February is the month of all things Valentine. Lacy cards, red hearts, avowals of undying love or, at least, momentary lust. A celebration of romance—tender, jubilant, exciting.

But there’s so much more to love than is dreamt of in the philosophy of a Hallmark copywriter. No less than the air we breathe or the food we eat, love in all its forms—partners, friends, family, community—turns out to be key to our survival. The emotional equivalent of a vaccine booster, we cannot live well or long without it. And every day brings us proof of this truth: What the world needs now is love, sweet love. (David/Bacharach)

Going Out of Our Minds

I can’t count the times in the past two years that Ed and I wondered aloud how people living alone have managed the isolation COVID has necessitated. Cut off from the usual public gathering spots—restaurants, movie theaters, sporting events, concerts, bars, shopping malls—people who live solo faced weeks, months, a whole year before the vaccine re-opened public spaces, and then on a limited scale. With the rise of the Omicron variant, social distancing and mask mandates indoors continue to matter. They also continue to discourage the kind of friendly chatter that naturally arose in such places pre-pandemic, chatter that made people who live alone feel part of a larger community. One of the gang.

And this long-term isolation is having a disturbing impact on our mental health. Up until the pandemic hit, the number of adult Americans who reported experiencing anxiety or depressive disorders clocked in regularly at around one in ten. That’s not a statistic to be sloughed off—as I wrote in October, the trend toward social isolation has been rising for some time—but COVID catapulted the numbers. Four in ten adults reported such disorders in 2020. That’s a four-fold increase, close to half the country. And statistics show that the damage to our mental health generated by a disaster far outlasts the disaster itself. Especially for isolated folks.

“What’s love got to do with it?” as Tina Turner sang. Well, everything. When people are isolated, deprived of the emotional interaction and support that love provides, they grow numb to their own feelings. Despair sets in. There’s only so many hours you can stream Netflix before the truth of the situation knocks you flat: You’re on your own. Alone.

Desperately Needed: The Great Healer

The pandemic has not only messed with our heads, it’s led to breakdowns in our physical health. We’re not sleeping too well. We’re stuffing our faces with food that doesn’t appear on the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans. As Supermarket News gleefully reported in 2020: Snacks fit the bill as shippers turn to comfort foods. Alcohol and drug use are also up—way up. Suicides, too.

In the chain of cause and effect, our mental distress can reduce immune function, worsen chronic conditions such as asthma, kidney disease, and diabetes, increase heart disease and decrease cognitive function. It’s the mind-body connection, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in people suffering the loneliness of isolation. The American Journal of Epidemiology put it bluntly: Social isolation puts people at greater risk of premature mortality.

Sharing the load with a loved one in a crisis does more than halve our troubles and double our joys, as the old saying goes. It may literally boost our immune system, lower our blood pressure, and hasten healing. As one of Ed’s doctors told us after his liver transplant: “Every physician knows love is the greatest healer of all.”

Where Did Our Love Go? Families on the Rocks

What do you think of when you hear the word “family”? Nurturing? Supportive? Loving? That’s one kind—the happy families whom Tolstoy said are all alike. But there are other families, increasingly greater numbers of them, who struggle to meet the challenges posed by the 21^st century: an ever-widening wealth gap, a high-pressure pace of life that includes 60 to 70-hour work weeks (with few boundaries between private and work life)—and a corresponding opioid crisis of pandemic proportions, no pun intended (opioid-related deaths skyrocketed from 21,088 in 2010 to 49,860 in 2019. And that’s before COVID hit).

So, what happens when you cram a flammable material into a tight space, pour gasoline over it, and toss in a match? Nothing good, I assure you. For too many families in the past two years, COVID was the flammable material, social isolation was the tight space, and worries over money was the gasoline. The result? An explosion of domestic violence.

In the two-month period from mid-March to mid-May of 2020, Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital saw injuries consistent with domestic abuse double in number compared to the same periods in 2018 and 2019 combined. “COVID doesn’t make an abuser, but COVID exacerbates it,” says Jacky Mulveen, project manager for Women’s Empowerment and Recovery Educators, an advocacy and support group in Birmingham England. Being stuck in a highly stressful situation, in tight quarters, with someone you don’t feel emotionally connected to can be just as distressing as being alone.

COVID is not the only culprit, though, when it comes to dividing families. One of the saddest statistics I’ve come across reports that one in four LGBTQ teens are disowned by their parents after coming out. Kids—as young as 14 or 15—tossed out into the streets like so much garbage to fend for themselves. How could a parent do this? Where is the love?

The short answer is religion. And it’s not just the fringe-y ones who preach fire and brimstone against any relationship not heterosexual, the Human Rights Campaign notes, but also the “standards” like the Roman Catholic Church (the largest single denomination in the U.S.), the Global Methodists (a sizable conservative group who is seeking to separate from the United Methodists precisely over LGBTQ inclusion), and certain Baptist sects such as the Southern Baptist Convention. Now, I’m not religious but I seem to recall a passage in the Bible that says something like whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me.

The long answer is Fear Of The Other. And FOTO is killing us as surely as COVID. In our communities, across the country, and around the globe.

331,893,741 Americans in Search of Community    

Most of us probably took our community for granted—our workplaces, play spaces, schools, and libraries—until COVID erupted, altering the entire social landscape. The fabled morning convocation around the water cooler at work? Not happening for the 42 percent of Americans who suddenly found themselves working from home via Internet in 2020. Another 33 percent were not working at all. And it seemed most of the remaining 25 percent were out there driving Amazon delivery vans, a very solitary way to clock in the hours.

But it wasn’t only adults who suffered the loss of community. Children couldn’t congregate at recess and college students weren’t hanging out with their friends on campus because most schools, pre-K through university, shut their doors and went the remote learning route. That’s a lot of isolation from our peers. And remote learning does not include the social lessons of life that shape who we become and how we relate to others. 

Even now, after the vaccine has re-opened many schools and campuses across the nation, 25 percent of us still work from home full-time, with another 20 percent doing so part-time. For some, it’s been a relief not to have to make a lengthy commute each day, or to have to “dress up” for the office, or feign riveted attention during yawn-inducing meetings. Nevertheless, it’s one less face-to-face connection. One more way in which we are sealed off from the people who make up our community.

And in that absence, distrust has grown—with a generous boost from various social and news media like Facebook, Fox News and One America News. People glance at each other uncertain, or worse with suspicion. Are you my kind of person? Snap judgements are made based on outward cues—skin color, ethnicity, occupation, clothing, even the kind of vehicle one drives. COVID may have driven us into our holes and kept our faces masked, but the real threat to our communities is how the pandemic has been played to divide us.

A strong democratic society is built on inclusion. Tribalism destroys families, communities, nations. It admits no common ground. No meeting place or intersection. We see it in the rising tide of fascism, in militia groups like The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, in hate-promoting conspiracies like those promulgated by QAnon and white-replacement theory advocates.

Immigrants, Black and Brown people, LGBTQ folks, Jews, Asians—it’s so much easier to fear and/or hate someone you don’t know.

