The Lake and The Mere

I read an essay recently (“Lake Panic,” page 111) which describes an enormous difference between the author’s experience of one of our small, shallow lakes in Wisconsin and a cold, deep, and clear lake in Maine; the former, friendly, gentle, peaceful, but the latter strangely terrifying despite its clear water and idyllic surroundings.

“It was terrifying,” I thought to myself as I read, “Because it wasn’t a lake, it was a mere.” That’s a near-archaic word. You may have only encountered “mere” if you had British Literature at some point in your schooling and studied Beowulf in an older translation. Sometimes it’s translated “sea” or “lake.” But in my mind, a mere is no ordinary lake:

Steep stony slopes, narrow ways
Choked paths, uncertain gullies,
Cliff-ledges over haunted lakes.
He took the lead with a few good
Men, to sound the unknown way,
Until he reached a mountain grove,
Above grey stone, a hanging wood,
Dour and dismal. The water below,
Seethed with blood. For the Danes,
The Shieldings’ Friends, there was
Heart’s pain to endure; grief woke
In those noble thanes, on finding
Aeschere’s head by the cliff-edge.
The lake welled blood – folk stared –
A fiery gore.

Source, pg 52.

Words have meanings and connotations; this we all know. But words have more, too. They carry a hidden genome that marks their source and origin, a skeleton inside of each word that hauls a suitcase full of history and culture that bounces along behind the word’s contemporary meaning. Nearly all of this is unknown at a conscious level to us, the users of our words. Some are quite sensitive to it: Churchill famously was, as was JRR Tolkien, being, as he was, a professional philologist and professor of English language and literature. Most of us are not consciously aware of words’ histories, though.

But philology knows. Philology remembers. And although I’m a casual amateur at paying attention to philological matters, my hunches about words are sometimes very good. Because of my gut instinct to think of that Maine lake as a mere, I suspected that “mere” might be of Anglo-Saxon origin and that perhaps “lake” was not.

I was correct.

“Mere” shares a source with the “mer-” in “mermaid.” It’s also cognate with the “mari-” in “maritime,” although that variation of a much older shared source word (the original shared word was proto-Indo-European) crashes into English via Latin, a very loud and obvious route, rather like a Roman Legion stomping into town and wrecking the furniture at Hrothgar’s longhouse.

The word “lake” has proto-Indo-European origins as well, although it comes into Modern English via Middle French. Respectable enough, but not that interesting to me. It’s not an Anglo-Saxon word. But mere is.

Because the Anglo Saxons hold the oldest, deepest parts of the English language, because they lived in the midst of heart and blood and God and monsters of every type, their words often have a ghostly ring around them that lingers in the air after you speak them in a way that words such “institution,” “celebratory,” “asylum,” or “fizzle” do not.  (Latin, Latin, Greek, and French-influenced Middle English words, respectively.)

This is why clear, cold deep water encircled with bluffs of stone that terrifies is a mere and the sandy-bottomed warm water left behind by an ancient ice boulder, lined with summer cottages, is a lake.

Working in the Dark

I did some of my garden work in silence one afternoon last November. It wasn’t literally silent; I could hear one neighbor’s dog fussing and the distant hum of a nearby freeway. When my other neighbor fired off a leaf blower it became downright noisy. It felt quiet, though. The leaf blower didn’t even bother me that much. I worked in gentle peace despite the leaf blower, the dog, and the traffic.

It felt quiet because I wasn’t listening to a podcast while working that day. I nearly always listen to an audio book or podcast while doing garden work. That day I made myself work without listening to something, because I’ve been thinking a lot about darkness, quiet, and content (as in the contents of this post, not “content” as in being content with silence.)

