Please. Please. Please.

 

The incident occurred about 10 miles north of Moss Landing, an unincorporated community near Monterey.

Moss Landing. Like some fictional town plucked from the pages of Anne of Green Gables or a summertime Hallmark feature. City-girl begrudgingly relocates from San Fracisco to sell her grandmother’s antique store and meets a handsome small-town birdwatcher named Sam.

But that is not this story. This story is more Son of Sam.

I’d just met a college friend for iced tea and avocado toast at a trendy coffee bar in Menlo Park where the lattes are $6 and the baristas aren’t in any hurry. My plan was to drive two hours down Highway 17 to the 1, hugging the coast until I hit my turn for Carmel Valley. I was attending a writer’s retreat with eighteen other women, organized by an editor I admired and followed on Instagram.

I was prepared. Full tank of gas. Cold Perrier in the cup holder. Sunglasses doubling as a headband. I found the one FM station that I could tolerate, even if it meant suffering through the same timeshare exit attorney ad every 22 minutes. About an hour into my drive, I pulled off the highway to use the restroom at a Chevron station with blooming Lupine out front and the clerk handed me a key ring the size of a lightsaber.

“Women’s is outside. To the right,” he grunted, not bothering to glance up from his phone.

Later, when I returned the monstrous key, I bought a pack of peppermint Trident to legitimize myself as a customer and then doused my hands in anti-bacterial.

Within a few minutes of careening down Highway 1, I became conscious of the SUV trailing me in the right lane, growing closer in the rearview. I was going about 55mph in a 60mph zone and within seconds, the vehicle had narrowed the gap to mere inches. Straightening in my seat, I stole a glance over my shoulder, perplexed as to why the driver wasn’t passing me on the left, leaving my geriatric pace in the dust. With only a few other cars on the road and large gaps in traffic, there wasn’t any plausible reason why the guy couldn’t simply merge.

Baffled, I sped up. But he only accelerated, keeping pace. I reduced my speed to 45, hoping the driver would grow impatient and high-tail it, perhaps even give me the finger, but instead he mirrored every subtle alteration I made. At one point, his car was pinned so aggressively close to my bumper that I was convinced he was going to ram me, thrusting my meagre Honda Civic forward, causing me to lose control.

My foot pressed down on the gas pedal, coaxing it back to 55mph. My heart rate quickened and I forced myself to take a breath, probing for any sensible explanation that might account for such erratic behavior. But I had none.

Craning my neck, I attempted once more to decipher the driver’s profile in the rearview, but his visor was drawn, face hidden in shadow. Afraid of diverting my eyes from the road for too long, I sped up to the U-Haul lumbering along ahead. The SUV kept pace. I merged, passing the truck, and promptly returned to the right lane. Surely, this would do the trick. The guy was distracted, an asshole to be sure, but now he’d continue on. However, instead of racing ahead, the SUV jaggedly swerved back, aligning himself once again on my tail.

I tried again, passing another car, but this time, I lingered in the left lane for longer. He continued to tailgate, shifting lanes only when I did. I white-knuckled the steering wheel and a spiral of fear began to corkscrew through me, spreading like poison until it suffused every limb, every pore, every cell. Sweat gathered under my arms and dampened my back. All at once, I felt sickening, terrifyingly alone—a rabbit caught in the open, staring into the beady eyes of a wolf.

I considered calling the police, but then doubted myself. What would I even say? I couldn’t even rattle off the license plate to my rental car. I scanned the side of the road for a mile marker but there was only grass and trees and a stone wall showcasing clusters of California poppies. I was a single car on a vague stretch of California highway, a tiny dot on a giant globe.

With an exit looming up ahead, I made a split-second decision. Without signaling or slowing, I waited until the last possible moment to jerk the steering wheel before exiting up and off the ramp.

What happened next shook me with a surge of alarm so primal that I’m certain I let out a guttural cry. The SUV skidded off the highway right after me, tires screeching to make the exit, before realigning directly behind my rear bumper. There was no mistaking it now. This was blatant. I was being hunted. Stalked. I didn’t understand why or to what end, but I needed to think. And I needed to do it fast.

The exit itself was deserted, not a gas station or McDonalds in sight, and I immediately sensed the acute danger of leaving the area around the highway. My gut clenched. My muscles twitched. Dread radiated through my core, flushing my blood—a rally cry pumping through a body deciphering between the instinctual call of fight or flight.

In a split-second decision, I veered left, heading for the stoplight at the top of the hill, and prepared to return to the highway, heading in the opposite direction. The light was red. I held my breath as the SUV hung back as though deciding. 911, I thought. I’ll call 911, if they follow. Gradually, the SUV crept forward, coming to a stop in the next lane. I stared stock-still at the light, willing it to turn, unable to look and meet the driver’s eye. Please. Please. Please. The threat seared through my sealed window like a blast of heat. Through glass and steel and concrete lane lines. I imagined him smirking. Running one bony finger sideways along his throat. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t look.

I sat there, trembling, trying not to provoke a stranger in an SUV, repeating a word women muster every day, exhaling it like a prayer.  Bracing for impact like a passenger on a downed plane. Please. Please. Please.

I’d read somewhere in a self-dense article that you are always supposed to look a potential stalker directly in the eye. To show him you know that he is there. To take away that element of surprise and rob him of that one iota of power. Eye contact signals to an assailant that you are strong and capable. That you refuse to go down without a fight, that you aren’t and never will be a victim.

When another car filed in behind me and the light turned green, I hit the gas and sped back onto the highway, not caring that it meant driving further from my destination. When the SUV didn’t follow, I sagged with relief, overcome with a gratitude that gradually sobered into a quiet pallor of shame.

I’d failed to look the perpetrator in the eye. I cowered when I was meant to roar.

I drove another five miles before I felt steady enough to exit and turn around again, checking my rearview every few seconds to ensure he was really gone. The radio was off, and as signs for Moss Landing appeared on the roadside—7 avocados for $1 and Roadside Artichokes—I finally allowed myself to exhale, to crack the window and listen to the hum of the engine and the call of seabirds over the dunes. The ocean glinted blue several miles ahead, wild and vast, and I savored the swell of distance like a gift.  