A World of Need

In September 2020—just six months into the pandemic—Oxfam reported that 32 of the world’s largest corporations had seen their profits soar by billions, thanks to COVID. Oxfam estimated that Jeff Bezos could pay every one of Amazon’s workers a $105,000 bonus and not be one dime poorer than he was when the pandemic broke.  

But the workers who created this wealth were not the beneficiaries of this boom (are they ever?). At a time when unemployment, homelessness, and a deadly disease threatened to swamp nations the world over, these corporations were rushing to line the pockets of their shareholders—sometimes with government funds intended to protect jobs—while neglecting their workers’ safety and health.  

And the greed rolls on. In no quarter has it been more deadly than Big Pharma’s insistence on outrageous profiteering from their COVID vaccines, a greed that has kept the world in the grip of the pandemic as variation after variation arises in a largely unvaccinated global population. And this refusal persists despite the huge amount of public funding that went into developing the vaccines in the first place. As Ebeneezer Scrooge says in the George C. Scott film, “It may not be fair, but it’s business!”

Profiteering at the expense of human life is nothing new though. Neither is the enormous threat it poses to life everywhere—animals, birds, trees, rivers, oceans. The planet in total. Rainforests and the Indonesian peatland are razed for industrial meat operations and oil palm. Our air is poisoned by carbon dioxide and methane from the burning of fossil fuels. Our oceans are choked by plastic. And the number of animal species is dwindling rapidly from loss of habitat and poaching. Big bucks in ivory tusks and tiger bones.

Decades before COVID, global warming was identified by scientists the world over as the major threat to all life on the planet. Since 1970, climate-related droughts have killed some 650,000 people. And storms, increasing in their frequency and intensity as the planet warms past human endurance, have claimed another 575,000 human lives. Within the past six months alone, Hurricane Ida’s 150-mph winds wrought destruction and death up and down the East Coast of the U.S., followed in December by a storm of tornadoes—yes, something like thirty of them—that ripped through nine southern and central states, killing more than ninety people and leaving thousands homeless.

I am constantly staggered by the number of climate deniers who don’t seem to care that they’re leaving their children an uninhabitable world. For many of them, it’s all about reaping big $$$ and the stuff it buys. People don’t write songs about stuff, though—at least, not often. What they do write about, have written about for thousands of years now, is love—finding it, having it, losing it. The unending need to love and be loved.  

Love. For one another. For our families. For our communities. For the planet and all living things. It is the one thing, the only thing that will heal us. It is the thing the world most needs now.

“We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them.” (Seneca)

[NOTE: As I write this, 2022 is just around the proverbial corner, and Ed and I are hoping to get away to some sunnier clime for a respite from all things cold and snowy. Since January is the month for making resolutions, I’m thinking JOY is long overdue. As in: Let’s make more time for joy in our lives. As in: NOW. By the way, I’m happy to report that shortly after this post first ran in January 2020, I took up playing my guitar again. Regularly. Guess I was driven to joy through guilt. Well, whatever gets you there. EnJOY!]

Years ago, watching some movie, a scene occurred which both amused and haunted me. A man tells his analyst, “I’ve always wanted to do such-and-such while I’m alive,” and the analyst says, “Well, yes, that would be the time to do it.”

It’s funny because we all recognize it. It’s haunting because, well, we all recognize it. Procrastination.

That thief of time, as poet and philosopher Edward Young famously noted.

Our favorite form of self-sabotage (author Alyce P. Cornyn-Selby).

Our default mode (Me).

Understandably, we procrastinate over tasks with a high yuck factor or an Einsteinian degree of difficulty, but why do we so often put off doing the things we really want to do, the stuff that makes us happy, the stuff we love, that which puts the J in joy?

Let Me Count the Ways

When my son was in high school, I gave him a tee shirt one Christmas that said:

We all had a good laugh about it, but in the years since, I’ve gotten to wondering what are the reasons I procrastinate? Why do I so often think about pulling out my guitar, limbering up the fingers on a few tunes—and then do nothing? What prevents me from taking up découpage again—an art I both love and have the tools and materials for? Why do I vow to read the user’s manual for my Nikon “this week” so I can discover all the creative, fun stuff my camera can do—and then let “this week” become a month, a year, two years?

Why do I put off my own happiness?  

Okay, I’ll have a go at filling in the Top 10 reasons I procrastinate—well, nine of them anyway. You can’t totally makeover a procrastinator at one go.

Maybe you’ll recognize a few.

1. I get wrapped up in the humdrum of the daily to-dos. Laundry. Groceries. Meal prep and clean-up. Weeding the garden/raking the leaves. Appointments. Workouts. Tidying the worst of the dustballs and flotsam that threaten to bury us alive.

Ed and I share most of this load, but it’s still a load. The monotony of the daily-to-dos—lather, rinse, repeat—leaves me both uninspired and desperate for something that is not emptying the dishwasher. I often think it would be wonderfully rejuvenating to drive out to the Quabbin Reservoir with Ed and aimlessly wile away an afternoon in that amazing wide-open space—living in civilization, you really do forget how BIG the sky is—but that would mean getting off my rusty dusty, digging out my hiking boots, driving an hour there and another hour back, possibly having to stop for gas… I get tired just thinking about it.

Hiking? Maybe once I’ve had a good nap.

2. With only a scant 24 hours in the day—can someone please do something about that?—I feel like a commitment to one more activity will be the blowtorch that ends up vaporizing me. As mentioned up top, I’ve been thinking for months, okay years now, that I should get back to my guitar. I love my guitar—an exquisite old Martin. I love playing guitar. I used to write songs. I love music—I know the lyrics to virtually every song written since 1961, for godsakes. So why don’t I pick up the guitar and work the calluses back into my rusty fingers? Why don’t I visit the music store downtown and see who’s giving fingerpicking lessons. I’ve always wanted to improve my technique. But lessons involve a commitment to practicing. Regularly. Should I give up reading (impossible!), showering (inadvisable)?

3.  Following on the time crunch of Reason #2 is the need for expedience wherever I can find it. I love to cook, I really do. We have enough spices to stock a small specialty store, and a collection of cookbooks that span our travels and culinary likes: Greek, Italian, Sicilian. Curries, minestrone,  tajine stews. I could lose myself in a Moroccan veggie tajine… if only it didn’t take so long. All that slicing and dicing. All that simmering and sautéing and roasting.

I keep thinking, “Next week, I’ll clear some afternoon hours, crank up Phil Spector on the kitchen CD player and make something fabulous.” But every week, that “some afternoon” gets pushed into the next week by an avalanche of must-do stuff where it’s a squeeze to manage a bathroom break, until I’m so overwhelmed by guilt (guilt for not doing something I like doing—teleport me to the nearest shrink couch, please!) that at long last I haul out Taste of America and prepare Shrimp-stuffed Eggplant, a dish that has 11 steps and involves chopping up several thousand vegetables. With each whack of the knife, I remind myself This is what life’s about, making time for the things you love, this is what life’s about, making time for the things you love, this is what…

4. Speaking of food, I put off doing what I love because I’m a prisoner of the old dictum You must eat all your veggies before you get dessert. The “veggies” aren’t really the issue here—I could do without housecleaning (as an inspection of the premises any day will prove), but there are veggies I enjoy—writing fiction and working out at the gym. No, the problem is not the vegetables of life. The problem is I too rarely get to dessert. And my favorite “dessert” is to go places and do things with Ed.

