Good Neighbors

By Kate Sweeney

A couple of years ago, I was walking by myself through our neighborhood when I spied a couple—a young man and woman—with a little girl in a stroller, about the age of my own child.

“Oh! You have a kid?” I blurted out, following up quickly with what I hoped was a non-creepy-lady-accosting-a-couple-on-the-street smile. “How old is she?”

“She’s three,” said the woman and then quickly added, “but we’re about to move,” raising a hand as if to stop me right there. The gesture was not unlike that of a married person in a bar flashing her ring finger.

I wanted to ask her: How did she know I had a child? Had other people stopped them like this? Because her response felt rote, like she and her husband had spent their entire tenure in our neighborhood fending off would-be play-daters. And, more important to me: If this was the case, where were these other desperate neighborhood parents? Because I wanted to meet them.

This interaction seems innocuous enough: a mother looking for other families to hang with. A gesture that stems from a longing, as much for people as for place—a precise sort of Shangri-La that’s common enough in the American psyche—a neighborhood composed largely of kids and parents. In this place, people stroll up to one another’s porches to borrow a cup of flour, to lend a watchful eye and a playmate, or just to exchange a casual hello or a joke. The streets of this Eden are littered with bikes, scooters, and sidewalk chalk. Halloweens are epic. The version that I envisioned stopped short of manicured lawns and signs in kitchens reading, “Wine O’Clock.” We are urban liberals, after all—with aging hipsters’ razor-blade sense of what’s beyond the pale, cool-wise. But facts were facts: We lived in an intown neighborhood—a quiet place full of quiet streets and houses with closed doors behind which folks kept to themselves.

During my son’s prime toddler playdate years, I was never quite successful at finding that Shangi-La. And that fact held within it echoes of other times and places, a longing for home even as I was in it.

This isn’t a story about mere loneliness. It’s about place.

•••

A few years out of college, I was absorbed by the desire to live in a commune, or intentional community, or whatever you call it when neighbors are all cooking together in a big group kitchen but minus the bearded dude in orange robes who sleeps with all the women and the person in sunglasses standing off to the side holding a briefcase filled with everyone’s trust-fund money.

My imagination landed on a place called Zendik Farm in the mountains of North Carolina. This was the early 2000s, when the Zendik Farm people would still come into the Little Five Points neighborhood in Atlanta selling tee-shirts, pamphlets, and bumper stickers that read, in bold black sans-serif: “Stop bitching. Start a revolution.”

I did not know what this revolution was, but I imagined it had something to do with living off the land, with giving the finger to the establishment and learning to survive by your own wits along with a group of like-minded, can-do people.

One day someone left a Zendik Farm pamphlet in the coffeeshop where I worked. It was full of long, rambling sentences about the philosophy of their founder, a super-pure guy with a salt-and-pepper beard and long hair like ocean waves who had died just a couple of years earlier. Now, his surviving wife, of equally beatific calm and oceanic salt-and-pepper waves, had taken over, and all of this—the rambling philosophy, the worship of these old hippies—made it abundantly clear that I would never fit in there … but maybe, if I had to? I could try? I thought. Because geographically speaking, this was still the closest thing to Atlanta resembling my dream of getting the hell away and living life for real.

I was twenty-four, George W. Bush was president, and I was angry. I spent my days pedaling my bike between the coffeeshop where I worked and the cramped apartment I shared with my boyfriend, a fellow angry coffee-slinger. Our courtship had taken place fast, a romantic freefall in the midst of a string of bad roommates that had us moving in together almost immediately. That first year of our relationship is a red-eyed blur of free carbs and caffeine from work and talking together late into the night. I read his Punk Planet magazines and listened to his music, both of which electrified me. He was very much into a certain brand of moral purity: He taught me the term “DIY.” During this time, I read one of my boyfriend’s favorite novels, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and dreamed of joining its characters in chopping down billboards and performing other righteous acts of environmental vandalism. I did my best to ignore the fact that there was a lot of page space dedicated to the amazing tits and ass of the Gang’s righteous female environmental vandal. I also borrowed a book from a coworker about animal tracking, written by a white man who said he learned this skill from a Noble Native American. My boyfriend and I daydreamed about learning these skills so that we could survive when the shit went down, but I never finished the tracking book, and, to tell the truth, neither of us so much as gardened or camped. He didn’t know how to cook rice. I had trouble hammering a single nail.

•••

The other day in the car, I was listening to a young indie rock band I’d never heard before. The chorus they sang erupted in the words: “The world has left us behind/oh, the world has left us behind,” and before I knew I had any reaction at all, I found myself spitting bitterly at the speaker, “I have no ‘us,’ I have no ‘us!’”

In a flash, I understood the singers to be singing about themselves as the millennials or Gen Z’ers whose very future has been stomped out by forebearers who’d inflicted environmental and economic ruin on this world. Left behind. And believe me, I more-than-sympathize, but at that moment, something mean in me struck out, something jealous of the club membership insinuated by the song’s righteous, mournful pluck. Sure, they’d been left behind, but they’d been left behind together.

I was born in a generational split. I did not share in the seatbelt-less 1970s childhoods of my sisters, both far older than me, nor am I a member of the hyper-scrutinized generation that came after. Sitting, as I do, in a late ’70s gap year of comparatively few American births, no marketing strives exactly to target me. All my life, it seems, this has put me at a distance. A distance from my older sisters and their shared childhoods. A distance from other kids, who, it seemed, were all far older or far younger than me in the lonely suburban neighborhood where I grew up. And at a distance, today, from coworkers who are just five or six years younger, but with figures of speech and ways of being that often seem utterly foreign.