I think of pruning a rose bush for the winter as a mindless task, done easily while listening to a podcast, but when working without listening to someone talking into my ear, I did a better job and a faster one. My mind wandered on its own because I wasn’t taking in content. Because I wasn’t lighting up my brain with interesting words, stories and knowledge, my own thoughts wandered around in my head. I looked down at a branch I had just cut and wondered, if Hell had water, would you use a divining rod to find it? Or would it be called something else? A cursing rod, maybe? And what would it look like? I imagined it would be lined with wicked thorns just like the y-shaped rose bush piece I was holding. There might even be a poem in there somewhere, I thought, if I let the image rattle around in my head for a while.

I also noticed that the first chilly nights had turned all the thorns on my rosebush red. A striking effect.

The time passed more slowly, or I worked more efficiently, or both, because I got more done than I expected to. I even wrapped up my work when I intended to, instead of being stuck putting things away and finishing at the tail end of my strength, long after I’d promised myself that I’d stop. Usually I run out of time to finish up the last tasks and I find myself cleaning up and putting away my tools utterly exhausted.

I think of the media we consume and other voices we hear as a kind of light: they shine on things we might not otherwise see. Through the content of the media around us, we see the rest of the world, experience each other’s joys and pains, share the burdens of friends and family, and inspire our own creativity. That’s all good.

Too much light is bad, though. Few of us can sleep comfortably in a brightly-lit room. Light pollution is actively harmful to insect populations as well as to human hormonal systems and our circadian rhythms. Likewise, too much content, too many voices, isn’t good for us. We need quiet, rest, and darkness, too. I am finding that my creative mind needs darkness —relief from— the streams of content and media flooding into my eyes and ears.

My brain resists this kind of darkness and quiet, but it’s good for me. I’ve started or finished more poems in the months since I began thinking about this than I have in the previous couple of years. I lose track of time less frequently. My days don’t tumble away from me out of control in a chaotic rush to the dinner hour if I force myself to do at least some of my routine tasks without an audio book or podcast.

I still need a podcast to make myself cook dinner, though. I don’t love cooking at the end of the day when I am tired (although I tolerate it occasionally when I’m not rushed) and I probably never will be able to do it without bribing myself.

Unprompted, unforced prayer has returned, a natural outgrowth of a mind wandering and ruminating on various people and problems as I fold laundry, clean a bathroom, or make a bed. This is also a good thing.

Shortly before the end of December, I decided to make my home office “dark” as well, and I stripped my desktop computer’s browser of all bookmarks and browsing history related to social media. I didn’t go as far as to sign out of social media platforms and change passwords on myself, because I still need Facebook occasionally for my car-consulting work, and multiple tabs open at once for a big car-search project just doesn’t work well on my laptop. But I made a rule: no social media in my office, save for the times I’m working with a client. I can do any social media I’d like, but it’s got to be outside of my home office on my laptop.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my writing productivity, comfort, and creativity have improved dramatically on the days I can be home without interruption and working on writing projects. Yesterday, when my husband was away for the evening at a meeting, I allowed myself free play on social media while I ate dinner in front of the computer. As a result, I “lost” an hour and half that had I fully intended to spend looking at seed catalogs in the kitchen. My rule is a good one and worth enforcing with myself.

I recommend that you intentionally put some darkness in your life. Take a drive without the radio on or music with lyrics playing. Fold a load of laundry without the TV on. Go for a walk without an audio book. Let your brain adjust to silence. It’s uncomfortable at first, but it gets easier. Just like stepping out into the dark woods at night, it will take a bit of time for your mind to adjust, but when it does, you’ll see things you’ve never imagined before. In my own case, Hell’s own cursing rod, lined with thorns, now lives on my bookshelf, awaiting a poem to inhabit.

The Ghosts Still Rise

I woke suddenly about four in the morning. In my dream, we were back in our small-town house, having had to return to Illinois and re-purchase the same house after only a short time living in Wisconsin. As I watched from the open staircase, a drip from a ceiling leak became a dribble, then a narrow stream, then a broad tumble of cold water, pouring from the ceiling on to the wood floor. At the moment in the dream that despair over the maintenance disaster unfolding before my eyes engulfed me, I woke up crying.

