The first short-lived peonies of spring begin as hot pink cups
for sunlight and bees,
for worker ants seeking nectar,
for rain water,
a lyric of early morning.
Now, on the windowsill, they have a second life:
they lower their crepe-wrinkled skirts around their thin stems,
and raise their fertile green necks, studded with yellow wands,
reaching.
They are ballerinas, a pas de trois, to spring music
that reaches even into the kitchen,
where they dance again.
There’s the rant. Then there’s the whine.
I gave up part-time whining a decade or two ago when I realized nobody was interested. I reassessed. Now when I need to whine, I say this: “I need to whine for three minutes. Is this OK with you?” Hearing “three minutes”, which seems reasonable – I mean, a person can put up with anything short of physical torture for three minutes – and whoever’s on the receiving end says, “Fine.” So I let loose. I’m respectful of the time.
I need to whine for three minutes.
I’m emboldened by an article in the Wall Street Journal. So, some background: I’m at the breakfast table this morning, I open the Review section, which I read first, just before the book review, the theatre review, and anything by Peggy Noonan, who is brilliant and reasoned, and I see a column by Sam Sacks. He’s reviewing Nell Freudenberger’s latest. Ho hum, I say to myself. I’ve already read a review of that book, and I’m no closer to buying (or reading) it now than I was then. There was something too smooth, too urbane, too circling, too meaninglessly psychological …. too too about her first book. I stopped reading halfway through. I was happy not to have paid good money for it. I couldn’t understand the hype around it.
I want what everyone wants. A good story. A good story.
Then! Sacks writes: “The absence of action is hardly unique to Ms. Freudenberger’s novel – indeed, it has become a virtual trademark of American literary fiction. Instead of contriving a forward-moving plot, novelists content themselves with embroidering on a premise; instead of dramatizing significant events, they layer psychological and atmospheric detail on mundane backdrops; instead of inhabiting scenes, they offer summary. Too often, the mandate on authors to make readers care about what happens next seems to speak only the genre fiction.”
I’m slapping my palm on the table, upsetting my husband, who’s focused on the editorials, and I’m saying, “Yes! YES!” I’m also saying to myself, “I knew that. Now, why didn’t I say it?”
So, here’s the whine: When is somebody who writes science fiction or fantasy or murder mysteries or spy thrillahs going to write a piece of “literary fiction”? I can read Don de Lillo and John le Carre and Elizabeth George and P. D. James only so many times before the pages fall out and the rubber bands dry to dust.
I want writers of American literary fiction to come down out of their heads and inhabit their bodies, that place where action and feeling arise. And that’s not the same thing as contemplating one’s own navel. I want to know more about the character than I know about the writer. I want a real narrative arc. Movement! And scenes I can enter.
I want what everyone wants. A good story. A good story.
See? Three minutes.
Photo credit: clarita
Every morning at 7:30, the red fox stops by our granite bird bath to take a sip.
This oasis, lying low in Siberian iris, we now keep scrubbed of bird droppings and filled for our discriminating friend. He sips carefully, his pointy nose finding the sweet spot, his tongue lapping, thin and quick. I move silently to the kitchen window to watch. I want to run my hand down his gray-red back, down to his white-tipped muff of a tail. His legs are thin. He walks with delicacy on small paws.
Before political correctness doomed Uncle Remus’s rich wisdom, I enjoyed his stories as a child –– right alongside Aesop’s Fables, Grimm’s fairy tales, and Greek myth. Brer Fox was my favorite character in Joel Chandler Harris’s Songs of the South. I suppose I identified with him – a loner, pondering, watching, a sometimes rascally fellow into an occasional schadenfreude. Even now, when I get stuck in my own “tar baby” messes, I remember my furry teacher, Brer Fox.
I imagine our fox feeling safe at our place. His route is predictable: up the hill from his den down in the field, a stop at the watering hole, a slow and graceful trot across the back yard, a clear preference for the steps through the perennial garden, up to a rocky outcropping where he pauses, listening, at a thicket of cactus. I imagine that he remembers the chipmunk he discovered there, pouncing and capturing it in an arching leap through air. I have learned that foxes hear low-frequency sound and that, perhaps, he heard the hapless little mammal with the racing stripes, burrowing, coming up for morning air. The fox’s wait was quiet, patient. No struggle about it.
