Not long after my mother died, she appeared to me in a dream. First, her reflection manifested in a shiny surface, then she materialized in the room. We sat down knee to knee, I on a taupe ottoman, she on the cream-colored sofa. I was overjoyed to see her. “Mom,” I kept saying, “I miss you so much.” My sisters joined us, and their presence felt intrusive at first because the connection was so fragile I didn’t want any interruption to dilute the energy. Then I realized how selfish that was. She was our mother, not my mother, and I waved them in to sit near.  

“What’s it like to be dead, Mom?” I asked, then immediately floated my own theory. “Is it, in reality, almost exactly like it is to be here?” 

She nodded, looked down where our knees touched, and said, “Yes. I’m trying to decide how much to tell you.”

And with that, she was gone. 

There’s this crazy thing about mystery itself I’d like to understand. I’m one of those women who didn’t want to know the gender of the baby I was carrying before its birth—three times. I loved picking out both a boy’s and a girl’s name. What a unique experience—like Schrodinger’s cat—until I knew the gender, each baby was both a boy and a girl. Revelation was the reward for the work of labor–that moment when the doctor would sing out, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” instead of confirming the less climatic, “Audra’s here!” Or “Yep, it’s Andrew!” Or five years later, “And here’s Emily!”

Also, I realize now, as I watch friends take their children or grandchildren on extensive tours of prospective universities, it was telling that I didn’t research my college better. I had applied to three schools, but after choosing which to attend, I didn’t want to shadow a student or check out the social scene or the cafeteria—in mystery, there is such hope– hope that the reality you will discover is better than any you could have imagined.

Which brings us to the mystery of life itself.

We have learned more in the last 100 years than in the previous 10,000. We have confirmed the existence of over 5,500 exoplanets, seen our brains light up in functional MRI machines, learned that we are forever quantum entangled with those we have touched. With Hubble and the James Webb Telescope, we seek the beginning of time, the Wall of Last Scattering, the genesis of creation, consciousness, of love itself. 

In the evolution of life on this planet, was there a point at which one proto-organism first sacrificed for another? That’s the only demonstrable way love can manifest if love is more than a feeling. And was that a genetic replication that simply went awry, or did love begin with intent? I think about these things. Sigh. A lot.

As passionate as I am about the search for knowledge and as excited as I am to press every piece of wonder into your patient palm, I suspect I’m in love with the chase. 

Maybe this is why: “Brain loves new.” Reportedly, we are the only species on the planet constantly scanning our environment for what is new. And yet, here we are, seeking to acquire the very thing that perhaps we don’t actually want—knowledge of where we came from, why, where we are going, and how it will end. 

I suspect the quest to find love’s point of entry will be futile because love had no beginning, and love has no end. And the search for the beginning of time will be futile as well because there is no time. That’s what I think Mom didn’t want to tell me yet wanted me to know. That time is the illusion we came here to experience. By housing the soul in a physical body, we agree to accept the illusion of time, the illusion of endings —why?

So we can experience loss. 

And be tenderized by grief. 

Because without time, there is neither loss nor grief. There is only love, present and everlasting. 

I don’t know what it is like on the other side of now, but I suspect the reality you will discover is better than any you could have imagined. That the space between goodbye and hello is not measured in years, as you experience it here, but in the space of a breath as you turn a page, open a door, or return the smile of the one you have longed for. “I was just about to look for you!” you’ll say with delight.

“And there you are.”

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

When I’m late for my workout with JT, like the day I was caught by a speed camera going one mile over the amount they let you legally speed just a mile from the gym, I walk in the door and accuse him of my own transgression, proclaiming, “You’re late! Where have you been?” just to mess with him. Or when I walk in to discover he’s just killing time waiting, staring at his phone, I’ll swing open the door and announce, “Oh, thank God she’s here!” just to make him laugh.