I managed to arrive in Carmel before check-in, so I drove another few miles to a regional park with hiking trails to stretch my legs and breathe in the fresh air.  A smattering of cars was parked in the expansive gravel lot. As the winds picked up, I pulled on my jacket and headed out on the trailhead. The visitor center was closed during the week, but the bathrooms were open, the mirrors rusted and covered in mosquitos. As I proceeded down the path toward the Waterfall Trail, I encountered an older couple with a Border Collie who warned me about the puddles but promised that further up it was all dry. I thanked them just as the late afternoon sun peaked out, warming my face.

I walked for another twenty minutes or so without seeing another soul. There was only birdsong and the pounding of my boots. The muffled gurgle of a nearby stream. Brandi Carlisle crooning in my earbuds.

I heard them before I saw them. Two voices drifting from the shadowed canopy of trees. Both male. And soon enough they were striding toward me on the trail. They were bare-chested and tan, t-shirts tied around backpack straps, the fabric flapping with each step. They nodded in unison as they passed, but I didn’t nod back. Instead, I straightened to my full height, boring into their eyes.

My unease compounded as I progressed further up the hill, startling at every rustle in the brush, every shifting slice of shade. After a while, I yanked out my earbuds, no longer finding comfort in the music, and scanned the switchbacks. I strained to detect the muffled tread of boots—listening for their chatter, sniffing the air for the savage musk of men. I needed to believe that they were good. Decent, nature-loving young guys out for a hike. And in all likelihood, they were, but I couldn’t count on that. I couldn’t bet my life on it. 

I can almost guarantee they weren’t obsessing over me, but I was thinking about them. While they were considering what to barbecue for dinner, I was wondering if the organic lavender sanitizer spray that I’d zipped into my Fannie pack might be a decent substitute for Mace.

I never made it to the waterfall that afternoon. A mile shy, I turned around, too spooked to be out there on my own, tempting fate like a lame antelope drinking from the watering hole.

On the way back to my car, I thought about my daughters and how I might prepare them for this disturbing reality. I thought of our stroll through the French quarter in New Orleans a few weeks back, avoiding the sidewalk potholes and leaky awnings. My youngest was both fascinated and repulsed by the sheer abundance of discarded cigarette butts. (1302 in 3 days, for those who are curious.) Midway through our walk though, a pair of panhandlers with half-lit cigarettes and a glut of purple beads dangling from their wrists draped necklaces around my kids’ necks. Their movements were hasty and insistent, despite my repeated protests. My daughters both smiled and said thank you as they’d been taught when someone gives them something. It was only when the pair stalked us down the sidewalk, voices raised, demanding cash, that the girls’ smiles wavered. As I promptly snatched up the necklaces and returned them, the girls went wide-eyed. They remained quiet for a while and I sensed they were embarrassed by their initial show of gratitude, by the fact that they’d been tricked. Nothing in life is ever free. 

The bead incident was so small and insignificant but someday, something else won’t be. Someday it will matter, and I was angry that such lessons are necessary. I was angry to have to teach my daughters that polite is good, but safe is always better. That as women, they will be in a perpetual state of alert, of never being able to let down their guard, constantly weighing if eye contact might prevent or provoke. I was angry that they’ll never be able turn off their sensor—that tiny voice that warns against walking into parking garages or down alleys or into elevators. I was angry that they’ll need to understand that bedrooms at frat parties only have one exit and that if something doesn’t feel right, it’s not right. Period. That sometimes as women, we have to pass up the waterfalls and that towns called Moss Landing aren’t safe, simply because they sound like a fairy tale.

I despised all that with both sound and fury.

But as their mother, I despised even more the idea of them, terrified and trembling, murmuring the most wretched of refrains: Please. Please. Please.

The Conch

 

Five years ago tomorrow, a text from my mom lit up my screen: Come now. Dad’s dying.

In the years since that fateful morning, I’ve cycled through the usual suspects—my childhood recollections of Dad—exercising moments so committed to memory they’ve molded into family folklore, fortified by Kodak prints loose in a drawer, and festooned with my siblings’ iterations. But more and more, I find myself savoring the rare coins, the treasures you unearth unexpectedly, a souvenir you forgot you even possessed.

It happened today with The Conch. A shell so special to me it deserves capitalization.

I was standing on the sofa, searching for a novel on the bookshelf, the living room lamp casting a soft hue when I spotted it on the top row, way in the back, obscured by shadow.

I was maybe eleven when Dad found it or stepped on it, rather. A Gastropod foot-skewer, buried under five feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico.

Dad was drifting in the current, water lapping at his neck, while I played in the shallows nearby. I remember the sudden yelp—the surprised high-pitch howl that clogged his throat and prompted him to dive down to investigate. At first, I assumed he might’ve stepped on a crab, so when his head disappeared underwater, I hightailed it to shore, terrified a crustacean army was in hot pursuit.

Seconds later, Dad surfaced triumphantly, spitting an arch of saltwater like some masculine Tuscan statue, and holding his prize aloft. He carried the specimen to the beach, laying it beside his foot to approximate its length. It was enormous. At least 13 inches long, boasting an intricate spire, suture lines blackened with seaweed. Turning it over, we realized it was already hollow inside—the abandoned home of something long departed. A creature who’d returned to sand and salt.

It wasn’t an especially pretty thing. It didn’t resemble the shell shop’s polished selections, lined up in uniform rows, pink and perfect as cotton candy. The ocean had worn its sheen to a dull yellow and a few barnacles clung to its outer lip. But it was intact and wild and spectacular.

Later, I looked it up in a reference book. Triplofusus Giganteus. A horse conch, the largest saltwater snail in North America. Florida’s state shell.

For more than a decade, it adorned the middle shelf in my parent’s basement bathroom—the one that displayed a door sign of a silhouetted, naked, peeing boy that mortified me in grade school when friends came over. It stayed there, collecting toilet paper dust until I got my own apartment and asked if I could display it. The Conch, not the pissing adolescent. The shell survived several moves across state-lines and bouts with bubble wrap, insulated like a priceless Fabergé egg. Eventually, it earned top-shelf honors in my suburban Georgian but somehow, I’d forgotten it was even there.