It’s been seven years since we left the little town of Paxton, IL. The shadows of the isolation I felt there have faded but they’re not gone. There are fewer things that wake the ghosts these days, but there are still some things that do, things half forgotten until the their shadows lengthen again.

The day before my nightmare, I felt vaguely anxious as I was doing the grocery shopping in advance of the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend. On my list were the items I need for baking my family’s fruitcake. This is my favorite holiday treat, one that works well when adjusted for food allergies, and it’s the only holiday baking I do. I usually try to do it the weekend of Thanksgiving.

The feeling of doom and threat grew worse throughout the day, sticking to my skin like cling film that I couldn’t peel off. The same muscles in my back that knotted into a painful lump our last two years in Paxton once again tightened into bands of pain.

I’m not sure if it was the fruitcake shopping and spending money on expensive ingredients that for many years I couldn’t justify buying that woke the ghosts or the fact of Thanksgiving itself. I suspect the latter.

When we lived in Paxton, this time of year was dreadfully busy for my husband and very lonely for me. My husband traveled extensively for work in the months before Christmas, leaving me parenting solo. I had no friends where we lived, despite years of trying to make some both in town and at our church. In our earlier years in Illinois, I’d decamp with the kid to a friend’s house in Fort Wayne, a few hours away, for days at a time, but in our later years, financial constraints and car issues meant our trips to see friends got farther and farther apart until they mostly stopped. Quite simply, I didn’t feel like I could spend the money on gas for the drive.

The old house we lived in, while undoubtedly charming, needed many repairs, small and large, and had old, drafty windows that rattled and banged in the wicked winter winds that scoured the central plains’ giant farm fields. I used to think that describing wind as “howling” was just a colorful metaphor, but living in rural central Illinois, I learned that the wind can quite literally howl. Bad winds here in Wisconsin can wake these ghosts, too, but thankfully, winds like that are not as common here and our Wisconsin house is solid and warm.

When Thanksgiving came, we almost never made it to both family’s Thanksgiving dinners. Because my husband was usually traveling for work right up to the end of the the day before Thanksgiving, travel had to begin Thanksgiving Day, and usually after church, as we often had choir responsibilities for Thanksgiving morning. Arriving for a noon meal on Thursday just wasn’t possible with a four or five hour drive. Some family shifted plans around so that sometimes we could make it later in the weekend. But there were some years we didn’t see anyone; it was just too much to travel. It was always a high-stress planning event, trying to figure out if we could come and when and whether we needed to combine family visits with tuning work in Wisconsin. Even though I wanted to see family, the travel and visiting was paradoxically very hard. I dreaded the stress of packing, logistics, and planning. Traveling with a highly sensitive and intense small child and keeping that child behaving well in front of relatives when she was off her usual routine, tired, and overwhelmed with people, activity, interaction, and noise required a well of patience and calm nerves that I simply didn’t have. I dreaded the days of recovery once we got back home as well. During Christmas we usually made it to both families, but the trip was far longer and the planning even more complex: trying to arrange our travel while balancing two extended families’ holiday break schedules, including nieces’ and nephews’ high school sports, plus husband’s work travel, required pen, paper, and enormous amounts of planning.

Many years we made the drive back home from Thanksgiving or Christmas in terrible weather on terrible roads. Ice, heavy snow, and one year, dangerously thick fog for many miles across rural highways. One Christmas we all fell so ill with norovirus that we had to stop one hour into our trip between the two families and get a hotel room for the night. Sometimes we had expensive car breakdowns. One Thanksgiving, a breakdown on the Tristate Tollway meant we needed a rental car half way through the trip and had to leave our car at the mercy of an unknown Chicago repair shop. That Thanksgiving cost us a couple thousand dollars onto the credit card in a time when money was quite tight.