We do spend large quantities of time together, doing the daily stuff of life, but the dessert thing is where I say, “Screw it, I’m not going to query any agents today or work on revisions or research markets for my latest short story. We’ll just jump in the car and drive north to Vermont or east to Boston. Spend the day combing bookstores. Visit the MFA. Relax and not count the hours.” That’s the crème brûlée I too often put off. Until X gets done, or Y is over. As we all know, X and Y never really disappear. They just mutate into new life-sucking forms from one day to the next. Life is short. Eat dessert first. And savor the crème brûlée. That’s where the memories are.

5. Some aspect of the thing I want to do feels uncertain, and this haziness quickly assumes the proportions of Mount Everest in my head. A couple of years ago, I got all fired up to sift through and recycle, donate, or—if all else failed—trash what we no longer needed in the attic, which I estimated to be about 90% of the junk up there. Okay, okay, I hear you: She dreams of cleaning her attic? Man, she needs to get out more. Yes, I do need to get out more, but stay with me here a moment. I like space. Uncluttered space. My experience has been that when the stuff we like or need is buried beneath an avalanche of the broken, the outdated, and the just plain ugly (What was I thinking when I acquired that?), we don’t get to it/use it/enjoy it. Add to that my tendency to hang on to a pair of shoes for 30 years (they’re perfectly good and still look great), and you get why clearing the attic might be something I really want to do.

Anyway, I was steaming along full speed ahead. Filling up boxes of books to donate to Reader to Reader. Loading cartons of clothing, CDs, kitchenware duplicates, and kids’ board games for the Salvy Army. Wrangling cords, computer monitors, and other outdated digital hoo-ha to drop off at Staples. When. Suddenly. I was confronted by five LARGE plastic tubs of American Girl dolls, their clothes, their accessories, their little bio books, their stilts and basketball hoops. I mean, these dolls come with a complete world of their own. They also cost, collectively, about a jillion dollars, so I was hoping to get a few bucks return on my initial investment. Something to sustain me in those twilight years ahead.

BUT there was just one teensy snag: I had never sold anything on e-Bay and hadn’t the foggiest how best to proceed. So I closed the tub lids and went downstairs and wrote a novel.

Last summer, I thought I will tackle this. I can do this. I’m the girl who jumped into her VW with all her worldly possessions and drove cross-country to live in a city she’d never seen. How hard can e-Bay be?

I got as far as reading the “How to get Started” section and making a list of all the things I needed to do: Clean up the five dolls, do my best to fix their hair (my daughter was a hair stylist of the 25^th century), separate out which outfits, shoes, accessories go with each doll, steam all the badly wrinkled clothing, take a sample doll-and-clothes package to the post office for shipping estimates, make sure my PayPal account is up to date, check comparable AG doll offers online, decide on prices, then write the copy and post on e-Bay.

I stared at this mindboggling list for several weeks and then resumed researching and querying agents for the novel.

6. Some piece, some part is missing without which I cannot do the thing I want to do, and that means getting in the car, driving to whatever store that has the missing piece/part, then driving back home to install it—if it’s possible to install, if I have the necessary tools.

Sometimes this is simple, if the part is camera batteries which I can buy from Stop & Shop—an easy five-minute walk from my house—but sometimes it’s trickier if the needed thing resides in a store two towns over—the town past the town on the other side of the bridge that spans the Connecticut River, on the road that always crawls and comes to a dead stop from 2 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. daily. On a Friday, you could read all of War and Peace on that journey.

When that occurs, it’s a matter of strategic planning. Can I carve out time to stop and get Part X on the way home from my next hair appointment (every five weeks)? Can I manage to track down the needed thing after my eye appointment (once every two years)? These are the times I can definitely rely on being in the town two towns over. I try to make those trips count.     

At the moment, I have a pile of artwork—prints from galleries in London, Paris, Florence—waiting to be hung, standing at the ready to lend elegance to my humble abode. The problem: The shop where I get my frames (big selection, good prices) is across that damn bridge, on the outskirts of the town two towns over. Last week, I finally managed to get a print from the Tate Britain matted, framed, and hung—I celebrated with a snifter of cognac—but the queue of prints is alarmingly long. Plus, we don’t really have wall space for all of them. Ed has suggested a rotating gallery approach. That sounds good. At least, possible. I’ll get to it soon. Really.

7. Technical glitches that mess with my head (which is most technical glitches). Last Christmas, I took a group photo of our blended family. Got out the Nikon (too many folks for any kind of selfie that didn’t have that fishbowl look). Set it up. Got out the tripod. Set it up. Screwed the camera onto the tripod. Set the automatic timer. Took a series of photos. “I’ll send you all a copy,” I promised everyone. That was a year ago.

Buoyed up by working on this post, I got out the Nikon. Predictably “batteries exhausted” flashed on the viewfinder. Not a problem! I located the recharger, plugged those babies in and reloaded. Not a problem! The photo I wanted to upload to my computer came right up. Feeling capable, powerful, CAN DO, I plugged in the camera. Nothing happened. Nothing uploaded. Undaunted, I googled the situation—maybe after such a long hiatus, I’d forgotten a simple step. I followed the online instructions. Nothing. Beginning to feel a tad daunted, I put everything away and promised myself I would dig out the instruction booklet that came with the camera. Soon. Because I want to print good copies to give everyone this Christmas. And I will. I hope.

8. What I want to do requires making arrangements with others via something I call “Calendar Roulette.”  Say, I want to meet up with a friend or friends for coffee, drinks, a day at the races, a night at the opera (a nod to all you Queen fans out there). We all toss the dates and times we are free into the ring, hoping the stars will align in some joyous constellation. But it gets complicated. A is leaving next week for a month of hiking in the Alps, B can’t make it this week but has an open day three Tuesdays from now, and C is only available when 1) her mother-in-law arrives; 2) the kids are at camp; 3) any month that has a Q in it.

I have a dear friend of many years standing—from the long ago days when our kids were in elementary school together. I really enjoy talking to Elaine, but other than random, brief sightings of each other, we hadn’t sat down together for, well, way too long. Until last January, when swearing undying determination, we bargained times like poker players at a high stakes table and—at last!—located a two-hour slot on a Wednesday for lunch. It was great to see her, talk to her, laugh over old times and catch up on what’s new. But I don’t imagine we’ll manage it again until sometime in 2026 when the moon is full and Sagittarius is in the 7^th house. 

9. It will take forever to do the thing I want to do. This brings us back to Reason #2 and my pathetic inability to PICK UP MY GUITAR AND JUST PLAY IT, as the Nike ad says.

