30 Days of Gratitude Challenge, Day 3: Homemade

For the first time in seven months, I put on a dress last month. Curled my hair—makeup, too. I even wore heels.

I did it for a funeral.

The easiest answer to the question “who died?” is that he was an old family friend. The longer answer is the better story though.

(It almost always is.)

You know the people in your life who are immovable fixtures? The ones who’ve been there from the beginning—not necessarily front and center, like your family, but early on something in you recognized something kindred in them.

That’s who Mr. Doug was.

I’m a poor fit for most people. Too sarcastic and salty and direct for some. Too reserved and cautious for others.

Mr. Doug wasn’t the only person who ever made me feel completely okay when operating at my factory default settings, but he was the first. He was a little gruff and opinionated sometimes, but so am I. He was also softer than he seemed … and so am I. He could dish out a good round of teasing, but his eyes really lit up when you were able to volley back.

There are few things in life I love more than a good verbal volley.

We also shared a love of homemade baked goods. He brought me a cinnamon swirl coffee cake when my grandmother died. I made him a chocolate meringue pie (his granddaughter’s recipe) on his birthday.

We exchanged handwritten thank you notes for the baked goods.

When I heard he was dying, I was sad for his family, whom I’ve loved like my own my whole life. I was sad for my grandfather, who was losing his best friend of 60 years.

But it took me days to be sad for me, and when it finally hit, I crumpled with a sob.

He was one of the ones who lets me be all the things I am.

The weekend before Mr. Doug passed, it was my grandfather’s 88th birthday. I had made a chocolate meringue pie for the celebration, and my granddad said he would take a leftover slice to Mr. Doug the next day.

At the funeral visitation a week later, I hugged Mr. Doug’s daughter and told her how sorry I was for her family’s loss and how much I would miss him.

“He was able to enjoy a bite of your pie,” she told me. “It made him smile.”

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This post was inspired by Callie Feyen’s 30 Days of Grateful Writing Challenge. Learn more here.

30 Days of Gratitude Challenge, Day 2: A Mistake

“Take the kayak out,” she said. “It’s a one seater, but you’ll both definitely fit.”

She was mistaken. Two grown women definitely do not fit in a one-seat blow up kayak. But we rowed around the little lagoon of the AirBnB anyway, playing Katy Perry on a waterproof iPhone, soaked from the waist down and laughing our heads off the whole time.

It was a disaster from start to finish, and it ended up being one of the best moments in my last eight months.

In summary:

• things that are a mistake: expecting to stay dry when you exceed the seating capacity of a kayak.

• things that are not: flying across the country for time spent carving a few more laugh lines with a good friend in golden light.

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This post was inspired by Callie Feyen’s 30 Days of Grateful Writing Challenge. Learn more here.

Maybe I'm Not Okay Today

I cried the other night during an episode of Schitt’s Creek. If you’ve never seen the show, just know it’s objectively unsad. Subjectively hilarious. A show we—my husband and I—specifically selected to start watching because it’s funny and light and distracting and basically perfect for a time such as this. Yet there I sat, in bed at 10:30 on a Thursday night with tears rolling down my cheeks and a lump in my throat because David was awkwardly sweet and kind to his boss’ stepdaughter.

That’s when I realized, huh, maybe I’m not okay today.

For 3/4ths of you, this probably seems baffling—that a person could literally have tears rolling down her cheeks as the first sign that something is amiss in the emotions department. But some of you know exactly what I mean. You know what it is to stuff down, to pivot, to give a wide berth to your feelings because we have things to do today and crying isn’t one of them. The yawn of the emotional abyss is too threatening—feeling anything seems like a gateway to feeling everything, so we’ll feel nothing, please and thank you.

One question though: How’s that working for you in 2020? 