This morning, I lifted it from its spot, cradling it in my hand like a newborn’s head, honoring its weight, its heft, like he did that first day. And I was back. Facing the roar of the ocean, skin warm, eyes squinting up at the cawing gulls. A copse of palms in the distance. Wet sand. Chapped lips. The slickness of Dad’s suntanned shoulders as we freestyled to the sandbar.

And as I stood there alone, savoring the memory, I thought, the things you leave behind.

I placed that shell to my ear—whorl against whorl—and listened. A thrum. A purr.

The susurration of water—ocean’s echo. The breath of reincarnation. A dead vessel whispering beyond the grave—harkening back. Frenetic wings from something alive. Something eternal. So that thirty years or five years compressed into nothing, evaporating time into a mist so fine that all that remained was a fleck of salt on a lip.

If I could’ve inhaled that sound—swallowing it like an elixir or consuming it whole with the gaping maw of an anaconda—I would have, but it felt too mystical, too massive to contain.

And yet, The Conch.

Perhaps, Dad’s very own genie lamp. I wish. I wish. I wish.

My Christmas Confession

My name is Emily and I’m an addict.

While I’ve never uttered that confession in the circular sanctity of a meeting, I do have a problem. A December problem. With gingerbread.

Such an admission may sound cavalier or insensitive to those with more “malignant” compulsions, but I assure you, I mean no disrespect. I empathize.

I’m a professional woman in my 40s, devoted mother, nature-seeker, avid reader, and functioning adult capable of passing the marshmallow test and yet, I am weak. In the presence of cookie kryptonite, I go limp—turn into a powerless, hamstrung, utterly impuissant human. After Thanksgiving, the mere waft of ginger morphs me into a lily-livered invertebrate. The chewy ones render me a toddler. Smear on a dollop of icing, a dash of sprinkles, and I’m a goldfish—liable to self-combust.

The genesis of my addiction bloomed in my twenties while baking holiday treats for friends. With a grandmother who won the Chicago Tribune’s Holiday Cookie Contest—infamous for her fairy-tale platters of sugar-dusted Czech confections—I figured I possessed the genes to pull off my own pastry prowess. I craved gingerbread and believed that a supreme recipe was out there, if only I could whittle away at the misses and hone my successes like a potter at her sculpting wheel.

With scientific precision, I tested, sampled, and rejected, scouring cookbooks and newspapers, even tearing recipes from dental office magazines whenever receptionists’ heads were turned. Until at long last—a winner: A recipe in the 2002 holiday issue of Cooking Light that yielded men so malleable and moist, so springy and supple, that I was ready to crouch down on bended knee.

Over the years, I’ve tweaked the formula, attempting to counter my overindulgence by making the dough healthier—substituting coconut sugar for granulated or applesauce for butter. Oh, how tempting it is to try and change our lovers. At times, I took it too far and the results were as nauseating as compromising one’s morals. You can put lipstick on a pig, but in the end, a cookie is a cookie. The ratio is perfect now though. And I clone my men like beloved pets before every winter solstice. Tripling, often quadrupling the recipe.

The leaves fall. The mums freeze over. November gratitude comes and goes in a blur of leftovers, 4pm sunsets, aggrandized football games, and tryptophan naps. I get antsy. My palms sweat. My mouth salivates, craving what I’ve been awaiting all year. The spicy fragrance of ginger. The warm heat of crushed clove. The slow decadence of molasses building up to the climax: nips of nutmeg melding with cinnamon sweet.

When you think about it, gingerbread gets one lousy shot. One month of public approval. King cakes claim February, pumpkin pies rule November and still, we gingerbread aficionados have to share the holiday spotlight with all those peppermint zealots. It doesn’t seem fair.

All in all, it’s a two-day process to mold my men. Day one is about preparation, measuring the ingredients and justifying all that middle-school math to calculate 1 ¾ tsp x 4. I mix the dough in a bowl the size of a sorceress’s cauldron and then separate it into parcels of parchment. Overnight, the logs refrigerate, germinating flavor and preparing for self-sacrifice. On day two, I recruit the kids so they can’t whine to their therapists in twenty years that they were denied rose-hued, holiday traditions. The oven is pre-heated. The cookie sheets are prepped. The counters are cleaned and dusted with flour. Rolling the dough to the proper thickness is key. Too thin equals burned and brittle. Too thick and I don’t get the quantity to sustain me through another year.

In truth, the kids are fairly decent at wielding the cutouts and predictably overindulgent with the sprinkles, but their stamina is lousy. You can’t lose steam after two dozen cookies! True devotees are committed to Tupperware storage. Because as soon as that aroma hits you in the nose—that enticing, delectable culmination of spice, flavor, fullness, and home—you are energized, brought back to life like Jason Bourne in a sensationalized action film.

Once the cookies cool, a thin smear of icing seals the deal. Think Vegemite—a little goes a long way. And then . . . that first bite. Cosmic. Euphoric. The softest give against your front teeth. The chew. The mouthfeel. The ebullient explosion of flavors. Sweet. Earthy. Piquant. Zing.

My girls like to tease that I stink at sharing. And, in this case, it’s true. Which is why I bake other varieties to give away—to prove my altruism and extensive culinary repertoire. Peanut butter kisses, oatmeal butterscotch, almond meringues, raspberry squares. Sometimes, I even toss in some powder-sugared Chex Mix in the nooks and crannies of my neighborly platters, but I don’t share the gingerbread. Like a proper addict, I even conceal them from my kids.

These days, I shape both men and women and if I had a non-binary cut-out, I’d roll those too. I make stars and bells, donkeys and houses, angels and evergreens. I rationalize eating six bells at once because they pretty much add up to one house. But that’s where my justification tends to get sloppy. While my adorned creations repose on wire racks, my self-restraint hightails out the kitchen window like a spastic housefly.

I’ve never been one to binge an entire pint of ice cream or sleeve of Oreos or bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. Even after a book-club gummy. I am the epitome of discipline—a disciple of portion control—except around these f’ing cookies.