Just a graceful in-the-moment watching, poised in a relaxed attention, natural to him, that holds him together.
Just a graceful in-the-moment watching, poised in a relaxed attention, natural to him, that holds him together, inside and outside. I remember thinking the lunge was cat-like.
“I said ‘Good mornin’,” Brer Rabbit said to the tar baby. Dressed in a hat, the tar baby looked to Brer Rabbit like a real person. Impatient and not one to be ignored, Brer Rabbit punched the tar baby with a left hook, then with a right, then with both feet. His struggles had landed him, stuck, in his own issues. Brer Fox, laughing like crazy, enjoyed the show from behind a bush.
Several weeks ago, we watched with fascination as our fox cornered a mouse and played with his catch for minutes, enjoying a game of volleyball, of sneak and toss, of cavort and hide, until his joyful game became his lunch. And we know that good feelings and a few light moments at table aid the digestion.
This morning, our fox rests on the garden steps in full sun, grooms himself patiently and works those pointy ears like rotating antennae. I stand at the sunroom windows, not moving, ten feet away from his small gray-red body, and look at him in wonder. He looks at me straight on. His ears come around when I move closer. He wraps his tail, white-tipped and muff-like, and rests there, confident.
Moments later, having had enough of me, he trots up the hill toward the vineyard, looking for something else to stick his nose into. His gait, so appropriate to his purpose, is unhurried. Inhabiting his small body, he knows what to do, and when, while my human day stretches out, over-planned and held together by a list.
And speaking of anger, check out Mardi Jo Link’s rant, “Rebecca vs. Mr. Wonderful”, in the fall/winter issue of Creative Nonfiction. It’s a fun read in a worthy journal.
Kali of the fierce nature
I’m not feeling lyric today. See my new category: Righteous Rants. Once in a while, I can be forgiven for having some fun with daily annoyances.
Once upon a time, I loved music around me. All kinds. Work with Verdi, create a new spreadsheet with the Stones, fold laundry with Rachmaninoff, plant a peony with Queen, prepare for a dinner party with Wagner, hang out with Whitney. That was then — Before the Assault of Piped-In Music. This is now.
I’m lying on the chiropractor’s couch, needles of energy pummel my lower back, ice packs hold me down, prone, and music blares from a speaker behind me. “I (something-something) sky / You (something-something) earth / Can’t get enough of your (something-something) … .” I picture the sound booth – girls screaming into a mic resembling a giant insect’s eye. I see the mixing room guys at the controls – “Hey, add some bells? and how ‘bout some Caribbean drums? and make that 2:4 time. More twang on the guitars. Fill the room, man.” I’m strapped down, imprisoned by somebody else’s assumption at 60+ db.
I’ve barely pushed my cart into the fresh produce section of Dave’s Marketplace when I notice that the music is louder than usual. Another screaming rocker. “Shake that thang / shake it for me, baby / come on and shake that thang / one more time / yeeaaahh.” Imprisoned again. I assume marketing studies show that we linger in grocery stores longer, buying more, if crooners and screamers accompany testing of cantaloupe, waiting at the deli for Boar’s Head. Do businesses actually buy this piped-in music rubbish?
I don’t know about you, but my appointments are as brief as I can manage. How many avocados can you squeeze? Do you really tarry at your ObGyn?
Go places with me. To that six-month checkup at the dentist. To that lunch at the new place on the East Side. To that annual trip to the mall for a new swimsuit. To that weekly visit to the bookstore, that daily workout at the gym. Anywhere.
Enough is enough.
What comes to mind in that fed-up moment is Sekhmet, the lion-headed Egyptian goddess with an attitude. And fierce Kali, the many-armed Hindu goddess with the scary face, the destroyer. Her tongue’s stuck out: patooie, she’s saying. Temper these outrageous ladies with a half-cup of good sense, timing, and compassion, and you’ve got yourself a good dose of right action.
Temper these outrageous ladies with a half-cup of good sense, timing, and compassion, and you’ve got yourself a good dose of right action.
I hear the door open. The chiropractor’s assistant enters the room to check on me, pinned down to the couch. “Could you turn the music off, please?” She laughs and complies. Somebody shuts up. Ah, silence …
I place a half pound of mesclun in the cart and walk over to Dave’s customer service desk – I know this woman; she’s a good sort – and ask if the music might be turned down. She cocks her head, listens, nods, smiles, and complies. The Mamas and the Papas take it down a notch. Ah, better…
“Excuse me,” I say to the dental assistant, “do you have a room with no music?” She smiles and turns a knob on the wall. Shania lowers to a reasonable nasal warble at nine in the morning.
