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The End of Lolliblog

The guiding principle of Lolliblog was a simple one: I resolved to pay attention. I would make it a daily habit to examine the shake-ups, missteps, what made me laugh, what made me cry. Paying attention has saved me from comfortable complacency. Paying attention has allowed for different perspectives and prepared me, like a surfer, to maintain balance while leaning into the inevitable shift.

Looking back, seeing the sweep whole rather than in parts made me understand why paying attention mattered. The terrain covering the loss of a dear friend to Alzheimer’s and my daughter’s breast cancer diagnosis is the same one I have traced loving my dog Charlie beyond reason and, within the past few weeks, finding out I’m going to be a grandparent.

Lolliblog gave me the chance to pay sustained attention, as well as truly appreciate the sum and its dizzying parts, on a near-daily basis. I am grateful to Tumblr for holding me, of my own free will, accountable.

Lolliblog may have come to an end, but my writing is very much ongoing, as you will see if you follow me on Substack at my new blog, Lollycosm. Here’s where you’ll find me: https://laurahurwitz.substack.com/

I hope you’ll join me.

To the Young Who Want to Die

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale. The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait: will wait a week: will wait through April. You do not have to die this certain day. Death will abide, will pamper your postponement. I assure you death will wait. Death has a lot of time. Death can attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; can meet you any moment. You need not die today. Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness. Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow. Graves grow no green that you can use. Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

By Gwendolyn Brooks

I just got this from Redfin. It’s the only photo of a two bedroom condo in Ventura, California for $350,000. They called it a “Home for You” (meaning me). Maybe they think I run a floor-cleaning service? Anyway, Redfin, this would never have happened on Zillow.

Cancellation Elation

I’m going to put it out there: some of my favorite things in the world are cancelled plans. Not plans cancelled by me, but those cancelled on me.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no misanthrope. I like people, and adore my friends. I am genuinely excited when making plans to do things with them. In the majority of cases, I want these plans to go without a hitch. I hate cancelling on other people and pretty much never make up an excuse. First, I feel intensely guilty about letting people down, and second, I worry that, like Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” I’ll get caught in my lie in a horribly humiliating way.

Plans cancelled by the other person are a different story. They are the social equivalent of an old-fashioned snow day. Even now, when my life revolves around laundry, walking the dog, and Googling whether it’s safe to eat certain foods past the expiration date, I love a cancellation.

It’s true. Even after I do all the prep, putting gas in the car and picking out a clean sweater, even as I am just about to head out the door, that last-minute text about a forgotten appointment or a check-engine light suddenly coming on appears on my phone and I am flooded with a mixture of elation and relief.

Does this make me a terrible person? I hope not. When I do out as planned, I almost always have fun. But there’s something about being let off the hook while being begged forgiveness of that feels like a win-win. I get to play both martyr and hero.

I know; this admission certainly doesn’t put in me a good light, but I consider it a public service. All of you who feel relieved when I cancel plans can feel free to keep your relief a happy secret, but just know you are not alone in occasionally hoping that, through no fault of your own, even the best-laid plans might get derailed, landing you on the couch watching Netflix in sweatpants.

I know. Heaven.

Sunday Scaries

I’d never heard the expression Sunday Scaries before Olivia, my son Micah’s girlfriend, mentioned it last week. It was news, though on a gut level I have known the Scaries for as long as I can remember.

Even when I was raising my own kids and school on Monday ushered in five days of comparative peace and quiet, an existential dread brought on as the weekend came to a close set in. On many Sundays of my life the Scaries would seem irrational, but they are inevitable as gravity. Every week, come Sunday, come apprehension.

As a child, Sunday Scaries would bubble up when I daydreamed during Sunday school. Even Sunday distractions, like The Wonderful World of Disney, one of the handful of TV shows my parents allowed me to watch, proved ineffective. Distractions are, well, distractions, and the Scaries would always circle back, like hungry coyotes around a wagon train.

I used to think I was alone in my misery every second half of Sunday, but finding out so many feel the same way that there’s a whimsical name for it makes me feel better. Sort of.

My guess is that this feeling combines separation anxiety with fear of the unknown, and it’s hardwired into most of us from childhood. We all crave safe haven, and life is unpredictable. That’s the human condition. Along with everyone, I’m currently undergoing the only known remedy for the Sunday Scaries: Monday

Spring Hopes

Yesterday, the grocery store was bedlam. Cars backed out of spaces with nary a glance in the rearview mirror, narrowly missing people on their way to grab grocery carts and careen down aisles the wrong way. Store employees eyes, furtive over their masks, looked glazed, shell-shocked. Our mundane suburban Stop and Shop was as grotesque Hieronymus Bosch might have conceived it, thronged with desperate masked bird-people single-focused on feeding themselves. Outside, here was a long, morose line of folks holding garbage bags crammed with bottles and cans to return. A bitter March wind whipped small whirlwinds of trash across the parking lot. Everywhere I looked, it was obvious that we’ve all had it. This plague year, winter was relentless, and we’ve dragged ourselves to the end of our collective endurance. Spring arrives today, and not a millisecond too soon. A lot is riding on this spring in particular. I wonder, can spring handle it?

