I'd Be Running Up That Road, Be Running Up That Hill. . . .

While napping yesterday afternoon, I dreamed that while talking with Mom in her kitchen, I mentioned missing being able to write letters to Grammy and how I always ache when I see pink things in the stores that look like something she'd love.  "You can write to her or send her anything you want," Mom responded, clearly puzzled.  "She loves hearing from you." It didn't feel at all like a dream, our interaction and the setting were so realistic.  I goggled at her a few moments before telling her I didn't understand.  What was wrong with Mom neurologically now, I wondered, just as I would in real life, that she didn't remember that her own mother has died?  She looked back at me with what was probably an expression identical to mine until I finally explained, "Mom--Grammy died.  Or. . .I thought she died. . . ?"  She looked both pained to hear me say that and relieved to understand finally why I had been so baffled.  I spelled out for her that I had thought--wrongly, it was turning out--that Grammy had died last January, we had all gone to her service in New York, and I had even spoken at it.  I told her I could share more details but that I didn't want to hurt her.  She said, sounding just how she would in real life, that it hurt her more to find out that I had thought Grammy had been gone going on two years and that I hadn't been in touch with her in all that time.  None of it even happened, I realized, a thrill of horror and gratitude sweeping over me:  Grammy is still alive!  Sommer's cousin isn't on a ventilator post-Covid!  Stuffed is still here with us!  Mikes' mom didn't have a stroke!  It was all a dream!  All the other losses of 2020 and 2021 were just bad dreams!  I started to cry from the incredible relief of it, and I woke up then for real, and really in tears.  Mom called a couple hours later to tell me that one of my cousins has a brain tumor.  January 2020-onward:  And so it goes. 

I pray and rest and appreciate beauty and keep in touch and listen to music and walk and work and cook good food and try to write and try to read, but life has felt more rough-patch-ish than not for so very long now--and for so many of us.  I told Mike the other day that although I don't feel like I can focus enough to write very well the past couple years and can't concentrate long enough to read as voraciously as I did before either, I need to keep trying.  It will be creativity that saves me this time, just as it has so many times before.  Bear with me, then, as I try to find the words to tell the stories.  It's been a long hard slog that has almost muted me, but I will keep trying.  

I will keep trying. 

October Saturday

'A high of 64° today, just cool enough, and just warm enough.  Blouse with a scarf, no jacket needed, but sunshine, windows open, and fresh air.  Lunch out with Mr. Mike and then to the movies to watch Joaquin Phoenix's brilliant performance in Joker.  Heart of leaves on the way home.  A postcard mailed to Mom and Dad.  Chili-cooking and baseball playoffs-watching tonight. Harry Potter series-rereading (now midway through book 5).  Stuffed asleep on the patchwork chair.  A night off!  Home!  ♥

Photo-Heavy, Heart-Heavy

Nightmares plague me in my sleep, one after the other, and despite the walks, the vitamins, the distraction of work, the talks with Mike, the donations made, the healthy meals, the frosting-covered treats, the focus on kindness and beauty, the books read, the magazines curled up with, and the visit home to family, the days continue to be hard too.  In many dreams since the 27th, I am being chased and am running for my life.  In one, I was hiding with Stuffed in a closet from a violent man who had just cut someone's hand off in front of me before I had escaped, and Stuffed and I were waiting it out until I thought he had given up on hunting us and we could climb out a window and run farther from him.  In another, I handed a small gift-box to a friend at work, and it was only when she hesitated to take it from me that I realized that she was Jewish and was afraid I was tricking her by handing her a box that contained a bomb.  Then the dream changed and I knew there was, indeed, a bomb inside and that we were in danger.  In one dream I didn't remember more of upon waking, Mike had told me that we would be okay but would need to stick together and be careful.  In one last night, I was standing on the boardwalk in my beloved Ocean City when I suddenly knew that the stranger beside me had it in for me and I needed to leave, and to leave quickly. . . .Knowing there are so many out there who have lived actual nightmares and mourned real losses of friends and family these past two weeks only makes me sadder.  

The day I caught the bus home to visit my parents and brothers, I walked out of the apartment only to find a news crew filming an interview a few steps from my front door:  One of the victims' funerals was being held across the street that afternoon.  (I had known that but hadn't expected to see news cameras in my front yard.)  The first time I visited the synagogue to leave my flowers, a newswoman who said she was from Denmark asked me how I was doing and a few other questions, and I awkwardly made my way for home soon after, uncomfortable talking at all, let alone while her partner filmed.  Maybe in awhile, when the news is paying less attention to this little part of the world--and being realistic, that will be when the next big gun violence story "steals" the spotlight--that will help some, I don't know.  A peace rally to honor the victims will be held this Friday, and I plan to attend, and maybe that will help some too, and again, I don't know.  It sounds like something that might feel like a step forward.  I have a growing list of letters to write--the mayor is on that list--and gestures of gratitude and recognition to pass along--the local police and the nearest funeral home are two on that list--and maybe getting those things done will help some, as well.  I want to give, give, give but feel fairly depleted these days.  

