When you need the heavy-duty self-care

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I get it. Regular self-care (taking one flight of stairs and remembering to chug four glasses of water right before bed) isn’t cutting it.

No, today, we need to bring out the big guns.

We need to emerge from bed without actually emerging. Yes, we need to stay wrapped in a blanket like a cape.

Not only that. We also need the fuzziest sweater in the world—nay—in the cosmos. We need to pair this with the big socks, the ones that take up most of the sock drawer. Yeah. Now wrap that cape back up.

Look at you. At fifty paces they’d think you’re a sheep.

Good start.

Now for something hot to drink. Herbal tea, maybe? Yeah, go ahead and double-bag it. No, triple-bag it.

Ooh, bracing! Who knew you could shove so much raspberry into one cup? It’s like un-sweet hot liquid jam. That has to mean something good.

Now curl up into the big chair. It’s very important that you curl. Imagine you’re the mousy heroine at the beginning of a romantic comedy. You know, the one who reads books asexually. Yeah, now you’ve got the pose. Perfect.

Now put the hot jam mug between your hands and feel the warmth seep into your sheepy body. Isn’t that nice?

Next: meditation is a good idea. I know, I know. But don’t worry. If you’re not ready for the whole nine yards, why not simply gaze at your houseplants? Meditate on them. Seriously, stare at them. Hark how they patiently turn toward the window. Look how they never fret about whether they’ll get the water and sun they need. Do they seem stressed?

Oh, jeez, yeah, that one seems pretty stressed. Maybe you should water it more often. Or less often? Go ahead and google “dying spider plant” for a while if you need to. I’ll pause.

All done?

Not to rush you, but you have a lot of self-care to get through for the rest of today, and we’re losing daylight here. I don’t mean this as an accusation, but maybe if you hadn’t doom-scrolled for an hour before you got out of bed we’d have more time. And I couldn’t help but notice that you went pretty hard on that dying-spider-plant googling. That is, I say with love, not the vibe we’re going for.

Deep breath!

Anyway, we’re going to need to speed up a bit. Oh jeez, you haven’t eaten anything yet, have you? It’s almost noon. Which is fine! We’re relaxing! But, you know, hop on it. I say that lovingly.

Let’s whip up a little nourishing breakfast. What do you have in the fridge? Perhaps oatmeal with fruit and nuts? Some sauteed mushrooms in an omelette or something? A breakfast salad with a poached egg and some shaved fennel?

Oh, just two Oreos and a slice of cheese? I…

Okay, whatever. Listen, you need to finish that tea and then drink a large amount of water so you’re hydrated enough for the hour of joyful outdoor movement we have planned, but I also don’t want you to get a stomach cramp, so, you know, maybe get sipping.

Nice! Looking good. You’re back from the joyful-movement hour. Endorphins feel great, right? Listen, I know we had a nice bath planned for later tonight with candles and Gregorian chants, but why don’t you go ahead and take that now without the candles or music because I don’t think we have time to shower too. Gotta double up! Lovingly!

Also, now that you’re clean, I think you should try to meditate again, because the houseplant-gazing didn’t really go as expected. It seems like it stressed you out. Not to worry—just chop-chop, hustle out of the bath maybe, and let’s try seated meditation again.

Oh, your boss called? Yeah, that’s fine, I guess today is a work day, after all. Can you tell him you’re pretty busy right now?

Oh. I see. Well, don’t hurry—we don’t do that, obviously, but—you know, don’t…not.

Hiiii, just checking in. May I lovingly observe that pretty soon it’s going to be dinner time? I did want you to fully unplug by then so you’d get two solid hours of screenless time by your early bedtime, so I’m going to gently suggest that you do the guided meditation while you also do your reflective journaling practice. Oh, and maybe you could also text your friends during that time so you are fully connected to your support network.

Three birds, one stone!

Ahhhh, that’s better, isn’t it? So many great stress-busting activities today. I’m really prou—

Oh, lost her. She’s doom-scrolling again.

Follies, Ruins, and Palimpsests

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On All Saints’ Day, we look back.