Actually, I did pick up my guitar one afternoon about six months ago. Trotted out a few of the old standard tunes. And boy did I suck. My fingers throbbed, making the chords sloppy and my picking, fumbly. In short, I, who have played guitar for, well, let’s just say decades, and two or three times in actual public places with an actual audience—though I admit, they certainly did not come to see me—I was like some hamfisted cartoon character with unarticulated pancake circles for hands.

The crazy thing is that I went through all this at age 12, when I saved up my babysitting money (at 50 cents an hour, it took a while) and bought my first guitar. Then, like now, I fumbled through chords, stumbled through simple songs, and toughened up my tender digits. But it was exciting. I was (slowly) improving! Where is that sense of joyous challenge now?

 More to the point, so what if it takes forever? The most challenging session with a guitar is still way better than doing my ten millionth load of laundry.

10.  You tell me. What keeps you from doing the things you most enjoy in life? From spending more quality time with the people you love? From developing a new skill? Reviving an old one?

As Ben Franklin, that wise and witty Founding Father, observed, “You may delay, but time will not, and lost time is never found again.”

“How soon ‘not now’ becomes ‘never’,” Martin Luther cautioned.

“A year from now you may wish you had started today,” author/artist Karen Lamb reminds us.

So this year, let’s do it. All those things we dream about. Let’s make a pact to:

Play hooky more often with the people we love.

Follow the pursuits that engage us.

Try something new that intrigues us.

As James Michener joyfully noted: “Don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today because if you enjoy it today, you can do it again tomorrow.”

Carpe diem. Let’s eat dessert. 

Comedian Robin Williams’ famous quip “Reality… what a concept!” has played in my head like a tape loop on steroids during these past—count ‘em—22 months of pandemic pandemonium.

I mean, do we even know what reality is anymore? Do we want to know?

Add to the COVID powder keg a toxic sludge of gun-toting fascists (some of them members of Congress!), a slew of anti-voter laws designed to finish off our crumbling democracy, plus the skyrocketing threat of climate change, and it’s easy to understand why reality has gotten such a bum reputation. It’s not an accident that my local supermarket has stacks and stacks of snack food in every aisle. We want so much to MAKE… EVERYTHING… THE… WAY… IT…USED… TO… BE.

To the point where we run the risk of missing the good stuff that’s right in front of us. The actual   hope, the joy, the positive progress. These things do exist. But because our gaze is so often turned backward—to the “good old days”—we’re adding to our stress, undermining our own well-being. And let’s be honest—the good old days were never quite as golden as they appear in the rearview mirror. Ask Ahmaud Arbery. That fabled glass we are always measuring—half empty or half full? There’s no denying COVID has been one tough ride. And it’s not surprising that we mourn who and what has been lost. But the situation is not stagnant. A quick glance back to where things stood a year ago confirms that. So let’s not get trapped in a funk and lose sight of all there is to celebrate simply because…   

It’s Not Quite Big Enough

Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed into law in mid-November, represents the largest investment in decades to rebuild our badly-neglected roads and bridges. It dwarfs the $286.4 billion Bush 2005 bill that was hailed as “whopping”. This new bill undertakes to replace dangerous lead pipes and provide clean drinking water for all Americans. It redesigns our ports and transportation systems with an eye to strengthening crucial supply chains. It provides $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations across the country, making the transition to electric cars on a large scale a reality for the first time. It modernizes our public schools and makes broadband accessible for all Americans.

Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is also the largest investment ever in mass transit and clean energy infrastructure. As a result of its varied and massive projects, the bill will create millions of good-paying union jobs—$45 an hour, the White House estimates, nearly 50 percent above the current average.      

So, why aren’t we celebrating this hard-won monumental achievement? A bill the American Society of Civil Engineers calls a “significant down payment on the $2.5 trillion infrastructure investment gap identified in their 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. A bill they say “will benefit American businesses and families for years to come.”

Because it is not as big as Biden originally proposed? Because we are frustrated that the Build Back Better Act—which goes even further in tackling climate change, expanding healthcare, childcare, and workers’ rights—still hangs in limbo?

One may be forgiven for not remembering—it’s been so long—but this is how Congress works. Democrats propose bills to help Americans live better and Republicans cut the allocated aid in whatever ways they can. Compromise is nothing new. It’s the only way anything gets done. The Affordable Care Act didn’t get the hoped-for public option, but it has gone on to provide healthcare for 31 million Americans.

The Infrastructure and Jobs Act is a good thing. It’s not a reason to despair. And it’s certainly not a reason to sit out future elections. Where would we be today if the 81,284,000 Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 had not shown up? 

Not Everything’s Available

From my Inbox a few weeks ago: Will Supply Chain Issues Ruin Christmas? (The New Yorker, November 2, 2021). In her article, UK writer Anna Russell describes the “hand-wringing” in her corner of the world as eager shoppers are hyperventilating over predicted shortages resulting from the pandemic and Brexit. These twin powder kegs have created a serious dearth of agricultural labor that is “already causing runs on gifts, turkeys, and puddings,” Russell says. After last year’s skyrocketing COVID case numbers cancelled holiday plans for many families, there’s a “palpable sense of making up for lost time.” People are demanding that everything be exactly the way it used to be. What if, she ponders, “there’s no Christmas turkey?”

In the States, we’re less worried about plum puddings and more distressed that the COVID-associated supply chain problems will “ruin [our] life plans” and frightened that these troubles “will never end.” How can we celebrate the holidays if the gadgets and toys parents and kids want aren’t in stock? How can we “make merry” if ordered items arrive late?

Reading this list of American woes in the Material Handling & Logistics News, I was struck by the fact that right across the page was this headline: Holiday Retail Sales Expected to Increase 7%-9%: Deloitte. Apparently, Americans are going to still be able to buy stuff. According to the Deloitte article, a LOT of stuff. About $1.28 – $1.3 trillion worth.  

Anna Russell declared that though “no one wants to be the Grinch” at Christmas, the shortages in specific foods and other goods “has cast a decidedly unfestive pall over preparations.”

Why an “unfestive pall”? Wasn’t that the whole point of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas? That it’s not the tinsel and wrappings and stuff? A quick refresher here: After stealing all their presents in the wee hours of Christmas morning and stripping their trees of tinsel and ornaments, the Grinch is shocked to observe the Whos in Whoville holding hands and singing joyously on Christmas morning. This is a revelation. As Seuss says: “Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before! What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas… perhaps… means a little bit more!”    

So, if puddings or turkeys are not to be found, can’t we still enjoy the holidays? One year, we had lasagna, and not an ounce of festivity was lost. In fact, it made a tasty change.

If hot-ticket gift items are sitting offshore in some cargo ship, swamped amid a zillion other cargo ships, does this really ruin our celebrations? If gifts are truly an issue, give Amazon a rest and shop in real stores. Support Main Street. There are books on the shelves of bookstores, clothing on the racks of outfitters, kitchenware stacked up in kitchen supply shops. You can gift experiences with tickets for an upcoming event or certificates for restaurants, massages, a weekend at some cozy inn. No worry about the supply chain. No delayed mail hassles from our pal (not!) Louis DeJoy.