I have a lot of financial, travel, and planning stress closely linked with the holidays. Even though it’s been seven years, even though money is not so tight anymore, even though we now live much closer to both families, when the “holiday logistics season” begins sometime around mid November and planning begins, the ghosts sometimes rise despite the fact that everything is different now.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my walk with grief, it’s that denying grief does no good and causes harm. I believe the same of these types of ghosts and shadows. It’s better to name them and call them into the light. Invite them to sit beside you and give them a spot on the bench — or at the Thanksgiving table. Truth is, they’ll be there whether you make space for them or not. Better to have them in the light than lurking in the corners. Speak them out loud or write them in text: Here was sorrow. There I felt trapped. I was tired and depressed at a time that I wanted to be happy instead. I was angry. We witnessed a dreadful cruelty and we remember it each year. What should be a time of joy is not. Things are better now, but the scars remain.

To deny former sorrow, fear, want, and disappointment is to try to change the past, which cannot be done. Instead, it is better to broadly embrace all of life, for each of us carries a pure yearning for Heaven and its perfection as well as the terrible wounds of our very mortal lives in this broken world.

The stories that we least want to tell are the ones that most need telling, said someone who shared a ghost of his own recently. In the telling, we diminish the power of our ghosts to haunt us. In the telling, we give others the gift of knowing that they are not the only one with ghosts lurking under their chairs, tangling their ankles. We are not alone. You are not alone. Even when the ghosts still rise, you are not alone.

Today I Wore Three Shades of Grey

As I write this, I am three weeks out from a follow-up appointment with a rheumatologist, where I’ll hear about the results of a tranche of complicated blood tests, incurred because I have symptoms of some sort of inflammatory process. I went into my first appointment assuming I’d be told that I have rheumatoid arthritis, but more investigation is needed. On initial examination, there’s no overt, raging autoimmune disease, says the rheumatologist. This is good. “But,” he added, “autoimmune diseases don’t read the textbooks.” So I had ten vials of blood drawn. I’ve been given a short course of steroids for now, to see if the over-reaction will shut off. The steroids mean I feel normal for the first time in about two years. It’s good to have some good days.

I won’t be entirely surprised if it turns out that I do have an autoimmune disease. I’ve long assumed that my immune system doesn’t function quite right. That’s not surprising either. It’s had quite a life, with a lot of jobs to do, beginning all the way back in toddlerhood, where successions of ear infections kept me on amoxicillin over and over again, until tubes were put in. Even after that, I suffered ear infections or sinus infections at least annually. As late as 2018, I had a stubborn double ear and sinus infection that took two rounds of scary antibiotics to finally clear.

I grew up in West Africa and that involved hard work for my immune system to do, beginning with vaccinations for various tropical diseases, including gamma globulin for Hepatitis A and an injectable cholera vaccine which has since been discontinued. I took malaria prophylaxis for years as a child, first Chloroquine and then Lariam, too.

And the stress. Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of my fellow boarding school classmates have autoimmune conditions. Whether that’s due to environmental factors —there’s no EPA in Africa — or the extended stress that is part and parcel of being separated from your family at the crux of puberty, teen growth, and growing sexual awareness, who knows? It could, of course, be a coincidence. We had a long stretch of years in Illinois that were very stressful. Although life was simpler there as far as busyness, it was far lonelier. Several of the years were financially challenging. The pandemic followed a year and a half of stressors strung one after the other like a garland of used diapers: from a sewer backup to injuries scattered among all family members to a garage door spring failure, we had a crisis every month for 18 months straight. Then the country shut down for Covid.

My symptoms —it’s easier to just say “my symptoms” than to list or explain them— are less if stress and busyness are lower. This past weekend I sang in the choir for the LCMS Convetion’s opening service, and afterward, assisted with communion clean-up tasks, helping to wash and then carry a dozen chalices, flagons, and ciborium from the hall, to the sinks, and then to the downstairs chapel. By the time I collapsed into bed back home at 11 pm, I was sobbing because I hurt so much. I made it to church on Sunday only because there was a late service available and I knew there was absolutely nothing else scheduled for the rest of the day. Even two days later, on Monday, I ordered grocery pick-up because I couldn’t manage my usual Monday grocery shopping.