Looking backward is as familiar to me as breathing is, which is to say, I often fail to notice I’m doing it. (After all, my type’s orientation to time is sometimes summarized as “preserve the past,” which is the kind of impulse one needs to keep a wary eye on.)

From childhood I’ve had a near-obsession with the past. This obsession led me by the hand through a lifelong historical-novel habit, a history degree, and a tendency to ruminate. To a panicked feeling of things always going too quickly. A pang that I’m not quite done with chapters of my life which have ended without my permission.

It also means I love old buildings. Before that history degree, in my foolish youth, I loved any old-looking building indiscriminately. But education has led me out of this darkness. I now realize there are, broadly speaking, three categories of old-looking buildings: follies, ruins, and palimpsests. Let’s explore them, shall we?

A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been wiped clean to have other writing put on it—or, more broadly, any object that has been reused for some new purpose. I’m abusing this word slightly to refer to old buildings that have been long in use. You often hear, for example, that old houses in this area of the East Coast are log cabins surrounded by newer and newer rooms, built up and out. My dad’s friend had a house like that: a modern enough house, but with one room with a dirt floor that once was the entire house. It was a palimpsest: something new built right up inside and on top of something old, until the two became one.

Palimpsest buildings like this are disappointing to a past-looker like myself. They seem to cover the best bits up, hiding them in modern taste or functionality. After all, very-old buildings have to be maintained. This means new workmanship, new materials, replacement walls and doors.

Look at the amazing Taos Pueblo, which is one of the oldest inhabited buildings in the country, over a millennium old.

Taos Pueblo, NM

Does it look precisely as it did a thousand years ago, asks my past-loving heart? Of course not. It is a home, a city. It has had to withstand the weather, the climate, wars and famines and droughts and population changes, and dozens of generations of children clambering around it. People live in it. They maintain it as their house. They build it and go on building it.

Bummer, sighed the past-lover in me. I wanted to see literal millennium-old adobe, untouched.

Palimpsests are the realest kind of old building, but they disappoint. They are buildings—houses or churches or offices or shops whatever they want to be—rather than reverent monuments to the past.

Give me a reverent monument to the past, I cry!

Here, have a folly.

Follies are fake old buildings built as decoration. (Now we’re cooking with gas). You might be fooled by them if you aren’t on guard. You might be wandering around some estate which belonged to someone with vastly too much wealth, and, oh my God, is that a castle? Is that a ruined Roman amphitheater?

No, dear, it’s a folly, from the French folie. Crazy.

Roman folly at Audley End, Essex, UK

Follies are like expensive jeans: often either neat as a pin or stylishly, intentionally weathered. They’re like catnip for people like me who watch a lot of costume dramas. And then, once you figure out their fakery, they’re pretty embarrassing.

A tidy-jeans folly. Photo by David Evans – Paxton’s Tower – Carmarthenshire, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42421316
A folly of the ripped-jeans kind at Mount Edgcumbe House, Cornwall, UK. Photo by Mark A Coleman, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55152363

Now that we’ve learned to spot a fake, let’s move on to the really real old building. The one that isn’t bastardized by modern hands. Let’s look at some ruins.

Ruins have beauty and tragedy. They look great in the rain. They’re really romantic. You can imagine having some very strong emotions there, growing your hair long and getting a little windswept. And the fact that they’re dead makes them extremely fun for a past-looker: they’re pure in some way that a palimpsest or a folly could never be. They’re like an above-ground time capsule.

Machu Picchu, Urubamba Province, Peru

Until you realize that ruining doesn’t just happen. Not usually. It’s more natural for buildings to become palimpsests over time, if they’re any good, because people naturally want to keep using what they’ve got. Ruins, I’m finding more and more, are often on purpose.

In preparation for Book Three, I’m researching a lot of 12th-century castles and abbeys in France and England. The ones in France are often still there, or parts of them that haven’t been repurposed. But many of those in England were ruined intentionally. Henry VIII sacked the monasteries to get Anglicanism off to a proud start, and Oliver Cromwell “slighted” (cannon-balled and pulled down) many castles to deprive his enemies of a foothold.