Much of the time, I like this distance. Distance—from any natural tribe or club or gang—is where I spent my entire childhood, and so it has come to mean comfort. I spent my childhood sitting under tables and around corners, forgotten, listening in and learning. I’m an observer, and much of the time, that feels like enough. But not always.

•••

In the coffeeshop, the staff was an us. The people we served, as we viewed them, were mostly white yuppies. My boyfriend didn’t like them, a dislike he shared with the rest of our close-knit gang of coworkers. They—we, I guess—were fiercely dedicated to one another: workers-of-the-world united by the reality that the American Dream was a bunch of bullshit and that to own a house or work something more than either a proletarian gig or a selfless nonprofit job helping our fellow man signaled corruption.

Something in me was suspect, though. I harbored dreams above and beyond that of our little food service community, and this made me a pet. “Here comes Katy, cub reporter!” a coworker would declare as I rushed in from the public radio station where I had scored something like a part-time unpaid internship. I flinched at this condescension; it made me try harder. My first tattoo was a traditional sailor’s-style number covering my entire chest, and my coworkers, standing around the chair where I lay prone in a velvet-curtained studio, cheered as one to see the needle first hit flesh.

•••

After three turbulent years, my boyfriend and I broke up. Among other things, my ambition had shown through. Careerist, he called me when I chose my reporting job over a move with him to the Midwest, to work at his brother’s fair-trade coffee business. We made several more attempts after then, including the last: a winter flight north to his attic apartment, whose kitchen lacked both butter and salt. The summer before, during the heady days just before the market crash, he had considered buying a house; he was still kind of broke but qualified for an amazing loan. Now, late at night, the snow falling on the thin roof of the saltless, butter-less garret, our last fight: He called me “a little gold-digger-y” for the way I’d salivated over the idea of being with a man who owned a house.

To be fair, I probably had.

By then, I was living with grad school roommates in a crumbling old manor house chopped into apartments. This was on the North Carolina coast. The house was a gorgeous, decaying thing: pocket doors with stained glass windows, sky-high ceilings, cockroaches, and walls with literal mouse holes, like in cartoons. Ours was the apartment famous for parties, and during one marked by an unusual level of debauchery—unsavory couplings on the kitchen floor and a mystery guest or two—my most precious cache of jewelry, including the mother-of-pearl earrings made from a grandfather’s cufflinks, disappeared from the hall closet where I’d stashed them in a fit of distrust, as the windows of my ground-floor bedroom didn’t quite close.

If grad school life in the crumbling manor house apartment did not provide security, it did provide a level of community that I haven’t been able to match since. My bedroom was the smallest of three. Located just off the kitchen, it had once been the maids’ quarters: it connected to a second, smaller, windowless room behind it. This was my inner sanctum where I spent mornings and evenings writing. These were hours of wonderful, dreaming solitude, the kind of solitude that is wonderful because it’s not mandatory: Out there down the long hallway, there was always a space for me on the living room sofa where my roommates were watching bad reality television. Friends would walk the winding route back to my door to insist that I join them out on the porch for some wine and a game of corn hole. We cooked big breakfasts, and dinner parties were frequent. Dance parties blew off the steam and drama of grad school life, and—well, I told you where those led. It occurs to me now that the true greatness in those years lay mostly in the fact of living within walking distance of friends.

•••

Last night, a frequent dream returned: I am back in college. Not grad school, but undergrad. Out of some nebulous obligation, I have left my home, spouse, and child to go live with a nineteen-year-old in a dorm. In this version, classes were set to start the very next day, but I had no place to sleep. I drifted past the small cement block rooms inhabited by happily bunked students in sweatpants eating popcorn and studying, and, in the dramatic way of dreams, I wept as I walked, my sense of dispossession complete. Awakening was the same as always: a blessed relief as the ordinary landmarks of home spring up, the insecurities of my peripatetic youth drifting back into the ether.

•••

My household today is compact, tidy, and small: two adults and one child inhabiting nine hundred square feet. The last year and change have found us more circumscribed than ever, sealed off from the world by necessity during a time of pandemic. The benign sorts of border-intrusion that signal community—dinner parties and indoor play-dates—were mostly off-limits to everyone, a fact which, during the first weeks, acted on me as strange sedative, quieting any fears of missing out I may have previously harbored.

It was in this calm that I recognized the commonalities of the kind of community that I crave: It is an introvert’s dream, a just-add water brand you don’t have to work at. Put one way: a favorite childhood memory is lying with my ear to the yellow shag carpet in the upstairs hallway, listening to the grown-up party downstairs. I would waltz down in my nightgown; guests would smile at me, parents would say good-night, and then I could disappear again. Put still another: a few years ago, some ten or twelve years after my own dreams of selling all my belongings and moving to an actual intentional community had faded, I began investigating the golden age of American utopias: Alcott’s Fruitlands, New Harmony, Oneida. In part, I was trying to understand my own dream of disappearing into to a prefabricated community.

I don’t want to be responsible for making community happen. But I do, fiercely and with great longing, want for it to be. And to be part of it. And so, it turns out that the dear ex, who, in that moment of anger, called me “a little gold-digger-y” was right: A gold-digger doesn’t want to make an effort. She wants no lonely apartment, but a move-in-ready home, with all the small physical and emotional niceties this term implies. I’m so sorry, babe.

