Picking your battles.

It’s a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

What things are worth going to battle over? How do you know when it’s best to shut your yapper and carry on with your day? When should you pick up your boom and fly? When should you crack open a beer and sit by the fire pit instead?

These questions make me think of my Dad. He rarely gets truly upset. About anything. He might complain. He’s a very humorous kvetch-er. But if Reggie gets legitimately upset, which is rare, it is a very big deal. He is good at knowing when to pick up a stick and charge into battle when absolutely necessary, and when not to. He mostly chooses not to. He was also good at letting us know when it was time to chill out, like when we argued with mom and he would look up from his book, make eye contact with us over the top of his glasses and slowly shake his head to convey, “You don’t want to die on this hill. Find a table, get under it.”   (And now that I am a mom, with small humans arguing with me, and a husband who is of a similar disposition, I tip my hat to that wisdom.)

I can count on one hand the things that make Reggie truly mad.

1. Dishtowels that don’t soak up water. I don’t know why this topic stirs up a lot of internal Reggie-rage, but he cannot abide them. I can hear him in my mind, “You could sew these together, put them out on a lake and use them as a boat! Who makes these things?” Don’t give the man sub-par dish towels.

2. Someone doing something, anything, that smudges his glasses. I was the worst offender, when in 1991 the year of our Lord we dined at an A&W Root Beer and I was playing around with taco sauce packets and accidentally burst one, creating a laser-like stream of sauce into his face which covered his glasses. That taco sauce possessed an oily-ness that should have been researched by the Dept of Defense, because despite 20 solid minutes of cleaning, the residue clung to his glasses stubbornly, creating a grease-sheen that made him furious with me. If ever there was a day he contemplated “forgetting” a kid at a restaurant and driving away, it was that one.

3. A squeaky car dashboard. We had a 1995 Suburban that rolled off the factory floor and into our lives with the sole purpose of enraging Dad. He would drive down the road and randomly, unexpectantly, slap the dashboard and say, “MARGARET, do you hear that?” This went on for years. He took it apart. He put it back together. The squeak remained. It was his own personal hell, the tenth one that Dante forgot to write about: Automobile Auditory Anarchy.

But Reggie has self-confidence and patience. He’s secure enough in his own judgement that he doesn’t feel the need to react right away. He can sit with his anger or irritation long enough to decide the right way to deal with it, instead of reacting in the moment. He doesn’t bark or pop off, which is why the people in his life listen to him and respect him. It’s a gold-mine way of thinking, whether you’re at work or dealing with family or worried about your kids.

So that’s my plan when it comes to picking my battles. I’ll trust myself and sit with uncomfortable things long enough to decide and plan, instead of reacting.

Or eyeing my broom. 

Unless someone spritzes taco sauce on my glasses.

Then I, too, will banish the sauce-assaulter to the farthest backseat of an SUV. And maybe slap the squeaky dashboard. It only makes sense.

I recently listened to a podcast where one of my favorite authors talked about finding artistic inspiration. She’s done huge things, and written about huge things, and I was surprised that her suggestion boiled down to a simple idea.

She recommended having an “artist day.”

This really means, “Just get out of your house.”

For those of us who work from home, and get our groceries delivered, we live a wonderful sweat-pants-feral existence. However, it gets a little insular. And it can feel like we need to embark on a grand vacation to break that cycle and find inspiration. But we don’t.

I’ve never been on a trip around the world, or contemplated the meaning of life on the beaches of Fiji. However, I once found a smorgasbord of inspiration on the beaches of Galveston, Texas while watching an inebriated man wearing a Skynyrd tank top yell “LOOK at those seals, they’re like g*d* torpedoes” when in fact there were no seals in the Gulf of Mexico, only roiling waves that looked like chocolate Yoo-hoo and a woman wearing a black swimsuit who I assume he mistook for a seal while staring through his Coors Beer Goggles.

I lived in New York for two years, and the single most formative experience that made me want to write didn’t take place on top of the Empire State Building, but at the Court Square subway stop in Queens when a disheveled man ran at me, and as I braced myself for a potential stabbing, he surprised me by sneezing in my face and yelling “CHEESEBURGERS” before running away.

Last weekend I found myself in a local thrift store, where a man and woman sauntered past, arms wrapped around each others’ waists and he announced for the whole store to hear, “My baby gets to buy anything she wants today. Anything at all!”

If that’s not main-character inspiration, I don’t know what is.

So thanks to the podcast, I’ve once again been reminded to get out of the house and go find good inspiration. Praying in an Ashram is fine. And hiking in the Swiss Alps would be fun. But right now there are half-off half-grown chickens for sale down at Tractor Supply, and I’m pretty sure that’s going to be an excellent place to people watch.

