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Gratitude for appliances

A few weeks ago, I noticed freezer burn on our frozen fruit. I chalked it up to someone (else!) not closing the freezer door properly.

The next day there was still freezer burn. Maybe it doesn’t go away that fast?

The next day there was still freezer burn. And I went to cook meat, and there was something slightly suspicious about it—the color looked wrong. But not that wrong. I was probably just seeing things.

And then A. decided the vent was probably clogged, so he vacuumed it out. And realized our decently full fridge had become… a large cooler. That was rapidly becoming less cool.

We spent a couple of days fridgeless.

Fridge-free, you ask?

No. There was nothing freeing about it.

We are lucky to have three coolers. Actual coolers, not “fridge temporarily cooler; sorry-for-the-convenience” coolers. (Except maybe for the one that doesn’t truly close. We should probably get rid of that one.) We went to the store four times over the next two and a half days, stocking and restocking ice to fill those coolers, gradually (and then not so gradually) disposing of things that we ate or that went bad.

I hate throwing food away.

And to minimize throwing food away, I spent more time than usual preparing exactly the right amount of food for that day. Because there was no place to keep leftovers.

Which made me really, really appreciate refrigerators.

Are they the most important appliance in our home? It sucks to have a dishwasher break down, but you can always wash by hand. It sucks to have a stove break down, but many of us have a microwave, a toaster oven, a grill, or even a camping stove to use if push comes to shove. But lose a fridge for a few hours and you lose so. Much. Food. Go without a fridge and you have to shop daily and spend so much time making just the right amount of food.

I know that in some places people do shop for fresh produce just about daily.

I’m also glad I don’t have to.

I’m grateful for our appliances. They all make life easier. But especially, extra-specially, for the refrigerator.

What’s a surprising thing you’re grateful for? Something we maybe normally don’t normally consider too deeply? I’m curious. Leave a comment and share below.

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The good kind of anxiety

This weekend, we invited a handful of friends to join us at the park.

Found a date and time that worked for everyone. Picked a location. Arrived early to claim it.

Sourced food, in quantities designed to avoid—at all costs—the mortification of serving too little.

(Not everyone suffers from this genre of mortification. A few years ago, we were invited to a potluck-ish dinner chez some lively, warm people who didn’t think it concerning—or even odd—that every presented dish was consumed in full, didn’t offer more than an additional morsel to a still-hungry guest, and saved half the prepared main course for their own eating the next day. Greater mental well-being? Less waste? Perhaps. But entirely foreign to me.)

We grilled food, trying to avoid the mortification of (a) undercooking and making the guests sick, (b) overcooking and having them politely attempt to chew (or discard) the food, (c) cooking too little—or too slowly—and having them feel hungry, or (d) cooking too much and having to stand in the sun for longer than necessary. Which leads to sunburn rather than mortification, but: similar pigmentation issues.

And it all worked out.

The weather cooperated. The food sufficed (and will continue to suffice for the coming week. Oops). The phones were only out for an occasional photo.

We planned on being together from 10-1. Everyone stayed well into the afternoon.

It was relaxed and fun and a wonderful change of pace from not spending many full days at the park with friends recently.

A little bit of anxiety before and partway through?

Well.

What a treat to feel anxious about trying to make an already positive experience better.

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Rules of sleeping arrangements

One early morning, A. gets up to use the bathroom. I decide to do some yoga.

I’m stretching on the rug in our room when he returns and gets back in bed.

On my side.

Look, I am truly grateful to share my life with my partner, but sharing a sleeping space? Always struck me as a little dubious. I’m a light sleeper, and if my partner is stressed, moving around, unable to relax—I’m awake.

Which sucks. Because my body doesn’t wake me up in the middle of the night. And because I have trouble going back to sleep when something does wake me up.

But I persevere for the snuggles.

I digress.

The point is: even with the body warmth (or cool extremities, if you ask A.), there are a lot of discomforts that come with sharing a sleeping space. So there’s compromise. There are rules you have to follow to not infringe on someone else’s space any more than necessary. (That single set of sheets that is somehow supposed to be enough for two people, for an entire night? Not designed by a relationship therapist.)

There. Are. Rules.

Rules like not moving around more than absolutely necessary if you’re the only one awake. Rules like, if you’re up late trying to reach the end of Reddit, not bounding into bed in the small hours of the night so your light-sleeping partner jars awake and stares at the ceiling for the rest of the night. (A. is pretty good with this rule.) And rules like keeping to your side of the bed.