Last year, we had gifts and a decorated tree. What Ed and I didn’t have for Thanksgiving or Christmas was the company of our four adult kids—residing in states from Maine to Louisiana—because there were no vaccines yet. Air travel put one at risk for contracting COVID. Indoor gatherings (especially those lasting days) posed real threats. Now, we are all vaccinated and most of us have even gotten our booster shot! That’s a reason to celebrate.

I’m here to say whatever holiday(s) you observe—Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa—being with loved ones is the only thing you really need to have a joyous celebration.   

It’s Not Fast Enough

Speaking of vaccinations, there’s been a lot of despair about how slowly things are moving. Why aren’t we back to “normal” yet? When can we just put COVID in the rearview mirror and move on? By which we mean: return to the way everything used to be.   

It has felt like a loooong haul. And my heart goes out to people who’ve gotten the vaccine in states where GOP governors have let the virus run rampant, so that some palpable level of risk remains. Vote those dudes OUT!

But, we need to remind ourselves of where we were a year ago. Restaurants: closed. Main Street shops (for the most part): closed. Movie theaters? Ha-ha, not happening. Travel, especially by plane or outside the States: Highly risky or simply not permitted. Holiday family gatherings? Hold the family.

Despite the eagerly-awaited vaccines that emerged late last year, things got off to a very sluggish start. In month one of the vaccine rollout, Trump only managed to get 12 million shots delivered. And no one in that gang of grifters was really busting their arse to oversee rollout or even stock the vaccine.

Then, in December 2020, before he’d even settled into the White House, newly-elected Joe Biden promised his team would get “at least 100 million COVID vaccine shots into the arms of the American people in [his] first 100 days.” This announcement was cautiously greeted with hope but also much skepticism. Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, felt it was an attainable goal, “but I think it’s going to be extremely challenging.”  

Well, Biden beat that goal handily—and doubled it. In late March 2021, he announced his team was upping their game, and pledged to get 200 million shots into arms in his first 100 days. Despite noisy backlash from GOP governors, gun-toting thugs, and QAnon hysteria, on Day 92 of Biden’s presidency, we reached that goal. By the middle of this last month, 446 million vaccine doses had been administered. One-hundred, ninety-four million Americans are now fully vaccinated, and another 53 million have received their first dose. We are traveling again, dining out in restaurants, going to movies, visiting with loved ones. How is this not good?  Champagne corks should be popping across the land.

Okay, because of the anti-vaxxers and a lax attitude about COVID spread in some states, we have to wear masks again. Leave a seat or two between patrons in the movie theatres. Continue to submit to COVID testing for travel. It’s not “like it used to be,” but the global effort to develop, approve, and manufacture a vaccine was Herculean. We’ve never witnessed anything like it. And Seattle recently reported that the daily hospitalization rate for COVID among vaccinated folks is less than half that for people hospitalized with the flu in a typical year. Roughly, one in a million. 

The Times, They Are (Always) A’Changin’

Somewhere in my recent reading, I came across an arresting thought. The gist is this: We always talk about people changing, but it’s the circumstances around us that constantly shift, and we stagger to adapt. The truth of that hit me square between the eyeballs. For anyone born after the dark years of the Great Depression and World War II, this is the first serious full-blown outright global disaster we’ve had. The first time the ground has truly shifted under our feet.

But if we step back for a moment, we can see that things are always changing. The town of my childhood looks nothing like it did. Instead of renting DVDs from Blockbuster, we now stream movies and series from Netflix and Amazon. Online dating apps—once a service many people feared would mark them as a “loser”—has become the place to meet potential romantic partners.

Of course, the Internet is the biggest change of all in the past few decades, radically shifting the way we shop, bank, communicate, work and search for work, among a zillion other things.

Social networking has made connecting to old friends and new easy and fun. It has also become a tool for exploiting people’s fears and prejudices to serve the ends of the uber-rich and the fascist. And that was true pre-Covid.     

Very little is the way it was even ten years ago, let alone at the dawn of this millennium. We’ve just had a seismic amount of change—and a frightening one at that—in a very short time, and that’s hard on people. But not everything we had is gone. In fact, the most important things are still here. People still fall in love. Babies continue to be born. The kids in my neighborhood still run laughing and shrieking in their play. Books continue to be written. Music continues to be made. Gardens bloom. Leaves turn color. A day in my local park, reading and wandering, remains a joy and a renewal. Last month, Ed and I saw an amazing exhibit—Titian: Women, Myth & Power—at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Though three of my favorite local restaurants closed their doors for good this last year, it turns out they were all owned by people past retirement age, and had literally served the community for decades. They likely would have closed soon anyway. The pandemic just hastened the owners’ decision. But more restaurants survived. And a few new ones have opened.    

Darwin understood that the world around us is constantly shifting, changing—sometimes subtly, sometimes rapidly, even violently—but he believed our greatest strength lies in our ability to adapt. It’s what survivors do.  Roll with the punches. Ride the tide.

A humorous example of this popped up on my TV last week. In the hand-off on MSNBC from Rachel Maddow to Lawrence O’Donnell, O’Donnell rolled up his suit jacket cuffs to reveal… paperclip cufflinks! Apparently, his on-air wardrobe features shirts that require cufflinks. He said he’s always forgetting them, but in the past has borrowed frequently from Brian Williams (who does the show after O’Donnell’s). “Since Covid, we’re not in the same building, so I’ve just been making do with paperclips. And they work!”  

I loved it. Okay, it’s not a “big thing.” But it’s the spirit and the humor. Two things we need right now to celebrate this wondrous, crazy, sometimes maddening, more often beautiful thing called life. And stay energized for the fight ahead. Because the real threats we face aren’t about social distancing in restaurants or masks on airplanes. They’re not even about stacked up container ships. In fact, they’re about the stuff we’ve been facing and fighting for decades: the twin threats to democracy and the climate. In a nutshell, the greed and tyranny of the few over the many.

But, hey, we keep swinging. In mid-November, House Democrats added four weeks of paid family and medical leave back into the Build Back Better Act, plus the long-hoped-for right of Medicare to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma on certain drugs, insulin among them. As I write, the bill passed the House this morning.

If we can’t be happy until we get everything we want, then my long experience tells me we will never be happy. I say celebrate what is good and keep pushing for what needs fixing. There’s still plenty worth saving, worth savoring, worth living for.  

During a recent chat with some friends, one of them recalled a high school teacher who embarrassed him in class by saying “you aren’t living up to your potential.”

Not living up to one’s potential—an arresting and, for me, rather dubious notion. What does it really mean, and who decides what your or my or anyone’s potential might be?

Let’s start with this teacher’s basis for 1) assessing my friend’s potential, and 2) deciding he wasn’t living up to the mark. Was the teacher comparing his classroom performance with his prior academic record? Measuring the gap between his output and his score(s) on academic knowledge tests like the Iowa Assessments, or IQ evaluations like the Stanford-Intelligence Scales?

Are there other factors outside the school setting that might have influenced how this teacher thought about my friend’s potential?

What Do Standardized Tests Really Measure?