I was bummed when I arrived this week, feeling abandoned in all the ways you have to fix by yourself because no one is coming, and therefore I was grateful that the workout seemed distractingly difficult. He has this giant rubber ball thing that has been cut in half –like a pitcher’s mound loaded with springs. I eye it warily as he pulls it out. It’s difficult to balance on in the best of circumstances, but especially hard if you are trying not to see your sad face in the giant mirror. Not looking up at the mirror gives you no focus point for stability except the floor. But just as they taught you in driver’s ed that you will involuntarily drive towards the thing you are looking at—so don’t look at cars stopped on the shoulder of the road—turns out if you are looking at the floor, you topple to the floor. Which always makes JT roll his eyes and say, “What on earth was that?”

He routinely makes me use free weights on a slant bench, or flat on my back, or standing, hoisting them up and over my head. He reports there have been no skull fractures. He will catch me if I falter, if it really gets too hard, and I wish someone could just follow me around all day catching the weight of the world when it feels too heavy. 

I often look perplexed when JT explains the next heinous exercise I’m to perform and request that he continue to demonstrate. I gaze with furrowed brow and head cocked to the side until he figures it out and tosses me the weight or rope or cable.

Yesterday, he made me use these horrid things called medicine balls, which are deceptively labeled 10, 20, and 30 pounds but are really 100, 200, and 300 pounds. The original medicine balls were animal bladders full of sand used 3,000 years ago in ancient Persia to strengthen wrestlers. Hippocrates was a fan 2,000 years ago in ancient Greece, considering them an excellent tool for restoring mobility to the injured. Whatever they are made of now, they don’t bounce. They plop. Not a fangirl of the medicine ball.

You have to stand on the bouncy half mound, raise the ball over your head, and slam it to the ground, which requires teeter-squatting, then stand up without losing your balance to lift the ball all the way over your head to repeat the maneuver without careening off the half ball. And if you are good at it, the ball gets replaced with a heavier one. This seems backward, like so much in life. Why is the reward something worse? Or, as JT says, “more challenging?”

I try to picture someone I hate to slam the ball into, but I don’t hate anyone. I don’t even dislike anyone enough to throw a ball at them. This has been a historical disadvantage dating back to ancient sixth-grade dodge ball.

We are the only two people in the gym on Friday afternoons. Sometimes I go to the massive window overlooking Forest Drive and mouth, ‘Help.’ I also miscount just to mess with JT—looking directly in his eyes and whisper-counting “4, 5” when it’s really “2, 3,” but he’s never fooled. I admire this ability to see through my subterfuge enormously. 

I decided I need to add some variety to my exercise workout. By variety, I mean something like running. By running, I mean pounding a treadmill. I do run outside as well, but outside has hills and no air conditioning and brick sidewalks corrupted by massive tree roots.  

And people honk when you run outside. Not in a good way. I don’t know why they are honking. Do they know me? Should I wave?

I have told JT I am trying to love yoga to add it to my routine as well. I have the purest of motivations—my best friend loves yoga, and the clothes are cute. Plus, my entire neighborhood is doing community yoga together once a month upstairs at a restaurant in town, and I want to make friends and drink wine together afterward. But it’s slow, and the music is bad. Seriously. Where’s the melody? Where’s the beat? Also, I don’t actually like to hear people breathe. Or to say things out loud together. 

Just once, a yoga teacher guided us through poses to James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend” by candlelight, and I lay on the floor and wept. Because you know it’s about a romantic love that has evolved to abiding love, which feels like a loss, a downgrade, but the music makes you want to believe that it is a holy transformation to a love better than that of which you are actually capable. 

For a moment, you know it is the way you’d like to love everyone, and it’s profound, holding you in that place between ego and egoless, between one-on-one love and one-to-everyone love. Between gone forever and world without end. 

I love so small and personal when I want to love so big and grand. But I do know you can’t be abandoned by a love that flows from the inside out. You can’t be abandoned by the love you give.

When I leave a workout, I look worse but feel better. Everyone does. I asked, and JT confirmed this. And since you drive towards the thing you are looking at, since you bring more to yourself of whatever you place your attention on, since what you point a finger at grows, I’m not thinking about feeling abandoned as I leave. I’m thinking that for an hour, I have lifted the weight of my heart against the pull of the earth and that laughter is stronger than gravity. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

 

They tell me I can’t stay with him. They are going to do their best to heal my son. He is four years old and getting weaker by the minute. 

