On a Four-Heart Day Off

As I was sitting down on my lunch-break earlier today with my oatmeal, Honeycrisp apple, almonds, prunes, cinnamon- almond butter, and walnuts--apple slices spread with cinnamon-almond butter then dipped into crushed walnuts is my latest addition to my lunches:  They're like a taste of healthy apple pie, so good--a bit of almond butter on my napkin appeared in the shape of a heart.  Maybe it is silly how much these found hearts delight me, but how could I not be charmed!  "There are only two ways to live your life," Einstein reminds us.  "One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as though everything is a miracle."  Indeed.  Each heart finds me saying, "Ah!  Hello, God!" and in this case:  "Thank You for the moment, thank You for this food, thank You that I have a job at all, thank You that it's a job that offers work I love and health insurance and good people, and thank You that I'm off the next few days."  It was a draining work-week, and the tiny almond butter heart reminded me to take a deep breath and regroup. 

As I finally reached my apartment building after work:  A heart on the front stoop's cement. 

Another heart, this one a bit of paper resting on the stairs' carpet, seconds later as I climbed the three flights up to my door. 

And then, in my kitchen, a heart-shaped raspberry.  ♥  And so began my desperately-needed stretch of days off today.  Truly, how could I not be (grateful and) charmed?!  

All the Way from Scratch

Monday's "Frank and Ernest" comic hit the spot and made me cackle. In an email yesterday, one of my aunts described herself as not being able to get out of her own way lately, and I thought, "You too?! That's it exactly." I often feel like God is bemusedly watching me and thinking, You know, you have everything you need, if you could just figure that out and get it together. That's likely the way it is for all of us, but I am feeling it pretty acutely lately.

In one example, I have completely blown off running since May's half marathon but decided to get back to it last week and ran a 5K over the weekend. Run-walk-run-walk-jog for ten seconds and walk again-run-walk-walk-walk. . . . I saw Mike waiting for me around the halfway point and berated him for not having thought to bring his phone to take a picture, since I was actually RUNNING that part of the race talked with him for a minute, and his first words were, "Are you the last one?" Apparently, he couldn't see any runners behind me. Correction, now that I know the race results: Apparently, there was only one runner behind me--I came in next-to-last in a race of 700-some people. And that's what I get for gaining back the weight I'd lost and taking off six months from running. (Don't call it a comeback. . . !)  This is when I join God in shaking my head and saying, Why didn't you just keep up with it?! Why must you always make things so hard for yourself? And I don't know, but I hope I at least get credit for trying and always coming back for more. Sigh.

The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. ~ Eden Philpotts

Before being hired for the position I've had the past six months, I spent two and a half years working as a cook. Although I love to cook and bake, the job was not my dream job, and although I knew I was still working toward my goals and doing the best I could, there were days it was all just maddeningly frustrating. Since it takes awhile to realize a pattern is, in fact, a pattern, I don't remember when I first started noticing this, but at some point, I began seeing hearts at work: Heart-shaped soap splashes by the kitchen sink's, one heart-shaped potato chip on the edge of the deep fryer while the rest of the chips had made it into the fry-baskets, a heart-shaped spill of maraschino cherry juice. My supervisor would call out from the walk-in freezer that a container of gravy had been knocked off of the shelf and would I please clean it up, and I would be greeted by a heart-shaped gravy spill before me. I would bend down to pull a red onion from their box and find instead a heart-shaped piece of Romaine lettuce on the floor in front of me. The other cook would bump his hand into my cup and my iced tea would slosh onto the table in a heart-shaped puddle. The daily sweeping and mopping of the restaurant would almost always find me reaching for my cell phone to take a quick picture of the heart-crumb or stain that was suddenly stubbornly stuck to the floor. If one of the hundreds of red potatoes was heart-shaped, it would be I and not the other cook on my shift who would blindly grab it from the bin. 

These moments sound like stretches of the imagination, but they happened so frequently, and only at work, and even then, only when I wasn't expecting them. If I looked down at the counter in deliberate search for anything heart-shaped before beginning to make a waffle for someone, I wouldn't see a thing, but two minutes later when the waffle iron would beep, I'd start to scrape the baked-on batter from around the iron's edges only to find that some had already baked into a perfect heart. I'm sure I was Cliff Claven-ish enough to show my coworkers the heart-shaped potato and chip, but I didn't tell anyone at work just how often this happened to me.



 
I began to believe at some point that all these hearts were not "just" hearts. Granted, they were not visions of saints in toast, but as crazy as it may sound to others--and as it did to Mike when I'd mention over supper that day's latest heart-discoveries--the hearts began to feel like signs to me. All those days working in a restaurant kitchen when I ached to be somewhere else doing something else, just when I thought I'd flip out and scream, I'd be "tagged" again and a heart-shaped bacon-piece would be left over on a guest's plate like a calling card from the universe and bring me some small comfort. It is silly and a bit sad, really, the things that help get us through the hard times, but whatever works, I say. Maybe the hearts were signs and maybe they weren't, but eventually I decided that every time I found one from then on, I'd take a deep breath, thank God that I had a job at all, and recommit to the goals of hanging in there and being patient while working toward something else.
 