In summation, just get out of the house. Step away from the desk. Leave your office. Inspiration promises to finds us, one way or another.

I’m still here. I’ve learned a lot in the past year. But I’ll just hit five highlights:

1. Eleven lines are coming for us all. But in my world, they’ve brought their tent, smore-making supplies, solar panels and camped out directly between my eyebrows. I’ve contemplated Botox, sure. But then I think to myself, “Hmmm… that would be the same cost as a new garden bed.” Garden beds are probably always going to win. Instead I got bangs like Goldie Hawn. Goldie knows about hair.

2. My children grew a lot. I didn’t authorize this speed-growing, but I wasn’t consulted. Jane goes to dances and sings in a choir now. What happened? She was just licking subway poles and wearing tutus. Now she almost looks me in the eye when we stand side by side. Gabriel decided this was going to be the year he talked, much to all of our relief and excitement. It turns out he’s been storing up a lot to say about anything with wheels, any food he doesn’t care for, or when I take the wrong turn on a walk and he holds his arm out like an old fashioned turn signal and says, “No, mama, we go dat way.”

3. I got married in December. His name is Charley. This house is a happy house. This is where I was meant to be. Every single step I took in the past 20 years led me right here to this house, with these children, married to the kindest man I know. I would do it all over in a heartbeat, even the sad parts, the brutal parts, the heartbreaking parts. All of those parts brought me home.

4. Work taught me a lot of lessons. Like if you don’t walk, your pants stop fitting. It seems like something I should have just KNOWN, but when work requires you to be glued to your computer 60 hours a week, you stop walking. And your pants stop fitting. So now I walk. Seems simple right? I also confiscated the dining room and made it into an office. If I’m going to spend long hours in a room, I want to be inspired. I don’t care what anyone says about electric fireplaces, they are the new-build’s best hygge friend. Also, the wall light is crooked, and now I’m the kind of person who doesn’t care about that.

5. You CAN wallpaper textured walls. Opalhouse Peel and Stick from Target… highly recommend.

So that’s it. Well, not all of it, but the highlights.

I’ll be back.

It’s been a year since I’ve been here.

A lot has happened.

I bought a lot of books I still haven’t read.

I wrote articles here and here.

The kids grew up and said cute things. Gabriel calls himself “Geo” and Jane told me I could start a TicTok account because, and I’m quoting directly here, “It’s been around for a long time, so anyone can use it now. Even old people.”

I found a couple of gray hairs.

Birds roosted on the patio lights by the front porch and created a Jackson Pollok pattern on the sidewalk that I don’t feel right about cleaning.

I love owning this house even if it does have a flighty HVAC system.

Jane asked if I was around for the Spanish Flu Pandemic, and if so, what was it like.

She also asked me if I knew that Abraham Lincoln was born in February too (my birth month) and then asked if it was the same year I was born.

Before anyone thinks I’m irritated with my soul-burning 10 year old, I’m not. She says things with a pure honesty that I love, and also in a direct way that hearkens back to the take-no-prisoners spirit of Sophia Patrillo. God knows she’ll need that in life.

And it is my birthday month. I’m solidly in my 40’s now. My newest hobby is trying perfume samples and then yelling “this stink has become one with my skin.” I am older. I am grateful. I’ve discovered the joys of bourbon in tea. I’m still alive.

#winning

When I sat next to Angela on a flight from St. Louis to Newark, I knew something was up.

I knew, because Angela had been gone for nine years.

I had an aisle seat that late December night. I was two months pregnant, nauseous, exhausted, and traveling alone, so I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings. The plane took off, they dimmed the cabin lights, and I settled in to get some sleep. As I turned my head, I glimpsed the profile of a woman sitting next to me and my heart stuttered. The profile of the woman next to me was the exact, and I mean genetic spitting image, of my friend Angela. My Angela, who had died from cancer nine years before.

I sat in the dimmed lights, breathing deeply and trying to settle my heart rate back to an acceptable level. The woman was asleep, and it was dark, and everyone else was either asleep or reading, and I discovered that if I turned my head just so, I could gaze at her undetected to my heart’s content. And I did. I never took my eyes off her.

The slope of her nose, the set of her eyebrows on her forehead, the way her eyes were closed tightly and determinately. Her nose, her chin… they were all the same. I knew Angela’s face better than my own, especially when she was sleeping. Before she died, I spent hours with her while she slept in the hospital, and then at the end as she slept in her home while the cancer finally took her over. I remember trying to memorize her face during a small family viewing before they cremated her, knowing that I would never set eyes on her beautiful face again.

And yet, here I was.

