At my training session at JT’s gym, I swing open the glass door and call out, “Oh, thank God she’s here!” to make him laugh. He’s killing time waiting for me between clients, running on the treadmill to keep himself in shape. He laughs, pretends to check his mileage monitor as the treadmill slows. “Gee, only 17, eight-minute miles,” he sighs as he turns it off. I laugh at the lie, then I plop down in the chair next to his desk.

“What’s up?” he says, pulling out his chair as well and yawns while he waits for the latest installment of my past week’s activities. 

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” I say. 

He nods, yawns again. “I wake up every night at 3:30. But the good thing is, it doesn’t affect me at all.” 

“Yeah, I can see that,” I say. “Are you anxious about anything?” The dreaded cable pulls are behind me, waiting as I settle in. “We should talk about this.” 

“Nice try. Get up,” he says, ending the best of my delaying tactics. “Let’s see whatcha got.”

JT has learned the art of revealing nothing while having a conversation, which makes sense since he has to talk to someone new for an hour at least 8-10 times a day. At the computer all day, I am a boundary-challenged bean spiller. Do not confide in me—the brain hates to keep a secret—it’s spelled s-t-r-e-s-s. The alternative spelling is s-t-o-r-y, and we live for it.  

After demonstrating the way I am to lift some weights while simultaneously lunging, JT stands aside, and I take the stance, trying not to tip over. Yesterday, I spun around with my eyes closed in the shower and thought, Uh-oh, this could have gone badly. So, I tell him that maybe we should work on balance and not strength today. He is already on it, dragging over the heinous half-ball thing on which you must balance, much like trying to stand on one foot in a bouncy house while some kid jumps up and down right next to you.

JT and I feel the same way about virtually everything except politics, so we never talk about that, but our attitudes are often apparent in our responses to other things. 

“They’ve just discovered another rogue planet not connected to any solar system,” I report, excited about this discovery. He eyes me as if scientists are tricksters out to get us—their ulterior motive–to fool humanity about everything from planets to platelets. “How do they know that?” he asks.

“And tomorrow is the shortest day in history,” I add. “Thanks to the Earth spinning slightly faster, it’ll be 1.34 milliseconds less than the standard 24 hours.”

“How do they know?” he asks again. “Says who?”

This is often the response to facts I share, and it’s one that I can’t answer because I can’t reproduce the corresponding research proving this fact off the top of my head. I read it, but I just can’t retain it. I guess I only have the mental bandwidth to remember the fascinating end product of research, so that’s what I share. 

For instance, the Appalachians are far older and were once taller than the Rockies. I remember they are lower in altitude because they have eroded centuries longer, but I don’t remember how scientists know that. 

Being able to explain how seemingly impossible things could be true is something I’ve surrendered spiritually as well. I’ve experienced enough miracles not to need the “how.” Likewise, when I pray, I ask for what would be impossible for me to accomplish on my own, trusting that it is effortless for a power greater than myself. I see it as done– this healing, this reconciliation, this grace. Strategizing means I still think the universe needs my input. 

Hard pass, says the universe.

JT takes me off the half-ball and tells me to walk the length of the gym, heel-to-toe, lifting a 10-pound weight extended over my head. I do this easily, my confidence returning. “Want me to go faster?” I ask.

“No. I want you to close your eyes and do it backwards,” he says.

Our relationship is one of balance. We are so far apart politically we can only 

acknowledge that fact with a laugh or a joke once in a while. 

But I often ask what JT did on the weekend and it’s what I did, as well. And he has two daughters he adores, and I have two daughters I adore. And I listen to him put their welfare ahead of his own desires, week after week, and I know I’d walk backward and blindfolded across the Bay Bridge for mine, so there’s that. 

He loves a dog who is a real pain, and I love one of those, as well. He has a roof that needs replacing, and I have one, too.

I was recently told that my soul’s purpose in this life is to experience all forms of love—parental, romantic, for humanity at large. In this life, I needed to love as a sibling, a spouse, and a friend —surely, we all do. But that’s easy love. I don’t think it counts toward being a good person. Love like that makes you a regular person. It’s the least you can do.

I saw a greeting card the other day that said, “One of us is right, the other one is you.”

