June 23rd: Jessica Handler
Phone alarm 7:30 a.m., Glenn Gould storming his way through The Goldberg Variations. The music puts me in mind of my mother, who loved Bach. Go downstairs and make coffee. My father once expressed shock that my husband sometimes made our coffee. “Whoever’s up first does it,” I told him, glad then and now that I run my household differently than the one in which I grew up. The cat is still asleep. So is my husband. I take my coffee out to the backyard. Fill a watering can from the rain barrel, which could use another mosquito dunk. Water the salvia, which is always thirsty. Water the two geraniums I transplanted into two separate pots. Cut some gardenias, still blooming on the bush that reaches nearly to the roofline. Cut the single rose. Sprayed dish soap and water on the rose buds in an attempt to discourage the aphids. Where did I leave the glass pitcher that I like to use as a vase? Not on the dining table. It’s in my office. I need the scent, the beauty. I am struggling lately, and these gardenias are small moments of delight.
Go to therapy and talk about why I think it’s performative for me to try to focus on things I appreciate in a world that’s shitty right now. Things like fresh flowers on my desk, or that fact that my father is no longer alive to make me feel badly about myself. I say that I will try. I want to try.
Sing in the car, mildly bored of my Beatles playlist. Think about how in the Southern vernacular of my childhood and adulthood, a person is bored “of” rather than “with.” Switch to an REM playlist, which in the passage of time has become not so different from The Beatles. Make weird mouth noises along with the guitar solo in “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” This is something I appreciate.
Stop by the pharmacy on the way home. I am loyal to our neighborhood pharmacy, which is resolutely not a chain, but also not in my HMO so I can’t always get prescriptions there. There’s a rumor that the pharmacist once saved a person in the parking lot by administering Narcan. I come here for over-the-counter meds, for advice, for Dr. Bronner’s soap, and fancy chocolate. I ask the pharmacist, who has greeted me by name for the past three decades, about decongestants as a treatment for my tinnitus, which is acting up in the humidity. He recommends two nasal sprays, one for day, one for night, “because you might get drowsy with that one.”
Temperature today is projected to exceed 95 degrees. Sometimes this weight of heat and humidity feels almost good. The prickling sensation on my skin reminds me of my teenaged summers in a neighborhood not far from where I live now, of days melting like discarded gum on a sidewalk, of walking in a daze to my friend M’s house, then to our friend E’s house, then collapsing in the cool dark of her living room until we roused ourselves to smoke a joint and walk somewhere else. Fifty years have passed since those days. M & E and I are still friends, as different as our lives have become, and this fact thrills us.
I take another look at the manuscript edits on my next book. Check and re-check some spellings of the few Yiddish words that a character uses. My grandmother’s “Yiddish Wordbook for English Speaking People” is my resource, which would have made her happy. This, in turn, makes me happy.
Be glad that my husband found the piece of glass clogging the dishwasher drain and now the dishwasher works again.
Eat the last of a bag of peaches. I will go to the green market in East Atlanta Village on Thursday afternoon for more. Am sorry that cilantro season is pretty much over (it’s too hot) but am glad for peaches. Sing a phrase of the John Prine song about “eat a lot of peaches,” but make myself stop because it’s kind of silly.
Organize the list of upcoming books for one of the three book clubs I facilitate. In the Excel spreadsheet called “Book Clubs,” I note which will be our August book, our September book, on through January.
Call both of my senators and our congresswoman to express my anger. “We’re hearing that a lot,” says the person taking my call. I laugh, he laughs. None of this is funny. I make these calls almost daily. This time, I express my desire for a call for impeachment. I take a moment to appreciate 5 Calls and Jess Craven’s newsletter for the scripts and the focus.
I fall hard asleep in the hammock for about ten minutes.
Don’t go to the outdoor community pool, because it’s closed on Mondays and Tuesdays
Don’t go to the indoor community pool, because I have a Zoom meeting that might be cancelled but it’s already too late to get to the pool, swim my laps, and come home to shower because I will not shower in a locker room because hair or Band-Aids or whatever and I live ten minutes from that pool anyway. (The meeting was cancelled.)
Text my voice teacher to confirm my lesson for tomorrow. We are working on songs that I’ve written to accompany this new novel, in the voice of a rock singer character. I have recorded a basic drum track to keep time, and can almost convince myself that I’m pleased with this different aspect of my creative life, and that I’m having fun.
Eat dinner, a veggie burger undercooked because of distraction or maybe it’s a new kind that takes longer, a side of slaw, and split a non-alcoholic beer with my husband (how have I only now realized that NA beer does just what regular beer should do on a hot night, which is be cold and somewhat fun?) and walk the neighborhood with my husband. This is a new thing we do, walk from our house to the very cheerful church half mile north of us as the sun sets, listen to the cicadas, comment on the neighbor’s plum tree, wonder what the renovation is going on in the house by the traffic light, remember that friends up the street have offered us tomatoes. We say hello to Tony the cat, who lives at the church. He allows a head scratch before going on his way, and we turn the corner and head home.
Jessica Handler’s novel The Magnetic Girl was awarded the 2020 Southern Book Prize. She’s the author of Invisible Sisters, one of the “25 Books All Georgians Should Read,” the craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss, and the forthcoming novel, The World to See (Regal House, 2026). Her nonfiction has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Oldster, and elsewhere. www.jessicahandler.com