“Excuse me,” I say to the waitress at the East Side bistro, “could you move us to a table that’s not right under the speaker?” She smiles and moves us, and five minutes later, I notice I can hear my thoughts and my friend’s story.
“Excuse me,” I say to the sales assistant who’s fetching yet another swimsuit. “This process is painful enough without the hardbody lyrics.” She laughs in agreement. She can’t do anything about the volume — I assume it’s brought to us by satellite — but we share the opinion that, in the words of Maggie Smith’s delicious crone in Gosford Park, “It’s a little more than background music.”
The franchise bookstore? The gym? Well, words fail me here. Take earplugs to Barnes & Noble, and run your three miles a day on a quiet neighborhood street. Leave your harnessed Sekhmet and Kali at home where they can await the next justified outrage. (TVs in waiting rooms? “Do not touch these controls!” warns a hand-written sign in one local doctor’s office. Sekhmet and Kali are getting their backs up already. But, hey, that’s for another day.)
Then I think of those other women. “Excuse me,” I’ve said to them. They’ve smiled or laughed in agreement. Strapped down too, denied the privilege of filtering for themselves. Inured.
Two clocks tick – a small antique clock in the dining room, a big ole grandfather clock in the library. The chickadees peep-peep-peep on the feeder. The turkey clucks by the stonewall. A male cardinal lets out a chirp that amounts to shouting in the bird world. And what I just heard was an uppity breeze in the pine grove.
Silence is hard won.
The 9:08 freight train clatters past the Kwik Way. I’m old enough to expect smoke when I see this much train. I park out front between two Ford pick-ups — one with a dog box, the other running tractor tires. Outside, the Chill & Grill propane tank sits on concrete, and in the newsbox, The State announces, above the masthead, that the Gamecock girls’ team lost to Stanford.
I’m here to buy my small (17-oz) cup of decaf with a squirt of sweet hazelnut creamer. For sale inside, also, are Bik lighters in yellow and red plastic, packets of single-dip snuff, Lays potato chips, and any kind of Barefoot wine you want. Vinyl-topped booths and tables are laid with fresh paper napkins, silverware, and glasses turned upside down. Ready. The place smells of fried sausage, fried eggs, and fried hash browns. I think about a smoky sausage biscuit with hot mustard, and only in this place. Old wants crash into new habits here — loose-coupled — and there’s a bumping around in my head, like the buffers of freight cars.
Old wants crash into new habits here — loose-coupled — and there’s a bumping around in my head, like the buffers of freight cars.
“Good morning,” everyone in the place says to me. I don’t know these people, but this doesn’t matter to them. This is White Rock, South Carolina, and if you don’t know everybody, you should. I’ve been here only a week and the red-aproned woman behind the Henny Penny fryer knows to ring me up for $2.30. Even numbers — for customer convenience, she tells me. You do the math. That’s 13.5 cents an ounce. Down here, Starbucks is viewed as a rip-off. And I’m feeling more conservative myself just being here.
I’m dressed. When I say dressed, I mean nice slacks (that means no jeans), a nice blouse, a nice sweater, nice shoes, and nice jewelry, not too matchy-matchy, but stuff I never wear in New England. The azalea, Bradford pear, and dogwood bring out the nice in everyone. I wonder if I should be making arrangements to live here full time myself. The air itself smells flowery, leafy. Nice.
I pay for my coffee, agree to “have a good one,” and head back to my car, a 1999 Honda Accord on loan from my nephew’s wife who’s said she won’t hear of me renting a car for ten days. Three big, friendly men stand on the sidewalk in short-sleeved shirts, smoking. They’re talking about how good the fishing on Lake Murray might have been at dawn — stripers, they’re guessing — after that cats-and-dogs thunda-busta we had yesterday. The air is clear of pollen, washed off cars and into gutters, and warm with just a touch of morning chill.
“Good morning,” they all say, and pull their cigarettes out of my way, as if in apology. Cigarette smoke reminds me of home, and I don’t mind it here. In New England, I’d have a few words for people who smoke on the street, huddled against their gray office buildings in their black coats and boots. Memory is tricky. There’s wispy emotion in it, curling up and around, like what’s left when a flame’s gone out and the hot, red wick remains for a second or two, and we can’t look away.