I hoard them, devour them, go back to them time and time again like a disrespecting lover. A slot-machine. A handle of tequila. I’ve been known to hide them, move them to another floor, bury them under dish towels like I’m playing peek-a-boo with my Freudian id. I burp those Tupperware more than a lactose-intolerant baby, devouring a cookie for breakfast, snacking on several after lunch, and then putting a serious dent in stock after sundown.

The initial bite is always the best—the flavor bomb to the tongue, the song to the saliva. And you chase that feeling like a rainbow. Like an elusive dream. Like unrequited love.

Every December, I lose all self-respect and yet, I am gluttonously giddy. While the cookies last.

Someone asked me once what three things I would save in a fire. My kids’ baby books, of course, because I’m not a monster. My box of hand-written letters. And that cookbook with a bundle of asparagus on the cover. Because way in the back, in the dessert section, there is a wrinkled page, greased and smudged, with a recipe that I can only make once a year.

A cookie that is both my cross and my comfort. My forte and my failing. My torture and my tradition.  

Tootsie Rolls and AR-15s

The girls picked out their outfits the night before, premeditated down to the red ponytail tie and royal-blue striped socks. We arrived at our friend’s lawn party with twenty minutes to spare. Enough time to nosh on cinnamon bagels and cantaloupe cubes, clink seltzer waters, and jostle our folding chairs into the shade. We settled underneath a sprawling maple as old as a WWII vet.

Candy bags were divvied out.

Street curbs were brushed free of ants and dead leaves.

Children lined up for organic popsicles from the bicycle vendor. 

Ears strained for the sirens.

Not once did I scan the surrounding homes and buildings, surveying rooftops for sniper shooters.

Not. Once.

I utterly failed to devise an escape route or identify what inanimate object might shield my daughters from a torrent of bullets threatening to implode their spleens and gallbladders. A pole? A bench? A dumpster? It never dawned on me to prepare for war. We were there to scramble for Tootsie Rolls, wave to the local gymnastic troupe, and cheer on the high school marching band. We were there to celebrate our freedoms, to double down on our rights as Americans to assemble peacefully.

Instead, we were lambs to the slaughter—pawns of patriotism.   

In truth, I wasn’t up for indulging in merriment that morning. The recent rulings passed down by our bought-n-sold judicial branch had left me pursing my lips in soured disgust. In a span of several weeks, our originalist Supreme Court had eliminated the federal right to abortion while expanding gun-owner rights. The conservative majority had buttressed the role of religion in the public sphere while hampering environmental protections. According to standard political measures, this past term managed to erase over a century of democratic progress. When you put a delusional psychopath in power, you must suffer the aftermath and swallow the bitter pill. And keep swallowing. The three justices Trump appointed may remain on the court for the next three decades.

In other words, I didn’t feel much like gnawing on Tootsie rolls.

             And yet, we dressed in our red, white, and blue, waved our plastic Pride flags, and saluted the soldiers riding in vintage automobiles. Our democracy may have been on life support, but it was still our home, a nation we longed to revere.

And then reality pervaded. Just as I was standing to applaud the Moms Demand Action procession in Oak Park, 30 miles north, a 21-year-old white male was gunning down toddlers and grandparents with an assault rifle—a military-grade weapon of massacre. A firearm he owned legally despite his criminal history. A firearm that dispenses ammunition up to three times the speed of sound. A firearm that causes such horrific bodily damage that victims are often identified through dental records.

There are lines in the sand and then there are full-stop fissures.

I no longer accept wrong place, wrong time. I no longer accept thoughts and prayers. Posturing and platitudes. Hearts and minds. Special interest groups and political inertia. I reject the ludicrous notion of arming educators and casting blame on mental health. Take the rhetoric and shove it.

314 mass shootings over five months in the Land of the Free.

30,000+ fatalities every single year.

Movie theaters. Elementary schools. Supermarkets and subways. Shopping malls and synagogues. Independence Day parades. I’m fucking
pissed.

That tired, old adage springs to mind:

The very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Guns kill more kids in the US than cancer. Our country is no longer that scrappy militia fighting the Redcoats in the late 1700s. The assault rifles of today are not the rudimentary muskets stashed in our apple cellars, just as our gas-guzzling SUVS are a vast deviation from the horse and buggies of yesteryear. Laws bend and evolve in response to the times. Cars require seatbelts. Federal labor regulations protect children under the age of 14. People other than privileged, bigoted white men are permitted to vote.  

Progress is a beautiful thing.

And yet, our gun laws remain as archaic and outrageous as bloodletting with leeches. Only specially trained pilots are permitted to fly bomber jets. Doctors grind through years of medical training before they can write prescriptions. Even the average American must pass a test to earn the privilege of getting behind the wheel of a used Honda Civic. But any 18-year-old teenager with cystic acne can pack heat.

America’s Second Amendment right to bear arms bludgeons the right of 2-year Aiden McCarthy to grow up with his mom and dad or the right of Anthony Mendoza of West Ridge to reach his 16^th birthday. A law dating back to 1791 makes it easier to purchase a semiautomatic rifle than a chocolate Kinder egg. Because, you know, some kid might choke on the plastic surprise toy.

As the court’s three liberal justices noted in their dissent opinion on the recent abortion case, “the framers defined rights in general terms, to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning.”

Jefferson and Madison sound like pretty smart dudes. I have to believe they understood that change is inevitable—that they not only entrusted but expected future generations to use their experience to inform constitutional interpretation.  

Hampered by inertia, we plod on, hitting the deck whenever a car backfires or tossing our kids into garbage dumpsters while sprinting from parades so the metal tombs might spare their lives. In the classroom, our kids practice lockdown drills before their multiplication tables. Hide in your cubby. Bury your face in your winter coat. Don’t make a single sound in the dark.

Meanwhile, our cowardly congressmen spout their condolences, obscuring the blood on their hands and their rubber backbones that fold on command. Our justices savor medium-rare ribeyes at Morton’s, cocooned within their security details, and slip seamlessly out the back door.

They should have to witness the carnage firsthand. Tiptoe through the blood-stained hallways. Mop the body parts from the pavement. Stand beside the ER physician desperately working to plug the holes of a human-turned-sieve. They should be forced to study the evidence photos while depositing their NRA donations and casting their votes.