“Please!” Andrew calls out as the medical team in their scrubs forcibly restrain him. “I’m not ready!” As if blond hair matted with fever, and not even in kindergarten, he is marshaling his resources and can get ready if they will just give him time.

The surgeon stops on his way to the operating room to explain what this emergency operation will entail and to suggest we wait up in Andrew’s room on the pediatric floor. The doctor’s surgical mask dangles limply around his neck. He is handsome and very young. We could have easily been in the same AP biology class at Northeast High, a public school in a working-class neighborhood.

Upstairs in Andrew’s room, my husband and I sit awkwardly on two straight-backed chairs, afraid to touch anything, as if by being very good waiting parents, we can somehow help our son. An infection has lodged in his elbow that could move to his brain or heart at any time. The doctor says the result would be “unacceptable.” Down the hall, I hear the muffled sounds of a child crying, and for a moment, I picture my life without Andrew. I turn to his father. “Do you ever think about losing one of the children?”

“Of course not,” is the immediate response. I marvel at his unpreparedness. His brazen assumption that the universe is a place of abundance. This will be the difference between us for a long, long time. 

Hours pass, and the door opens. The surgeon stands silhouetted in the frame. “Your son did great,” he reports. “He’s in recovery and should be waking up soon.” Relief floods the room like light from the hall. For the next six weeks, Andrew will require intravenous antibiotics around the clock, but with a port left in his slender arm, we can be taught to administer them at home. My husband is jubilant. Once again, his expectations have been rewarded.  

The door bumps open, and strangers lift Andrew from a gurney onto the waiting bed. He is incoherent, eyes closed, and over the next several hours his face crumples into silent, waterless tears in his sleep. It is almost as if it is not his pain they anesthetized but his ability to communicate it. I fight an impulse to slip off my shoes and climb onto the bed to cover him, healing his body with my own. Gratitude so intense I understand it is joy, makes me believe that I can.

Twelve years later, my husband and I are outside stacking the woodpile. It is a blue and gold fall afternoon, unseasonably warm. I want to take off my work gloves, but the gleeful dog will run off with them.

Andrew slept late and has been in his room most of the day. Occasionally I hear the bathroom door open and close, but no Nirvana blasting down the steps, no telephone. Still, he is home and that means safe, so I go about my chores until suppertime. 

Climbing the stairs, I see there is no light on in Andrew’s room even though the sun has sunk beneath the horizon. There is a soft groan from the bed. He doesn’t feel well he says, and I am shocked to see he is actually under the navy spread. His head hurts; he was up all night, that’s why he’s been trying to sleep. I’m the mother of a teenage boy and skeptical. His father and I went to a movie last night. Maybe someone came over. Cheek to forehead, I feel for fever, bring him ice water and Tylenol, straighten his covers, and go back downstairs, worried about all the wrong things.

I’m scrubbing the pan in which I caramelized pork chops when an apparition appears. Andrew, his face white, squints in the painful light. His head hurts so badly, he says. He grasps the back of a kitchen chair and utters an explicative that is so out of character it breaks the spell of doubt. There are no longer skeptics in the room, only one very sick boy and two suddenly terrified parents. 

We ease Andrew into a chair to ask more detailed questions. When his father asks him to touch his chin to his chest and he can’t, I run for a blanket and the keys to the car. I’ve just reviewed the symptoms of spinal meningitis, and Andrew has all of them.

In the emergency room, he is in so much pain he can barely stay conscious. The pediatrician on duty is a tiny young woman with barrettes in her long dark hair whose shoes must be the size of our seven-year-olds. Andrew lies on the table while she attempts a spinal tap, and my husband grips Andrew’s hands in his own. Every wave of pain that crosses Andrew’s face sweeps across his father’s a second later. He has the position I want in the small room, but I was delayed registering our insurance information. Also, my husband has so rarely been home that there is something sacred about my exclusion. I stand mesmerized, watching as if I don’t know them when in this moment, they are all that I know. 