How do we find common ground when it feels as if our very morals conflict?

I don’t know. It’s like finding my way backward and blindfolded to those with whom I don’t agree. But I can place my attention on judgment and strategy, or I can ask that love magnifies all that we share.

Rumi wrote, “Out beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrongdoing, there is a field.

 “I’ll meet you there.” 

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

Anthropologist Jane Goodall, whom I greatly admire, died recently.  Until Jane, we believed we were the only species on the planet to make and use tools. Of course, Jane was a single, blond, 26-year-old female when she proved otherwise through her patient observations of a wild chimp she had named David Greybeard, so her discovery was discounted by the established (read primarily male) scientific community for years. Eventually, we (they) had to admit, Holy cow, that little gal was right. We aren’t quite so unique after all. 

She also proved that we are not the only species to kiss and to beg. Interesting juxtaposition.  

We are falling from the pedestal of our self-proclaimed uniqueness. We had to learn that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, that the Milky Way is not the center of the universe. We may not be the only planet upon which life has arisen, and we are not the only species to reason, feel affection, and gratitude. Perhaps we are not even unique in this last bastion of distinction. After watching chimps discover a waterfall, then stop to gaze at it as if mesmerized, Goodall speculated we may not be the only species to feel awe. 

We are, however, the only species for which nearsightedness has become a global epidemic. In the U.S., there is a national surge of over 36%, and globally, 224 million people are highly nearsighted, meaning they can’t see things clearly that are far away.

Another word for nearsighted is shortsighted. Ahem.

We are in the middle of the 6th mass extinction event; did you know that? We are losing biodiversity at a rate 1,000 to 10,000 percent higher than would occur naturally if humans were not affecting the environment. Humanity itself may be dying out. There is currently an unprecedented decrease in birth rates worldwide, with fertility rates falling below replacement levels in most countries. Statisticians report that the effect of these trends will be felt on a global scale in about 60 years. 

There are cultural reasons for this trend, and many reasons we could still reverse. “How is it possible,” Jane Goodall asked, “that the most intellectual animal to have ever walked on planet Earth is destroying its home?” Talk about shortsighted.

In 1977, NASA launched twin Voyager probes into space, weeks apart, carrying identical golden records imprinted with a message from humankind to any intelligent life form in the cosmos who might find them. 

The records carry both audio and visual messages that represent Earth’s diversity of life and diversity of human life, with greetings in 59 human languages and 115 images. Sounds include footsteps and whale songs, laughter, and thunder, a rain forest teeming with life, and the heartbeat of a woman in love. Voyager 1, carrying that greeting, is now more than 15.6 billion miles from home, sailing in silence through the constellation Ophiuchus, still seeking someone to tell: we are here, we are here, we are here.

This is who we are.

Goodall’s last published work is “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times,” but she warns that the window of opportunity in which to reverse our path is closing. How accurate will Voyager 1’s message be if it is ever found? What if 59 languages have become four, and back on Earth, no one recognizes the sound of a rainforest? Or the heartbeat of a human in love?

If we are losing our ability to see clearly what is approaching from a distance, we should at least see clearly what is right here: the precious, rare beauty of this Earth and the interconnectedness, the holy interdependence of all who inhabit it. 

Interestingly, for all our lack of uniqueness, there is one thing that it seems only we do: bury our dead. Not for fear the body might attract predators to the campfire, but with ritualistic reverence because those who died were loved and their loss mourned. This practice dates back at least 150,000 years, to the time of the Neanderthals. How do we know?

Because Neanderthals didn’t just bury their dead, they filled their graves with flowers. 

If the Golden Record is ever found and decoded, I hope the message it carries remains true. 

We are a blue planet orbiting a yellow star, 26,000 light-years from the center of a galaxy called the Milky Way. We teem with whale song and laughter, babies’ cries and thunder, and evidence that we have loved each other for a long, long time.  

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

It is October, the month in which both my daughters were born. I guess back in March of the year in which each was conceived, I thought that to have an autumn birthday in Maryland would be to celebrate the rest of your life in the prettiest month of the year, and somehow that worked out not once, but twice.  