Me at Fountains Abbey, North Yorkshire, UK–a ruin you can blame on Henry VIII

This makes me shake my fist at them, both for being such intolerant dipshits (pardon), but also for making it hard for me to know the precise dimensions of some of these buildings. Yes, this is about me!

So I’ve come full circle: I turn my nose up at follies, now, and ruins make me a bit sad. I see them more as lost information, lost usefulness. They are buildings that didn’t get a chance to live on as palimpsests, to be useful to people.

Ian at the Seneca Quarry, Montgomery County, MD, a ruin you can blame on Victorian architecture going out of style

But the irony even there is: when these armies knocked down an abbey or a castle, people (being resourceful) used the rubble. They picked up the bits of the fallen walls and used them to patch their houses, their bridges, their crumbling garden retaining walls. These old ruins are living on as palimpsests, but spread out all over the countryside.

Take it one step further: after all that slighting, the rich started to love the aesthetic of the ruined buildings everywhere, looking rather elegant and skeletal, picked clean of rubble. They built some of their own in the backyard so they could stare at it over breakfast. Isn’t that a palimpsest of a kind, the repurposing of the very idea and function of a ruined building into a piece of artwork?

And take it another step: during some famines in Ireland, the wealthy landlords didn’t necessarily want everyone to starve to death, but couldn’t abide the idea of simply giving away cash or food. Instead, they gave the suffering masses construction jobs building “Famine Follies,” which sometimes were actual follies and sometimes were simply roads to nowhere. Unnecessary manual labor, I guess, rendered people deserving of food.

Picture that: starving people put to work hauling stone around the countryside to build a pretend ruin, which is to say, a building of no practical use masquerading as a building that once had (but no longer has) a practical use.

By now the whole idea of looking backward at pretty old buildings is collapsing in on itself. The idea of gazing longingly backward at all is foolish: uninformed at best; reactionary at worst.

Much better to love the idea of the palimpsest. To love the building that many generations have adapted and molded and fitted to their needs. To love the stones that fell out of the wall and ended up filling the gap in someone’s chimney.

For All Saints’ Day, better to stop looking back with regret and desperation, trying to freeze it in place, trying to see it in clear focus. Better to know that just like seeds in winter, what is dead still has a future of its own strange kind.

In the long meantime, everything is recycled. Nothing will be stagnant. Nothing will be resurrected whole. Old buildings are resurrected in others or returned to the earth. Old chapters of our lives will not come again, but they take on new resonances with every year, like the turn of a kaleidoscope.

Such a long time to be gone, and a short time to be there.

October 23, 2014

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An entry from six years to the day before, but that’s a story for a different day.

October 23, 2014

Beets are incredible. on the cutting board whole they roll around like filthy rats with their hairy tails. They fall on the floor as though to scurry. I lop the tails off and throw them away because they disgust me. Then the hunks of beet bodies flow and stain my cutting board bright pink, catalog pink. Unreal. 

Without being heated or soaked at all they just want to explode their color and wet funky smell. Hotpink blood staining my fingernails for days, an eruption of earthness into my second-story kitchen like a cold volcano.

I chop a few of them with a bunch of carrots, fingerling potatoes, chicken, spices, and cheese and mix it all in a casserole dish. I pour in half and half that was about to sour. Instantly the half and half sloshes around the casserole dish looking for all the world like Pepto Bismol. It’s Doctor Seuss food. Then I whip two eggs and mix them in. 

The bake will boil down the pink cream.

Debugging

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Dad made sure to clean the sink at the end of the night. Scrub it thoroughly, separately wash the mat and drain traps, run the garbage disposal, dry it down. I found this out when I did the dishes and he was there at my shoulder telling me how.

I didn’t really get it. Cleaning a sink sounded a lot like cleaning a shower: aren’t these things inherently clean? Isn’t it sort of their job to be?

(Don’t worry, readers. I now understand that this is, bafflingly, not how it works.)

“It keeps the cockroaches away,” he’d say. Sometimes. Other times he’d say it kept the elephants away, and when I raised my eyebrows, he’d ask when I last saw an elephant.

I could no more imagine cockroaches scuttling around our tidy arid house’s sink than I could imagine elephants tromping through the living room. But he’d grown up in a hot wet climate, and I could tell—once you see a roach, you don’t ever un-see it.