An autoimmune disease diagnosis may give me the excuses I need for the quiet, contemplative, introverted life that I desire but have never been able to justify, being a person who wants to always “do the right thing” and suffers terrible guilt when I don’t meet my own expectations and those of others. I want to give, serve, volunteer, and work as much as others do. I want to meet all the expectations, real and perceived, that are put upon me. But I can’t. I have known for a long time that matching my activity to that of others, even others significantly older than me, is difficult and unpleasant and breeds exhaustion much more quickly than it does for others. In college, every big project push at the end of a studio module ended with me very sick. I get sick nearly every January following the intensity of the holiday season. This past winter, I caught a second round of Covid on New Year’s Day. It was two months before I was back to a normal-for-me activity level; others who fell ill at the same time were back on their feet in two days.

Now I have reached the point where I actually can’t do things. I have to ration what I do, choosing carefully only the things with the most joy, the most reward in relaxation or fun, or the highest level of useful service to those God has made my vocation. I need to have a curated life. I have to think ahead and make contingency plans in case I’m too exhausted when the event arrives. I’m most likely going to disappoint people, more than once, as whatever this is trundles along. I must keep leftovers stashed in the freezer for bad days when cooking is too much; with a severe gluten allergy, ordering takeout isn’t an option. I have soft, easy clothes ready in my wardrobe, linen pants, and hoodies in my favorite colors, for the days when it feels like even clothing will hurt. Today I wore three shades of grey, a color that I love and always makes me feel most like myself.

I have a lot of these skills already. I joke that am reviled on three continents because my house is tidy and my refrigerator organized. The time I was publicly dressed down by another woman for admitting that I iron my husband’s shirts still stings a little. There are some upsides to being what others might perceive as neurotic: if I must have a quiet life to calm an overreactive immune system, I can be thankful that I am a person who never wanted the constant party in the first place and already keep our home as a refuge from the storm.

But I worry about the judgment of others. “She said she couldn’t help, but I saw her at the powerboat races with her Dad.” Nobody’s said anything like this to me and I doubt that anyone ever will here in the Midwest where people are less confrontational than elsewhere, but I hear the imagined recriminations in my head. I will need to learn to have an unfearing, “No, I can’t,” with no apology. Putting off this perception of judgment is something I will need to get used to as I learn a new way of being in the world. I know it’s coming from within my own head, but we tend to be our own worst enemies. 

If the course of steroids shuts down these symptoms permanently—possible, says the rheumatologist— and no burgeoning autoimmune disease is present, maybe the occasion of my forty-ninth birthday this week is a good enough reason to be bold about a quieter life. Back in January, I named this year “Renewal” for the year my daughter moved out on her own and the year I began writing more seriously and intentionally. I thought of it as a year that could begin a “second adulthood,” the Later Adulthood, the years that span from the end of active parenting until the years when work must slow and old age arrives. A season of life that often includes the third Great Change of a woman’s life: menopause. A year to reassess and start new things. And here I am, needing to do so in ways I hadn’t considered.  But I feel more peace about perhaps having a serious condition than would have thought possible. I am thankful.

The Seven

Outside of the shop, Katie couldn’t help another look at the big black car. A decade and a half of hard work in industrial design had given her a sharp eye and a sarcastic mind. It was nearly impossible for her to look at manufactured goods of any type without a design critic in her head commenting on what her eyes were seeing. Alpina, the car said across the back corner. It had a BMW emblem in the center of the trunk lid. BMW, all look same, she thought. Laziest designers in the world. Still, a pretty car. Probably a banker. Or the owner of this strip mall. As Katie continued across the fire lane, a tall blond woman in a navy business suit came flying out of the grocery store next door, heading straight for the black car. Katie quickly moved to her own car; she didn’t want to be caught staring at the car of someone in fuck-me-red stilettos.