The term “IQ” (intelligence quotient) was coined by German psychologist William Stern in the dawn of the 20^th century. It was almost immediately adopted by Alfred Binet who, together with Theodore Simon, created the Binet-Simon intelligence scale, the first modern test of its kind. Rather than measuring what a child had learned, the test assessed mental abilities through such items as the child’s reply to an abstract question or their verbal definition of a known object such as money. The child’s IQ would then be calculated as a quotient of their mental age (estimated by the test) divided by their actual age and multiplied by 100, e.g., a six-year-old who performed at the average level for six-year-olds would score 100. If that child performed at the average level of a nine-year-old, their score would be 150.  

In everyday parlance, one’s IQ quickly became a shorthand for classifying people as brilliant, average, or not-so-swift—labels that can color teachers’ attitudes toward a child, especially the low performers, and prove difficult to shake. But Stern and Binet both cautioned against using IQ as a sole means for categorizing intelligence. They felt that intelligence is multi-faceted, individual differences are highly complex, and comparing two people in any qualitative way is a near-impossible task. Perhaps most significantly, Binet, who intended his test as an aid to identify kids who need an extra boost in the classroom, believed that intelligence is not fixed or inborn.       

Despite these disclaimers, the then-new and rapidly growing eugenics movement (Hitler would become a big fan) seized upon IQ testing as a method for identifying the “feeble-minded” who they hoped to eradicate by preventing such people from “breeding.” Indeed, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics, suggested in his book, Hereditary Genius, that these people be sent to celibate monasteries or sisterhoods in the interests of improving the race.

Tests of Knowledge. Whose Knowledge?

On even shakier grounds in defining a child’s potential are knowledge-based tests like the Iowa Assessments or the Stanford Achievement Test. These tests are designed to measure specific skills and track a student’s progress. But what is knowledge really? It can only be what we have been exposed to, not what we are capable of achieving. And the experiences of American children (indeed, children everywhere) are so widely divergent as to make any truly meaningful comparisons, let alone pronouncements on a child’s potential, ludicrous. Though testing companies—responding to criticisms of bias—are quick to assure us their updated tests are more culturally inclusive, can you truly compare the scores of students from an underfunded, overcrowded school that lacks many basic materials with the scores of kids in an affluent suburb where the schools have state-of-the-art science labs, a fine arts wing, and the latest textbooks?

All children have knowledge, i.e., every child has experienced, observed, and taken in a ton of info about the world around them. But the child who shares a one-bedroom flat with three siblings and a single parent doing the Mickey D shift has a very different understanding of how things work than the child whose financially-secure family provides dance lessons, visits to science museums, and trips abroad. Both have knowledge. And they both know that the social order values one kind of knowledge over the other.      

Even if we remove economic inequality from the picture for a moment, the child whose experience is a sprawling family farm in Idaho has a very different view of the world from the child growing up in New York City whose daily life is the subway, skyscrapers, and a rainbow of diverse cultures. Even Binet acknowledged that measures of intelligence were not easily generalizable and could only apply to children with similar backgrounds and experiences.

The Many Shades of Intelligence

The brain is a many-splendored thing. As Yasemin Saplakoglu, writing for livescience.com, says, “The brain tells us what to do, how to act, what to think and what to say… We depend on this organ to live and learn, but much about this organ still remains as mysterious to us as the inside of a black hole.” 

One of those mysteries is what motivates each of us to pursue certain paths and reject others. We now know a lot about the brain’s neurons and synapses, its frontal lobe and the amygdala, but that “thing” that is each of us, what drives it, how it manifests itself in our individual capabilities? Our “test score” on that is about zero. So, how can we measure a child’s potential? Yet, there is something in our collective society that always wants to measure stuff—gender norms, quality of life—quantify it, label it, then tuck it away all neat and tidy. No confusions. No uncertainties.

Yet, human beings are full of mysteries. For example, I can make good connections between seemingly disparate events, I’m fluent in literature and history, facile with words, creative, but I could never have invented the computer. My head just doesn’t work that way. Does this make me less intelligent than someone who dwells in the land of IT? Turn it around. Is a geneticist who understands human genome sequencing but can’t read music more or less intelligent than a composer who writes symphonies but barely passed biology in high school? Or are they simply different? 

The theory of multiple intelligences, proposed by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner in 1983, comes closer to admitting the immense complexity that is each of us, but even it cannot predict or codify how these various types of intelligence—combined with our individual experiences and that undefinable thing that makes you you—stamp us with a potential that can be expressed in numbers, percentages, grades. The thing that made Van Gogh paint in the way he alone painted; the “spark” that inspired Alan Turing to build the Bombe machine that broke the German Enigma code, a major turning point in the Allies’ road to victory in World War II.

The First Rule of Status Quo: Thou Shall Not Buck One’s Social Class

Those “other factors” I mentioned up top that influence our beliefs about a child’s potential? In my experience as both student and educator, none is more likely to bias a teacher’s (school’s or community’s) assessment than the socio-economic status of a child’s family.

Expectations flow from certain well-defined “norms” (a word that, in my opinion, one must always approach with a certain wariness), e.g., a “bright” child from a “comfortable” home, “of course” dreams of a degree from Harvard, Princeton, or MIT, and a future in medicine, law, investment banking, engineering, or IT. They would “naturally” aspire to a large airy home, a yacht, and a vacation house in some trendy beach area (where one can hang out with all the other people who have lived up to their potential).

The affluence a family commands is no small lever in the world. Just look at George W. Bush. Dumb as all get-out, but rich and once the most powerful public figure in America. Did he ever dream of anything other than politics? Was he ever allowed to even have dreams that were driven by something other than his social status, family connections, and dynastic wealth? It’s worth noting that such factors in determining potential are all slanted toward the white, the Christian (or at least the non-Muslim and non-Jew), and men. A woman may choose to seek a high-status position. But if the “little lady” decides to stay home or volunteer her time or make bracelets to sell on Etsy, she’s not deemed a failure. We didn’t expect that much from her anyway. And society rarely asks of the Black man running the gas pumps if he has other aspirations or talents.   

The (Hidden) Tyranny of You Can Be Anything You Want

“You can be anything you want to be.” Sounds like a great thing to tell a child, right? And to be fair, many parents and teachers who say this mean it simply to be an encouragement, an ego boost. But sometimes there are hidden parental agendas. You can be anything (I want you to be). You can be anything (appropriate to our family’s social class). You can be anything (that has prestige/earns big bucks—a neurosurgeon, a corporate CEO—and if you’re not, then you’re a royal f#&k-up).

It can be difficult for a child to see this hidden agenda until the backlash comes. I wanted to be a writer from the start. I penned my first poems at age five, my first short stories at six. But the first time I pitched an article to a magazine at age 19—and yes, I made many mistakes in that initial effort—my mother (without even reading the pitch) said, “Oh, they won’t want that.” It was discouraging, confusing—and angering—for me. Why was she trying to crush my first attempt at giving my dreams flight in the larger world?