What ended up being two and a half years passed, as time always does, and last May, the phone call requesting an interview for my current position finally came. Call me crazy, and point out that I reaaaaaaaally could have used some time off, but I take my magic where I can find it and am grateful for it when I do. I haven't noticed any hearts--edible, spilled, or otherwise--in ages. I found them when I needed them, and I am thankful.

His Eye Is on the Sparrow

I was living in New York City as a first-time grad student in the fall of 2000. It was a discouraging semester, and times only got tougher as the weeks went on. On the way back to my apartment one afternoon, I decided to pop into a sandwich shop for a takeout lunch. I can’t remember now why I (ever) chose that place. It consisted of the counter and a narrow galley space with an exit at either end, it was always raucous and jam-packed with people pushing their way toward the counter and then to the exit, and I always emerged from it feeling annoyed and disheveled, like I’d just survived a skirmish. It was close to my apartment, though, and on some days, maybe that was enough.

That afternoon, after minutes of being pushed and shoved to the middle of the shop where the counter was, I was suddenly stopped by a huge black man in a business suit. He was built like a linebacker and was easily 6’8”. How I hadn’t noticed him in this crush of people was beyond me. I’m 5’2," and to be approached by anyone in this city of strangers was so unexpected, I could only stare.

Not put off by my mute staring, The Linebacker in a Business Suit bent his head down toward me and smiled. ”I just want to tell you it’ll be okay.”

“What?”

He kept smiling and nodded as if to acknowledge that he understood my startled and rude response to him. “I know things are hard right now,” he told me, “but it’s going to be okay.”

Before I could reply, I got jostled by the hordes of students packed around me. When I looked up—maybe two seconds later--he was gone. The man who had been standing at least a foot above the head of even the next-tallest person in this tiny space was nowhere to be seen. That familiar tingly feeling that always marks these kinds of moments for me was already setting in, but I maneuvered myself enough to turn around and look for him anyway. When the place was that crowded, even a paper-thin man would have had to push his way through the mobs of students and book bags-thrown-over-shoulders for a full minute before finally reaching one of the two doors at either end of the shop. The man was just gone.

When I got back to my apartment and shared the story with my roommate, she shivered and crowed, “You have the weirdest experiences!” And I do, I suppose, but I had walked away from The Lunch-Hour Skirmish Sandwich Shop that afternoon believing all the more something I’ve really needed to hold on to ever since: The Universe is aware of Little Old Me and is sending me a sign here. I believe in holding on to hope, I don’t think we’re ever alone or unloved, no matter how lonely or unlovable we may feel, and I trust that the Universe is always somehow aware of us as we plod our way through it. It's going to be okay.

Luck in Your Own Backyard

Three things have occupied my thoughts lately:  I'll soon be thirty, the latest stage of my life to feel like "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" seems to be passing, and I miss my grandparents.

The framed four-leaf clover in the drawing above is my rendition of the real one that has a place here on my desk. I look at it every day and think about luck and its place in my life. My grandfather used to search his backyard for four-leaf clovers for me. He would sit at the base of his thinking tree and study the grass until he spotted one. There was always a lucky clover from Papa being pressed in a book, waiting for me to claim upon my next visit. I would take each one home and carefully tape it into my Bible, the only place that seemed right for such a collection. When I had a falling-out with God while in college, I threw out the Bible--and seemingly, all the good luck it contained. If my thirties see fewer moments of such reckless stupidity than my twenties did, we should all be glad.

I have gotten through the six years without my grandparents, of course, but I can't help but think that they all would have been easier had my grandparents been here for them. When I returned home from a failed grad school venture, it was Papa's spin on the events that most helped me. "A nice girl like you, you move to a big city and they treat you like that! But you tried! People who don't make mistakes don't make anything." He died four months later, so I never got to hear his take on any of the many twists and turns that followed. I never got to ask him what he thought of luck or if he considered himself lucky. He and his family had come to America from northern Italy when he was a boy--"America! Where the streets are paved in gold!"--and his mother died a few years later. He was always sure after that that he, too, would die young. A decade later, he and my grandmother met, somehow strangers to each other in a mining village of a few hundred people. Early in their marriage, Papa contracted Black Lung and was told to put his affairs in order and make arrangements for his family. He lived to almost-90 and celebrated more than six decades of marriage. As Joe says in Force of Evil, "You can't tell about your life 'til you're all through living it." By 2001, Papa had lived long enough to know that he never could have guessed how his life would unfold or what the "better or worse" that he had vowed to be there for would actually entail. Six years and countless highs and lows later, when I think of Papa and his lucky clovers, I ache to tell him that--even if the collection is gone--I'm beginning to get it.

After Papa died, I flipped through the pages of a book I'd taken from his and Grandma's house and found a four-leaf clover pressed inside. I promptly framed it and set it next to my favorite photo of us and promised not to be as careless as before. Maybe that wasn't necessary. Maybe luck, like love, never really leaves us. But still and all, maybe Papa knew that his granddaughter would sometimes need to be reminded that, regardless of what life held for her, she would always be one of the luckiest people in the world.