This is my favorite season, but the juxtaposition of the memorials and police tape with the stunning foliage and (all the flowers and) fall light has made the past two weeks even more jarring.   Relatedly, it has been mentioned over and over again that the site of the shooting was also quite literally the real "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," since Fred Rogers lived just three blocks away.  On the afternoon of September 11th, 2011, a fellow teacher and I were driving home together since our classes had been dismissed early, and while we listened to the news on the car radio and talked some along the way, all I remember of the commute home was how brilliantly blue the sky was.   And now when I remember the shooting and these weeks that followed it, I will remember how the morning I took my roses to the synagogue was the prettiest morning I'd seen yet that fall and how striking the fall colors were that year.  This is just life, of course.  And it goes on, as the saying goes. 

♥

And End of October

Six hours after beginning to write this, I remain stymied by it.  Mike's mom called Saturday morning to ask if we were okay.  Mike was still in bed when she called so had no idea what she meant.  Had we both been up and ready to go out to breakfast an hour sooner, we would have been on the street of the synagogue shooting while it was happening.  This is our Saturday routine.  The synagogue's street is one I regularly do my long walks on so has been pictured in many of my "out on my walks" posts here over the years.  It is where I take almost all of my fall leaves photos.  It intersects with my beloved cobblestone hill, aka The City Street We'd Love to Live on Someday.  Our Dunkin' Donuts is two blocks away from the synagogue.  The theater where we just watched A Star Is Born is also nearby.  (A surreal sight is the movie theater, drugstore, public library, and ice cream place in the background of news coverage of a neighborhood vigil.)  The yard of the little stone ranch house across from it is planted every summer by what seems like a million dollars' worth of rainbow-hued flowers.  (Another surreal sight has been that of a CNN anchor reporting in front of it.)  The survivors of the shooting were taken to the same hospital where Mike's dad died a few years ago.  Some of the victims' funerals were held across the street from our apartment.  Coworkers and neighbors have more direct connections to the synagogue and are suffering more significant losses than these this week, of course.  For us all, this hits home.  I took my little gingham ribbon-wrapped bouquet of orange roses to the synagogue this morning, to honor this neighborhood, its first responders, the lives changed in it, and the lives lost in it. 

One coworker took her kindergartner twins shopping Saturday afternoon and was asked by one if someone would shoot at them while they were out.  Another coworker reported that her own synagogue was protected by officers in two strategically-parked police cars Saturday. . . .How many other cities have been through all this before, of course--the sidewalk memorials, the news coverage, the outrage, the questioning, the seeing-one's-own-town-in-and-on-the-news, the traffic detours, the funeral-after-funeral-after-funeral, the "victims identified" horror, the "victims' stories" sadness, the President's visit, the calls for donations, the announcements of blood drives, the defiant t-shirt slogans and signs, the city-wide vow to come back from it even better. . . .We are far from the first to go through this.  I lived in Baltimore, an hour from D.C., during the September 11th attacks and had lived in New York City the September before, and the heaviness felt here this week brings back the memories of that time.  It is our turn here now.  I don't understand hatred.  And I see this week that I don't understand it any better now than I did seventeen autumns ago. 

Meanwhile, it was a perfect fall morning here, with all the sunshine making the trees glow.  

The leaves are beginning to change color, and the sidewalks are every day taking on more of that scattered-jewels look I love. 

My sweet cobblestone hill is coming into its fall glory-- 

--even though police tape and memorial stars now line one end of it. 

This beauty and these signs of solidarity have to be my focus this week, though.  Forget the police tape, Val.  All the kindnesses will carry us.  A Boston hospital had a huge pastry order delivered to a local hospital this weekend with a note that read "We stand with you. . .Stay strong."  A neighborhood collection was taken up to have a bunch of pizzas delivered to the local police and fire stations located three blocks from the synagogue.  Local museums and attractions have offered free admission for families this past week.  "Need a friend or a shoulder?" our breakfast spot's sidewalk placard read by Saturday afternoon, I later learned.  "Coffee is on us today."  May I collect goodness and do my own part to spread it, all my days. 

God, make me brave for life: oh, braver than this.
Let me straighten after pain, as a tree straightens after the rain,
Shining and lovely again. . .

God, make me brave, life brings such blinding things.
Help me to keep my sight; help me to see aright
That out of doubt comes light.

-Author unknown, from Prayers for Healing, edited by Maggie Oman

♥