Dead Letter Department #106

status report

All of last week felt like clawing up a steep, crumbling slope. I did my stupid yoga (That counts, my friend said, when I described laying disconsolately on the floor for 15 minutes before she arrived for our work date), worked on my draft, eked out one transcription after another at the side job, managed to respond to most text messages, if not in the timely fashion to which I would like my friends to become accustomed.

I even ate vegetables, lots of them, for the third week in a row. Last Sunday night, after I watched Kendrick skewer the nation & Drake during the halftime show, I caramelized a pile of kim chi in gochujang & butter, made a sauce, browned chicken, and dumped in a pile of leeks, mushrooms, shallot, & baby bok choy, all of which I layered over couscous & a bed of arugula, which made an impressively grown-up dinner for four nights in a row.

I repeated the Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote that I ran across recently to myself—What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it—& then felt ridiculous that I was using it for things like making dinner & getting out of bed in the morning. It helped anyway, a little.

My windowsill spider vanished—or was driven away, rather. When I looked one morning, it was huddled in one corner of the web, and a slightly smaller, brighter colored spider was wrapped around the fly the original web-spinner had so diligently captured, presumably sucking the last nutrition out of it, but the next day both spiders were gone. I haven’t yet convinced myself to clear the web away, even though I don’t think its coming back, & the web is growing increasingly dusty.

Two bald eagles have been hunting in the neighborhood—I just glimpsed one now. I don’t remember if they were here last winter, if this is a seasonal visit, now that some of the trees in the park and the long green strip of the creek’s run down to the bay have dropped their leaves, giving them a wider view of whatever small prey might be ambling about.

At least the cold snap is over, & I can stop running the taps & worrying about pipes freezing.

I took yesterday off—the side gig would have been totally dead, for the federal holiday, & I had felt for several weekends in a row like I really needed an extra day tagged on at the end of the weekend. I was ambition-less, going into it: no major projects, no heavy duty reading, and then ended up spending most of the day’s allotment of energy going to one of the 50501 protests—50 protests in 50 state capitals, if you haven’t been following.

Going to protests is exhausting. Even getting ready wears me out. I think about cars crashing into crowds & concealed carry licenses & every bad police interaction I’ve ever seen, while also reminding myself outcomes like that would be unusual, here in my small liberal city, and then I go anyway.

I thought it would be small, maybe even dispiriting, but when I found the intersection listed on the posters, there were already hundreds of people, and as I drove around the nearby blocks, trying to find parking, they kept streaming in: two older women, one limping, the other using a walker, carefully crossing the street together; the sixty-something veterans of dozens of protests, hauling along multipurpose signs, kids from the college looking nervous. I literally could not find a place to park my car until I remembered the existence of the parking garage, and ascended from its depths into the street and the noise with a sense of relief.

I wish I could remember more of the signs, though your social media is probably as full of the clever ones as mine is. There was a little kid across the street holding one that said “Cinnamon rolls, not gender roles,” and another, even smaller, who had clearly been tasked with her own sign-making, which meant hers just said CAT, in enormous, uneven handwriting, presumably one of the few words she was confident in spelling all by herself. There were outraged scrawls about Elon Musk and fervent hopes for unity and trans health care, flags for Palestine, for unions, for the protection of our federal lands. I see a version of one particular sign at a lot of protests, that says something along the lines of Whatever you think the Germans should have done before WWII, or the abolitionists, or the Civil Rights movement, is what you should be doing right now, & I think yes, and feel relieved that I dragged myself out.

More and more people kept coming, so I got my mom set up on the seat of her walker & circled the intersection to get a sense of the crowd, having to turn back at one point when I couldn’t get through the thickly thronged sidewalk at all. There were bike cops in front of the yarn store a couple of blocks away, and when I’d been trying to park, I saw cop cars too, all enough of a distance that they weren’t really interacting with the crowd.

A couple of people with bullhorns led the crowd in the usual chants, and a pocket of people broke out into We Shall Overcome, which always reminds me of the first protest I remember going to, when Matthew Shepard was tortured & left to die. The news broke on my college campus through a series of handwritten, grief-stricken flyers posted up everywhere they had tape for, and a bunch of us drove to Columbus to join the protests there, where the older hippies were horrified to realize we didn’t know the words to the joyful, sobering old protest songs. They taught us, holding hands around the building, the words to We Shall Overcome, and I have never forgotten them.

It is easy, sitting in my house by myself looking at the news, reading the godforsaken & hopeless comments, to feel profoundly alone in all of this, but I stood there on the sidewalk full of other people just as angry and sad and scared as I am, and we all cheered when people driving by in the middle of their workday, in their cars with the Uber medallion lit, in their company trucks, honked and waved wildly at us, and thought, well, we’re not going down without a fight.

If you missed going this time, there will be another—50501 is a good collator of events to find what’s happening in your city.

one good thing

My friend & I went for coffee on Sunday, to one of our favorite places that’s closing, and then walked around the neighborhood, up to the tiny free gallery, through the park and back. I forget every single time that they somehow get the portents of the seasons before my house does, just a mile or so away, and was agog at the green shoots & buds everywhere, and then physically stopped in my tracks by actual daffodils and crocuses, blooming away. Spring did not forget about us this year.

Thank you for reading, & a specially fervent thank you to the new people who have signed up to support the newsletter. I appreciate you more than I can say. I’ll write to you again soon, and in the meantime, I hope you take a step, and then another step.