Perhaps not. It’s a big ask, and it goes far beyond buds and birdsong. But history teaches us to fall for it every year, both gentle and otherwise. Spring is infectious, causes a fever, and this year, we hope not only to catch it, but pray for it to catch us.

Re-entry Resister

For lunch, I heat up pizza.

Orphans,

one veggie, one Margarita

shrouded in plastic, rescued from the dark backwoods of the freezer,

a surprise I can comfortably handle.

See,

I worry about what comes after

the low stakes Now,

where if I don’t return a text,

it’s okay. You don’t hate me, or you get over it.

At night

I stand in the yard and look at the sky.

It is the only vast unknowable I appreciate,

a suggestion, not mandate.

The firmament spins unaware of the

countdown to Earth’s grand re-opening

which, between you and me, I plan to skip.

My world, sweatpants-cozy; is the back of my hand.

The freezer harbors mystery enough.

My prayer: more found pizza.

My West Coast Dad

When Sam and I moved from the East Coast to the West, I missed my parents like crazy. Then, I got a job as an assistant in the Western Regional Office of the Association of Yale Alumni. Barbara, my boss, literally, on day one, became my combo closest friend, mentor, and West Coast mom. Her husband, Doug, was my West Coast dad. He was a law professor, academic, soft-spoken and quirkily brilliant. Politically, he identified as Socialist, yet instructed me and Sam to put our paltry savings in mutual funds and money markets. He loved history books, the stock market, and terrible lyrics to country songs. When Barbara and I signed up for yoga, he came along. Turns out, he could do a perfect headstand.

Forty years later, and Doug is dying. He is in hospice care, beset by twin demons: Alzheimer’s and cancer. Barbara made the agonizing but best decision to take out his feeding tube. He is mostly unconscious in a room at a care facility in Palo Alto, his favorite poster of Paris over his hospital bed and Joan Baez and Judy Collins playing on a CD player in the background. Barbara, as always, is there, too.

We Zoomed yesterday and I tried to hold it together when I said goodbye. He can’t talk, but he opened his mouth when I said his name before thanking him for 39 years of kindness, during which I watched him play sous chef to Barbara as they put together five-course meals from their teeny galley kitchen. There were trips to Yosemite with Doug behind the wheel, every bend in the road causing Barbara to put her hand on his shoulder and say, “Ease up, Douglas.”

Before Doug right now is the final bend in the road, and Barbara, contrary to her cautious nature, has let down the guard rails. No need to ease up, Douglas. Barbara is by your side; what I’m wishing for you, gentlest of men, is to go gentle.

Keeping the Ducks Happy

Nibbled to death by ducks. This is a phrase I first read in an essay by Joan Didion. Apparently her husband John told her that working for Life Magazine as a correspondent would be like getting nibbled to death by ducks.

That’s how I’m feeling about my job these days.

The ducks are not the students. Well, maybe the students who don’t their work or answer my plaintive emails, the duck being the nagging vacuum their non-compliance creates. The main ducks are the self-evaluative forms I’m required to fill out, the numerical grading system which has long struck me as absurd in a gifted arts program, the staff meetings that feel like they have nothing to do with anything that can possibly help or enlighten me, and the power games that go on in any corporate system staffed by humans.

I suspect the only folks who aren’t nibbled to death by ducks are those who live alone, off the grid, completely self-sufficient. That is, unless they have limited mobility and run into a team of actual ducks, who, from what I understand, can be quite aggressive.

I was filling out a rubric grid yesterday that was supposed to state what transferable life skills fiction writing would bolster and my first attempt, which included writing a cohesive narrative, was rejected as not something you’d need in real life, I finally settled on patience, tenacity, greater attention to detail, and how to offer constructive criticism. But even as I wrote this down it struck me that as both lame and requisite, like grasping at straws on command, which, now that I think about it, is like being, myself, a nibbling duck, only my heart’s not in it.

Anyway, my strategy is to keep the ducks in charge happy, acceding to their demands by tossing breadcrumbs from a safe distance. I mean, they just want to survive, right?

I get it. So do I.