In the early months of the pandemic, I developed a different kind of sympathy, this one for my neighbors, the extraverted ones. I felt myself blessed, blessed, a thousand times blessed for the job and the home I still had—but also for the strange way in which this time was working in my favor. In my basement office, sunlight and birdsong pour in through one tiny window, and I was free of the mandatory small talk and sense of exposure that typify a day of open-floorplan office work.

And when I had to stretch my legs, there were options.

It’s an understatement to say I was no longer alone on my walks. Instead, one unlikely road near my house became the distanced Barcelona Ramblas of East Atlanta, populated each spring evening by joggers, young couples by the dozen, roommates tossing Frisbees as they strolled, and entire families—everyone awkwardly jostling to space themselves apart along the wide street that’s usually home to cars flying too fast past our houses.

In those weeks, I met three different parents with kids my child’s age. I loved everything about the chats I had with these people—their mutual genuine warmth and brevity, and how they ended with a mutual promise of playdates “after all this is over.” Sure, I would say, and in the quiet knowledge of options sometime down the road and the parting of ways that would occur within thirty seconds, I found perfection. We were all lonely now, but I was markedly less lonely than before in this level playing field: this one damaged world was all any of us had, not one of us bound for some other Shangri-La beyond our ordinary street on a glorious spring evening.

•••

And then, things changed, because they always do. The vague promises my neighbors and I made of future fellowship during those early days of the pandemic didn’t threaten my introvert’s bubble, and it turned out they never would. Looking back now, I cannot remember the specifics of what we promised, nor a single name. As spring became summer, the number of people I passed in the streets dwindled. In the baking heat of the parking lot outside the grocery store—the only place I ever went—we sweated through our masks. Once inside, I found it hard even to make eye contact with anyone, so repulsed was I by these other bodies which quickly became a mass of blurred, contagious humanity in my peripheral vision. And still, I felt lonely. Lonely and ineffectual as I kept our kid apart from the world, clicking away at “Donate” buttons on my phone during that summer of protest, and during the dark winter that followed, walking our old dog down empty streets while listening to news podcasts that kept me an informed, terrified citizen.

I’m not saying there weren’t moments. There was at least one.

A candlelight vigil honoring Congressman John Lewis sparked joy so sharp it was hard to distinguish from anger. After his death, hundreds of us walked beneath a highway overpass that sliced a Black neighborhood in half, our words reverberating back to us in waves of call and response: Good trouble. Good trouble. Good trouble!

It was a sudden full-body thunderclap of spirit that had everything to do with people and place. This explosive no to the dominant narrative of exclusion offered a double jolt of communality. We were home, and we were home.

•••

When I was younger, I imagined community to be a thing one secured and checked off a list, like a haircut that agrees with one’s chin or a writing career. (Joke’s on you, Young Me.) You find it and, bam, there you are around the campfire; you’ve not been rejected. These are your people and there is nothing further to seek. The other night I found myself around a real campfire, leading a birthday toast for my sweetheart. The fire had been late getting going and we complained as we waited: It was too cold, too dark to just stand around like this, but now we huzzahed as one, the periphery lurking, a barren wilderness at our backs, our little group of six or eight inching a bit closer now despite the continued risk of pandemic contagion.

It was one of those moments of ultimacy. But it was just a moment. There have been other fires, other toasts my whole life through with stretches of cold between. It will all find its way to me again. This thought occurred to me as I looked at the faces of our friends, all of us imperfectly fitted to one another but clinging close on this chilly fall night. Laughing at a joke, I sat down. My camp chair was a little too close to the flames and I knew that the next morning, I’d be dehydrated with itchy legs. For the moment, I bathed in the warmth anyway.

•••

KATE SWEENEY is a writer, podcast host and producer, and former public radio journalist living in Atlanta, Georgia. Her book American Afterlife, (UGA Press, 2014), earned a Georgia Author of the Year Award. Thomas Lynch called the book “a reliable witness and well-wrought litany to last things and final details.” Readers mostly tell her they were surprised it wasn’t a total bummer. Among other places, her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Utne Reader Online, Atlanta Magazine, New South, and Creative Loafing. More here: katesweeney.net

Animal Me

By Beth Kephart

There’s a doily fringe of Japanese maple leaves just beyond the window, three tired pear trees, and after that, close as that: him, with his yellow hearing defenders clapped tight across his ears, and his large-capacity fuel tank steady on his back, and the telescopic tube caught in the grip of his very pale hand. His tee is florescent orange. His shorts are khaki. His shoes are made for leaf blowing.

Sometimes, in a breeze, he’ll stand—watching the leaves loosen from the trees and falling. He blows before they touch the ground. He blows. He blows. He blows.

Sometimes he’ll blow all morning, take a sandwich break, then blow again into the afternoon, a steady rev, a thought-traumatizing roar, a vehemence of machinery lodged high on the sound pollution chart, and I’ve checked the township rules: it’s legal.

Sometimes he’ll hire a guy to blow with him, and after they’re done, he’ll get his Shop Vac out and roar-suck the lamina, the petiole, the blade of whatever leaf defied him. You do not defy him, you do not lay your leaf self down on his red-brick path, which is feet away from where I stand, in my quiet room.

It’s hard work. He does it. There is a kind of dedication to a certain kind of art, and I wonder how this makes him feel, what caliber of satisfaction it yields, why I, who write quiet stories, who sustain quiet friendships, who teach quiet truths quietly, who believe in the power of quiet conversation, cannot right the story here. Cannot peaceably take the few steps to my side of the divide and wait for him to finish. To just ask: Please.