There was no back door escape hatch at Uvalde or Highland Park or Sandy Hook. There was no security detail on high alert.

The only armor those innocent victims had were their unalienable, constitutional rights: To life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Let freedom ring.

Just as pissed?

Donate to www.everytown.org or www.sandyhookpromise.org or https://momsdemandaction.org

Call your representatives. Illinois residents, educate yourselves on the HB5522 Bill to ban assault rifles.

 

The Keepers

Four years. And I wonder sometimes who still conjures you—the keepers of you?

              Dad was not a very social guy, you see. He didn’t cultivate friendships the way one fertilizes the lawn. They were mostly accidental. Bluegrass in a stubborn patch of dirt. A dandelion squirming through a sidewalk crack. You knew him because he was your coach or college roommate or the neighbor you’d spy doing chin-ups outside on a blustery November day. He was an introvert at heart but when you heard the vibrations of his barrel laugh or caught the sparkle in his eye when he relayed a joke, you felt privileged. Like you had just stumbled upon something rare. A white rhino in the wild.

              Dad spent the last 10 years of his life as a patient in my parent’s home. The final stretch confined to a bed. He left the way he came in. Immobile and not saying much. He died slowly. His body was there, but his spirit—his essence—had departed long before. We were keeping a candle alive that wanted to burn out. And it was hard to watch.

              I turned my head a lot.

              But Mom, she couldn’t afford to. She was the one, morning-in and night-out, urging him to sit in the sunshine, to wash his underarms, to hobble to a chair, to eat canned pears. She’d point to the driveway where he wouldn’t have to encounter anyone or suffer the pink-heat of embarrassment and encourage him to do laps, slow as a turtle. “You must move,” she’d say. “Every day you have to move.” She organized and counted his daily medications like some tackle The New York Times crossword. With precision. With patience.

              For the entirety of my childhood and the time that preceded me, Dad was the athlete. The broad-chested bear who’d run around the Concordia track until his sweatshirt was soaked through and goaded us to descend the Grand Canyon with a pair of 8oz water bottles when my brother was only five.

              Mom, on the other hand, threw like a girl.

              And yet, that woman once carried Dad on her back down my deck stairs when he couldn’t take one more step. There’s labor in dying and it’s not solely borne by the one departing.

              A few months before he passed, I stopped at my parent’s house to grab something. The house felt still and empty when I unlocked the door—the only sound was mechanical, a whooshing from the portable humidifier. I knew Mom was out without even calling to her. The car was missing from the driveway. I also knew Dad was upstairs; he never left.

              After I retrieved the item, I hesitated in the downstairs hall. I wasn’t even in a hurry, but I pictured that conversation—the one I would have if I climbed the stairs, still zipped in my coat, and found him lying supine on the bed, eyes closed, that stale smell of inertia inhabiting the room. I knew that conversation like I knew my own skin.

              I’d hover in the doorway, maybe crack the shade and cause him to squint in the sudden spill of light. I’d say “hello” and “how are you?” like an actor delivering a script, anticipating the line that came next. Or the lack of one. The sigh. The hollow reply. I’d scramble to come up with something to fill the silence. An anecdote about the girls. My list of errands for the day.

              “Do you need anything?” “Are you comfortable?” “Mom should be home soon.”

              I didn’t trek up the stairs that day and it haunts me. Years later. The selfishness of the act—to simply walk out that door, turn the key in the lock, and reverse out of the driveway. Leaving behind a person unworthy of acknowledgment.

              Writing these words still plunge me into a vat of shame. I know he likely didn’t even hear me. Or if he did, he may’ve even preferred that I let him sleep. Shade drawn, tucked in his cocoon. Rationally, I accept my going upstairs wouldn’t have made any notable difference. It wasn’t going to cure him or bestow any miracles, but it may have given him the smallest moment of reprieve, a reminder that he wasn’t alone, that glints of hope, of life, of his legacy existed and persisted beyond those four walls.

              Regrets are the burden of the living.

              Today, four years in, I wonder who keeps him close, who still keeps vigil. In truth, he’s been gone much longer. My hope is that memories of him may scatter like ashes. Stop an old acquaintance in his tracks. Spark a recollection. Pull a tender smile.

              The softball coach, roaring for you to round third.

              The hardware man, cutting you a new key for the side door.

              The neighbor, nodding at you as he takes out the trash.

              The Dad—unwavering and giant, rough callouses and warm flannel arms—waiting for you to come upstairs.

Minnie Turns 152. Emily Turns 41.

Trigger Warning: Loss / Cemeteries

Yesterday afternoon, on my 41^st birthday, I meandered into the cemetery across the street. It’s a place I’ve frequented during the pandemic, drawn by some insatiable quest to replenish, to carve out quiet and solitude away from foot traffic and blaring car radios. Maybe to hide from all the bad news.

            A cemetery may sound like a rather macabre place to spend an hour of one’s birthday, but I find it’s one of the few spaces that imparts instantaneous perspective, whether it’s the open sky, the vigor from exercise, or the innumerable gravestones. It’s hard to feel as though you lack the upper hand when you’re the only living, breathing human around. And yesterday, I needed that. To look out, rather than in.

            Birthdays like New Years’ can be tethered to the expectation of celebration and merriment and yet, as I grow older, both occasions seem to deliver more wistfulness and nostalgia for the years that came before—for the moments and crossroads that cannot be revisited, let alone reshaped—than for anticipation of what lurks around the corner.

            As author Robert Dugoni writes in his best-selling novel, The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, “There comes a day in every man’s life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back.” The same may be true for us women, except we’re surely multi-tasking as we peer into the rearview.

            According to a 2019 NCHS study, the life expectancy of a female in the US was 81. COVID has slashed that by nearly 2 years. So, at 41, who’s to say whether there’s more sand above or below me. To presume flirts with arrogance, but it’s also downright foolish. Regardless, I awoke yesterday with a vexing weight in my chest. A case of the doldrums. I drank my tea before tending to the trash littering our driveway: a swell of crumbled wrappers, rotten tomatoes, blackened banana peels, and soggy paper towels that the raccoons had ransacked and then urinated on during the wee hours. As I brushed scurrying ants from my wrists, I tried not to dry-heave. Afterwards, I showered, changed, and smiled at the texts streaming in on my iPhone. I replied with hearts and blowing-kiss emojis, lest I seem ungrateful. And I was grateful. I am grateful. I was humbled by every phone call and Facebook message, but my melancholic pall only persisted. 

