What if you do a good deed, if your intentions are to help and instead, you end up enabling a bad habit, one that goes against your principles?

I was standing in line at the 7-11 with my Slurpee. The line ahead of me was short, but the cashier was slow and so I waited behind a big, black man and a homeless man for quite a while.
The black man had an Australian accent and was wearing a sports jersey. He was holding a turkey wrap in one plastic box and had another plastic box full of fresh fruit.

The homeless man was young, white, slender but muscular. His beard and hair were dark blonde and kinky-curly—exactly like my son’s hair and beard when he let it grow a bit. He was wearing faded pink volleyball shorts, inside out with the tag looking like a tiny tail, and avocado green and black striped trouser socks with the toe part stretched out and dragging on the floor.

The black man said something to him about the socks—I couldn’t hear it all, but it sounded as if he were cautioning the young man about the need to change his socks often so he wouldn’t get foot fungus. He also said something about healthy food, like his turkey wrap. The young man looked keyed up, but he was polite, said something I couldn’t hear in response.There was a little more conversation which I could hear little of, but it seemed to center around ways to stay healthy. Maybe the black man was a doctor.

When it was his turn to pay, the black man put his plastic boxes on the counter and then said to the homeless man, “Anything you want, man.”

The clerk waited, the black man waited and then homeless man pointed at the display of cigarettes behind the clerk. “The short ones, please.”

After a few minutes in which the clerk picked out the wrong cigarettes, the homeless man pointed and repeated that he wanted the short ones, the clerk picked up the wrong ones again and the homeless man corrected him again, finally the homeless man got his cigarettes. After the clerk rang up the order, the black man paid for everything and then, he shoved the boxes of fruit and turkey wrap still on the counter toward the homeless man and walked out of the store.

My husband, waiting outside in the car, was incredulous that the homeless man had checked out before me. It seems that when I went into the store, the homeless man was outside, searching in the garbage from the laundromat next door and in the dumpster for cigarettes. He found a couple of butts and then Bob said a security guard who came out of the 7-11 shooed him away.

I am sure that the black man, who wasn’t in the store when I arrived, came to the 7-11 to pick up something for lunch and he saw the homeless man outside and wanted to help him. So, he offered to buy him something in the store. From their conversation, I think he thought it would be food, something to tide the guy over for a while. But, cigarettes? From the way he pushed his purchases toward the homeless guy, I think he was disgusted—maybe with himself, maybe the homeless man, probably a little of both. He still wanted the guy to have something good and he wasn’t going to go back on his word, even after the guy picked something not good. So his compromise was to pay for everything and then to give the healthy stuff to the man along with the bad.

We want to help, but often, we want to help in a way that will truly help, not enable more destruction. So, we attach expectation to our help and judge the person who will receive it. They don’t have to show gratitude, but we want them to meet us halfway—to be willing to make their life better. And sometimes that is not their choice. And the next time you have the opportunity, you don’t help because you don’t trust that person to make the right choice—your choice. It’s a conundrum.

If the black man had known that the homeless guy would choose cigarettes instead of food, would he still have offered to help? Would he have found another way—maybe bought food and brought it out to the man. He chose to give the homeless man some dignity—bringing him inside the store and giving him a choice, not just buying something and handing it to the man outside the store. He tried to make the homeless man’s life a little better and that makes me a little sad, because it had to have felt like a small failure. In his day to day living, will the black man reflect on this past experience to tell him what to do in the future? It’s something he’s going to remember.

And the homeless man? His life is all in the present, getting what he needs at the moment from the environment, which includes people. I don’t think he will reflect on this past experience. He might not remember it. He lives in the moment.  Living in the present, isn’t that what philosophers say we all should be doing?
​
Not a meeting halfway, not a meeting of the minds, not really a connection with a fellow human. And that is often the way help is received—just take it and run. And it’s often given with expectation. Two different paths going in diverging directions. It wears out the givers and is only a brief moment in time for the takers who have endless need. And so it goes.
 
 
 

What must it be like when you finally do the thing you were born for? The thing that is part of your very DNA. I saw this in action a few days ago when my Lakeland Terrier found a gopher hole. Lakies are bred to hunt vermin; to dig rats, foxes, badgers out of their dens and kill them. Cali is almost two years old, and until we moved to a house with a yard, her idea of grass was to fly over it in pursuit of her Frisbee.

A couple of days ago, we saw a few piles of dirt in the grass and Cali noticed movement in one of the holes next to the dirt. Like a bullet, she flew out of the house and fetched up against the closest pile of dirt. She began to dig furiously, pausing only to poke her nose down into the hole or to place an ear close to it. When I came up to her, she backed up, paws splayed on either side of the hole and froze into guard position. The look on her furry face was one of total focus and the energy coming off her was full of purpose. She looked…transfigured.