Despite many run-ins with rats and other non-rent-paying dwellers of group houses I shared in college and afterward, I never saw a cockroach until I spent a summer in DC. We kept that house pretty clean but if you stayed up late enough you’d see them scurrying along the baseboards of the first floor like a conga line. One night my friend got drunk and started picking them up one by one between his thumb and forefinger and tossing them through the back-door safety bars.

“And stay out!”

I don’t think they did.

Because that’s the problem: once you have them, they never leave. At least that’s what all the websites say, the ones you frantically skim when you’re having a semiannual panic that maybe you have an undetectable infestation. They’re trying to sell you extermination services, after all. They’ll tell you that if you see one, you have a hundred, and if you have a hundred, there’s no amount of sweeping at the base of the cabinets that will starve them out. They’re like original sin. You need an intercessor; you can’t absolve yourself.

Despite several prolonged bouts of Googling the guises a roach may come in (can they be incredibly small and also shaped and colored differently than most roaches? Can they lay microscopic eggs?) and a few bouts of frantically tearing the place apart, learning how to vacuum around appliances no one has moved in a decade, I have once again concluded that we are living alone in this place.

(Alone, that is, except for the plants and the friendly tiny spider who lives in the front window. We’re glad to see her every morning.)

But I know that even if I move far away from this swampy place they seem to love so much, and far away from messy neighbors and the trash chute that seems to back up weekly, I’ll never go to bed with scraps or drips in the sink.

Because that’s what they want.

And, much like supervillains, they are skilled at making obsessive enemies for life.

Trapped in the Fitbit Cycle

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So you’ve been pretty sedentary lately. That’s okay; it happens to all of us at chaotic times like at the end of grad school or during the quadpocalypse. You noticed yesterday that your legs were sore after a moderately long walk, which makes you worry that you’ve lost a lot of fitness since you ran that half-marathon a few years ago.

Fear not: modern technology can help you. Buy a fitness tracker!

Soon, you’ll receive gentle reminders on your non-dominant wrist that will help you move a bit throughout the day, encourage you to get enough restful sleep, and increase the amount of beneficial exercise you get. Imagine how good you’ll feel then.

You’ll love how the colorful interface rewards you for meeting your goals. Some days, you’ll meet all of them—climb enough stairs, take enough steps, cover enough miles, get your heart rate up for enough minutes, burn enough calories, do some movement during enough hours, and get your target amount of sleep. That’s a lot of metrics. Just imagine meeting all of them by dinnertime. You’ll call these Perfect Days. At the end of them you’ll be glowing with pleasure and just a bit of pride. Hopefully the good kind. You’ll be very glad you decided to make this healthy step.

And you’ll commit to never cheating. You won’t be like those people you see who sit, roll their eyes, and shake their wrists when they get a reminder at the end of the hour to move around. No, you’ll take this seriously. After all, you’re not doing it for the rewards, as you are not a lab rat—you are doing it to actually improve your health. You just want insight and a bit of encouragement.

During the first week, you’ll feel pleased when you get five Perfect Days. You’ve taken up running again and you’ve gotten familiar with your building’s stairwell, which it turns out isn’t nearly as ominous as you thought it would be. Great job!

In week two, you’ll be well underway to a Perfect Day when your boss calls you at 3:45, which is not ideal because you’d planned to go for a walk at ten-till-4 that would have gotten you a lot of steps and also hills for stair-climbing credit. Goodness gracious, he’s really droning on. Soon it’s 3:57.

You’re still going to walk—that’s the thing. You’re ultimately going to get the right number of steps in the day; at this rate, they just won’t necessarily happen while the clock still says 3. But your body doesn’t know the difference, does it? You’re still going to get good movement scattered throughout the day. It’s not like you’re actually going to be sedentary for two full hours!

At 3:58, you decide to shake your wrist. Only, you emphasize, to have the data reflect reality, which is that you’re going to go on a walk in a few minutes whenever he stops talking. You crank your wrist back and forth until it buzzes to let you know you got your steps in.