Again and again, the doctor attempts to get the needle in Andrew’s spine. Her face is flushed; it distresses her to hurt him. She swabs Andrew’s spine, her small deft hands puncturing him again and again. She’s a pediatrician, a children’s doctor. My son, an adolescent, is as tall as his father–a boy in a man’s body. “Stop! It’s the needle,” I say. “The needle must be too small.”

Things go quickly, then. The tap complete, Andrew is admitted. He does indeed have spinal meningitis.

Over the next week, Andrew is kept on intravenous antibiotics and painkillers. His sickness is viral, excruciating, but non-fatal. We bring him pajamas, flowers, and photos of Kaya, his dog. His little sister comes along delighted with the drama and envious that Andrew gets tapioca on a tray. Red Jello. He offers her both with a smile.

We visit every day. Totally present. While Andrew sleeps, I listen to a mother across the hall reading to her child. Her voice is soft with a Japanese accent. “And if you become a boat, I’ll become the wind, and blow you home to me.”  

To pass the time, we recount Andrew’s exploits as a boy– the raft made from detergent bottles, the racing go-cart he designed with the cinderblock brake on a string. And we laugh, touching each other lightly on a shoulder or sleeve, then hush ourselves as if we’ve spoken aloud in a library.

We recall the sleepless nights of the intravenous IVs when Andrew was four, and as the days wear on, the room fills with such tenderness that I’m afraid to acknowledge it for fear it will disappear. 

The day Andrew is discharged, I take down photos taped to the cupboard doors, throw out flowers that have withered. In my exuberance over his recovery, I have to keep myself from talking too much; from repeating the discharge instructions more times than necessary. Parental love is different from other kinds, I think as we drive home. There is an intensity born of gratitude, an element of faith, or at least hope implied in its endurance.

And then you let go. The grand design of the universe requires relentless relinquishment. Your kids move about the world, create families, dream new dreams, and life becomes an effort to stay off stage but in the auditorium. To witness without wanting. They tell me I can’t stay with him. 

If you become a boat, I think, I won’t become the wind, trying to blow you home to me. I’ll become the sea, carrying you wherever you need to go. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

   

 

I have a confession. 

When I go for a walk, I call it a hike. 

I only call it a walk if there is a black-and-white terrier involved. Which is ironic because then you could call it a pull, a drag, the Iditarod, or a squirrel hunt. 

Also, in the confession category—I don’t like to walk with friends. (Sorry not sorry.) If our aim is to talk, let’s not be bumping shoulders on the sidewalk for a stroller to squeeze past or for the entire cross-country team of the local high school to stream around us like rocks in a river. Let’s relax on the front porch swing with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, crusty French bread, and some cheese. Or, in a pinch, Pringles. 

But the evidence that walking is good for you is overwhelming. I have a friend who, as a trauma physician, accumulated so much grief and emotional injury to his psyche that he walked 1,000 miles on the Pacific Coast Trail to heal his wounded soul. His boots leaked, the elevations were grueling, but he also encountered birdsong, stunning vistas, and trail angels—people who showed up at just the right moment with medical tape, steaming black coffee, cell phone chargers, and words of cheer. Sometimes they had set up stations at the approach to towns where they might be anticipated, but often they just appeared when most needed. 

I had an experience with a trail angel of sorts, only the trail was a bridge after a hurricane. I was in a prolonged period of fear and ambivalence where I could not see the way forward when one night what began as a dream became something else–an experience in another dimension perhaps. You tell me.

I dreamed I was driving across the Spa Creek bridge with my dog, Kaya after a storm with hurricane-force winds had raised seawater levels to astonishing heights, far higher than even a storm at full moon pulls the tide. 

The river was swollen so high that the bridge was submerged beneath several feet of creek water, and in my dream, the lanes no longer had guardrails. As I started to cross, I realized that without any reference points, I’d have to drive blind and just hope I stayed on the pavement beneath the water. If I turned the wheel even one foot in the wrong direction, I’d steer right off the invisible edge and sink. 