We lived in a neighborhood that had long been a working-class fishing community but as waterfront property became coveted by Washington professionals willing to commute, the peninsula was becoming slowly gentrified. At the time we brought our firstborn home, however, it still possessed an eclectic diversity we were drawn to as young adults, but worried about now that we were parents. There were sirens at night, and once, gunfire right down the street. 

We pulled up in front of our white stucco Victorian with the picket fence I’d painted in the last days of my pregnancy, and I lifted my two-day-old daughter from her car seat for the first time. This was to be a private homecoming, with my mother arriving after we got settled to make us her Hawaiian chicken for dinner. Unfortunately, I hadn’t anticipated Mrs. Rosman next door. She was old and eccentric, unkempt in an unpleasant way, and her silent, staring husband was very strange. I was young and superficially friendly but kept my distance.  

What I didn’t know was that she had been waiting for this moment since seeing me lowered gingerly into the passenger seat of the car and an overnight bag stowed in the back. She emerged from her house with the sagging sofa on the porch, and hobbled out onto the sidewalk, her thin hair lifting in the breeze. 

“Let me see the baby,” she demanded. She stared critically at the little face. “Well, what is it?”

“It’s a girl,” I said, leaving the blanket partially covering the baby’s mouth like a miniature surgeon’s mask. I smiled and tried to turn away, to get to the safety of my own front door, when Mrs. Hosfeld’s claw-like hand grabbed my arm and twisted the baby towards her. She lowered her face and planted a big, wet, germ-laden kiss right on my new baby’s face. Hormones surging, ready to cry at everything, and completely irrational, I was horrified. “Oh my God,” I thought, with all the sense of the sleep-deprived, “She just ruined my baby!” 

Once in the house, I needed to take a shower. Should I bring the baby into the bathroom with me? The idea of not being in the same room seemed intolerable, like breaking the law. I think I thought I had to carry her around in her carrier like a purse.

Over the next few weeks, I realized protecting my daughter was more immediate, more irrational, and more primal than love. The need to keep her safe, encountered for the first time there on the sidewalk, was the first fierce attachment I had felt as an adult. It was in the following days of feeding, rocking, diapering, and bathing that protection took on its true identity, which was, of course, profound and abiding love. I have thought about this often since then, having learned that love can be inspired by service, not the other way around. But there was another lesson here. 

Sometimes we are the recipients of miracles and too distracted or oblivious to notice. It is only years afterward that it dawns on us that, but for an alert stranger on the beach, we might have drowned, or two seconds later into that intersection, we might have crashed. 

So, it was years later that I realized I had not thanked God for the biggest miracle in my life. 

The night this child was born, I’d been in prodromal labor for the preceding 24 hours, where you suffer contractions hour after hour that do not move the baby down. Eventually hospitalized, with some intervention, labor finally became productive, but she was a very large baby and had been unceasingly active in the womb most of those nine months.

 By 3 am, I’d been pushing for two hours, and my doctor wanted to leave for a hunting trip on the Eastern Shore in the morning. The decision was made to use forceps for the last couple of pushes to get this show (and him) on the road. It worked. But until that moment, no one realized that the umbilical cord had been wrapped tightly around the baby’s neck throughout the entire ordeal. Not wrapped around once. Not twice. But cinched around her tiny neck three times like a belt, strangling her through all those crushing contractions and hours of pushing. 

“Jesus!” the nurse exclaimed as the doctor uncoiled loop after loop after loop. 

They put her in my arms, and all I saw was a perfect baby. It didn’t occur to me then or for years how easily we could have lost her. And it makes me want to heap retroactive gratitude upon the universe for sparing me that near-miss tragedy and for giving me that joy. 

How many miracles have gone unheralded? Having missed this one, I’m assuming on principle that my life and yours have been flooded with them.

 Like having been lucky enough to live next door to an elderly lady who had waited all night and all day to welcome home the new little life next door. Who gave the only thing she had to give: a kiss. 

And just like learning that service generates love, retroactive gratitude is now a continuous wave, a spiritual practice, especially in October, when I find myself saying thank you for the gifts I recognize, like you, beloveds, and for all those I will become aware of in the fullness of time. 

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

I spent the weekend with my two older sisters and their husbands in what has become a regular sister-gathering now that our parents are dead. 