You’re not necessarily proud of this, but it’s not cheating of the sort you’ve seen in other people, because you ultimately get those steps and then some. And it all makes sense when you get your weekly report and it shows that—yes—that was a Perfect Day.

You start reading up on the recommended articles about all types of health. Rest is extremely important. And, indeed, you’ve even taken to occasional naps to make up for nights when your watch tells you that you slept more poorly than usual. It turns out that taking real time away from the stresses of daily life can add years to your lifespan. You book a vacation—a weeklong stay in a rustic cabin.

It rains cats and dogs all week at the cabin. You love it, actually. It makes you feel incredibly cozy. You brought a big, juicy book you’ve been longing to read for months. You deactivated all the stressful, time-sucking apps. You sleep better than you have in months or years.

And, as it happens, you move less. You’re just so relaxed, and the couch with the big picture window with a view of the rain falling in the deep-green woods is so hypnotic, that you realize your body is craving stillness.

But every hour the thing on your wrist buzzes. Buzz. Buzz. Every day until Wednesday you fake it, shaking your wrist until you meet at least some of the goals, because after all, this whole thing was about tracking how healthy you are. For overall health, it’s very important to do the kind of good resting you’re doing this week. So, in a way, it’s not cheating to take credit.

Buzz. Buzz. Every hour.

On Thursday you realize what this reminds you of: it’s the rigidity of clock-time, the scourge of modernity. It’s a nag, a task. For several minutes you spiral picturing the report you’re going to get on Sunday: the email will have a bunch of angry-red, pointing-down arrows in it. You moved a lot less this week than your average. You went up almost no stairs. You didn’t do your workouts. As though you should be punished, criticized, for resting one week in a dang year!

This thing is really just a capitalist shill, isn’t it? It’s trying to hold you hostage to this patriarchal vision of us all as thin, “productive,” emotionless superbeings who spend a lot of money on wellness products, because at the end of the day, we’re all valuable to the extent that we’re consumers and/or products to be consumed. That’s no life at all.

This is actual tyranny. You’ve tyrannized yourself in the name of making yourself healthy. It would be much better to simplify, to take all the electronics out of the bedroom, to wake up with the light in the window and let your body live how it wants to, like your peasant ancestors who you imagine moved intuitively and ate a lot of barley and wild dandelions. Who measured their lives according to the seasons and the spiritual calendar.

You are liberated.

Six months later you get winded walking to the store so you buy a Fitbit.

Relationship Advice

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I’ve been a male anglerfish. I sank my teeth in, gave up entirely on nourishment. I let my jaws and lips dissolve and fuse with the flesh of the beloved’s side, waiting to be made useful, equally happy to wither down to a dead pair of gonads.

Having lived this way, I can tell you I don’t recommend it.

Mural by @patrickowensart

I’ve been a penguin, cozying up to the beloved, but only for a season, shivering together on the ice. Us against the elements like that: it wasn’t to last. I waddle away from it with whatever kind of smile a beak can form.

Still, if you’re going to square with impermanence, you might start there.

I’ve been a lioness, helping and shunning and nurturing and punishing. I’ve been a sea otter, falling asleep holding hands on the wavering tide.

Now I’m one in a pair of pigeons. We dwell in the city and feed on trash, but you should see us when we take to the trees. We look just like doves.

Soft Animal

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I read somewhere recently that your body is the only way you have any experiences in the world.

This is painfully obvious, maybe, but it wasn’t to me. As a post-Enlightenment person, I’ve struggled for many years against the feeling that I am a rather defective brain in a vat. That is to say, “I” am my brain, and my vat is this meat-suit that for some reason cannot process certain ordinary foods and which gets sleepy at inconvenient times.

But I am the vat. So is my brain. Everything my brain has ever done has been because the vat was there to do it. At the end of the day, my brain is an organ that feasts on glucose and relies on other squishy little organs to function. Every shard of love, every brilliant thought, every heart-piercing thrill, happened in my body.