Rationally I knew it was not Angela. But emotionally the hairs on my arms were standing up, and tears were streaming down my cheeks, and I felt in my soul that my friend was paying me a visit. I felt that somehow in the realm of the cosmos, heaven, behind the veil, or whatever other term one uses for “the next world” was stretched thin at that moment. It felt like she was with me, her warm, wise, take no prisoners, suffer no fools, spirit washed over me and I could feel her, while I gazed lovingly at a replica of her face.

I sat there, thousands of feet above the world’s surface, in the dimmed cabin of a jet airplane, and thought, “Something is up. Something is happening. This must mean something.”

I used to be a woman who looked for meaning in everything. I believed that we received visitors from the great beyond. I believed that a fluttering leaf from the sky that landed at my feet in the shape of a heart meant something wonderful, that God was messaging me. I believed that when I prayed “help” into the world, an ever-loving God heard me. I used to be that woman. But years of heartbreak, loss, disappointment had stripped much of that away.

And yet on that night, in that plane, looking at the face of my dead friend, I knew absolutely that something was up. I just didn’t know what it was. So, I decided to consider it a blessing, a hello and a how-are-you from a woman I had loved with all my heart. That I still loved. That I would always love. I reconsidered the beliefs I had lost, the idea that maybe I should once again look for signs.  And I sat in the dark of that airplane and gazed at a stranger’s face and felt love in my heart for my friend, and maybe for that divine power I doubted.

When the plane landed, the cabin lights flooded back on, causing me to squint and avert my gaze because I didn’t want the poor woman to wake up and think she had a strange stalker staring at her. But I couldn’t help it, and I glanced back at her again. And that’s when I saw the woman looked nothing like Angela. She took her hat off and she had short blond hair, nothing like Angela’s brunette waves. When not in profile, her features weren’t nearly as refined, her nose was blocky, her eyes blue instead of green. It was as if Angela had shape shifted away.

Instead of feeling baffled, I quietly smiled and gathered my purse and got ready to get off the plane. Angela had been to visit me. And then she had gone back to wherever she’d come from. I felt warm and loved, and so happy to have seen her again.

A few days later the baby inside me died. Well, actually, if the doctor’s calculations were correct, the baby had died inside me around the same time I was riding next to Angela on that airplane.

It felt like a practical joke, a New Year’s Eve “just kidding” moment inside the ER as the clock struck midnight and all the nurses cheered and wished each other a happy year, welcoming 2018, and my baby was dead inside my stomach. I laid on a narrow hospital bed, in my hospital gown and looked down at my stubby haired legs I hadn’t shaved in a few days because of the pregnancy nausea and exhaustion. It felt like a joke because just two weeks before, coincidentally on the anniversary of Angela’s death, we had gone to the doctor and listened to his little heartbeat. I had even visited her old blog and left her a comment about it. It felt like the right thing to do, letting her know. Had that called her to me? In my mind, my baby was a boy, and very stubborn. Despite lower than normal HCG levels, he continued to grow and develop. He was determined, I’d felt it. I called him The Little Engine That Could because I just knew he would make it.

But he didn’t.

On the anniversary of Angela’s death, we got good news of Little Engine’s heartbeat. A week later Angela rode beside me in the airplane. A week after that, I said goodbye to my baby. I sat in the ER, listening to the drunk revelers coming in with sprained ankles and joking about dancing on tables, and cried my eyes out. I cried in a way I had never cried before, and listened to sounds coming out of my mouth I’d never heard before, mournful inhuman sounds I didn’t know I was capable of making.

I laid there with my hairy legs and ass hanging out of a worn gown and cried my heart out. I cried because I was 37 and everything felt too dark, too late, too old. I cried because I missed my friend and the wise words she would have been able to give me. I cried because I loved that little life and its heartbeat inside me so much. To everyone else, I’d lost a pregnancy. But to me, I’d lost a baby I already knew and loved.

I feel certain that there was no coincidence in the tangled timing of Angela’s death anniversary, baby heartbeats, and ghosts on a plane. All those signs were enmeshed in a way that I cannot possibly detangle, and I still can’t. It all had to happen to remind me that there are some things we will never, ever, understand. I had to go through all of it to be standing where I am today, home again in Arkansas, living in a house that feels like a hug, with my two happy babies. And lately Angela has been waving hello at me again, this time in less dramatic, smaller, private ways. I believe that in this life, if we’re lucky, we get more than one soul mate, and she will always be one of mine.

I like to think of Angela in the next life, loving the three babies I lost, but especially The Little Engine That Could. If anyone could appreciate a stubborn little spirit, it would be Angela. Maybe that’s just a silly fantastical story in my mind, but it comforts me. If there was anyone who would love my babies, it is her.

Signs are everywhere, and I don’t think we’re really ever meant to decipher all of them. Instead, I think we’re meant to be comforted in the knowledge that this isn’t all there is, that there are bigger things happening behind the scenes, and that the ones we love never really leave us.