I form sentences I never speak.

I write letters I never tuck into his box.

I hold back, remembering our history. Past infringements—a branch from his tree on the roof of our house, the incessant blinking bleeping of an exterior light—were not finally cured by the words I chose. The issues were resolved, in time. But our neighborliness contracted, ushered a silence between us in.

There are all kinds of noises on my street. The screamer girls. The screamer boy. The red puppy with the four-syllable yap. The chopping chomping spinning blades that power tree life down.

Though there are times at night when bird song floats in. Fox shuffle. Deer munch on leaves. Times when I still feel safe in the house where I’ve now spent most of my long living.

•••

Safe from me.

•••

The first time I went animal I weighed eighty-five pounds and my face was swollen to twice its normal size. You’ll have to believe me; there are no photographs. It had been six weeks since surgeons had wired my mouth shut after installing steel-reinforcements among disintegrating jaw bones. Six weeks since chicken broth through a straw had become my only diet. Six weeks since I’d been writing my end of any truncated conversation down. The clients I had in the business I’d built couldn’t understand the garble of me on the phone; most left my consultancy for others. The friends I had didn’t know what to do, save for Nazie, who arrived one day with boxes of Florentine paper and sat, unafraid and near, while I took it in—the marble swirls, the fluid textures, the varieties of cream. There was December rain on the day she came. I lived on Gaskill Street with my husband. The rain had turned the air beyond the window dark. The light inside was amber.

Write it down, Nazie said, handing me a pen, spreading out the paper. Write whatever you’re feeling.

And we sat, and like that we talked, and I wasn’t animal.

•••

I met the animal in me on New Year’s Eve. My parents and brother had come to town. A spectacle of fireworks above the Delaware River was planned, and we were to walk there in the bright cold—my parents, my brother, my husband, and me. The narrow house where we lived had come with its own attenuated parking spot—a bricked-in place that was, in summer, the site of a potted garden—and that is where my father parked. I was in my winter coat and my winter shoes and if a wind came in my father and husband would catch me, I knew, before I lifted off, Dorothy-like, and headed for the moon.

My twisted kite tail of a body.

My plump pumpkin-shaped face.

My monster self.

I’d avoided photographs. I’d avoided mirrors.

It was New Year’s Eve, and I was going out.

•••

The louder the leaf blower blows, the more deeply he sinks into his leaf-blowing trance. Though the path he clears is no more than twenty feet long, he walks it into miles when he blows and blows and blows.

Back and forth, and back and forth. On the other side of the window in my quiet room. On the other side of the quiet me.

•••

Soon as my father pulled into our winter parking space, soon as I had stepped outside and we were nearly off—me with my monster face, me with my protectorates—a man drove up in a fancy car and parked precisely where one would park one’s obnoxious car were one trying to park in my father.

There were No Parking signs for anyone to see. There were little hatch marks on the asphalt. There was my father’s car, suddenly imprisoned. That man didn’t care. It was his New Year’s Eve, and the fireworks along the Delaware would be no less than prophetic. Maybe he’d been side-street cruising and this was the best spot all around, or maybe he was just one gigantic asshole, but he was leaving his car where no car should be, and my instinct was to tell him.

You can’t park there, I opened my mouth to say, but what came out was mwah mwah garble, a desperate mash of bleating sounds chewed gibberish by surgical metal and snuffed into nothing by that plastic thing they’d wired between my teeth, to keep my new steel joints from moving.

Mwah mwah mwah, I said.

Mwah mwah mwah. Now I was screaming.

I was aware of my husband’s sudden horror.

I was aware of my father’s stepping forward.

I was aware that the driver of the fancy car had turned to look at me, and that he was laughing. I was hysterical to him—my monster face, my strangulated sounds. I was hysterical, and now he was walking.

The animal in me went after him.

I was not who I thought I’d ever be.

•••

The room where I work is a quiet room, for I am a quiet self: I am contained, I am restrained, I am equilbria. I read, I write, I fold paper there. I thread needles and I sew. In my quiet room I do my quiet work, listening through the windows I raise for tree breeze and squirrel leap and birds inside in their toots. Bee buzz, feather twist, cricket chirp, cicada, the sounds of my husband’s shoes on grass, the sounds of my husband, faintly whistling, the sounds of the world going on, the many sounds of silence, peaceable and whole and unendangered.

And undangerous.

•••

I went after that man with the bones in my hands, with my body, thin and twisted, with the pulp and bruise of my monster self. I went after him, hurling words snuffed to hard soft sounds by wires, bolts, and plastic. I went after him, struggling for air through swollen nostrils, struggling for balance, there in the dark, where my parents and brother had come to visit because there was to be a show, where my husband watched in horror, where the sign said No Parking, where he was laughing.

I went after him, feral.

Instinct obliterating thought. Wrath as self-erasure or self-pronouncement but I didn’t know which, I could not think, I was molten magma, ugly spew, a misfire of my senses.

I felt my father hook one arm.

I felt my husband hook another.

I heard my husband saying, What the hell?

Hit the man, he’ll hit you back.

Hit the man and cede to the worst in you, the secret, hidden animal urge that you do not recognize, that cannot be you, somehow is.

•••

When the man with the sun-colored hearing defenders revs, there are no sounds of silence. There is instead the hot holler of his blower, the power blast of his decibels, the endless useless joy he takes from walking his brick miles, chasing the leaves that have not fallen yet, chasing the detritus of nature. When the man with the sun-colored hearing defenders revs, there is no quiet self in a quiet world.