My side has my pillow (in its case, thankyouverymuch). My side has my alarm clock. It has my pretty neat nightstand.* And it’s on my side. So if I go to sleep late, or by chance do have to get up in the middle of the night, or wake up early to do yoga and then want to return to bed, I know where to go. I don’t have to worry about sitting on another human and hurting both of us/sliding off.

Unless someone else isn’t following the rules.

* I leave my mess elsewhere. Like in the drawer of the nightstand. And on the dresser. And elsewhere. Did I say I was easy to live with?

What are your sacred rules of engagement? Leave a comment and share them below.

I’m very, very curious about what triggers your inner type A.

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On trusting someone else to tell you how you’re doing

It’s been four years since A. was diagnosed with cancer, and there’s something I’ve never quite understood.

When A.‘s doctors told him they detected a malignant growth in his lymph tissue, there was a single sign visible to him (and me) that anything was wrong: what looked like a bouncy ball from a dentist’s vending machine, lodged under the skin of his thigh.

He didn’t feel off.

He wasn’t in pain.

Any difficulties he had, physically or emotionally, were easily attributable to something else.

Sure, he double-checked the diagnosis with a well-known medical center. And locally, as soon as his hematologist looked at him, she noted (out loud) “tumor-induced weight loss”—something we see in photos when we look back, but that must have developed gradually: it was not at all obvious to us at the time.

Still, he went ahead with treatment. With months of pain and nausea and weakness and some close calls. (It’s never a good thing when the doctors can’t figure out the source of your fever when you have no immune system.) He subjected his body and mind to a variety of torture. Voluntarily.

All on what? Some lab results? Some charts that showed things he couldn’t feel or truly see on himself? Photos claiming to capture what was happening under his skin?

Look, I was there. I was physically in the room for a nontrivial fraction of these things. I took it seriously. But it wasn’t my body that was being diagnosed, so I had to rely on these scans and blood tests. But did A.?

I’m thinking about all this because this summer I got a medical diagnosis of my very own. (You get a diagnosis, and you get a diagnosis!) It’s considered eminently solvable and therefore not serious.

Don’t worry, please.

And I do have symptoms. I mean, I think? I can tell something isn’t quite right.

But is gulping down the medication(s) these blood tests entail—daily, for the next 16,790 days of my life (knock on wood)—in proportion with the symptoms I’m dealing with? Are MyChart results with an exclamation mark next to them enough to go on? I have to take the doctor’s word that my labs are (a) mine and (b) accurate, that if I don’t do anything it’ll eventually cause my heart to stutter and stop before its expiration date, but only after all my nerves undress and juggle with fire.

I have to believe a person my age who wears a white coat and has a goofy sense of humor, who sees me usually once a year and only knows about me what I choose to tell her.

And my blood test results.

Or so she claims.

Which is probably why so many people mess up things like birth control and don’t get vaccinated and keep up bad habits, from poor sleep (umm…) to poor diet and exercise. It’s hard to trust what you can’t see.

What I’m saying is: I get it.

How can you believe life can be better if it’s always been like this? If it changed so gradually (or so obscurely, under layers of normal-feeling skin and muscle and fat and bones, under what feels like a functioning brain) that you didn’t even notice how you got here? If you don’t remember what anything else was like? Or if you’ve internalized that, when you’re old enough, things are supposed to stop working the way they used to?

It must be hard to convince people to change their beliefs about themselves and the world, let alone their behavior.

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Wisdom from the Sage of the Water Store

What is a water store?

My friend’s feeling icky and flu-ish and the only thing she wants help with is refilling her 5-gallon water jugs.

So I discover there’s a thing called a water store. (Which my text editor is marking as a grammatical error. Does that mean it’s not linked to my GPS? I thought you all talk to each other.)

After seventeen questions more than appropriate for a place with exactly three types of spouts to choose from (the bottle washer, the normal water spout, and something that remains mysterious, even after all those questions), I lug two very full water bottles onto a cart retired from a respectable career transporting AV equipment across the local middle school, and I approach the register.

The cashier is a man with hair. So much hair. Hair down to below his chest, hair worn loose and curly, hair that is gray with some black and white mixed in.

“What are you up to?” he says.

“Just trying to help a friend. What are you up to?”

Perched on a stool, he tilts up his chin, considering.

“Drinking water,” he says.

“Eating pumpkin seeds,” he continues. And then:

“Taking it one gallon at a time.”

Do we care—or even notice—if someone says they’re taking it “one day at a time?”

But if, instead, we think about what a day means to us and talk about that?

Then, we form a bond with other people. We plant our words and ideas in their heads. We have a chance to affect how they think feel, and act.

Or maybe we just give them a two-minute anecdote to share with a handful of other people. (Hi!)

As for me? I’m trying to take it one early bedtime at a time. Or, well… starting tomorrow.