Now, where did I read this helpful little nugget of wisdom? On the Internet somewhere, which means I have no idea who said it or in what context, because the Internet is a soup of free-floating little ideas. Just like brains in vats, ideas on the Internet are rootless entities. The Internet is a masquerade ball for brains, the place where brains go to be on holiday from their vats. On the Internet we’re all just user-names, cell numbers, saying words, needing nothing but electricity to work. I send memes or thinking-of-you texts to a username or a cell number and I truly believe, if I don’t bother thinking about it too hard, that I am communicating directly with a person I care about. I forget that I’m using my body to talk to a machine, relying on the fact that the person I care about will use their body to talk to their machine soon and we will thereby be connected. But that person is not their cell number, their Instagram inbox, any more than the love I feel for them is the digital photo of the enormously fat grizzly bear I send them.

Online we are stripped down to pure thought, pure language. This illusion is quite an ego trip for the brain, which is humiliated to be so dependent on its embarrassing and unpredictable body.

I haven’t been writing much. I forget to do it, if I don’t have my to-do list helping remind me to. (Don’t let anyone ever tell you that a writer is someone who can’t help themselves from writing. On the contrary; it’s very easy to avoid it for days, weeks, years. Especially the hard parts: long projects, messy ones. Ones that require research. It’s the easiest thing in the world not to, just as it’s terribly easy not to eat vegetables, for a while.)

Every so often I realize I “should” post something here. Then I consult my trusty box of ideas. Twenty-five pages of them. I scroll down from the top, up from the bottom, middle out. But there’s often just a shrug awaiting me there. A lot of the ideas have really missed their moment (sorry, guys). A lot of other ones are very heady—maybe the kind of thing my brain fancies itself impressive for even considering writing, but the rest of me just goes—

Give it a rest, nerd.

So on a quiet afternoon, here’s where I find myself: low energy. It’s raining outside. The bright yellow leaves look especially brilliant against the gloomy gray. Mug of chai with some extra ginger slices in. Bright-red fall-scented candle making it all smell pretty spicy in here. Between books and board games and Sunday dinner.

If there is a time for my brain to charge ahead, write some impressive thing or other, this is not it. Today is a day, with apologies to Mary Oliver, for the soft animal of my body to love what it loves.

361

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The cool darkness of the old back hallway. Carpet feet, light falling in silver.

The green out the side window and the olive bending tenderly over my front window.

In the backyard under the maple spreading each of her red-green hands over me, a red-green net against the hot-oven sky. Stretched out on an Adirondack chair watching the dark-green pool send slivers of sunlight up to the leggy pears.

The dry heat warming my thighs under my book.

Hot tomatoes ripening in the sun, a scent too big for their tiny red cuteness.

As twilight falls, the cooling like you only get in the dry. Some stars coming out. Windows open to the crickets, the fireworks of early August.

Hedges. Gardenias. Camellias. Azaleas. Elms, ashes, oaks. Gold Spanish grasses.

Coyote bushes scraping my bare legs as I cycle at a sprint. Sun falling into my open shoes. The fuggy water smell of the river. A glimpse of the snow-dark Sierras.

Silent craggy oaks casting oak shadows on the gold grass. Coyotes and jackrabbits loping across open spaces. Boulders, mini-cliffs.

Trees from everywhere. A city from a plain from a marsh from a desert.

The window open at night as I sleep. A cool breeze through the greenness of the trees. The contrasts. Gangs of turkeys revolting across the lawns. Tiny sidewalk footpaths between fences.

Little shops where people wear tee shirts, tennis shorts. SUVs down wide straight streets. Low buildings. All the quiet sprawl of the shrugging West.

Yes. And.

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Today is a grief with no name, an anxiety with a dozen hydra heads.

It’s a mega pot of ramen made in a trembling frenzy.

Two carrots, a shallot, a tub of leftover vegetables.

An egg, American cheese.

Sesame oil, soy sauce, Marmite, chili garlic paste, Old Bay, oyster sauce.

Too many flavors. Too big for an ordinary bowl.

Put it all into the sunshine, then into the belly, then the belly into the sunshine.

That’s better.

The grief takes a step back and folds its arms. ⠀

The ginkgoes throw their hands up in a shrug dance.

A white butterfly manically meanders for flowers.

Dogs ruckus.

An artist sands her chair.

Dozens of unread lives wait to be read on the shelf.