•••

I scream into the roar, but he can’t hear me. I say shut up shut up shut up which is mwah mwah mwah which is no sound at all against the blower. I slam the windows shut, but my quiet world is rattled. My quiet world, my quiet stuff are now the anger channel.

•••

I like to think that I would have stopped myself from throwing myself against the guffawing fancy driver. I like to think that I am not the woman who stands at her window raging. I like to think that my quiet self is the self who tells this story.

•••

On the sill of the window I have flung open wide again, I place a pair of putty speakers and an ancient, dirty iPod. I wait, I wait. He blows, he blows, menacing the leaves. My pulse is loud. My temperature is rising. At last he powers off. The roaring stops. He un-defends his ears. I touch the right parts of my ancient machines and dial Abba in—a full-on volume 10, the loudest noise I’ve ever propagated. “Dancing Queen” slams the air with music—so hard, so loud, so savage. “Dancing Queen” outlouds the yapper, outlouds the man on the path.

If only now he’d look up at me, if only now he’d see me. If only now I were not claws and fur, the animal I hope desperately I will never again be.

•••

BETH KEPHART is a writer, teacher, and book maker. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

Head Case

By Reyna Eisenstark

A few years ago, my ex-husband C. (already my ex-husband of a few years) fell down in his living room and could not get up. He was eventually able to crawl to a phone and call 911, and he assured the cop who showed up that he wasn’t drunk. It’s hard to know what exactly the cop thought of him, a fifty-year-old man crawling around on his hands and knees in a once-beautiful house that had been gutted to its studs and that also included cages of parrots that may or may not have been squawking in panic.

C. had been having difficulty with his balance for a few weeks. After the fall, an MRI revealed the cause: hydrocephaly, or fluid that had been accumulating and creating an intense pressure in his brain. At some point, years ago, during our marriage, he had fallen, possibly from a ladder (neither of us could really remember any kind of significant fall), unknowingly damaged his head, and the fluid had been slowly building until his brain could no longer take it. This is not a precise medical explanation, but it’s the one I’m going with.

For many years before this incident took place, I had been fascinated by a famous head case—that of twenty-five-year-old railroad supervisor Phineas Gage. In 1848, Gage was packing blasting powder into a rock when it accidentally triggered an explosion that drove a metal rod straight through his head. Gage survived this accident, which destroyed a portion of his frontal lobe, but afterward he was apparently “no longer Gage.” This once amiable man became angry and abusive; his personality had been permanently altered. Or so every basic psychology and neuroscience text would have you believe. The case of Phineas Gage is usually held up as the first time doctors were able to correlate the frontal lobe with personality, but many of these early studies are now considered questionable. There is evidence that Gage was still Gage, that he eventually recovered after the accident. Yet like many stories of this kind, the more interesting myth has persisted. I (and many others) very likely preferred it.

•••

Once I learned about C.’s diagnosis, I thought back to our marriage, to a time when, though I couldn’t really pinpoint it then, his personality had begun to change. He’d always had a bad temper. But at some point it got worse, so that when he was angry, the anger was more vicious, cruel. He was no longer C. I did notice it, but it was a slow, steady buildup, just like the fluid in his brain, and there was so much else going on, things that would have likely ended our marriage anyway. But I never suspected that his personality was being damaged from his own brain.

There is a metaphor C. often used throughout our marriage that has only seemed relevant to me now. It’s this: before football players wore helmets, they were more careful about not crashing into people’s heads. Once helmets became mandatory, the players attacked harder and got, paradoxically, more injured. C. would point to this in instances where “fixing” something actually made the problem worse. This story always resonated with me as, I suppose, various stories about head injuries did. For some reason.

•••

After the MRI, C.’s balance and other functions slowly got worse, until about a month later when doctors inserted a shunt into his brain to drain the fluid, and he was basically back to normal. Except not exactly normal. Normal the way he was before the injury so many years ago. He told me that he’d had no idea how much rage he’d been carrying around with him all the time until it was suddenly . . . gone. He was also able to read books again, to focus on things, to stop feeling irritated at everyone. The intense pressure in his brain had subsided.

After our separation, but before the accident, C. had other medical issues to deal with, but this did not keep him from doing dangerous work around his house and rescuing a large number of parrots, which he’d wanted to do for years. The parrots were always squawking and were allowed to take up as much space as they liked and, if you were not careful, would fly directly at your head as you entered the house. So much of C.’s life was about not protecting his head and I do mean this in every way possible.

•••

But this is not C.’s story; it’s mine, and the myth persisted. It was easy to tell myself that a brain injury was at the root of all of his terrible behavior and poor decisions. The question as to why I simply accepted all of this is one I refused to answer. Who doesn’t like an excuse?

One time, in my early twenties, I showed up at a therapy appointment five minutes late. My therapist at the time, who I didn’t like all that much, made a big deal about my being late, about how it wasted both our time, etc., and I just apologized and hoped we would move on. But then she looked at her appointment book and realized I’d only been five minutes late. She thought my appointment had been thirty minutes earlier and that I was thirty-five minutes late. Okay, fine, I thought, but she wanted to know why I hadn’t pointed that out, why I’d let her go on and on like that when I’d really only been five minutes late. I must have seemed crazy to you, she said. Why didn’t you say something? And this is probably all I got out of my short time with her as a therapist: why didn’t I indeed.

