Tiny Commotions

I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I wake up at 3 at 4. Sometimes unprovoked, sometimes when the neighbors across the street turn on their floodlight and my bedroom windows glow silver behind the curtains, crosshatched with the veiny limbs of the tree in the front yard. I rarely try to will myself back to sleep. Instead, I rise and read or write until I drift off again. I pet Walter, who snores or purrs […]

My social media is a blur of memes and reading lists, of heartfelt pleas to listen, to amplify, to defund, to abolish. I watch friends get in fights with their relatives, their neighbors, a friend of a friend in a comment section on Instagram. Most of the time those relatives don’t say the really awful, overt stuff—though the Nazis and the Confederate Flag wavers and whatever unctuous post-post-modern fusion of has been enjoying a bit […]

I had a hard time getting up this morning. I read the news in bed, so I could have the option of turning over and crying into my pillow, should the mood take me. I didn’t. Maybe I’m cried out, dried out, not so much toughened up as turned brittle by Events. Maybe I’m too far up on the knife age between fury and despair to wring out any weeping. My life is okay, but […]

Over the last few days, one county, thirty-five miles and about 180 degrees removed, politically, from the overeducated, progressive oasis where I make my home, about 4000 mostly-unmasked white people descended upon a local track to socialize, crowd into the stands, and watch car races on a national holiday to commemorate war dead, hours before COVID-19 neared its 100,000th (reported) American life since, roughly, March. The smiling race fans, many of whom in a high […]

A woman I know once told me that when she was young, lonely, and broke, she would venture out to the nearest box store—a K-Mart, perhaps, in those days—take a cart from the dispenser by the front door, and wander each aisle after aisle, filling the metal basket with anything and everything that caught her fancy. Dishes, housewares, games, toys, art supplies, dresses, jewelry bedding, candy, whatever. Sometimes by the time she reached the far […]

True confession. Everyday I get up and hear about everyone’s elaborate pandemic baking and their fancy home-prepared meals. And though I’ve done a little both, honestly I’ve gotten a lot of takeout over the last twelve weeks. Like, a lot of takeout. Like from all of my favorite local restaurants. Like multiple days of the week. And what I want to tell you is that takeout is awesome. And it’s oftentimes more cost-effective than cooking […]

A few days back, as I walked from the Co-Op to the car on a well-masked and socially distanced grocery run, I was approached by a similarly masked, middle aged white lady the parking lot. She waved me down and I turned, fearing I’d dropped something or left something in the store. I couldn’t read her expression , but she waved and, though her mask, mentioned that she’d seen me in the store shopping and […]