020.

Next up on my reading list ...

I've been dipping in and out of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration for the past month. I'll finish it this weekend, and I look forward to author Isabel Wilkerson's brand-new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

Next up is my library book of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, another novel I've been meaning to read for a while.

I also just ordered a copy of Jailed for Freedom: A First-Person Account of the Militant Fight for Women's Rights. This little-known book by Doris Stevens is the source material for Suffragist, a new Broadway musical that was to premiere in league with this summer's centennial of the 19th Amendment. The production is delayed now, but just hearing creator Shaina Taub describe her discovery of this book was enough to make me want to read it.

Pandemic postcard #18: Beacons in the dark

Have you been able to see Comet NEOWISE? It is visible in the Northern Hemisphere for a while longer, rising in the evening sky and coming closest to Earth on July 23. I haven't seen it yet; I was up before dawn trying to catch a glimpse last weekend, when it was close to the horizon, but city lights and hills precluded a view. (A rising Venus was amazing, though!)

I'll never forget seeing Comet Hale-Bopp in the spring of 1997 on a drive home from Salt Lake City to Twin Falls, Idaho. Motoring north through dark high desert skies on Interstate 15, then Interstate 84, I had the comet in my view for several hours, nearly the whole way home. That evening ranks with the 2017 total solar eclipse as one of the great natural phenomena I've experienced. How fitting is it that Comet NEOWISE seemingly came out of nowhere in late March, becoming visible to NASA scientists during the first pandemic surge? We need all the bright lights we can find in these dark times, and I hope to see this new comet sometime next week.

As I mentioned in last week's post, I've been "at camp" this week. It's all been online, of course, but it has been wonderful to reconnect with my Eliot friends, even over Zoom. We've been hearing timeless tales of many cultures from talented storyteller Will Hornyak. We've had a talent show, games, (including a fun offline scavenger hunt), TED Talks, worship services, small-group discussions, and much more. I will be sad to see it end. I may even sign up for the August camp, which I've never attended--but I continue to have lots of time on my hands. (More on that below.)

Camp meant a lot of screen time, but I've managed to spend this entire week away from social media, and I took in only a bit of news each day. I'll be sad to see that end, too, but as Will related in one of his programs, a vision quest can't go on forever. Ultimately, people need to return to their daily lives. Of course, this is something we're all wrestling with now. As people go back to their routines of in-person socializing, many people are getting sick and sickening others. It's an unsteady dance we're doing, and it seems we'll be doing it for another year or so, until a widespread vaccine is available. I know this is especially hard on families, as well as on people experiencing homelessness and people with little social contact of any kind.

Will told a story this week about two villages. (You can watch an earlier performance of it below.)  A natural disaster had brought the villages to the brink of war, but with imagination and creativity--and some wise grandmothers--the villagers solved their problem without bloodshed. As Will says, we need new steps, new dances, new songs, and new stories in times like these. Stories can break the spells we weave around ourselves, the narratives that sometimes keep us feeling like change is impossible.

With the end of July nigh, I am among the millions of Americans who face the end of enhanced unemployment benefits next week. Although I've freelanced much of my life, I'd love to find a full-time job that I can dig in and do until it's time to retire. I applied for one in late May that would've been perfect for me, finally learning just this week that although my resume made it through several "cuts," I will not be a finalist. I know it is no easy task to find work in one's late 50s, but I still believe something good will emerge in due time. I'll keep looking for the beacons in the dark, and I will try to be one, too. My superpower is helping people tell their stories, after all, and there's a big need for that these days.

Thanks for reading. I'm going to spend some more time away from screens next week--to go camping, look for the comet, and hopefully see my daughter (who lives 500 miles away) for the first time in 2020. I'll be back with another dispatch in two weeks. Until then, be well...and be the light.