•••

Probably the more apt metaphor for this entire situation, better than Phineas Gage, better than football helmets, is that of the frog who jumps out of a boiling pot of water versus the frog who sits in a cool pot of water and does not notice that the water is getting hotter until it is too late. Except that this too is an imperfect metaphor. A frog will very likely jump out of a slowly boiling pot of water once the water gets too hot. But this is one of those metaphors that is useful anyway because, even though it’s not really factual, we know exactly what it means when we use it. Psychology professors like to repeat the story of Phineas Gage because they like what it suggests, even if the facts are wrong. I’m pretty sure the facts about football helmets are absolutely true though. That was the thing about C. Sometimes, his metaphors were right on.

•••

One of the things that scientists really did take away from the case of Phineas Gage is that the brain and mind are one thing, and that alone is pretty impressive. What I can finally take away from the case of my own ex-husband is that the damage to his brain/mind made things much worse for all of us, but that the outcome (me leaving our marriage) would have, should have, been the same. Though I am the kind of person who tends to obsess over random moments in the past that unintentionally changed my life, I haven’t done so with this one. It turns out I am done worrying about his head. I am looking after mine.

•••

REYNA EISENSTARK is a writer and editor living in upstate New York. You can read more of her writing here. Or all her Full Grown People essays here.

Old People

By Susan Moldaw

I unbuckle my mother’s seatbelt, open her car door, sling her purse onto my shoulder, and watch while she turns sideways, slowly inching to the seat’s edge where she braces herself with the car frame as anchor. She’s arthritic, eighty-eight years old, and a widow. I hold my breath as she moves one leg out of the car, then the other, wobbly and teetering as she finally stands. She clutches my arm as she hoists one leg up from the curb to the sidewalk, then the second leg. And it isn’t a simple two-step; it’s like scaling a mountain for my mother, with an ever-present fear of falling—a not irrational fear for anyone over sixty. I count my own years.

“She’s a fall waiting to happen,” I fret to my sister a few days later, sprawled on my bedroom easy chair. My sister lives out of town; we talk several times weekly. “She needs someone who will walk with her all the time.” I’m preaching to the choir. We both know convincing our mother to hire a companion will take an act of God. What she will allow is housekeeping and cooking help.

A woman goes grocery shopping for my mother at Draegers, cooks meals of red snapper or baked salmon with golden beets. At times she zips a hard-to-reach zipper or fastens a button at the wrist. When I visit, she tries to support my mother as she rises from a kitchen chair. My mother stamps her foot and slowly stands on her own. Afterward, we walk to the family room and sit on a couch with a floral print.

“She’s only trying to help,” I say.

“If I stop doing things for myself, pretty soon I won’t be able to do anything for myself.” My mother is a connoisseur of robes. She brushes a few stray crumbs off her long, pink terrycloth that has a convenient front zipper. Several crumbs remain that I refrain from flicking away—this time. I glance out the window and see the two iron outdoor lounge chairs where my father and I used to sit before he died nearly eight years ago. They seem bare in January, without their summer cushions.

I look back at my mother. “That makes sense,” I say.

On another lengthy call, I say to my sister, “I can manage her, but it isn’t fair to same-age friends who help. She’ll topple them.” Emboldened by righteous anger—her stubbornness might endanger her friends—I sit my mother down in her kitchen, cheery with its brightly colored, hand-painted tiles and African violets in ceramic pots. I steel myself for her to stonewall, as she usually does.

“There’s a lovely employment agency in San Francisco.” I can’t use the agency’s actual name—“Sage Eldercare Solutions”—so I say “Town and Country,” an agency Sage sometimes engages. My mother brightens at the name. Many people she knows use Town and Country to hire household help. She has used them herself. My mother is reassured by familiar references.

“They have what’s known as ‘care managers,’” I continue. Her eyes narrow. Her breath grows rapid. She looks around the room, as if to spot the nearest exit. “Maybe Town and Country will find someone who can go to an occasional movie or out to dinner.” Weekends are hard since my father died, and she gets lonely, though she’s been a phenomenal widow, calling friends, making plans, and going out. “Nobody wants a widow at their dinner parties,” she likes to say, “though they’ll make room for the widower.”

My mother glances at the headlines of today’s New York Times, scattered on the kitchen table. She takes tissue from her blouse sleeve and blows her nose. She puts the Kleenex back in her sleeve, straightens the paper, and looks up. “All right,” she says. “I’ll talk with someone.” With no hint of excitement, I say I’ll contact the agency.

•••

Town and Country sends a young woman for an interview who comes to my mother’s home. She’s neatly dressed, with a pleasing smile. She sits on the couch, crossing her legs at the ankle.

“Tell me about yourself,” I say.

She nods and says she has a passion for the arts, is trained as a nurse, and most importantly, she loves people. She directs her comments to my mother and speaks in a quiet voice. My mother leans forward. She loves the arts, and she’s energized by people. Now we’re getting somewhere, I think.

References of potential hires are promised, the agency fees acceptable. But the hapless woman titles herself a “Geriatric Care Manager” in an email to my mother, and the deal is shot. My mother refuses further communications.

“Geriatric,” my mother fumes. “Old people.”

That patience so often extolled in daughters evaporates. I want to bark, You’re old! Just hire her, Mom! but I don’t. Calling my mother old is akin to calling her ugly or useless. I know she doesn’t like old people. Neither had her father. He was ninety when he died. I rein in my anger and muster a weak, “Let’s keep the contact,” and “Perhaps we can revisit this.”