            By mid-afternoon, disgusted with my own moping, I buckled my ultra-cool Fanny Pack around my waist, the one I stole from my daughter’s parade bag one 4^th of July when the local librarians lobbed 1980’s belly pouches at the crowd instead of Tootsie Rolls. I tied up my sneakers, secured my earbuds, and set out in spandex for the cemetery.

            The circuit takes me around 50 minutes to complete if I power walk, a calculation that is important to bear in mind, given that the caretaker locks the imposing iron gates promptly at 17:00 hours, regardless of the souls (dead or alive) trapped inside.  

            Typically, I head south, striding past the entrance statue, two stone hands raised in prayer, and continue down a shaded road lined with Elms to section 21—the most tender part of the route, marked with a meager sign that reads, “Babyland”. Only once did I wander among those 100 or so grave markers. To do so again, would be wrenching and I’m simply not brave enough. Most of the infants and toddlers buried here died in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. The majority have the same year etched on either side of their respective dash, some with teddy bears and pastoral lambs carved onto the rockfaces.

            One weekend last winter, after an impressive Chicago blizzard, I’d trudged through the cemetery’s crudely plowed streets. Salt pellets had rendered the roads passable, although tire treads and footprints had turned the slush a dingy, ashen gray. But beyond the road, virginal snow shrouded the grass and graves for several weeks, undisturbed and beatific like a white blanket of wool. I could almost pretend those little grave markers weren’t there, tucked in under the elements—that all those children had in fact survived and grown up to be engineers and meteorologists, parents and world travelers.

            Further down the pot-holed road hangs a sign that reads, “Select Singles”, which never fails to make me cringe. It seems a strange, borderline inappropriate way to label this sectioned-off parcel as though it is facilitating some sort of afterlife dating pool. Beloved sister. Dear Aunt. Dad. I wonder about these strangers, worry they died alone, worry that all of their possessions were emptied into a dumpster after poorly-attended funerals, certain that For Sale signs were staked in their front lawns while any surviving pets were relegated to shelters. I can only hope these “select singles” aren’t shaking their heads, lamenting about their first edition Steinbeck novels that ended up in garage sales or their cash-stuffed tin cans still buried under backyard peach trees.

            From Bachelorville, I cross the bike path that bisects the cemetery and approach one of the older sections. I pass the Schroeder family plot where Robert and Martha, born in the mid-19^th century, are buried with their five children, none of whom survived past their twentieth birthday. I pass Mabel Bott’s rose-hued granite headstone and August Horn’s deteriorating grey one, buckling from the protruding roots of an ancient Oak. I pass Charles and Emma Shoup who died in 1920, one month apart, and Otto and Mary Priebe’s cylindrical headstones that resemble logs around a campfire. I smile at Bertha Blessing’s headstone, one of my personal favorites. She lived to be 86 and I’m convinced she was enchanting with a name like Bertha Blessing. A doting grandmother who smelled like honey drops and freshly baked bread.

            Most of the people in this section never made it to 50, let alone 81, having been born into the world before antibiotics or chemotherapy, a time when contracting strep throat or stepping on a nail could be your ultimate demise. While my feet shuffle forward, I conduct mental math, pondering what caused each person’s passing. It dawns on me that my walk is no different than my mother’s enigmatic obsession with newspaper obituaries. Although, I can’t recall if she admits to feeling invigorated or beholden when she discovers the deceased is older or younger than her.  

            At the crossroads, I choose left and I’m doused in afternoon sunshine. My bare skin drinks it in like lemonade. The days are getting shorter and soon I will be treading this path bundled in fleece. There are fewer trees on this side and after a long summer, the grass is brittle and yellow in patches. My gaze drifts several rows ahead where in August 2020, I encountered a shiny mylar balloon tied to a stake, blowing in the breeze. Happy 40^th was spelled out in oversized red letters. Curious, I’d crept up to the stone marker and furrowed my brow. Camilla Voss. August 2, 1980 – November 19, 2008. She’d died twelve years prior but someone was still bringing her balloons. She would’ve been 40 that year, just like me. The balloon is long gone now, but the plastic garden stake remains, sticking out of the earth like a stem without a flower.

            When I reach the perimeter, I round the southeast corner where on the other side, empty El trains wait their turn to pick up passengers bound for downtown. A few months prior, lightening split an Elm down the middle with the precision of a lumber jack, leaving behind a stump that is worthy of The Giving Tree. Beyond the stump, obscured by a thicket of bushes, vehicles whiz by along six lanes of the Eisenhower. Every so often, random bursts of country or heavy metal music emanate from stereos. I turn the volume up on my earbuds to drown out the ambient hum and kick the acorns out of my way. 

            Half-way down the road, I admire my favorite tree from afar, the sugar maple I stood beneath one warm day last fall when the wind was coaxing the scarlet leaves from their branches. I’d raised my arms and the leaves whirled around me like confetti, a kaleidoscope of reds and oranges and corals so vibrant that I felt as though I’d beckoned a sunset. In the shade of that tree, is a porcelain image of George T. Walzak, a young soldier in his WWII army uniform, who died at the age of 90 in 2010. His gravestone bears the epitaph I find etched over and over throughout the cemetery. Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shephard; I shall not want.”

            Maybe that’s my problem, I think. I do want. I want a whole lot.

            By the time I reach the western edge, I already smell the river. Dank and earthy. Like an upturned wood pile. As I veer right, the pavement is almost always damp and snippets of flowing water are visible through the chain link and under bush. The river is maybe 60 feet across and more brown than blue. Truthfully, in direct sunlight, the surface appears almost green, the shade of baby food pouches that adulterate perfectly delicious fruit with spinach. At the next clearing, I pause to listen to the frogs and wait until a serpentine stick floating downstream disappears from view.