Today’s Sunday, and just across the street, the parking lot of Bethel Lutheran Church is half full. Early services on the Fourth Sunday after Lent. Purple cloth drapes from a cross near the street. This is church country, and the big-congregation Baptists and Methodists know that Easter’s coming. Choirs are assembling, and candles smoke on altars up and down Old Lexington Highway. The vegetable stand kitty-cornered to the church — Jonah Stukes Fresh Vegetables, a sign says — seems abandoned. On Wednesday, he had early tomatoes and peanuts boiling on a smoker. Later in the summer, he’ll have native corn and peaches and beans, and his daughter will play, barefooted and snarly haired, so close to the red signal light at the intersection that my back will ache. Another sign says We Buy Old Cars.
The train has rattled on up the single track. In daylight the Southern Coastal Railroad races through these parts, stopping traffic in all directions, rushing from Columbia, moving on up the line to Chapin, to Greenville, northwest of here, sometimes with three engines pulling sixty cars. There’s nothing old about these cars, red and yellow and green. I counted them last summer as we drove alongside on the way to Fat Buddy’s for fried chicken and cole slaw. Jeans are OK at Fat Buddy’s, and a blue T-shirt I bought last year says I’ve been there and that I like the place well enough to advertise. ”What’s Fat Buddy’s?” folks in New England ask, and I remember waiting for chicken, fried to order while we drank a pitcher of Corona. Thirty minutes. Nobody’s in a hurry.
The trains that split White Rock in half three times a day are all about business and what counts for bustle in these parts. Shock absorbing buffers cushion the cars, holding each undamaged by another along a rough track. The whistle is heard as a warning; the flashing red light and the black-and-white poles put a hold on the present moment, a temporary wait on moving too fast into tomorrow. At night when I’m awake in the dark, I hear the mournful whistle of the 3:15 to Simpsonville and Greenville. There’s regret in it, and a call, and imagined smoke, trailing.
photo credit: PhillWatson
Outside the window, the first songbird of spring after the winter that wasn’t. A cardinal by its sharp call — the first one on the feeder, the birdbath, the fir, even before the robins, who are late. The word is out: hustle.
There will be straw collecting, mate selecting, nest building, bark tapping, worm and grub hunting, gatherings at the bird feeders, territory protecting, and quick sex. The windows are open for the first time since October. The pine grove awakens and shushes in the breeze, like an inland breath.
… surf taking and retreating along the packed beach … that’s the planet’s true ijawi breath …
There’s been no winter. The deer didn’t eat the rhododendrons and, hey, I wore my new (fake) fur coat only four times — both of these situations are of equal importance to me — and this spring’s not so much a relief as an expected occurence. But it’s sweet enough. My last year’s summer clothes still hang in my closet. I’m not sure what to make of this.
I begin to think about the Outer Banks. I may turn my head to hear the wind in the pine grove — that shushing, whispering, and awakening — but surf taking and retreating along the packed beach of a barrier island, grounded in the broad Atlantic basic? Well, that’s the planet’s true ijawi breath.
The brown pelicans know this in their light bodies. Watch them.
The game closet, yesterday. I was rummaging through it, looking for something, when I found a small piece of a jigsaw puzzle in a corner. Stem green with a purple edge, one side a ninety-degree angle, the rest of it like fingers flung out. A cornered amoeba.
I do not like jigsaw puzzles. They crop up everywhere in my life, as if the universe continues to send me not what I want, but what it thinks I need to see … until I see it. I suppose, then, the universe will be sending me jigsaw puzzles forever. Because I won’t do them.
Take, for example, the jigsaw puzzles for the beach house. Prior to our family trek to the Outer Banks each summer, all puzzles are dragged out of the game closet, unpacked, spread out, picked over, dismissed or chosen, repacked carefully, talked about in the car for 500 miles, removed from the car first, set up on a card table, and fussed over. The year we forgot the card table, we used the dining room table for the puzzles and ate on our laps. Ketchup was difficult.
“Coming down to the beach?” I say to four family members. It’s 10:00 – beach time – and I’m at the door, greased up, hat on head, beach bag packed with the day’s supply of books, pens, and notebooks. Four heads bend over a puzzle.
“Looking for this piece,” one of them says to another, pointing to a hole.