This fear was realistic because, unaided, human beings are unable to navigate a straight line. We can fly drones on Mars and find our way to other galaxies, but without landmarks (a church steeple, a distant mountain peak, a constellation), we instinctively move in circles. No one knows why, but one theory is that every step contains a misstep that compounds over time without a landmark by which to course correct. Blindfolded or just lost in the forest, without a visual point of reference we naturally loop back on ourselves. We will never find our way out of the woods. Without help, we will never find our way home.

So, with all the sophistication of a 12-year-old, I got out of the car and stood in front of it, thinking perhaps I could feel my way by wading—I could walk a few feet at a time feeling the pavement beneath me, then get back in the car to drive those few yards, stop and repeat.

I was standing there debating the merits of this game plan when something enveloped me as gently as thought—with the substance of air—and tenderly lifted me right off my feet. Enfolded by light, held in spun gold, this force carried me up and up until I was maybe 30 feet in the air. 

My sleeping self told my conscious self, “Something astounding is happening. Remember this,” just as the force began moving towards the east side of the creek. Stunned, I felt myself literally carried to the opposite shore, where I was tenderly lowered to the ground. 

I woke up astonished, mentally reviewing the experience in order to translate its meaning. The sensation of being lifted and carried was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. But because the barrier between the materialized world we inhabit and the world of spirit from which we came is a foreign country, we have no common language. Communication with spirit is by necessity the very essence of sign language, with both its limitations and elegance. 

I lay there puzzling out how to tell someone else what I’m telling you now. “Last night, I was carried over troubled waters,” I thought. “Something carried me from fear and confusion to the place I was trying to go.” 

In the still of the night, with only the whisper of the fan overhead, I suddenly understood. 

This was not a dream; it was a promise. Not just for me, but for all of us. 

The earth spins through space in the key of B flat, elephants grieve their dead, heat lightning is a myth, but singing sand is real.  

I want to understand all of it—every magical fact that is neither magic nor supernatural—but the mind-blowing nature of creation. How could I have lived most of my life not knowing most stars are binary? How could I have not understood the phases of the moon, or that compressed, the ozone layer that is the reason life even exists on this planet, is the thickness of two pennies? That the hottest stars in the universe are born and burn blue?

 Look up, look up!

The pattern for everything is all around you. The whorl of fine hair on a baby’s head is the spiral of a nautilus, the spiraling arms of the galaxy embracing you. It is the circle in which you would inevitably walk without help, without landmarks. Without trail angels to inspire you. And you are mine.  

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

Twice in my life, a stranger has commented that I’m a dead ringer for someone famous. This always fills me with dread. Let’s start with the basics. Is the famous person a man or a woman? How old?

Most recently, I was paying for a dress at White House Black Market, and the very sweet sales clerk said, “Oh my gosh! You remind me so much of someone—she’s an actress on a TV show, I just can’t think of her name.” 

“Ready for my credit card?” I asked, nudging it toward her. 

“No, wait! It’ll come to me…”

“Ha ha, you can just put the receipt in the bag,” I said, eyeing the store’s entrance back into the mall.

“Wait! You look JUST like her! It’s that show, Frankie and Grace! Have you ever seen it?” she asked. 

The truth is no, I’ve never watched the show, but I’ve seen the promotions for it. It’s about two old-lady friends—which I have for real–and I know who the stars are.

I said a quick prayer and offered hopefully, “Well, one of the stars is Jane Fonda.”

(pleasepleaseplease.)

“Nope,” she said, still searching her cheerful brain. 

I looked at her sadly. “One ringy-dingy, two ringy dingies.”

“That’s it!” she chortled. “Lily Tomlin!”  

“It’s my small eyes,” I complained when I got home. “They used to be bigger. I’m having them enlarged! Immediately!” 

I grew up in a household where self-improvement was the main theme. So, though I do look in a mirror several times throughout the day, what looks like vanity is more like spiritual scrutiny—it’s not to admire myself—it’s to improve myself. Somehow, “How can I be a better person, (Mom’s message) got fused with “How can I be a better-looking person?” (Society’s message.)

So, here’s the tricky part. 