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600 what, Missouri?

I was waiting at a light the other morning when three women cycled by, and I overheard them.

“In some county in Missouri, they’re at 600 a day.”

Cyclist zooming by

600 smiles at strangers in the streets to make someone’s day?

600 meals donated to keep the community nourished?

600 foster animals adopted to promote companionship and care for living beings?

600 hours of collective exercise to make the county happier, stronger, more resilient?

600 bedtime stories told to help families comfort and connect with each other?

600 new instruments picked up to add another dimension of beauty to life?

600 plants acquired to clean the air and foster calm at home and at the office?

Or perhaps it’s something else. Perhaps it’s the same thing everyone’s talking about, has been talking about, for a year and a half now.

But isn’t it nice to imagine otherwise?

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Meeting people where they are

I’m 18, taking a community college class in linear algebra. The mechanics are taught impressively well. I understand what to do… but I don’t understand why.

So one day, I raise my hand. “Can you tell us what linear algebra is for? Who uses it? What does it let them do?”

The professor responds. “We don’t deal with applications in this class.”

I never figure out if this professor really thinks students shouldn’t need the answer or if the question catches her off guard, but it makes me wonder. Why not give your students a reason to learn besides degree requirements and GPA? Why not take the opportunity to facilitate learning rather than memorization?

And why not respond to a direct question that has such a clear answer? Because it turns out linear algebra has a lot of applications.

I do well enough in the class, but the only thing I remember is this contrast: how well she teaches the material, and how poorly she justifies why we should learn it.

A few months later, it’s my first winter in college. I’m on a university-organized trip to Italy taking an economics course, condensed into three weeks, on the history of the euro.

Today, I remember how the cities we visited looked. I remember how they felt to me. I remember the texture and taste of some of the food we ate. I remember the weather and several historical sites we visited.

What I don’t remember? Is almost any of the academic material. Folks, it. Was. Dry.

Of what I was supposed to be learning on this course, I remember only two things, both of which made an immediate impression.

One is another student’s presentation on the liveliness (to put it mildly) of Italian politics. My own presentation: Not Memorable.

The second is this:

A professor from the major university nearby joins us for a few days to speak about Italy’s transition to the euro. She speaks seriously, at length. I struggle to understand what she’s talking about. Even now, I can picture her walking and talking, but I don’t know what she’s saying.

Until I ask her a question. “How did the transition to the euro affect you?”

Unlike the linear algebra professor, she answers.

There were two exchange rates from lira to euro, she says. One for salaries, another for prices. In a short time, the income she and her husband make was effectively cut in half.

She describes being unable to buy her daughter an ice cream in the street. This professional, well-put together person, this careful speaker, begins to cry.

And suddenly, all the material we’re supposed to be learning is real. It matters. It affects the day to day life of this person before us.

Nearly two decades later, I remember.

One of the hardest things about communicating with people is meeting them where they are, understanding what they need, what they care about. And then giving them that.

Has there been a time when someone did a particularly good (or terrible) job of meeting you where you were? I’d love to read about it—please share the story in a comment below.

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Late December back… before…

Last weekend, we video-chatted with friends. Let’s call them the Es.

We visited them on a road trip in late 2019, just before Christmas.

The day we met up with the Es, we made our way over to their place after visiting another friend at work, swinging by a store, and eating falafel outdoors among a bunch of strangers. At the Es’ place, we met their family members, who were visiting from two different states.

That day.

When we talked to the Es and remembered all that, we collectively cringed. What were we thinking? All those droplets, in close quarters. All that contamination. What were they thinking, letting us into their home?

Here’s hoping we can be okay with that level of contamination again soon.

Wishing you all health and sanity. Functioning utilities. A vaccine in your arm. Land that stays where you left it. Crops that can ripen and be reaped. Rain, but not too much. Weather that’s mild by local standards. A general absence of plagues. And protection against whatever other disasters I haven’t considered.

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I’ll have the mint chip with a side of normality

“See the espresso with Nutella?” says the woman behind me to the man next to her.

“I was just looking at that!” I say.

They share that they are in town for Valentine’s Day, visiting from the next county over. That they’re staying in a hotel downtown, and that checking in took an hour and a half because of all the holiday weekend visitors. That those visitors all have masks and some have gloves, everyone doing what they need to do to feel comfortable. That today is this couple’s first time in this gelato shop.

And in this age of distance and masks and even less eye contact than usual, when half the people I pass while running don’t raise their gazes enough to see whether I’m waving or nodding or smiling at them (and I’ve checked: people do notice when you smile with your eyes), even this exchange feels monumental.

As does the gelato.

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