“Try this one.” Murmurs.
“No, I need a ninety-degree angle. Green. With a little purple showing.”
“Y’all coming?” I say.
“Found a different one!” my husband shouts, and applause breaks out. He looks at me as if to say I’m not a team player. I know this.
I go down to the beach alone, schlepping my chair, umbrella, bag of books, and frustration.
Now, take the jigsaw puzzles at The Heritage, my mother’s retirement community. Rummaging through closets in the club room, the Puzzle Queen of South Carolina discovered 179 boxes of puzzles, dragged them out, shouted “Come on, y’all” to everyone in her building, and thus founded The Heritage Jigsaw Puzzle Club, going strong for three years now. Puzzles are fussed over and discussed as if they are intractable children. She has told me three times that The Puzzle Club has completed 53 puzzles. This is not from short-term memory loss.
“Let’s walk down to the club room and see what’s happening with the puzzle,” my mother says to me. I’m visiting her for two weeks, and we’ve just finished three loads of laundry and a chocolate treat.
“I’m not into puzzles,” I say. “You go.”
“But I want us to do stuff together while you’re here.”
I’d rather read Pam Houston’s latest book. “OK, OK,” I say.
I sit down at the card table in the club room. Three other elders are there, intent on the puzzle of the week. Hot air balloons. The workers murmur, eye one another, poke through puzzle pieces, try one, then another, ease pieces into right places, and snap them into place to a chorus of exclamation. I look down at the tiny pieces, all similar in shape, size, and my interest in them.
“Why don’t you like jigsaw puzzles?” my mother says.
“No idea.”
“Puzzles keep you young. They work your brain.” She’s ninety-six.
“My brain’s just fine.”
“Epiphany happens outside language,” we are told.
“They help you understand how the small things fit so you can figure out the big picture,” she says. “You know. Puzzles are like life.”
“Mama, you know I don’t believe that.”
Opinions on the subject rip across the faces of my mother’s friends, but no one offers support for either side.
“You should think about it.” Heads nod. She finds a piece that fits, lets out a whoop, and applause breaks out around the table.
My brother sits with Mama and me in her living room. I’m go back to reading reading Pam Houston. She spreads dissimilar fragments of her life around with her pen, sees some odd relationship among the pieces, some quirky theme; the pieces don’t fit together and she doesn’t force them and she doesn’t tell us every little thing. But I know somebody is present. We are left to infer. “Epiphany happens outside language,” we are told. My yellow highlighter and ballpoint are poised over the page – How does she do this?
My brother and I are sitting with Mama in her apartment. I am reading. They are working a crossword puzzle, another family activity I’m not good at. Or don’t have the patience for.
“Can’t get this last word,” my brother says. “Eight letters — begins with M — means ‘Vacancy on the top floor’?” His pencil is tapping, his leg is pumping, he’s leaning toward Mama whose brow is furrowed over the coverless Webster’s she uses for her crossword puzzles. It’s almost as old as she is.
“Mindless,” I say without looking up.
They jump as if they’ve been shot from off-planet. My mother says it fits, my brother says it’s perfect, and the Sunday crossword is completed.
Words I can do. Words are not a game. I remember what Mark Twain said about words. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between a lightning bug and a lightning strike.”
It’s 11:00 by the time my husband arrives on the beach with his chair and his own books. I hold his red beach cup of tea with lemon, no sugar while he sets up for the day.
“I don’t feel deprived because I don’t like jigsaw puzzles,” I say. ”And I’d rather write.”
“The puzzle’s missing one piece,” he tells me, frustrated.
I backed out of the game closet, pulled the dust bunnies off the green and purple puzzle piece, and took it downstairs. I put it where he’d see it. When he came home, he said something like, “Finally we’ll see the big picture!”
“What do you do?”
We’re all asked this question, and back in the day, I had the required response. Dressed in a dark suit, silk blouse, designer scarf, and black pumps, I’d drop the name of one of the best independent schools in New England, and my fellow party-goer, comforted that his (or her) time was not being wasted by a nobody, would smile and introduce a topic worthy of five minutes of small talk.
Asked now, the question takes some serious pondering and emotion management.
“I write,” I say.
“What do you write?”