If I am one of these things, which we judge to be superficial, I seem to automatically become the other, which is what it’s all about. Because on the rare occasions I feel pretty, I am a better person! I’m kinder, more generous, and present for those around me. I stop thinking about myself. I flirt with babies in the dog park. I contribute to St. Jude’s at every cash register, bring my neighbor’s trashcans in, and overtip at the Bistro. It’s as if happiness fuses with kindness and weirdly, they feel like love. And love is generative. Like radiation. Like light. In those brief moments of confidence, I’m a floodlight. And maybe that kind of unselfconscious love is also a searchlight. It illuminates any similar energy in your path. 

I was looking for a gift in Anthropologie yesterday, and an appealing young man whose mother probably called him “pumpkin head” was holding his own 8-month-old baby boy in front of one of the mirrors while his wife paid for a pair of earrings. The baby was the picture of health—rosy cheeks, bright blue eyes, a head as perfectly round as a soccer ball. 

I couldn’t stop smiling at them because they were beautiful, and with all the pain and violence in the world, appreciating beauty is a soul-healing prescription I’ve made as natural as breathing. Placing your attention on the gifts strewn in your path is like setting your energy dial to receiving the sacred. 

But it wasn’t this pair’s physical beauty that was compelling. It was their joy. This dad and his baby boy adored each other, and my smile was for the existence of love itself. The baby caught my eye, and his face lit up. His dad brought him over. 

“This is Troy,” the young father said. 

“He’s precious,” I said.

“Thankfully, he looks like his mother,” the dad said. But that wasn’t true. I could see the mother. She did not have this dad’s crystal blue eyes and radiant smile. Love was making Dad happy, and happiness is always generous. They returned to the mirror, and I sent them a silent blessing –a wish for their continued well-being and delight.

We fill up in so many ways: romance, work, family duties, exercise, travel, philanthropy. We pour energy into the empty place and call it life. We call it “what I did today,” but we are almost always in acquisition mode. In the subtle search-for-meaning-mode.

But blessings flip the energy. They are a desire from the inside out for another’s good fortune. And what makes them more than a wish and closer to a prayer is that, in a way, a blessing says, “I’m asking that something bigger than I am protects you and grants you joy.” Do we have that ability? To bless each other? Without religion or rules? To say to the universe, “I don’t have any authority here, but could you please bestow love by proxy?” I hope so.

Because I feel it all the time, the desire to bless. The man on a rickety bike who looks like he needs a car. The woman fanning herself at the bus stop when it’s sweltering, the patient in the ambulance blasting by, the lumbering, overweight jogger doing his best. Bless you, bless you, bless you. 

Does the bus come faster? Does the bicyclist get a car? Does the patient make it to the hospital? Does the runner get a second wind?

When I was very pregnant with my first child, it was time to say goodbye to a pastoral therapist I’d been seeing. I was done. He had been the first person in my life to identify the hole in my soul, and, as Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” Although I still have much to learn, it was time to close this chapter.

He put his hands gently on my belly, held them there, and closed his eyes. “If I have a blessing in me,” he said, “it’s yours.” I was struck by the fact that he qualified his statement. “If he had a blessing?” He was an ordained minister. He wasn’t sure? But he was also just a human being with failings. And neither of us could know anything with certainty.

It was a hot August evening. The crickets sang as if song alone could delay the arrival of autumn, and the sweet, humid air was still. I walked to the car, gravel crunching beneath my sandals, heavy with child and slightly heavy of heart. I looked back at the little church with a sense of closure and accomplishment, but when something good comes to an end, it takes a while for “good” to outweigh “over.” As I started the car, I chose to believe perfection was neither possible nor required. 

Joy is radiation. Love is a benediction. I pulled onto the road home, knowing I’d been blessed. The baby I would greet as the leaves turned gold had been blessed.

And if I have a blessing in me now, it is yours. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

My great-great grandmother, Mary Jane Aten and her husband Robert, set out in their horse and buggy on a cold November afternoon in 1900 to visit their son Henry in the town of Vermont, Illinois. Along the way, they stopped in Table Grove for lunch with their daughter, Flora, staying for a couple of hours of roast turkey and talk. When they resumed their journey, they closed the buggy’s side curtains against the autumn wind, and Robert snugged down the earflaps on his brown cap. Mary Jane leaned against him, bundled up tight in a coat with a hood.   