 As usual, there were some retellings of family tales, some stories that were revelations, and some that were three variations on a theme. There was no right or wrong to them; they were just each of us sharing our differing perspectives—like who was Mom’s favorite, what we inherited from Dad, and how things might have turned out differently. That kind of thing. 

And for the record, I’ll say it again, I was not Mom’s favorite. That distinction varied, the recipient being, in Mom’s words, “Whomever needs me the most.” 

A role to which no one aspired. 

This powwow was in the hills of Western Maryland, where my firstborn sister’s place overlooks a valley of golden fields bisected by a picturesque railroad track. In the morning, fall mist draped the tree line, giving the illusion of mountains and memories far bigger than the hills.

Because looking back often includes a confession of sorts, I shared this one because it involved a talent for which I have always been a bit vain, and which may demonstrate a learned response to those who need me as well. I am, after all, my mother’s (third) daughter.

Don’t judge too harshly. About the only things I was good at were kickball, running, and making eye contact with my teachers. Kickball and running have not turned out to be particularly valuable life skills, but eye contact is probably why I have three kids and own my own home today. 

We were lingering at the dinner table over my brother-in-law’s peach upside-down cake. “I was at the post office,” I said, “and the line was about 12 patrons deep waiting to get up to one of the three service windows. There was an 8-foot-long, narrow table, about 12 inches wide and chest-high, down the center of the room, where we could queue up to await our turn, simultaneously writing last-minute addresses on envelopes without losing our place in line. I set my purse down and started addressing a package while several other customers did the same.”

 As each person finished their business at the windows, our line slid along the table, I explained. A man ahead of me in line was frumping around pretty anxious about how long the whole process was taking, and I sympathized. It was like being on the beltway in a slowdown—where I always remind myself that every car in front of me has the same goal I do–to get to the next exit as quickly as possible. So, I relax about what I can’t control, knowing my anxiety contributes nothing, and that everyone working towards their goal is inadvertently working towards mine.

The man, fastidious in a button-down-collar, blue shirt, rolled up sleeves, and black jeans, was about three customers ahead of me, so we got to our windows simultaneously—he all the way down the row, me at the one nearest the end of the table. But as I turned in my parcel, I noticed he had not left the building but was frantically searching for something on the floor. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw he was now roaming the entire room, looking a tad panicked. Then he bolted out the door. 

I asked when I could expect my package to be delivered, thanked the clerk helping me, and turned to leave when this man burst back in frantically scanning the room again. 

“Did you lose something?” I asked, looking him right in the eye, because what can I say? It’s a gift. And because my only other gift, besides kickball and running fast, is that I am a really good finder. When the kids lost something, or Mr. Oliver could be witnessed searching his car, I’d always ask, “What are you looking for?” then calmly scan my intuition and within a minute or two produce the missing object.

My finder-sense was coming online, my helper-sensibility was on high alert. He had a need, and I was going to help him meet it. It was the role I was born for.

“My keys!” he groaned, panicked. “I can’t find my car keys, and I’ve got to get home. My wife has to get to an appointment and I’m already late.”

I felt into an image of his keys, imagined them in my mind’s eye—scanned my internal vibe-meter for where they might be lying in a corner of the room behind a table leg, or under a one-day delivery envelope left on the counter. I lifted a pile of label debris by the postal packaging display.

Then I began looking with him in earnest, and now his problem felt like my problem, which meant I was kind of in my element. I could almost feel the sense of happy satisfaction the moment I’d be able to say, ‘Are these yours?” 

He left the building again and I continued to search. Finally, I walked out into the wide shallow parking lot where cars were parked like teeth in a comb, in case he had found them and left, but he was out there peering under a Subaru. 

I needed to get home myself, and having completely failed to use my superpower for good, I called out, “I’m so sorry! Hope you find them!” 

I opened my purse for my sunglasses, and to my horror, there sat a clump of keys I had never seen before. 

He was incredulous. To be fair, so was I. “You mean you’ve had my keys all this time?” he asked, eyebrows raised, face flushed, and voice rising.

Sometimes you just can’t do anything but say you’re sorry and know that, for the moment at least, you have legitimately earned the title: Mom’s Favorite Child. 