Once at her car, she turned and looked back. The tall blond had stopped directly in front of the black car. As Katie watched, she leaned forward over the hood and spat a huge wad of something onto the hood. Then, spinning on one heel, she left, heels tapping as she walked to an SUV parked a few spaces away. She tossed a large handbag into the SUV with enough force that it slammed into the passenger side window. Jumping in after the bag, she screeched her way out of the parking space and nearly hit a pedestrian at the crosswalk marked in front of the grocery store’s main entrance. Katie doubled over in laughter, glad whomever the woman was who was driving the fancy SUV was now gone and couldn’t see her. Whoa. Jealous wife, maybe? She dropped into her own car, still smiling, released for a moment from thoughts of the funeral that afternoon.

Isa Raidi, watching from the front window of the coffee shop, his black leather bag on the floor at his feet, figured the woman he saw watching his car getting befouled was probably laughing at his expense. She had doubled over, dark hair tumbling over her face, her hands clasped where she’d clapped them together as she bent over. He stared, his newspaper, a dirty, archaic habit he’d picked up following his father’s death, dropping to the small bistro table. He’d not seen someone laugh like that since he was a child. It was entrancing.

Isa was supposed to meet with his almost ex-wife’s lawyer in about two hours. He had decided, though, just before he saw the dark-haired woman laughing and just after he saw his soon-to-be ex-wife Cassie Raidi — no, that would be Cassie Fredericks now — spit a huge snot-wad, supplemented by her seasonal allergies, onto the hood of his car, that his Alpina B7 was going to have a tricky electrical problem that was going to prevent him from getting to that meeting. It would not, however, prevent the B7 from taking him out on a long, hard morning drive.

Cassie was going to be pissed if he didn’t show. She wanted out of the marriage, and fast, but not so fast as to make concessions that might cost her money. She had the better lawyers, he lesser ones; there wasn’t much he could do. Indulging in a few passive-agressive games was making the process of dismantling ten years of a marriage a little less dreary. Isa Raidi smiled as he neatly folded his paper and stashed it his bag.

He messaged his attorney on the way to the Seven.

Hollow

We moved to Liberia in 1979. My dad was to be the auto mechanic for a mission organization in Monrovia, the capital city.

Liberia is a small country, about the size of the state of Ohio. It has a history that can be summed up in a few sentences: freed American slaves, many originally from the Congo River delta, not this part of West Africa, are magnanimously re-settled in coastal West Africa with the help of philanthropic white Americas, some of whom are genuinely philanthropic and others whom are scared of having their nice white cities filling with now-free Black people and wish to send them “back to Africa where they came from.” These freed slaves set up a constitutional republic of their very own and thus was formed the only country in Africa to never be an official colony of another country. There is of course much more complicated and messy history than that, though, one that includes corruption and grift from the beginning, Black-on-Black slavery, reliance on outside aid and ill-advised loans, and the endless plundering of a small country by people who should have known better, because they were Black themselves and had also lived under another’s thumb, too, as well as white people all too willing to take advantage of innocence and naivety. It’s no accident, I’m sure, that the state archives of Liberia were ransacked in the multiple rounds of looting that Monrovia suffered in the early years of the same war that chased my family out of Liberia and back to Wisconsin. This isn’t the story of Liberia, though. That’s been told plenty of other places. There are better books written than I could write on Liberia’s origin story. It’s not my story to tell, anyway. It a story that belongs to Liberians. It is theirs to tell.

My own story in Liberia exists between the stupid, brutal beginning of the Samuel K. Doe presidency and the stupid, brutal end of it, ten years later, when Doe was tortured to death by Prince Johnson’s flunkies and bullies. Between the beginning and end of the Doe presidency exists the bulk of my childhood. It was a happy one. We arrived in Monrovia shortly before the April 14th Rice Riots of 1979, a miscalculation by President Tolbert’s minister of agriculture which caused thousands to riot over an increase in the government-controlled price of rice. By the time peace was restored and the curfews lifted, over seventy people were dead and hundreds of protesters had been rounded up and jailed. At the time, I was four and my brother was a little tot of about 18 months old. My mom and dad would go on to have two more children, both born in Liberia at Cooper Clinic.