The Nature of Lovingkindness

I was talking on the phone to my daughter Sarah in North Carolina. She told me she was coming up upon an elderly man was sitting in a wheelchair. I heard her say, “I like your hat. Did you go to Yale? I’m from New Haven.”

He said he didn’t know that it was a Yale hat; he’d always assumed it had something to do with the YMCA. They both laughed. Then he asked Sarah if she went to Yale.

“No, but I love New Haven, and I miss Connecticut every day,” Sarah told him.

The man kept talking. He’d recently lost his wife, and meeting Sarah was an incredible coincidence because he was about to move to Connecticut to be with family. It was a town near Hartford, and he was nervous about the move. “I’ve lived in North Carolina my whole life, and I’m afraid people won’t understand me with my accent.”

Sarah assured him that he spoke quite clearly and that he’ll love Connecticut, because people there are very kind and welcoming. Connecticut is beautiful, she told him, and the woods and hills in that part of the state are lovely.

“I’m Jim,” the man said, and asked her name. When she told him, his response was “Sarah, like in the Bible?” He said he felt so grateful to her. When he told her goodbye, he added, “I love you, Sarah.”

Sarah has that effect on people.

“Aw, Jim, I love you, too,” Sarah replied.

This is why Sarah has that effect on people.

“Sorry, that took longer than I thought it would,” Sarah said.

To which I would say, after the lump in my throat cleared, that it took as long as it took, which was exactly right. Lovingkindness isn’t bestowed, but sowed. Sarah has always understood this. Hearing their sweet interaction unfold was a gift. And as for overselling Connecticut, there’s no chance of that. Because of Sarah, Jim’s not only going to love it, he loves it already.

Unmute

At our monthly school Zoom, in the minute before the meeting started, a teacher I don’t really know began talking about how she worried she might be losing it. She laughed, her tone light, self-deprecating, but with an unmistakably earnest underpinning. I don’t know, she said, maybe it’s just me, but I can’t multi-task anymore. I was folding clothes and talking on the phone, but I had to stop because I couldn’t do both at once. It was like the stupid folding required all my attention. It’s so weird to me because I have always been the ultimate multi-tasker. But now, it’s like…and she trailed off.

The rest of us were automatically muted, per school Zoom protocol, so her decision to start talking required her to unmute herself, which took guts, or maybe desperation. Our principal, running the meeting, was also not muted, but she might as well have been because she said nothing. The rest of us sat- some, maybe, like me, wondering if we should unmute ourselves and respond empathetically- but there was nary a yes, I get it, me, too; I think we all feel like that some days. Instead, we formed a silent honeycomb of faces, noticeably relieved when the principal started talking about how we might view this pandemic time as an opportunity, rather than a stumbling block.

But, after seeing so clearly my fragile self in my confessional colleague’s shoes, trying to juggle activities that were never before mutually exclusive but realizing I lacked the emotional bandwidth, I couldn’t reframe the year as anything other than sucky.

The fact is, these days, I talk to myself. I talk to my dog. I didn’t used to, at least, not so much. Too often I am sad and lonely but I actively avoid people. My focus is moment to moment. I am chronically anxious. I get tired easily. I get nervous before I have to teach over Zoom. I have a beer every single night without fail that feels way more like a necessity than I want it to. Some mornings I wake up and the weight of my emotions is physical. It takes all the will I possess to haul my sorry ass out of bed. My body aches, because my spirit does.

I don’t even know if I have it in me to teach next year.

I wish I could go back in time and tell that unguarded teacher that I feel her. The times we crack through our reserve or fear to talk about our feelings should not be shuffled under perky, aspirational workplace initiatives, but examined in the rare offered moment. It takes an honest voice, heard and supported, to turn community-building from abstract to actual.

Compassionate humans of the world, unmute.

Into the Woods

My sister-in-law Amy is 13 years older than my husband, Sam, her brother; she’d moved out and gotten married before I arrived on the scene. She would come back to Connecticut for summer visits, which is when I first got to know her. She and her husband John lived in Detroit, where he taught philosophy. They had three kids and Amy made pottery as a side gig. She was cool, a voracious reader who watched controversial films, grew her own vegetables, appreciated modern art, and listened to jazz. She was petite, with jet brown hair past her waist and an explosive laugh. She was, is, a force.

Sometime after Sam and I got married, Amy and her family moved back to Connecticut, and we grew closer. Now, she lives less than a mile away in a facility that offers assisted living for seniors. It’s her second stop since leaving her house of over 30 years four months ago.

