Old clothes as distraction
If you have anxiety about the upcoming election, how are you handling it? Instead of going to Harris rallies downtown, I’m whacking tennis balls and spending as much time as possible sorting clothing donations at A Wider Circle. That photo up top is what greeted me this afternoon. Here’s what it looked like after I got rid of several hundred pounds of crap and filled three large Z-racks with professional clothing the organization can actually give its clients:
Every time one of the dudes working the receiving dock came back to my area with another bag of donations, he’d smile at me and apologize. “I’m so sorry! We appreciate you! MVP!”
It made me laugh. It helps that he’s incredibly attractive.
As overwhelming and gross as this work can be, it distracts me from the news, for which I am grateful. But then I get home and don’t have the energy to go through my mom’s stuff.
So instead, here’s something I wrote for the class I took this month. The prompt was something like “write about a memory you have that differs from what other people remember.”
You should see the other guy
I am a tween. I am with my family in Cape Cod. It is sunny and warm out, but for some reason we are not at the beach. My mother is inside the house, the one we rent every August. It is the smallest house on the street and it has a name: The Dinghy. There is a large side yard that is mostly hidden from the street by a quarter acre of out-of-control, ten-foot-tall blackberry bushes.
My father and brother, who is probably 7 or 8 years old, are in the side yard with a baseball, a baseball bat, and a mitt.
I am friends with the girl my age next door. Susie. She and I are walking from the house my family rents to hers, away from the side yard. We are on the small street. The blackberry bush situation means I can't see the rest of my family, and they can't see me.
We hear a loud CRACK, a second of silence, and then my brother screaming like he is being murdered.
"MARGARET!!!" I hear my mother yell. She assumes I have done something terrible to my brother.
Susie and I run to the yard, where we see my brother shrieking, holding his hands over his face. My father is horrified because he has accidentally "hit a line drive" into his son's eyeball.
My brother's eye swells up and closes. It turns purple and shiny. Later that week, my father tells my brother, "when people ask you about your black eye, tell them 'you should see the other guy.'" It becomes a running joke.
For years this story is told and re-told at holiday dinners. How awful my father felt. How wronged I felt. How justified my mother was in assuming it was my fault, because I was always picking on my brother. (How easy it was to make him cry.)
My mother has now been dead for five years. My brother is now 48. Recently I learned neither he nor my father have any memory of this event ever happening. They think I am making it up.
I'm going through old family albums. Eventually I will find photos from that summer to prove my memory is better than theirs.
Links
A parent’s guide to surviving middle school. (Atlantic)
Tressie McMillan Cottom’s take on the MSG rally made a lot of sense. (Instagram)
An article about the week before an election, which, yeah, everyone wants page views, but this paragraph has much broader relevance: “My oldest, dearest friend is an immigration lawyer, helps get kids asylum from Central and South America. She deals with children who have lost their parents, witnessed murders… She’s a single mom and goes home to be with her almost 4-year-old every day. You have to put it down, is what she says to me. You pick it up and hold it, do as much as you can. But then you put it down. Nothing will get better if you’re crushed by it.” (Emphasis mine.) (The Cut)
See also: Maria Popova’s list of 18 things she’s learned about life. I should revisit this once every few weeks. (The Marginalian)