A year after the Rice Riots, Samuel Doe, a barely-educated sergeant in the Armed Forces of Liberia, along with other enlisted men from the Army, shot President Tolbert to death after dragging him out of bed in the middle of the night in front of his terrified family. Ten days later, most of Tolbert’s cabinet ministers were lined up against telephone poles anchored in the sand on the beach and shot in their underwear by Doe’s drunken soldiers. The cabinet members were executed in shifts, with the next to be shot watching on, as there were more cabinet ministers than execution poles, the first shortage of many to come in Doe’s Liberia. These wouldn’t be the only deaths. But not too terribly long after that, the city returned to normal, except now with different people to pay off, only with larger amounts if you were trying to run a business, the curfews were lifted, and I returned to school.

A classmate of mine lost her father in that mayhem. One of the adults around me said her father was one of those shot on the beach, but I have no way of knowing this for sure. I think that her father was a soldier in the Liberian Army, not a government official, so I think maybe he lost his life other than on the beach on April 22, 1980. But I do not know. It is not less awful. Sides do not matter when your father is dead. I wish I knew more but there is no way to know more: I only remember her somber face, her sad dark eyes, and her days of silence at school. I have one photo of her, taken during a class gift exchange, taken a couple of years before she lost her father. She is wearing a Western-style dress complete with puffy sleeves and I am wearing a heavily embroidered Liberian dress made in one of the tailors’ shops in Waterside Market. We are dressed up in each other’s fancy clothes. I am from Liberia but not of Liberia; my father was not killed.

Cassie Takes A Spill

This is undoubtedly one of the most fun things I’ve written. I’ve waffled many times on publishing it due to the language, which will surely offend some.

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Oh, my god, Isa Yousef Raidi! You are going to kill us if you don’t stop wagging your dick around on the freeway like some sort of dog around a bitch in heat.  I told you it doesn’t matter when we get there, although, goddammit! If you’d let me get that new dryer I wouldn’t have had to stand there in my heels, ironing your damn shirt, I could have just tossed it in that steam dryer. . . Hey, watch out! there’s a semi up ahead there, I think he’s going to pass that minivan, oh, sorry, he’s going for that left-hand exit. Do we need that exit? No? I was sure the exit we needed was a left-hand one, hang on, let me get my phone and check . . . Crap! No signal again! When are we going to get a new phone for me? You said “no” on the dryer and you said “no” on the Audi, it only seems fair that I shouldn’t have to use a phone that only randomly works, I mean, come on, this is 2023, not the freaking Obama Administration.  I can’t even go anywhere without worrying about having internet! It’s humiliating.

Why are you taking that exit? I know I said it doesn’t matter when we get there but that doesn’t mean you should take the longest way possible, good fucking grief, why don’t you ever listen to me?  Is this about trying to win or something? Having the last word without saying anything? Oh, my god, you almost hit that tree! And can you pay attention to your driving and not go over the rumble strips? They are there for a reason and this is not one of your damn track days, okay? My ten-year-old Range Rover is not your fucking BMW! I’m going to try to read.

I cannot read with your driving. Why are you taking the corners so hard? It’s hurting my shoulder and the seat belt is going to ruin my silk top. I’m taking off this seat belt — now you have to drive nice! Are we there yet? I don’t know this way you’re taking to the funeral home, so I can’t judge how much farther it is. How much farther is it?  I hope you’re ready for that eulogy. My mom loved you, you know, always thought you were brave and courageous; she always said that about you. Not sure why; taking a car on the track isn’t really brave, I mean, look at all that money you spend on safety gear. You could drop off the top of the Willis Tower and not die wrapped up in all that crap you use. Wouldn’t it be easier to just not drive at all, if you’ve got to wear gear that costs as much as that awesome dryer cabinet thing you think we don’t need? I mean, really. Obviously, people are not meant to do that sort of stuff if you’ve got to wear that much crap just to do it.

