Lolliblog

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

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.