Amy’s life has had more than its share of loss. First, there was her sister Reva, to cancer, then, her brother Marty, also to cancer. Most devastating of all, her son Paul was killed in a car accident. Then, her husband John left with $200 dollars and the family car to run off with Amy’s two-decades-younger cousin, who he’d met at the family reunion that Amy organized and hosted the month before.

As many times as she was sunk, Amy, like her middle name, rose. Watching Amy surface again after each tragedy offered life-lessons in resilience. But these days, Amy’s brain is no match for losses, even micro ones. She loses the slips of papers where she’s written phone numbers, names, and reminders. She loses her glasses, her water bottle, apartment keys, and cell phone. Don’t even get me started on her television remote, or the passwords on her computer. She lost a sandal somewhere in her tiny studio last week and couldn’t find it for days. She makes appointments and shows up at the wrong time, off by not minutes or even hours, but days. Weeks.

That being said, the external minutiae that slip-slide away are nothing compared to the pathways steadily, inexorably ceded in her brain. Such is the nature of this beast.

This year, I’m spending time with Amy while she’s still Amy (not that she’s ever been still). She’ll continue to move toward whatever comes next, but not alone. I hate everything about this, but I love Amy. She will lose me, too, and I’ll be there for it.

Pet Peeved

As a dog owner, I walk my dog Charlie exactly five times over the course of the day. Three of the times it’s a short foray in the front yard so he can pee. Two other times, in the late morning and mid-afternoon, I take him on longer poop walks around the neighborhood.

These days, I am working from home, some portion of the time teaching over Zoom, and some other portion writing. Charlie’s walks are among the only breaks I take in my work, and, as such, are mostly all business, though I do enjoy getting out into the fresh air to clear my head while he sniffs around for a suitable defecation spot. Recently, though, we have been ambushed by people, also walking dogs, who, unlike me, want to turn things into a thing.

I can’t tell you how much I hate this.

It’s not that I’m unfriendly. It’s just that I want Charlie to poop, already, and people distract him. It’s also that as a writer, my head is full of musings that I don’t want disrupted by having to ask about your Shih Tzu. “Suzy, right? Sukie? Ah, Sukie, of course! She’s so sweet! Look, Charlie, Sukie! Awww, look, they like each other! Have a nice day!” It’s the worst.

I imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald stuck at home with his dog while trying to finish The Great Gatsby. I’m almost there, just one last sentence, he thinks, reaching for the leash. “So we beat on, boats against the current,” he starts. Now, for some swell dependent clause that embodies the theme of my brilliant American masterpiece… And he steps out and runs into Muffy Hanford and her standard poodle, Genevieve, so now the end of The Great Gatsby reads: “My, look at the time! We should be getting back.”

I have a chatty eccentric neighbor with a pit bull, and recently made the unfortunate acquaintance of another chatty eccentric neighbor with a border collie. I have taken to surveilling the street for them before stepping out with Charlie, but sometimes one or the other surprises me by just materializing around a corner. I try to wave cheerfully while dragging Charlie away. See, Charlie likes to socialize, and I get that, but I don’t, and he weighs 15 pounds, and I’m holding his leash.

I know, I’m a monster.

This isn’t a plea for sympathy, because clearly I don’t deserve it. It’s more of a complaint. All I want is to walk my dog in peace. I actually fantasize about moving to an isolated cabin in the woods so I can walk freely, without risk of running into a dumb conversation beside the one I’m having with Charlie, which I suppose is another problem altogether.

Et Tu, Cuomo?

Come on, Cuomo. You let a whole bunch of people down, and down hard. Take me. I was squarely in Camp Cuomo during the pandemic, you scrappy champion of New York duking it out in those daily briefings, railing against the scourge of Trump, but between fudging the nursing home death numbers and now, this…

Can you be a good civil servant and a liar? That’s a tough one. There are lies told for the greater good, I suppose, so maybe the answer is maybe. Can you be a good civil servant and a sexual predator? Easy. No. A big, whomping, bipartisan no.

Power. That’s what it’s all about. A horndog in a position of power is dangerously morally rudderless. “The heart wants what the heart wants,” to quote Emily Dickinson, as quoted by Woody Allen, the sexual predator/director I once worked with after landing a minor role (which was subsequently cut) in the film “Manhattan”. “Manhattan” is Allen’s poignant ode to New York and statutory rape, in which he typecast himself as Isaac, a twice-divorced 42-year-old comedy writer who is dating Tracy, a 17-year-old high school girl played by Mariel Hemingway. Is that fucked up? Yes. Why didn’t we see it as fucked up in 1979? Beats me. And also, while we’re on the subject, fuck you, Woody Allen.

Forgive me. I am furious, and I digress.