Sometimes the efforts to direct a child’s dreams involve more than simply maintaining the family’s social status. Several years after I pitched that first article, college over, I took a job waiting tables while I wrote my first novel. That’s when the hidden agenda really emerged. “You could be anything you want!” [Mom again] “If I’d had your intelligence and your opportunities…” Yadda, yadda, yadda. It emerged through many painful repeats of this scene that what I could have been—what she wanted me to be (because she gave up a career she loved at my father’s insistence)—was the CEO of a prestigious marketing firm. Never mind that I loathe the whole corporate thing. I was born to live out her dreams. I was her “second chance.” Sadly, I think this is more common than many parents would like to admit.

Getting Encouragement Right

Encouragement is great when it’s for goals the person being encouraged has freely chosen. Not being allowed to feel okay about our own choices and dreams is a set-up for frustration, anger, depression, and pain. Parents and teachers need to step back, take the time and effort to discover what floats a child’s boat—and this can change many times as kids grow up and become adults—and provide opportunities/support for those young dreams. This is never wasted. Supporting a child in their search for who they are and what matters to them—providing materials or lessons (if that’s feasible), introducing them to mentors, or just simply learning more about the things that engage them—can have rewards that last a lifetime. For the child, for the parent, for their relationship.    

For the adults in the room who refuse to do that, I can only paraphrase Bob Dylan: Please get out of the way if you can’t lend your hand.

Upward Isn’t the Only Kind of Mobility

For a world that offers a breathtaking array of possibilities in life, from dog surfing instructor (yes, this is a real job in California) to rocket recovery technician, robot tester to alligator wrangler, it seems a bit myopic to assume that the only definition of a well-lived life comes down to a prestige title, a corner office, and a high six- or seven-figure salary. One size has never fit all. Thank god.

I know more than one person who has turned down promotion to a high-level management position at their company—said no thank you to the increased pay, perks, prestige—because they did not want to manage people. They did not want the endless rounds of meetings, the oversight of resources and personnel. They just wanted to continue doing the job they already enjoyed. A well-known children’s author once told me that many editors at publishing houses dread a promotion because it takes them away from the work they became editors for—to read manuscripts, discover new talent, and edit books.

Are these people not living up to their potential, or are they exactly where they should be—honing their skills at a job they love? Of course, turning down a promotion usually means you have to look elsewhere for a job—so “unimaginable” a thing, so damning, is it to reject “the American Dream”, you can find yourself increasingly shut out of all the good projects going, the stuff you do love, as punishment for bucking the status quo.

Coloring Outside the Lines

So, what about you? Who are you? What floats your boat? What if your dreams don’t accord with what others label your potential?

First of all, you are far from alone. John Steinbeck, the great American novelist, attended Stanford but left without a degree to pursue his writing. He picked fruit and worked on the construction of Madison Square Garden while penning his first three novels, all which sank with barely a trace. At 33, he got a taste of success with a short story, “Tortilla Flat”, but it would be another four years before the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, and he would be 50 by the time East of Eden saw print.

Stephen King served as a high school janitor, among a host of other odd jobs, while struggling to get his fiction published. His time wheeling the cleaning cart through the halls, though, inspired him to write the opening girls’ locker room scene in Carrie, which would become his breakout novel. Perhaps nothing is ever truly wasted.

Only one thing seems more audacious than someone determining what another person’s potential is—and that is telling them they’re not living up to that potential. So, follow your passions whether or not they fit the pigeonhole others have pegged for you, whether or not they bring you public recognition and status symbols. We do the things we love for an intrinsic reward that has no neat, quantifiable measure. You will never be happier than being who you truly are.   

During the long seeming decades of living life behind a mask (and, sigh, now we’re back there again, indoors anyway), one of the things I missed most were the little random chats people have in passing. The exchange of smiles. At a time when we most needed the comfort of contact with our fellow human beings, we had to make do with the occasional nod.

Talking to people bridges the gap created by absorption in our personal cares/woes/busy-ness, creates warm fuzzy feelings that foster a desperately-needed civility, reminds us we are part of something larger than ourselves, a community. We need to talk.

What happens when we stop talking was painfully illustrated recently when a California teacher wound up in the hospital with head and face lacerations after an enraged parent attacked him. The reason for the beating? The parent had just discovered the school, following a new state mandate, was making the children wear masks in the classroom.

Whatever happened to “use your words”? Even the most heated discussion would have been better. I guess it’s just fortunate the parent didn’t pull out a gun.

Talking Down Your Fears

In my notes for this post, I jotted down a line I found on the Internet: We text constantly, but we talk less. While there may be myriad reasons for this—e.g., wishing to convey a quick, brief message without becoming ensnared in a long, chatty conversation—a 2020 report in the Harvard Business Review suggests deeper issues may underlie our preference for texting over talking. In a string of experiments, people were given the choice to get in touch with an old friend by either phone call or email. Most chose email, despite the fact that they expected to feel more connected to their friend if they actually spoke to them. So why not pick up the phone? Because they also imagined—and feared—they would feel more awkward. Typing seemed the “safer” route. 

Afraid to talk to our friends??? Worried about letting others glimpse the “real” us? Is this the fallout from a decade-plus of Facebook relationships where we paint a perfect, enviable picture of our life to the world, all the warts (and human need/frailty) removed?

Well, the good news is, as so often happens, our inflated fears are all out of proportion to reality.  When people were randomly assigned to contact an old friend by email or phone, those who made phone calls reported feeling more connected than the e-mailers—as they’d anticipated—but also far less awkward than they had feared beforehand. This finding held up even when people were asked to talk to a stranger to discuss a given issue. “This is consistent,” the research notes, “with other findings suggesting that a person’s voice is really the signal that creates understanding and connection.”    

Cat Litter Chat

Talking to other people, especially in passing, doesn’t have to be brilliant or witty or deep. One of the easiest ways to connect is through the simple commonalities of life.

Recently, on my daily stroll, I passed a house where two women were carrying their shopping from the car. One had a gigantic box I recognized. Cat litter. For those of you not blessed with cats, I will reveal that pre-COVID, cat litter came in 20 lb. bags. Not featherweight, but doable. Since the pandemic, however, it is only available in my local supermarket in THIRTY POUND boxes. While bags have some friendly “give”, boxes are blocky. They have hard corners—ouch! To top it off, this woman—a tad over 5” tall—was carrying this boulder of a box up a steep incline.

In solidarity, I called out, “I can’t believe how heavy they’re making those boxes of cat litter now.”

“Don’t I know it,” the woman called back. “It’s a killer. My arms are numb.”

That was it. They entered their house and I went on my way, but my spirits were lifted. I felt good, a part of my larger neighborhood, my town, humanity. I hope I left them feeling the same.    

The Shortest Distance Between Two People

My first mask-free walk occurred about three weeks after my second dose of Moderna. It was harder than I thought to give up that mask—I hated that I hadn’t talked to anyone on the street in over a year, hated that I couldn’t beam a smile in anyone’s direction, but I also associated the mask with safety, with staying alive. After some inner tussle, I braved the streets barefaced one sunny May morning.

Five or six blocks along, I passed a house where half a dozen people were chatting, sprawled across two sofas, an armchair and a rocker on the lawn. This seating was grouped around a large dining table and separated by end tables of various sizes and woods. A hand-lettered piece of cardboard—TAG SALE—was propped against a garbage can.