Now, bear with me. I have choices and I’ve tried them all. I’ve said, “I write nonfiction,” but that brings on the next question, “About what?” which is always asked with that teetering hope that I write about the little inns of Provence or windsurfing off Hatteras. Here’s where you learn first hand that people are comfortable when they’re impressed – “Oh, how interesting,” they get to say – and they’re fidgety when they’re disappointed.
“I write about the ordinary, the everyday.”
He (or she) takes a sip of red or white wine, fidgets, and imagines stories about juggling for bin space for the perfectly packed carry-on or the ramekins of choice for molten chocolate cakes with mint sauce. Here, I might put in “It’s called creative nonfiction” — that ought to do it — which is designed to have the same effect as the name of that New England prep school. Instead, this gets an “Oh?” which forces me to consider my last bullet. “Or some would call it personal essay. Or a new kind of memoir.” Either lodged in the listeners’ eyes or loosed freely out of their mouths is inevitably this: “What have you done that’s so interesting?” At this moment, I find it impossible to like these people.
I come back with a useless and evasive, “There’s some really good creative nonfiction out there. Written by folks you’ve probably never heard of.” It’s the best I can do to brace myself for the next question, the nuclear option, “Have you published anything?”
How will I know when I’m a writer?
Here’s what I’ve been told by the generous: Writers write. By that measure, I’ve been a happy dabbler all my life, a serious writer for five years. I liked the derring-do feeling when I wrote “Writer” on my tax form. Why would the IRS care, I figured. The drones will ask to see my MacBookPro?
And here’s what I’ve read: Writers work at their craft – with others and alone – and they read. Check and check. I am one serious, disciplined warrior.
I am one serious, disciplined warrior.
There’s more: Writers perfect a story, then submit. It doesn’t matter that journals, magazines, and little presses reject 97.031% of the stories they receive. Count me in. Recently, hesitantly, carefully, I’ve submitted two stories to a half dozen or more journals and magazines, determined that 2012 will be the year I publish something, somewhere.
But wait: Writers see one story accepted for every 75 submitted, which means I have 72 rejection letters to go. I have four. In my imagination, they speak of some logical sequence, like a stairway to success, the object being to get that piece of paper. Proof. I have these reject emails filed by date; my Excel spreadsheet lists dates and comments. I’m a tracker. A list maker. An analyst.
One rejection letter was the usual boilerplate, the ubiquitous “Thanks, but this isn’t for us.” I’m clearly not a writer. Not really.
The next seemed delightfully personal, “This one’s not for us, but we’d like to see more of your stories.” It was here that I began to believe, like the day before my (then) future husband popped the question, and I was waiting, expectant, knowing “wife” was real when the piece of paper said so.
The most recent rejection letter was one step away from certainty: “While this one’s not for us, all our editors read your story. We love the texture and the way it circles and circles. A unique voice. Please send us more stories.” Almost there. I am 18 again, taking that extra bow to a packed house after my turn, en pointe. Soloist, the program said, printed on thick paper.
This year, I’m going to open an email, and I’m going to read this: “We would like to include your story in the next issue of our journal.” A fourteen-word sentence, and I’m a writer to somebody other than myself, blessed by the god of writers.
“What do you do?”
“I’m a writer.”
“What do you write?”
“Creative nonfiction.”
“About what?”
“Oh, the ordinary, the everyday.”
“Are you published?”
“Yes.”
photo credit: Guilane Nachez
Every six months or so I want a dog. I think of this returning wish as a chronic disease, like malaria. I punch up “Rescue Shih Tzus” on my MacBook and page down through what’s available. I get to choose what area, how old, what color, how much, and when available. Like shopping online for the right lamp.
I found an adorable Shih Tzu nearby. Male. Seven years old. Alfalfa colored. Black eyes, looking at the camera as eight-month-old babies look at the world — as if they just arrived from the other side of the moon.
“Here,” I say, “look at this one. Isn’t he adorable?”
I don’t expect an answer. He doesn’t want a dog. We’ve had this conversation many times, and we’ve debated all the reasons. Vacations, the rugs, early morning and late night potty walks, and our frequent commutes to Boston, our long days there. All valid reasons why not. I allow MacBook to sleep, and the chronic disease begins to subside.
After the evening news, Nature brings us a preview of an upcoming documentary, “Ocean Giants.” There in deep water in a photographer’s lense is a mother whale and her tiny baby, just born.
“Look at that,” I say. “Isn’t it adorable?”
“We’re not getting one,” he says.