President, Governor, Movie Mogul, Acclaimed Director. The list is long, and each one can add Sexual Predator to their Wikipedia entries. They don’t get to leave untarnished legacies, because their dicks got in the way. Their victims, who have been harassed, abused, traumatized, careers derailed, will no longer be collateral damage while their predator’s stars keep ascending.

Which brings me to Andrew Cuomo, and this more measured conclusion, after 24 hours to cool down and reflect.

I read what Cuomo’s accusers have said, and the seduction playbook of the groomer in mentor’s clothing is just so horribly familiar. It’s triggering, and I think my outrage is commensurate with my own experiences and my disappointment in Cuomo himself. It’s clear that at the very least he’s got terrible judgment and it is likely that his transgressions go deeper.

Ultimately, I believe the accusers. I also believe the truth will out.

I have talked myself off the ledge, but Cuomo’s still on the hook. That’s a power shift that I can live with.

Et Tu, Cuomo?

Forgive me. I am furious, and I digress.

Which brings me to Andrew Cuomo, and this more measured conclusion, after 24 hours to cool down and reflect.

Ultimately, I believe the accusers. I also believe the truth will out.

I have talked myself off the ledge, but Cuomo’s still on the hook. That’s a power shift that I can live with.

The First Rule of Write Club

Writing students are sensitive souls. It goes with the territory, really, and it’s the main reason group workshopping an emerging writer’s work can feel daunting.

Running a writing workshop, which I do every week, requires guidelines. Together, our class established these at the beginning of the year. Among them: we value a supportive creative community. Comments should be affirming, constructive, and specific. Every member of class should speak to their writing peers as they would like to be spoken to.

This past week writer A, new to our school, workshopped her story, which I thought was quite good. I applauded the fact she’d made the unconventional choice to narrate it in the second person. Writer B, a confident and direct upperclassman, disagreed. She spoke out against using the second person in general and criticized the narrative itself. Writer B’s final comment was that Writer A should cut the entire second half of the story, because it contained nothing Writer B even remotely cared about.

This being Zoom, I noticed Writer A turn her camera off as I frantically tried to soften and walk things back. My urgent mission was to wrap things up on a positive note and move on. I wanted to get Writer A to a safe, positive distance.

The fact that it is three days later and something I’m still obsessing over makes me realize that teaching, when you care deeply about the students, is exhausting, and my role as a facilitator and amplifier of creative self-expression can be heaven, but it’s often hell.

You ask students to take risks, to reveal themselves in their work, but neither you nor they can control the reactions of others. You can circle back after the fact, as I did, but by then, the chariot of fire is out of the burning barn. And, in a setting where a writer is required to put their work/heart/soul under a public magnifying glass, while there may be set rules about being thoughtful and supportive, we’re talking human beings here, with free will and limited impulse control, so there’s no guarantee.

Damage control, I can do. Empathy, for sure. Saying that they should examine, rather than reject, their pain, and, while it’s still fresh, put it all down in writing. Spare nothing. Someday, it will serve them, when writing about embarrassment, or unkindness, or that time their spirit was crushed before picking themselves up and becoming a writer anyway.

The Last Taboo

“Nomadland” is a dignified, devastating film. At its center is Fern, a woman who takes to the road after the death of her husband and economic collapse of her hometown in Nevada.

Frances McDormand plays Fern, a woman in her mid-sixties. Fern is unvarnished, authentic, and McDormand plays her minus make-up or flattering camera angles. This un-gussied aspect of “Nomadland” was not only integral to the cinematic relaying of Fern’s story, it also gave me hope that it’s no longer box-office poison to show that female humans, if lucky, get old.

I’ll admit it; watching Nicole Kidman in “The Undoing” freaked me out. Scenes where she was afraid, or furious, or sad, or lovingly maternal, registered identically on her filled, frozen face. At the end of the movie, she jumps from a helicopter and runs across a bridge to save her son from imminent death, and even as she bobs and sprints, her slightly smiling expression doesn’t move. Her body looks like it’s topped by a small Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.

On the other hand, close-ups of McDormand’s unaltered creases felt like a road map of Fern’s story. There was no preening self-consciousness to pull me out of the constellation of Nomadland’s real people and real places, with McDormand as True North.

Getting old in America, especially for women, has long felt like a personal and commercial failing. We perceive- because of the vast machine built around fighting aging, because of how others perceive and, in turn, make us perceive ourselves- basically, that as we grow old, we become musty embarrassments.

Time changes us, whether we resist or allow it. Nomadland showed me that leaning into the change is not only badass but beautiful. Think about it. What part of the entire human experience would you choose to skip? Can you name one? I can’t. I’d rather spend every second immersed rather than ashore, futilely trying to hold back the tide.

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