            Once I zig-zag over the bike path, I’m ¾ of the way through my route. I stare out at the menagerie of headstones and pointy obelisks, stretching skyward, and I wonder what some of those men might have been compensating for. I think of the poor doctor who commissioned his own mausoleum just around the bend. William Molden, whose wife Lina died in childbirth, leaving him with a son who ended up dying in infancy five months later. Exquisite tragedy can be decoded in numbers. He had pedigree and money, but nothing spares a human from loss.

            Nearby, a black walnut tree has dropped a slew of fruit. The road is littered with bright green orbs so numerous it’s as though someone abandoned a pee-wee tennis lesson. But I don’t stop to admire the harvest. Instead, I am scanning for her, trying to recall where I first spotted the modest grave more than six months before while zipped into my parka, fingers tingling inside heated gloves. The slate carvings are weathered, but legible. Minnie Karner, September 25, 1869 - August 6, 1924. She’s the only one I’ve found thus far.

            Happy 152^nd birthday, Minnie. I’m sorry I didn’t bring any balloons.

            On the final stretch, I pass the open field where the Canadian geese congregate, defiling the adjacent road in excrement so I’m intentional with my steps. The geese generally ignore me or else stare on in disdain as do the occasional deer that dart amongst the gravestones, helping themselves to a Kentucky bluegrass buffet. It’s unusual if I encounter more than one or two people on my circuit. Sometimes I cross paths with a bicyclist pedaling toward the Prairie Path or a landscaper, clearing a dead tree or planting marigolds. I rarely, if ever, see anyone visiting graves and I wonder, especially with the older ones, if people still grieve for them. If a human lifespan averages 80 years, our ultimate purview is only a generation or two longer. We are mortal after all, merely passing through, borrowing the earth for a dusting of geological time. Our legacies are finite and forgettable. And while that’s sobering, it doesn’t necessarily make me sad.  

            After he died, my dad wasn’t buried in a cemetery, instead he was cremated, ashes scattered in places that constituted the fulcrums of his life. As a result, I can’t claim a formal location where I mourn him and yet, I’ve discovered I don’t need a plot of land to find or revere him. I connect with him here on this walk as much as in any quiet reflective moment. I have wondered if he is proud of me, if he finds the grandkids amusing. I’ve asked him, futilely of course, if he might grant me the privilege of hearing him speak my name one more time. Often, I catch myself trying to conjure his laugh. It’s a sound I never want to forget and at the same time I recognize, after my mother, my siblings, and I are all gone that no one will remain to evoke it.  

            As I plod along the winding driveway to the exit, I am listening to my audiobook, John Green’s Anthropocene Reviewed, and he’s talking about the concept of time and loss. He writes “I wish I wasn’t so scared all the time- scared of the virus, yes, but there is also some deeper fear: the terror of time passing, and me with it . . . I will never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment. Just as you will not speak to many of the people who loved you into your now.”

            I hear the heartbeat in such language, the pulse almost tangible. His words burrow into my skin and find refuge there. I recognize their meaning. His prose is so precise I can only equate John Green to a safe-cracker, listening to and sensing the give of the dial in a combination lock until . . . there, a click. And the metal latch breaks open.  

            I wonder about Minnie Karner‘s laugh. If it was high-pitched or rattled in her rib cage, causing her to keel over to catch her breath. I wonder if her husband made her laugh or her girlfriends or maybe the man she’d wanted to marry but couldn’t. I wonder if her own daughter ever tried to conjure it.

            Thinking about Minnie, how can I not feel anything but gratitude on a day where I am walking on this sacred ground, crunching tinderous leaves underfoot while she is below? In the final block before home, the shadow of an afternoon moon melds into focus like a Hidden Pictures puzzle. Minnie and I were born on the same day, 111 years apart. All of her moonrises are behind her. But my dash is open-ended. Less punctuation, more promise. My own wants, still unfurling.

 

*Note: Names have been altered to preserve privacy

How my Dead Father Found me a Job

While the title smacks of hyperbole, of stretching and tossing truth like pizza dough for dramatic effect, my dad really did giftwrap a new career for me. Almost three years to the day after he died. Hand on heart.

                Hyatt Hotels was my employer for seventeen years, the length of an entire childhood—milk to Miller Lite. They took me in, doe-eyed and blinking, my first real job out of college in a post-9/11 haze. What stands out in that inaugural year of professional triumph is one Tuesday eight-hour-shift when all I did was fry chicken wings for 1000+ guests. But I learned perseverance and patience from that tedious poultry encounter and somehow managed to ascend to several different properties and positions throughout my Hyatt tenure, all while avoiding Buffalo marinade.

                By May of last year though, I was sacked—one of the thousands of hospitality employees upended after our industry evaporated like coyote piss in the desert. On shaky newborn legs, I embraced my fate, surrendering to a cruel reminder—that the assumption of being in control is merely kindling for some of life’s greatest bonfires. I had forgotten the old adage: When man plans, God laughs. To me though, the cackling sounded rather gleeful. Smug, even. Many days that spring, the celestial hilarity hurt my ears.

                Undeterred, I crammed my summer with writing, mothering, laundering facemasks, and swallowing translucent vitamin-D softgels after some HuffPost article claimed they were COVID’s kryptonite. I consulted with my career coach and my best friend from college who whipped my fossilized resume into shape and made it sing with key phrases like collaborative advisor and strategic analysis until it was opera-worthy. I honed my pitch and upgraded to LinkedIn Premium. I colored my damn parachute. I composed lyrical cover letters, regretting that the digital age precluded me from dabbing them in seductive fragrances like gardenia and baby freesia, a nod to Legally Blonde. By night, I perseverated, spinning my weaknesses into strengths like a circus contortionist, and by day, I networked with the level of gusto usually reserved for scouring the planet for the perfect bone marrow donor.

                Change in itself is no bunny hill. Career shifts can feel like Kilimanjaro. I learned that worthy guides and proper gear are essential. No one should be climbing it alone. 

                The challenge with professional reinvention is akin to running backwards—such a clumsy crusade to propel oneself away from everything familiar while relying on swift over-the-shoulder glances to avoid smacking straight into a wall. I hit that wall. Several times.  