I loved it. It was just such a funny, fantastical scene, I couldn’t pass it by unremarked.

Now, humor is always a bit of a risk—it can fall flat, can be met with puzzled looks—but I’ve got a magnet on my fridge that says Laughter is the shortest distance between two people, and I tend to chance it, so I called out, “You’ve done it! You’re all set up for outdoor living.”

They all laughed, and I laughed. We chatted for a few minutes—about how good it felt to see people’s faces again, how great it was that we’d made it to summer. I walked on clouds all the way home.

Peace, Love & Understanding: It’s Just a Few Words Away

As noted up top, we need to talk to people because not talking is the quickest route to misunderstandings, anger, and unhappiness. When you’re feeling slighted or wronged, though, it can be hard to remember. I was reminded of this recently when Ed and I had dinner at a local Mexican bistro. The set-up here was you ordered your food/drinks at the counter/bar, then selected a table and a server would bring your meal.

As I waited in line, I noticed there was no listing for the beers available at the bar, so I asked the woman who took my order if I could see a list of their brews. She was very short with me: “We don’t have a list.” Okay, could she maybe tell me what was available on tap/in bottles? “I don’t know,” she said and tallied up my dinner order. “If you’ve got anything like Corona or an IPA, I’ll take one.” She shrugged and gave me my food total.

By the time I was seated at our table, my happy spirits at a night out had plummeted into the annoyed zone. “What kind of restaurant counterperson has no idea what beer is available?” I asked Ed. “Why was she so hostile? I wasn’t rude.”

“I heard her tell the man in front of me that the power was out for a couple of hours,” Ed said, “but orders for pick-up kept pouring in online, and there was no way to prepare them. Then everyone showed up, expecting their food.”

Okay. Reset. The woman has just spent two hours in the no-fun zone, sorting out late orders among a crowd of hungry customers. She’s having a Bad Day.

When she brought our order to the table, I commiserated with her about the power outage. Gave her a chance to unload a bit about the frustrating evening. In the end, she brought me a delightfully “hoppy” beer. Sometimes, all people need is someone to ask how it’s going. Someone to listen.  

Unexpected Connections

One of the great joys of talking to people is finding unexpected connections. We pass by “strangers” every day with whom we share much more than we guess. Never has this felt truer than in the darkest days of COVID, when we were all suffering the same fears, frustrations, and the loss of everything that felt “normal.”   

During one of my daily strolls last August, on a street I’ve walked down 11,892 zillion times in the past eighteen months, a boy called out to me: “Do you want to look at the cards I made?” A sandy-haired kid of 8 or 9, he had a display of some two dozen handmade cards on a folding table edging the sidewalk. We exchanged names and I began perusing his stock—a truly impressive and highly original assortment of cards that expressed friendship, humor, love. I asked him how long he’d been making cards and where he got his ideas. Then, I showed him my four or five favorites and told him what I especially liked about each one.

I was honestly sorry I didn’t have any money on me. When I asked if I could come back the next day, the woman who was sitting on the porch steps said he would be going back home to Boston the next morning. She introduced herself as his aunt, and we swapped the sort of basic bio details people offer on meeting. Turned out, she’s a writer, too. We chatted a bit about the state of the publishing industry, the kinds of writing we each do, the markets we’ve published in, and how frustrating querying agents can be.     

Before saying good-bye, I asked the boy if he would be selling his cards in Boston. He said he had sold a few there earlier in the summer. “But some days no one buys anything,” he sighed.    “I hear you,” I said, “I don’t sell everything I write either. But I hope you keep going because your cards are amazing. You have real creative talent.”

I like to think all three of us felt we’d connected through our work as artists of various stripes. I know I did.

More Than A Transaction

Call me weird, but I like to talk to the people I come across in the daily transactions of life: shopkeepers, salespeople, restaurant staff, the guy behind the deli counter, the woman bagging my groceries. Not long-winded discussions on the state of the universe—I understand that people on the job have multiple responsibilities to juggle—but something beyond a curt “I’ll have the Salad Niçoise” or “Please bring the check.”

One of my concerns about the fallout from COVID is the dramatic increase it spurred in what was already an asocial trend: buying everything online, ordering take-out via GrubHub, streaming films at home rather than viewing them on the big screen at the local cinema. Of course, before the vaccine, this was absolutely necessary, but I hope we rally from our sofas and easy chairs, stop ordering everything online, put on our glad rags and go downtown, as Petula Clark advised.      

When the restaurants re-opened in my town in June, one of our first dinners out was at a much-loved Italian restaurant. After the long shutdown, everyone was nodding to and smiling at each other. As the crowd thinned and the pace relaxed, we started chatting with our server, a woman in her early forties, about how wonderful it was to be dining out again and the great need people feel for community. The conversation led her to talk about a related tragedy concerning her daughter. At one point, her eyes filled with tears. She paused, unable to go on. I reached out, put a hand on her arm in consolation. After a moment, she placed her hand atop mine. It was such a basic human connection.  

We are so much more than the outward face we show, the public role we play. Not just a server. Not just a customer. Those simple friendly greetings, those brief exchanges about the day, a humorous remark, a kind word—in those moments, we acknowledge the other person’s humanity and demonstrate our own.

What The World Needs Now

Nothing is more natural than talking to people at an event you’ve both attended. It’s a slam-dunk opportunity to build on the commonalities that brought you there. To strengthen that sense of community. Yet, my observation has been that few people do. When a concert or play or ballgame ends, we tend to rush to the exits, jump in our cars or onto the subway and … flee in silence.

Legendary violinist Joshua Bell is always a BIG draw at Tanglewood, and because he’s such a favorite, the exodus from the lawn afterwards is always s-l-o-w. Everyone lugging their coolers, lawn chairs and tables. Everyone stopping by the restrooms before heading out on the highway.

Never one to waste an opportunity, while Ed was in the loo, I started talking to a woman who was also waiting for her husband. I mentioned how great Joshua Bell is, and that I’d never missed a performance of his since my kids started playing violin. Same here, she said. I told her that when my kids were violin students, all the tween-age female violinists used to crush on Josh, and I’d tease them, saying they didn’t stand a chance because Bell (a very handsome man) was much closer to my age and therefore, I had first dibs.  

The woman laughed and said her daughter had played violin with a group of student musicians following one of Bell’s performances. It became a family joke that Joshua Bell had “opened” for their daughter’s concert. The woman’s husband appeared, wearing a Mets tee shirt, and I mentioned that Ed and I are big baseball fans, he, the Red Sox and me, the Yankees. The couple laughed and asked, “How does that work?” By this point, Ed had joined the conversation, and he related a funny story about a cop in NYC asking us the same question. It was a lovely cap to a wonderful evening.  

Talk to people. It’s not rocket science. It’s not Shakespeare. It’s often not even so much the content of the words as it is the human connection. As the research mentioned earlier noted, it’s our voice—the act of speaking to others—that fosters understanding and creates a bond. The world could really use that now.  

And me? I talk to people because—like most of us—I need them to talk to me.