What was that? Did you bump the lock button? Oh, wow, I didn’t know there was a lake back here! Look at those houses! I bet they’ve got lots of room for entertaining. . . we could have Jill’s family and Dusty’s family over for Thanksgiving and have enough room for everyone if we had a house like that. They could stay all weekend and we could have a fridge just for all the cocktails and we could have more than one fireplace! Oh, wow, look at that house at the end! I’ve never seen such a big garage. It’s so pretty there at the end of the street with all the lights. I wonder who did the lights? The rain is making the lights twinkle! So pretty. Can we go house shopping after my mom’s will is read?  We should be able to upgrade now that Mom’s money will be there. I’ll give up the Lexus if you say we can buy a house. An actual house, not a condo in a freaking factory building, like a college student. Slow down a bit! I want to see if I can see in the windows as we go past.

Hey, I said slow down. What the fuck are you doing? I said, slow down! This is way too fast for that turn, holy shit!

Oh, my god, Raidi, this not funny and this is not how you make your point! What a child! I should have listened to my dad. You’ve ruined my clothes! I am covered with dirt, you asshole! And now we’re going to be late for the funeral. Late to my own mother’s funeral! She would forgive you… she thought you were a fucking saint! But I don’t. You’re going to pay for this, you asshole!  I am going to make you sorry you turned around and came back for me after you dumped me out in the ditch! I’m calling Dusty in the morning and I am going to make you SORE-REE. I absolutely will take you to court, watch me. Oh, lookit! I’ve got five bars way out here! Woooo! Looks like I can order that cool steam dryer right from here while you go get the car. You owe me big time now. Ugh. Wow, what an ugly house. I don’t know why people think they need such shitty big houses anyway. Gross. Go get the car, and hurry, ‘cus we’re going to need to stop at Nordstrom’s for clothes because there is no way I’m showing up in front of Daddy’s friends looking like my husband dumped me in a fucking ditch!

A Place For Tiny People

“And she thought: I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.”

Alexander McCall Smith

When my grandpa visited Liberia in 1983, he spent much of each day sitting in a chair on our back stoop, watching the taxis and market ladies go by on the street at our house on Old Road. His arthritis greatly improved, partially due to the thick, humid heat, but I think also due to the ability that Africa grants you to just be without doing.

During their visit, my grandma discovered that in Liberia, “Ol’ Ma” is a term of respect, for to be old is to be wise.

In Africa, a day has more than twenty-four hours. There is time and place for tiny people.

Photo by Seyiram Kweku on Pexels.com

Prolouge

This is the story of a book that would have been written sooner if someone thought it was worth writing and had told me so. That someone was me. I told myself it wasn’t worth writing. I told myself that the writing would make a mess, that touching these memories would rain down destruction on me and my husband and child with the overwhelming flood of what I had lost. I would not touch the electric wire of memory, I told myself. Each time I tried, my Big Feelings bled all over our lives, messy muddy nasty crying things. It was too much. I couldn’t subject my family to that.

My feelings have always been too big for my body. Even when I was very small this was true.

For about thirty years after I left West Africa I managed to not feel all the things with my big, messy feelings but when my daughter reached the same age as I had been when so many of my losses started to pile up, the cardboard box I had stuffed everything into started to leak and tear and the heavy things inside started to fall out. Metaphorical though they were, some of them fell on my feet and I was taken down with very non-metaphorical and unexplainable foot pain.

This is the story of a book I could not write until the not-writing of it started to eat me, oh! This is the story of grief that slept long time, eh.

It is a story of what happens when grief grows up, finds a voice, and learns to shout. I gave my grief a name —that took a few years all by itself. She insisted on it, banging on my windows with a machete, maybe drunk with cane juice and shouting at the big cottonwood tree above the village upcountry, red dust powdering her bare, crazy feet. Slowly the things she was shouting began to form words.

Her name is Old Ma.