I thought, later, that must be what it’s like to find what you were born for and to be able to do it, at last. To have a purpose that feels like destiny, like finding the puzzle piece that fits exactly, like being whole. Wouldn’t we all want that feeling? To experience it, even vicariously through your dog is a gift.
​
Cali stares out the window, waiting for the gopher; she digs in every hole she sees and tracks dirt into the house; she’s almost as obsessed with gophers as with her Frisbee. I guess obsession is the flip side of finding your purpose, but it still looks good to me.

COVID, fires, smoke and moving—just some of the many excuses I have for not blogging or writing. To be fair to myself, we moved from Northern California, after selling our house, to Southern California and the process of putting a house on the market one weekend before COVID shutdown, prepping for sanitized prospective buyers, packing, negotiating with inspectors and buyers. loading up The Really Big Truck and then shoehorning the contents into a Much Too Small storage unit, took a lot of my writing time. And, since I was no longer in Northern California, I had to give up my column at California’s oldest newspaper as well as all the articles and reviews I do freelance. So, I don’t have any deadlines or assignments, both of which move my writing muscle.

Instead, as we are temporarily vagabonds living at our daughter’s house, writing has taken a back seat—way, way back—to Frisbee mornings with the dog, cleaning our daughter’s house and doing her yard work, feeding everyone, helping with schoolwork, house hunting (lots of that), and keeping the dog from chasing anyone who leaves the living room to use the bathroom or go upstairs. And finding things. Things we packed and now we don’t know where the box is; things we unpacked and put somewhere in the house and since it’s not our house, we don’t have an internal map of where things might be hiding and so backtracking to remember where you put them is sometimes beyond us.
​
No houses to hunt today, dog is Frisbeed out, house is within acceptable hygiene standards, grandchildren are in virtual school, and I am free to write. It feels like something I get to do, instead of something I’m supposed to do. It feels quiet and productive and non-fattening—almost as good as a long soak in a hot bath with a good book. I am the good book today.

Oh, it’s been a looong time since I’ve posted. In the interim between the last post and this one, we got a puppy and our son died. That last sentence is baldly factual, but the emotions, experiences and changes that crowd those two facts are immense, more than can be encompassed in words. Isn’t that the gist of what writers try to do—either flesh out the facts with emotion and experiences that change the characters or distill their characters’ emotions, experiences and changes into words?

Some things forever change you. Most things can, if you allow it, but some things change you without your permission. You’re never not changed by death. Whether it is a person you hardly knew, an elderly family member whose death is expected or a child whose death blindsides you, you are forever changed. You see just a little differently, think just a little deeper, become aware of things you couldn’t imagine. If you’ve never done it, could you imagine how it feels to drop a rose onto a casket? Could you imagine the combination of peace, love and sorrow you can feel watching a hospice patient transition? Could you imagine you would be giving someone morphine, adjusting their cannula, applying lip balm to lips that aren’t your own? Deciding what goes on the headstone and choosing a casket?

Not the things you dream of doing, but the things you do because you have to. And they change you. I think that some changes, not necessarily bad changes
​, can come about no other way than through catastrophe or death—you have to go through it--not read about it or hear about it, but blunder through it in all its messiness and anxiety. I didn’t want to be changed by death, but it has happened, in ways both subtle and obvious. And now, in writing my own character, it’s up to me to decide what changes I’ll keep and which changes I will eventually transform into something else.
 
 