                At my lowest point, I may have even engaged in a pep talk with my sister’s Goldendoodle. Although, when he responded by licking his privates, my destiny appeared rather grim. After all, the message was clear: Slush-pile resumes succumb to slow, anonymous deaths. The only way I was going to find a new job was through someone I knew. I just didn’t realize at the time that my someone wouldn’t be alive.  

                When my father died three years ago, I couldn’t have fathomed the many ways in which he would continue to impact my life. And not just in the cliché sense of carrying on his memory, his Olympic-sized competitive spirit, his grit-toothed lessons of fortitude, or even his devotion to carbohydrates. Instead, I’m referring to moments when I’ve been aware of some elusive, spectral presence stirring the pot or manipulating the marionette strings in my favor. I picture him in a cloudburst, hovering over me like a body guard with an oversized Costco umbrella. He’s there in service, unobtrusive and quiet as a luxury car engine, providing shelter and sanctuary. Sometimes, I even forget it’s raining.  

                By November, I was still coming up short in the career department . . . gradually . . . deliberately . . . combing for my next move. And while I was adamant about being intentional—rather than humping every available job post and ending up a miserable, hungover bride after her off-strip-Vegas wedding—I was also turning restless. Before I got the axe, I hadn’t fully grasped how much of my self-identity had been tied to my career, however unhealthy that may have been. In essence, my vocation permitted me the chance to adult (the verb-form), to travel, to carve out a space—separate from my primary responsibility as a mother. It was mine alone and it represented independence. Financial, as well as emotional.   

                A week before Thanksgiving, I received an email from my alma mater, advertising a joint virtual mixer with another university. Great, another Zoom meeting, I lamented, poised to swipe it the trash. But then the first line caught my eye. Stanford and Princeton Clubs of Chicago welcome all alumni to a casual and virtual meet ‘n greet. How odd. Pre-COVID, the Stanford Club had sponsored several downtown mixers with the entire Ivy League Club, but this one was solely with Princeton.

                Anyone who has sniffled through a Hallmark commercial knows that sentimentality is a powerful trigger. I thought of my dad, how proud he had been to identify as a Tiger. At times, his devotion to Princeton seemed almost excessive, until I would remember that we are all susceptible to irrationality when it comes to who and what we love. My dad’s college years were his halcyon days. He worshipped the place, attending every reunion, donating to the wrestling club, and drilling “Old Nassau” lyrics into his children’s brains, all the while clinging to the hope that his progeny might carry on the baton as a legacy. Spoiler alert: None of us did.  

                Still, it struck me that if he were alive—if his heart hadn’t failed him, if the depression hadn’t bulldozed him—this mixer might have been something we could have endeavored to do together, both quarantined in our own homes, separated by a mere mile due to the threat of contagion. And honestly, I didn’t have anything better to do that night. My calendar was as blank as my checkbook register.

                That Thursday, I donned a Princeton sweatshirt in his honor and my Stanford baseball cap over my dry-shampooed head. I resembled a cringe-worthy, pompous, poster-child of elitist privilege. In fact, I looked like a total ass. As two dozen Zoom-fatigued participants introduced themselves one by one, I thought about how my dad would have bragged about our little father-daughter duo, admitting how heart-broken he once was to have to sign tuition checks over to Stanford, sometimes even writing Princeton on the “PAY TO” line before voiding them in a less-than-subtle attempt at humor.

                 The truth is that I had always planned to follow in my dad’s orange and black footsteps, hurrying through those pre-American Revolution stone arches, literature books in hand, Lord Byron on my mind. But just as I was all primed to go, I veered west. California beckoned me as it must have those early explorers, promising an unchartered adventure that would be all my own. All through April of my senior year, my dad tried desperately to convince me otherwise. He wrote me letters, sat me down at the kitchen table for grueling, drawn-out talks, and even appealed to my sense of duty as a daughter. We were both twisted up inside, our love stretching thin like taffy, threatening to break. And when the time came and I decided, in an uncharacteristic act of adolescent defiance, to mail my declaration card to Palo Alto, he left the room, crestfallen.

                That Thursday, when it was my turn to say hello on the Zoom, I mentioned my dad, class of ’71, and his reverence for his alma mater. I told the group that Princeton’s campus was where he had reached his athletic peak—somehow juggling three collegiate sports—and where had he earned notoriety in the form of a wall-of-fame photo at Buxton’s Ice Cream shop after consuming twenty-four scoops of butter pecan. In one sitting. The man was a legend.

                As the group divided into random breakout rooms and we settled into ice-breaking chit-chat, someone mentioned that his company was hiring, a position within my parabolic searchlight: Customer Success. When the clock started ticking down, marking the final seconds before being transported back to the main gallery, this person kindly offered to pass on my resume to an internal recruiter. In the days that followed, I honestly didn’t give it much thought beyond gratefulness.

                Until I got the follow-up phone call.

                Two months and two interviews later, I was prepping for a virtual final-round with this very company. I positioned a photo of my dad, smiling right above my webcam, as a reminder to look directly at the camera. In the picture, he’s sporting a suit and tie. His hair still has its dark pigment and his cheeks are two Maraschino cherries, rosy from his drink—a Tom Collins—or perhaps, from the confined heat. The man produced more sweat than a Bikram yogi in a rubber suit. At the apex of his smile, I can spot his false tooth. My dad hung out with me that day in my office for four hours and eleven minutes. And at the end, he held his hand out, palm-up, before folding up the umbrella. He wasn’t just smiling at me; he was beaming with pride.

                This past week, I accepted the company’s formal job offer, celebrating with a double scoop of butter pecan. We can’t all be legends, but the view from atop Kilimanjaro looks pretty darn worth the climb. 

                In reality, my father would have never been on that alumni Zoom with me. Computers terrorized him more than chunky tomatoes in marinara sauce—which should not be underestimated. Only my mom could have actually gotten him logged on. And yet, he managed to help orchestrate my path to employment from beyond the grave.

                And that generous soul on the virtual mixer who forwarded on a resume as a favor and professional courtesy to a perfect stranger . . . he earned his bachelor’s degree at Princeton. If that isn’t divinely paternal intervention, I’m not sure what qualifies.