Tad Friend, writing about ageism in The New Yorker, refers to a chapter in a collection on the subject, written by psychologists. They assert that many shun the old to protect themselves from thoughts of death. “Ageism is so hard to root out,” Friend continues, “because it allows us to ward off a paralyzing fact with a pleasing fiction. It lets us fool ourselves, for a time, into believing we’ll never die.”

If my mother’s dislike of older people hides her fear of death, she’s not alone. I avoid my own advancing age. Sixty-five, seventy—why, those numbers sound positively youthful. I’d rather not think too hard about how many years I may have left.

•••

My mother and I go to the San Francisco Fall Art & Antique Show. She decides to take her walker, a collapsible contraption that she’s festooned with dusty dried flowers in shades of rose and blue with one burst of yellow, affixed to the front of the walker with a wide pink ribbon wound round. Using a walker isn’t entirely unprecedented—she uses it around her house—but when she’d take it out before she’d excused it with complaints of temporary foot maladies, or she’d brought it on short trips as a necessary travel aid. This time, she makes no apologies.

Once we arrive, I retrieve the walker from the trunk and snap it open. My mother and I accomplish her departure from the car in our usual manner, and she establishes herself within the walker’s confines, beaming. My mother blooms in society, and dresses to good effect. She wears a dull gold tunic jacket, black silk pants, and black tennis shoes—a concession to the comfort of her feet and only noticeable if you manage to divert your gaze from her diamond antique brooch.

The evening unfolds in a cavernous hall of San Francisco’s Fort Mason, a former military base now home to non-profits, including the Blue Bear School of Music, the Magic Theater, and the San Francisco Children’s Art Center—an art program I took my sons to when they were preschool age and I was not old. Picasso drawings, fine English furniture, gold ladybug pins dotted with sapphires and rubies for eyes, amidst other objets line the walkways, tempting strollers on all sides. My mother greets passersby, old friends from her many years of activity in San Francisco society. A few glance at the walker, but she seems unaware. We roam freely; as the night progresses, the crowds thicken and we get hemmed in.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say, worried she’ll be knocked over. I don’t know how we’ll maneuver.

With a thrust of the walker, she plunges into the morass, scattering women in five-inch heels and men in dark suits with alarmed expressions. Why do I underestimate her? My father knew she was strong; he used Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy dictate to describe her: that she spoke softly and carried a big stick. He tried to protect her anyway. “That’s why I married him,” she says. “I knew he’d take care of me.” Who will she let take care of her now—her purse tucked into the basket of her walker for anyone to snatch, her gait unsteady, her bones old?

My mother smiles as the crowds part and we safely emerge at the front door. Someone asks if I need help, but it’s all I can do to keep from laughing— what mettle! what spunk!—managing a “No, thank you.” I steer her into the car and store the walker in the trunk. When I join my mother, she has the show catalogue open. “Our favorite jeweler didn’t come this year.” She turns a page.

“Mom.” I throw my catalogue into the back seat.

She folds a page corner in her catalogue and looks up.

“You were great back there. That walker brings clout.” I check my lipstick in the car mirror and rummage in my purse for the tube. My husband sometimes asks why I wear it. Because I look dead without it, I think, applying fresh color.

My mother turns another page in her catalogue. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll need it,” she says. For the rest of your life, I think, a bit unkindly, though I only smile. Another truth I won’t utter. If I’m protecting my mother from her eventual decline, it’s no stretch to say I’m also protecting myself from my own.

•••

Nearly thirty years ago our family threw a party for my mother’s sixtieth birthday. I still have the guest list. The Bartels. Dead. Scott Carey. Dead. Connie Eisenstat. Dead.

My father.

The list goes on.

We both read obituaries compulsively. In the last few years, several friends my age have died. A neurologist I know says that she won’t get resuscitated if she has a heart attack. “After sixty, you never come out of it the same.” Sixty! I’m shocked. Am I already at the point of no return?

My mother makes younger friends. She likes them better because they’re that much farther away from death. Just recently, she called my friends and me, “young women.” “I’m not young!” I told her. (Neither are my friends.) Medicare, social security—all just a few birthdays away.

•••

I’m reading The Oxford Book of Aging, an anthology of essays, stories, and poems on growing old. A poem by Ruth Harriet Jacobs titled “Don’t Call Me a Young Woman” includes these lines: “I am an old woman, a long liver./I’m proud of it. I revel in it…” Jacobs, in the context of the poem, owns her age, though perhaps she struggles with ageism. Have I mentioned my age? I’m sixty-three. Like my mother, age is uncomfortable to declare.

“Age is just a number in your head,” my mother is fond of saying. Yes—and no. According to Tad Friend, aging is “…the leading precondition for most of the decline-hastening diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s.” Age, plus health, may be the winning ticket, so for my mother and perhaps others age really is just a number.

In a book called Countertransference and Older Clients, countertransference meaning, simply, how feelings the professional has about the client may impact care, there was a chart of disabilities that reminded me of aging. I never could get it out of my head. Here are the maladies that got me the most: “Being unable to recall who you were or answer simple questions about your past; Being dependent for bathing, toileting, and being moved from place to place; Never being able to do your favorite activity again; Watching your body waste away inch by—”

I have a sudden urge to throw salt over my shoulder, knock on wood. Writing more feels like tempting fate. “Don’t call me a young woman,” writes Jacobs. “You reveal your own fears of aging.” Perhaps the reason I don’t want my mother to call me young is that it reminds me that I’m not.