“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
There are no words for some things. The part of your brain that produces words shuts down at the death of your child or your partner or the trauma of facing your own mortality, dropping you into a vast pool of emotion where the landscape is indescribable, unfamiliar, and all pervading. And you are lost.
People ask you questions: Are you OK? Do you need anything? They say they are so sorry and hug you with all the love they can impart. But, lost in this place of no words, you can manage only a nod or shake of your head.  
Waves of anger, pain, sorrow, come upon you at unexpected moments—not the moments you set aside because now you’re finally alone and can let loose. No, they overcome you when you find a piece of clothing behind the furniture, at the mortuary when you’re trying to decide whether you want an oval or a rectangular photo on the funeral remembrance card, when one of their favorite songs comes on the radio; when you pick up fast food and remember how much he loved going through the drive through to pick up a single cheeseburger; when you find the hot sauce he bought you in Cayugas in the refrigerator.
Hard to navigate this place of no words and its landscape of pain. Grief is a stationary point in time—there is no going forward with your loved one and the present is a void, so only brief moments of the past remain, frozen in time. No opportunity to hear their voice again, to make plans for a barbecue or to watch them go through life. It’s just…stopped.
And maybe that’s where grief really begins. When you realize that you’ll never hear their ring tone or receive a text from them again, when you find yourself at the checkout stand with the perfect waffle weave shirt with blue sky and clouds and remember you have no one to give it to anymore. When Thanksgiving and Christmas will always have an empty place at the table and you no longer have to make brownies without nuts.
There are no words and use them to help us shrink what is huge and intangible into something familiar and predictable--neat little bundles strung together  to describe the indescribable.
There are no words, and yet, sometimes those useless words are the only things that offer a lifeline out of the swamp of emotion, keeping us from being completely submerged.One word at a time, we reach out, take one step and then another--out of pain and into life. The more words are used and the more people who hear them, the stronger the tenuous bridge from the place of no words to the day-to-day world and the more space opens up within us.
Is the world of words any better than the place of no words? I don’t know, but, it can be the choice between living or  drowning. It is worth making the attempt to put what can only be understood with the heart into words to be understood with the mind.
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
​

Write what you know—it’s the advice freely handed out when you indicate a wish to write. It’s not followed by teachers giving creative writing assignments or even college professors who want a 10 page paper by Monday. While I think it’s helpful to start out with what you know, if everyone adhered to this advice, the number of fiction books would dwindle greatly—especially the fantasy, sci-fi- and paranormal genres. The murder mystery genre would fade and the books that remained might have you questioning whether you really wanted to stand close enough to have the author sign your book.

My writing today is all about being cold and stuck, two subjects that I know well as my last three weeks have been spent indoors, trapped by snow and black ice. The lack of movement and the relentless weather is also causing a stuckness in my emotional state. Not going anywhere, not doing anything, not even aware of what I would want to do if I weren’t stuck.

So I’m rolling what I know into what I write, hoping that I can write both my character and myself into, and then out of, Stuck. It’s working for Barry, the main character in my novel, Road of Polished Stones. Barry’s leads and his funds have run out; it’s almost Christmas; it’s raining and cold; and he is alone. Without a guiding clue, all the roads seem the same--they could be anywhere in the world and go anywhere for all the use they are to Barry. His mind is fixed on its singular quest to find his father and now that he has fruitlessly explored all the possibilities in this place, he is really and truly stuck.
​
Barry will have options—I will write a few for him and he will take one of them, because that’s what you can do when you write fiction. Barry won’t be stuck anymore; he will go on to have more adventures, meet other people, experience conflict and drama. As for myself, I’m not as  facile with creating options and then  acting on one of them, delivering myself out of Stuck and into the movement of the world. But, I keep writing and one of these days, I will write myself right out of Stuck. 

Tomorrow is the first official day of Fall—my favorite season. I love the vivid change of colors, the change in the air from hot to cool, from sweaty to invigorating. I like change; like to mix it up. But, there’s change and then there is CHANGE. Change is usually easier when it’s your idea. CHANGE is hardly ever your idea—it’s the tumultuous stuff that throws your world into a tailspin, forces you to rethink who you are and puts all the things you thought were stable and predictable into a maelstrom.
Humans are changeable beings. Some of us fight change, fearing chaos. But change is who we are. Fighting it goes against our nature and becomes exhausting in time. We should be good at something that is so much a part of us, but when CHANGE comes, it’s like we’ve never experienced it before. I hold the view that ultimately, change/CHANGE is good, but when there is a lot of CHANGE all at once, it’s hard to keep that view in focus.

The hardest thing for me with CHANGE is knowing when to surrender resistance. I’m not built that way and neither are most people. First, you push back against CHANGE, stand your ground. Eventually, I realize that my resistance is making things worse and I formally surrender. I don’t give up—there’s a difference. Surrendering is a way of coping, a deliberate choice: I will allow this CHANGE; I surrender myself to it and allow it to work in my life.  Then comes the hard part: standing still while it happens. Waiting for the pieces to stop falling and then looking around to see where you are. Only then, can you see a path; a way out of the chaos and into something…else.
​
And that’s when you really have to focus on seeing CHANGE as a vehicle for something good to come in. Because we can’t see it; we don’t know where the path leads. This something else is unknown and maybe, we think, we won’t like it. We liked the old way, the way that has vanished. But, when the path is gone, you can choose to stand still forever or move forward, trusting that a new path will appear. All of the main characters in my books share the desire to move forward despite not knowing where they will end up. Maybe I’m using my characters to teach myself the lessons I need to learn; maybe all writers do.