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

I have a philosophy which is, if a little is good, more is better. A teaspoon of Miracle-Gro once a week makes the flowers bloom? How about a tablespoon every day? Kaboom. 

Leah-dog agrees with me on this philosophy. One walk a day is good? Three is waaay better, mama. 

This does not pertain to everything, however, as you shall see. 

Someone we will just call Not-Me, over-ordered mulch for this small city yard—to the tune of six yards–which is a mound, no lie, the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. And since this house has no driveway or off-street parking, the tractor-trailer that delivered this astonishing order had to dump it on the sidewalk and street in front of the house. 

Immediately, city traffic enforcement began cruising by, very excited at this new development. Parking had been compromised. Scofflaws were afoot! That was me, now doomed to haul the mulch, one wheelbarrow load at a time, up the 3 brick steps into the front yard, behind the wrought iron fence, to free the avenue of parking obstacles. 

Professional landscaping trucks cruised by hour after hour, the employees in the cabs looking down, shaking their heads with incredulity, and probably placing bets on the impossible task. As the hours wore on, parking officials cased the situation more frequently, waiting for that one opportunity, say, during a break for water, that they could claim the mulch had been abandoned and was now a legitimate violation. 

I shoveled, heaved, and dragged for 7 hours without pause. I missed a physical therapy appointment; lunch was on the fly. But by 4 o’clock that afternoon, the car-sized mound of mulch on the street was now a car-sized mound in the front yard. 

It was a lot of a lot, as Taylor Swift would say.

What if something crawls in there over the winter I asked Not-Me, eyeing the mountain, which was as tall as my head. I had encountered this once before, you remember. In my previous neighborhood, forty snakes had come slithering out of a mulch pile in the spring, in which they had been incubating for God knows how long. All of which I had had to kill by myself for the safety of a two-year-old toddler standing on the far side of the pile.

I was assured this would not happen twice. Yeah, what are the chances that something creepy wants to live in the new mulch pile? 

Yet when I went to move more of the mulch to places that didn’t need it a week later, the rake hit two big eggs. Perfect, unbroken, and yet buried deep within Magic Mountain. Too big to be snake eggs, I told myself, yet what mother duck would burrow into a mulch pile and abandon her eggs there? Maybe they had been stolen by a raccoon! A little bandit with a black mask and little black hands! Stowed away for future use. 

I pulled the eggs out and left them next to the house foundation to admire and wonder over. Two days later, they had disappeared without a trace. 

But this weekend, I was taking the dog for a walk, and on the side of the house between the remnants of Mulch Mountain and the street, I looked down and spied a snake slithering along next to my shoe. Had he come from the mulch? Were we going there again? I snapped a quick photo and checked him out on my phone. A harmless rat snake. 

There was a time in my life, I would have run for a shovel anyway, but those days are gone. I carry flies out of the house. Run down three stories to release spiders. (Not always. If a bug doesn’t cooperate with capture, sometimes it has to go into the light…), because I’m not extreme about anything. I’d say I’m a very medium person. 

But everything seems more sacred now. Although a bit squeamish, I captured the snake in a cardboard box and carried it down to the creek, where I let it go among the kudzu vines, the violet asters, and burgundy coneflowers. The breeze blew up the bank carrying the scent of saltwater and sun. Live long and prosper, snake. 

But I feel bad that whatever was in those eggs didn’t have a chance to live. Although I don’t know how this could be true, I suspect that it is: there isn’t life that doesn’t matter and life that does. Life is diverse in its expression, yet universally holy. Indivisible. And, I’m beginning to believe, somehow conscious.

 As Kate Forster points out, spiders dream, dolphins have accents, otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. And I’d add, elephants grieve, cephalopods hold grudges, and gray wolves mate for life.

We are islands in an ocean, and it is not the ocean that connects us but the floor of the sea.

I think “if a little is good, more is better” refers only to love and how it shows up in the world. Through you. Through me.

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

I am on time, but my dance class is missing. I run down the deep stairwell at the City Rec Center, past the rock-climbing wall, where the bored instructor in the ballcap sits student-less as usual and yell to him, “Next time! Really going to try it soon!” which is a well-intended promise, but when push comes to shove, I always eye that towering, two-story wall with its dangling ropes, and wonder if that’s how I want to die. 