Sweet tea mixes with milk.

We smile at each other.

Yes. And.

Lenny, August 2009

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I scurried down the road to the train station that morning a few minutes late (as I always was back then) in the faint rain. Sheepish and damp, my slippery sandals wearing a welt into the side of my foot.

The train had just left as I creaked through the turnstile, so I bought a coffee and paced the platform, cursing my bad habits.

I tried to call Lenny to tell her I’d be one train behind. The phone rang and rang. I pictured it sounding in the bright-yellow little kitchen where she kept the eggs on the counter like so many English do. She didn’t pick up. She must already be in the car, on the way. Would she know to wait?

Over the loudspeaker: the train to Birmingham was delayed several hours. 

A man next to me struck up a conversation, distracting me from my anxiety. He was going to Birmingham for a job interview. Neat leather portfolio in hand. He lived in Cherry Hinton with his mother. He was from Ghana. I told him I’d lately had the best meal of my life at a Ghanaian food stand in London. He wasn’t surprised. It strikes me now that he didn’t seem flustered by the lateness of the train. I don’t remember his name.

He was such a sweet man and he gave me no reason for discomfort, but as I always do I froze when he asked for my number. “I have to tell you,” I said, resorting to the truth that always sounds so cowardly, “I have a boyfriend.”

“That’s great! I just want to be your friend.”

I must have said something toying with the line between doubt and generosity. I gave him my number.

When my train arrived we said goodbye and I got on for Audley End. It was a short ride, no more than twelve minutes, and as we heaved between the hedgerows I kept looking at my phone. He never did call. This was back when I expected a call, not a text, from a new contact. I sound old saying that.

Neither did Lenny call, of course, because her only phone was plugged into the wall at her house.

Arriving, I ran off the train and down into the parking lot to find Lenny standing next to her car with her walking sticks supporting her, one in each hand, looking solid and fierce behind her glasses.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I tried to call.” 

“That’s all right, dear. I knew you’d be on the next one, and if you weren’t then I’d go home and see if you’d rung.”

I don’t remember if I gave her a hug. We’d only met twice before: once when I was twelve and my grandmother brought me to visit her. She’d offered me wine, and I’d said in refusal “I’m twelve,” at which point she offered sherry instead. The next time I’d met her had been just a month before this meeting, when I’d stayed with her and my grandmother and mother in her sloping four-hundred-year-old house just down the hill from the thousand-year-old church just before I started summer school. She was nearly ninety, and I was twenty, and now we might be friends as well as distant cousins.

We got in the car and closed the doors, and she pulled out into the street. With her remarkable speed we flew by the sprawling grounds of Audley End, and through the old market town of Saffron Walden, then out into the countryside and the glistening fields of rapeseed.

She could not walk without her sticks, and yet drove with the reckless abandon of a teenaged boy to whom the thought of death had never occurred. I concealed my clutching fingers under my legs on the plush seat, and tried to reconcile myself with impending doom. I distracted myself, looking out the window at the sun gleaming off the bright yellow-green hills, by wondering about the colorful armies who must have galloped over them during the last few thousand years. Just a few miles away there was a trio of ancient burial mounds hidden casually in a copse behind a church.

The anonymity and broadness of all the bodies who have shared that space enveloped my mind.

Arriving in her tiny townlet of Hadstock, Lenny parked her car on the narrow road in front of her house. The hollyhocks swayed in the damp late summer. Inside, we drank tea at her kitchen table and talked about her trip to Bruges. A postcard of it hung above us on the wall. 

Enough time remained for us to have lunch before I needed to catch the train for my afternoon classes. She took me (flying as though at warp speed down the winding lanes again) to her favorite pub. The Crown. I had a meat pie and lemonade, and for reasons I cannot remember we talked about little but death. Its strange beauty. 

Later she would tell my grandmother that she never felt so close to a young person before, and the thought of that makes me happy still.

After she dropped me off at the train station, I never saw her again. She moved out of that house with its impossible stairs, and a few years later when I thought of her I looked the place up online. It had a “For Sale” sign, and the one next to it, too. The hollyhocks are gone from the front garden, and Lenny has moved on out of this life.