This is why, the theory goes, they never heard the train at the crossing two miles north of Vermont where the CB and Q road crosses the tracks. Robert drove the buggy onto the rails, directly into the path of the train barreling toward them. The conductor saw the carriage, applied the brakes, and frantically blew the whistle, causing the horse to freeze. Barely able to slow, the train plowed into them at near full speed. 

In an instant the buggy was kindling, no piece left bigger than the wheels. The bulk of it remained on the train’s pilot. When the crew doubled back, they found the horse was uninjured—though the force of the impact had stripped him of his bridle and harness. 

My great-great-grandparents had been married since 1852 and had nine children. But what moves me about this story is where and how they were found. Robert 82 and Mary Jane 72 were discovered lying together on the bank—Robert’s arm flung outward, and Mary Jane cradled in the crook of it—as if they were sleeping. Their catastrophic wounds were invisible—their clothing untorn– and her hair, long and still dark, remained tied back like a girl’s.

Ridiculously, I’m grateful more than 100 years later that an obedient horse was not hurt. And less ridiculously, that two people who were ahead of me in the family line stayed married for more than half a century and loved nine children. I like how that feels because I’ve been seeking a solid sense of self for most of my adult years. 

My father left when I was so young that when, at 36, I saw him seated next to my mother at Capers for brunch, I was silently stunned. It was as if I had been swimming off the deep end all my life, and my toes had just touched the bottom. Suddenly I was someone new—someone with parents—not just a mother. For the first time, there was solid ground beneath my feet. I felt like I came from somewhere. And we all need that– our origin story—and I’ve come to realize an origin story starts long before your parents. It begins as far back as you need it to. 

You can look for clues in a variety of places, family history, stories like Robert’s and Mary Jane’s, and even your genetic makeup–which is why I was excited when I was gifted with one of the very first DNA test kits to come on the market.

At last, I would discover more clues as to who I am from the inside out. I expected to have Robert and Mary Jane’s English and Scottish ancestry confirmed and hoped for a surprise or two. I sent in my samples, waited a week, and logged onto the internet using a private barcode to see the results of what the company called cutting-edge science. The results of my DNA sample were depicted graphically as a target overlaying the ten countries whose populations most closely match my genetic identity. I stared expectantly at northern Europe, but there was nothing there. Nothing. 

“So,” the ever-helpful Mr. Oliver said as we scrutinized the screen. “Your primary countries of origin are… Tanzania…” he pushed back from the computer to assess me quizzically, then turned back to the screen, “and Mozambique.” 

“Surprise,” he said, but he said it in Leah-the-dog’s voice—which is how we often communicate around here when we want to deflect emotion or, as in this case, we just want to make the other person laugh.

Not a drop of Scottish or English blood. “That can’t be me!” I snapped, indignant and inexplicably offended. Because I had assumed the accuracy of the results and they didn’t jibe with what I knew to be true, I was caught in a space-time anomaly in which I had no identity at all. I think I felt huffy because I felt tricked. 

But in reading the fine print, I realized the company’s claim that its analysis was as personal as a fingerprint was valid because it was also just as worthless in decoding ancestry. Their business was analyzing “Junk” DNA, which is non-coding, and though we are still searching, it seems to have no purpose at all, even though it comprises more than 75% of your entire genome. Technically, however, the company was correct. Since early man walked out of Africa, it’s everyone’s home address. When the major religions of the world claim, “we are one,” and anthropologists refer to the “family of man,” they are not wrong.

Until 1972 Junk DNA was referred to as “Selfish DNA.” It seemed to exist only for itself. Maybe that has been its undoing. Why it now sits in our genome, no longer sending instructions to make us who we are but as a record of where we have been. 

Body, mind, spirit—we walked out of Africa with all three intricately linked and evolving only to demonstrate that what exists only for itself loses dominion.

My great-great grandparents’ lives ended bookended by family—a son in Vermont, a daughter in Table Grove. Like them, may we all die knowing who we are, in the arms of someone we love.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.