I continue down the stairs, cheers from a basketball game surging over me in waves, and sure enough, the room where we danced last week is dark, the door closed, and I’m momentarily confused and disappointed. This is our second session of Latin Dancing and I went all out in preparation, meaning, as the instructor suggested, I wore a skirt this time and I’ve got a hair tie on my wrist in case the room heats up again.

The women in this class are strangers to me, although a couple seem to know each other. There were eight of us at the first class, and for the instructor’s sake, I have been praying that everyone came back tonight, because she can’t afford to lose students. Her name is Nancy, she’s about 28 years old, wears a ponytail and glasses, and is a professional choreographer who calls out instructions in a lilting Spanish accent. 

As I hit the last step, a woman from my class runs out of a nearby room and smiles at me—“We’re in here! I came to get you.” And I smile back; the tiniest kindnesses are ridiculous in their impact. 

I feel the beginnings of a tribe stir my heart.

So, we are in a smaller and better room where the mirrors are unobstructed. And everyone returned! A couple of other students are wearing skirts as well. We practice the dance we learned last week, Fireball, and then move on to the Mambo. Then back to Fireball because we have the mental retention of bricks. 

But the more we practice the more control we have and the freer we get, the less we concentrate on the instructor and begin inhabiting our own bodies, dancing for whoever we are dancing for. You. Memory. Imagination. 

Sometimes I think we dance because of the days we didn’t, and for the days to come when dancing will no longer be on the syllabus. We have been briefly given another moment in which to defy gravity and the limitations of time. I was born in a flame, everybody gonna know my name, the music imagines. And like adolescents, who still believe there is no one they can’t be, and nothing they can’t do, for the length of the dance, we imagine that, too.

As we learn the Mambo, which is essentially another word for “shake it,” I am fixated on Nancy as she breaks down new moves. Like how to swing your hips as you rotate in a circle, swinging out slooowww, then fast- fast, slooowww, fast- fast. 

This is much harder than it sounds. Rotating your hips without moving your torso starts with your feet. Watch a hula dancer sometime. All that mesmerizing rhythm and grace are being engineered elsewhere. That’s the trick, isn’t it? To hide the mechanics of grace?

 When I compliment the woman dancing next to me, she suggests I move like I’ve got a hula hoop around my waist. Elbows up to keep our frame.

This makes me think of the first dance I ever learned. One day my father brought a hula hoop home from work, a new toy, then set it aside and taught us the Twist. It’s a new dance, he said, demonstrating. Just move like you are drying your backside with either end of a bath towel while putting out a cigarette with the toe of each shoe. 

Well. He wasn’t wrong. 

Funny the things that stay with you. 

I participate in another class at the Rec Center called Cardio Dance. Like Nancy, Leandra, who teaches it, is a pro, a joy to watch, and a challenge to emulate. But Leandra goes through the moves slowly, lets you think you’ve gotten them, then does a bait and switch, whipping them out at triple speed. Or she changes direction! 

We are all facing one way and suddenly she spins around, and we are supposed to be going in the opposite direction, leaderless—or sometimes, in any direction, it’s a spontaneous free-for-all. Decorum breaks down, and we rollick like teams in the Puppy Bowl. You can’t help but laugh, dancing with the rules tossed out, responsible for your own moves. Wait! I’ve got moves?

Wait… I have to change direction?

Sometimes Leandra just shouts for joy over the music or laughingly yells, “Uh-oh!” Like someone’s in big trouble now, like her body just got away from her, and who knows what’s going to happen. Even she doesn’t know; she’s following wherever spirit leads her. 

I always laugh because “Uh-oh!” means, “Let go,” and the words break something open inside me. A container of some kind that keeps me in here and you out there. 

But in that moment, façades fall away, and spirit takes us higher.

Time is our partner, beloveds.

Dance like the roof’s on fire. 

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

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

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

I’m Mummy’s mommy.

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

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

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

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

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

I knew it was her.

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

I am a terrible criminal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really, Mrs. Durbeck?

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

The email said nothing more than this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Because, well, who isn’t?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last travel story, I swear.

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

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

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

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

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

I laugh and say, “Yes, of course!” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I look sly. 

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

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

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

Kidding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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