•••

There are blessings an observant Jew recites every morning, and though I’m not an observant Jew by Orthodox standards, I say a version daily while I’m still in bed. According to the Mishkan T’filah, Reform Judaism’s prayer book, these morning blessings remind us of the miracle of waking to bodily life: “Praised are you, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who opens the eyes of the blind…who stretches the earth over the waters…who strengthens steps…”

My mother may walk with strong intention but walking hurts.

Bunions and corns and bursas and hammertoes condemn her feet with each step. Heeding my mother’s plight, I exercise my toes every day like tiny soldiers in formation, stretching them, raising them, making the big toes touch because they don’t anymore. Side-by-side they curve to the outside of my feet, the beginning of a bunion I was horrified to notice on my left foot. I rush ahead twenty-five years to a nightmare vision of myself: hobbling, bent over, hanging on to a walker—nothing like my mother’s queenly stance.

•••

One of my mother’s friends—a woman six years her junior— fell not long ago in Hawaii. My mother remarks over dinner at her home one evening, “Hawaii is hard for old people.” We sit in the family room on the floral couch, with trays balanced on our laps, the TV news on. “Yes, it is,” I say eagerly. “Hawaii’s been hard for you.” Finally—an acknowledgement of her age and frailties. I take a sip of tomato soup. On a recent family vacation to Hawaii, she’d been ferried in a golf cart to meals as her primary outings. My mother’s soup spoon clinks against the side of her cup. She looks at me in surprise. She hadn’t included herself.

I hold my soup cup and look into the swirl of red, then glance at her. She doesn’t have a trace of gray in her salon-dyed hair. Neither do I. My appointment for a cut and color is two weeks away. Just that morning I’d considered moving it up because I hate the sliver of gray, widening daily where my hair parts, but I’d used a color wand instead, called “Brush It Away.” I keep one in my purse and travel bag for “emergencies.”

The emergency of looking old.

Leaving her home later that evening, driving on suburban side streets as the sky darkens and my aging eyes struggle to adjust, I think about her mortality, and mine. Odds are, she’ll go first.

I hope she goes first.

I don’t want to think about her death! Or my own. Who wants to think about no longer being in the world? I merge onto the freeway. The lights of the oncoming cars disorient me. I keep my eyes on the road.

•••

In my work as a chaplain I’ve sat with death. The old and some young taking last breaths, sometimes alone, sometimes with family members gathered round. There are many ways one goes, or says good-bye— with love, without love, regrets, or without regrets, sadness, relief, anger. Most people fear a painful death. My fear is dying alone, but that’s not just it. I fear dying before my time, by fire, water, war, or other happenstances of fate, matter-of–factly listed in the Unataneh Tokef, the prayer recited at Rosh Hashanah— the Jewish New Year. I hear the prayer every year at services, and shiver.

I don’t have the courage to ask my mother what she fears. I hope I’ll have the guts when her time comes. Will I have the blessing of sitting with her at the end? Who will sit with me?

•••

I drop by the San Francisco Jewish Community Center one afternoon for Shabbat blessings. Children from the preschool sit on the atrium floor on carpet squares. A singer strums Sabbath songs on a guitar. He sings “Shabbat Shalom—Hey!” and at the “hey!” adults clap, kids belt “hey!” and some kids pop from their spots into the air, landing in a squat, repeating their blast on each successive “hey!”

Sitting at a round table covered with butcher paper, crayons scattered on top, I write “Peace to All” and “Welcome the Stranger” in bright green. I take a large hunk of freshly baked, fragrant challah from a basket offered by a staffer and a Dixie cup filled with red wine. Munching on the challah, I watch the kids laughing and jumping with all the energy of four- and five-year-olds, while images of the life course spin through my imagination: the kids, starting out, me, thriving in late middle, and my mother, bringing up the rear, her body slowing down but her spirit alive as any kid’s—all of us moving into an unknown future.

•••

In fall, my mother and I go to synagogue for Rosh Hashanah. We sit towards the front, my mother walking unsteadily with her walker on the aisle’s downward slope. In front of us is a family who lost their son in the previous year. My mother and I attended the memorial together. I look in my bag for Kleenex but I know she’ll have a supply—she always does. She hands me a wadded-up tissue and we both wipe our eyes as the cantor begins to sing. We listen as sunlight streams, illuminating the blues, greens, reds, and yellows of the stained glass windows. I glance at my mother’s profile, the view of her in synagogue I’ll always remember—the straight line of her nose, the curve of her cheek with its tiny red veins and rosy cast, the same slight brown spots that I so resolutely try to vanquish on my own cheeks on visits to the dermatologist. The image reminds me of my favorite photo of her, also in profile. She’s a teenager, just a few years before she met my father. Her hair is held back by a clip, she’s wearing a print dress with a little girl’s round collar, and she’s gazing starry-eyed into the distance, as if imagining the life she’d someday have.

Sometime during the service, a young woman goes to the bima—the raised part of the sanctuary—and begins to sing. She’s the daughter of a dear friend my age who died just months before. I tell my mother who she is. My Kleenex is soggy, she hands me another, then slowly and gently takes my hand. We sit holding hands as the singer’s voice envelopes us. The dead take their seats with the living and my soul expands, comforted by memory, my mother’s presence, and the connective tissue of love.

•••

SUSAN MOLDAW’s work has appeared in bioStories, Broad Street, Fourth Genre, Literary Mama, Narrative, Ruminate, and others. She’s a chaplain and gerontologist and is currently completing a program in spiritual direction. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.