I’ll answer for myself and say not great. Oh, don’t get me wrong—I’m still pretty good at sidestepping my emotions. That’s what 37 years of practice will do for a girl. But things are … amiss. Like the fact that I’m not sleeping. I have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep and basically the whole sleep situation is not really a thing right now. I’m exercising and vitamining and drinking a little more water with no increase in REM hours, so I’m beginning to suspect The Feelings are to blame. 

As we’ve already discussed, I’m prone to inexplicable crying mid sitcom. I’m also snapping at my family when they don’t like the dinner I serve them, my weekly cocktail is now more like daily-ish, and sometimes I leave the house as soon as my husband gets home from work, drive my car to an empty parking lot, and just sit there, in the quiet, until I get a text letting me know the kids are in bed and the coast is clear.

I’m not an expert in human behavior, but I think maybe these things mean that I’m not entirely okay. And if I’m not okay, and we’re all living different versions of the same hellish year, then it seems like there’s a chance you’re not okay either?

We don’t have to talk about it, of course. If there’s one thing I’m sick to death of in 2020 it’s effing talking about it. We could never ever talk about it again, and that would be too soon. So just, I don’t know, blink twice or something if you’re not okay either.

Assuming you’ve blinked, we could sit shoulder to metaphorical shoulder. We could turn on a better crying conduit than Schitt’s Creek (I like Queer Eye or Steel Magnolias or Little Women, personally, but I’m open to suggestions). And—here’s where I get a little crazy—we could feel something. 

Not the whole of it, of course—God, could anyone handle the whole of it right now? But for the space of a makeover or the minutes in the graveyard with M’Lynn and Ouiser or the moment when Jo wonders if she made a horrible mistake by saying no to Laurie and now she’s going to be alone forever … we feel it, just a little. We let a few tears roll down our cheeks, and we don’t swallow the sob right away. It’s too much, too dangerous, too open-ended to be sad for us but to be sad for them? We can be a little sad for them. 

So we sit, you and I. And I know you’re crying and you know I’m crying, but we don’t have to talk about it. The knowing is enough. 

Because maybe I’m not okay today, and maybe you aren’t either. But I see you. And you see me. For all that I feel that I can’t name or know, there’s one emotion I note by its absence.

I don’t feel lonely. And that’s because I have you.

On Books and Friendship

This is a picture from one of my favorite days ever, with some of my favorite women ever. But I wanna talk for just a second about that beautiful brunette on my right (your left) for a second.

That's Callie Feyen. She's on the writing team with me over at Coffee + Crumbs, which is how I met her and came to take this picture with her at the book launch party last April. Callie has taught me more about writing in the 18 months I've known her (like really known her, not just Internet-stalked-her-essays known her) than I learned in my previous 33 years combined. Why? Well, because she's a flatout brilliant storyteller and you learn how to do it by, I dunno, osmosis or something, when you spend time with her and soak up her words. But also, because she's a teacher through and through. Middle schoolers are her special gift (bless her) but she can't NOT teach. It's in her, and it spills out without even trying.

When I was working on a particularly hard essay last spring—hard because it was honest and vulnerable and costing me everything to work with the words—I knew I needed help. I also knew that help had to come from Callie. She came in with practical advice (like changing up the intro and ending on a bit of a cliffhanger) but it was also like therapy in a way, because of how she pushed me to just sit with the words and the feelings they brought me, to sift through and figure out the parts I wanted to hold onto and the ones I wanted to let go of. I am really proud of how that essay turned out, but I'm even prouder of the work in my heart it wrought, and that was all Callie.

Today is a big day. Callie has a written a book, The Teacher Diaries: Romeo & Juliet, and it's book launch day. If you like brilliant storytelling, you need to buy Callie's book. It's part memoir, part creative-non-fiction, and part masterclass in how to teach Romeo & Juliet to middle schoolers. She weaves the three together seamlessly and her way with words is ... impressive. I got to read the first two chapters last week, and let's just say I had to order it with one-day shipping from Amazon so I can read the rest of it as soon as possible.

I'm so proud of my friend.