I thought we would fly to England this holiday season to see our eldest daughter Audra, who lives in Surrey, but she came to the States this summer with her husband and their two little boys, the heir and the heir. No one would call Lucas, that five-year-old charmer, a spare.

So, although I would have loved to see my daughter again, I was a little relieved that they’d be skiing in France this holiday because travel, while exciting, can be stressful. And by “can,” I mean “is.” I’m stopped at Security virtually every time I board a plane, and it’s always easier to leave the US than to be allowed to come home.

Last year, on checking in at Heathrow for my flight to Dulles, I scrambled to get all my possessions in the screening bins without holding up the well-dressed businessman tailgating my efforts. Shoes off, computer in a bin of its own. Personal care products in 3.5 oz bottles, my boarding pass out. I waited for the nod before I walked through the X-ray booth. I smiled, but not too much, not like I was up to something.

But I was still pulled out of line for more intense screening. Weirdly, this always makes me feel both indignant and guilty. Like the UK Border Force knows something about me that I don’t know, and we’re all about to find out. I’m as interested as they are. What the heck DID I do?

So, I put my arms up helpfully while they patted me down—I leaned into it. I do the same thing when doctors say, “You may feel a stick, a pinch, or some pressure.”  I was the picture of compliance.

But I got pulled out of line for a secondary screening as we were actually boarding. I sat on a bench with other suspects even though I never-ever use words that rhyme with Tom or leave my suitcase unattended. I stood by anxiously while my computer was swiped for explosive residue, and even though I knew there couldn’t possibly be any, it felt as if, because they were looking, it just might materialize. This is why I avoid annual physicals as well.

Then there was the trip home alone from the southern hemisphere with only my youngest daughter, then 7. After we were fully boarded and the doors sealed, the pilot came on to inform us there was something wrong with the brakes. We were to stay in our seats. They could make the repair without us deplaning.

Three hours later, still strapped in our seats, and 6 hours after we’d left the house in Auckland, we took off for a 12.75-hour flight to San Fransisco. I looked across the aisle at the man in the pale blue Brooks Brothers shirt and said, “You get it that they haven’t tested the brakes, right? That the first test will be when we hit the tarmac in San Francisco?”  We smiled at each other like people who are going to die but now feel better about it.

So, by the time we arrived in CA, I’d been traveling with a second grader, hauling luggage to transfer desks, lifting carry-ons, scrutinized repeatedly, and seated in Economy for 16 hours.

Instinctively anxious, I overshared at Customs—explained what didn’t need explaining while everyone else streamed to Baggage Claim.

When I got there, I saw the man across the aisle who was going to die with me if the brakes failed, and I wanted to say thank you. No. That’s not quite true. I wanted to say, “Don’t leave me.” Is that weird? And “Thanks for sharing that quantum potentiality with me for a while.” I smiled at him, “We’re going to live,” I said. He laughed, “Looks like,” he replied. He hefted his suitcase from the conveyor belt and headed towards the sliding doors, toward whoever or whatever awaited him. “Have a good one,” he called back. He meant “day,” but I heard “life.”

Goodbye, goodbye, have a good life.

I understand the concept of entanglement as attachment. Even the briefest of life intersections with others have left an indelible impression on mine. And I was too well loved as a child to have the instinct for attachment I have, so it’s a puzzle. I should be unaffected when the woman I never knew in cardio dance moves to Florida. Or when the neighbor who constantly put her trash out on the street a day early moves away. Why do I occasionally wonder if she is happy? I don’t even know her name.

Maybe I’m called out for repeated security screenings because those waves of energy detect the hidden attachments to others I carry.

If life is a trip that ends in a foreign country—one none of us has visited but have heard a lot about–I’d really like to be at ease going through check-in. To be surrounded by loved ones at the transfer desk, to be able to tell the Customs agent (whom I’ll always remember), that I’m reuniting, not just with family and friends, but with everyone I never knew.

“Have a good one,” I’ll call out cheerfully as I exit the terminal. And I won’t mean “day,” I’ll mean life everlasting. As I step into the next great adventure with you.

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.

Yesterday, I took my rescue terrier, Leah the Wonder Dog, to the dog park at Greenbury Point—the site of one small victory for mankind, one giant loss for the Man. Congress just ruled that the Navy could not commandeer Greenbury Point to create another private golf course. Greenbury will remain open to the public that loves it. The riverside trails are a great place to restore your soul beside still waters or to walk a dog.

Off-leash in the play yard enclosure, Leah ran like the wind—flying across the grass like a pilot practicing touch-and-go landings. I ran too, to encourage her to exercise, but as she flew joyously toward me, I flashed back to a similar scenario running in Southsea Commons, Portsmouth, England, last spring. 

I ran through a nearly empty park—broad grassy areas defined by tree-lined avenues are bordered by hotels and restaurants on one side and the sparkling Solent on the other. As I passed Southsea Castle, I noticed a woman walking a smallish white-and-gold dog off-leash on the far side of the Commons. It was against the law, but I understood the temptation–there were no other dogs and few people around.

I was deeply into my playlist, air pods in, listening to Ed Sheeran—imagining myself beautiful, not ordinary, fast, not a 12-minute-miler, hair loose in the wind, not in a ponytail—oh stop it, at least I admit it—and for an instant, as the dog turned away from his owner and began to run toward me, I had a vision of two lovers running through an empty field toward each other in slow motion, arms opened to embrace.

Taylor Swift came on as I passed the D-Day Memorial, and now I was Shakin’ it Off, running faster, getting cooler and quite possibly younger by the minute as the dog closed in. As he approached, I could see he had the square head of a Scottie, the wide jaw of a Pit, and probably weighed 40 pounds. Missing my own dog, I sent the pup bounding exuberantly over the grass a surge of goodwill. When you can’t be with the dog you love…. 

On a runner’s high, the dog yards from me now, I realized we were going to intersect, and I beamed my affection at this white and gold missile, my Leah stand-in whom I loved by proxy. I slowed so we could greet each other just as he hurtled himself forward and sunk his teeth into my calf. 

I shrieked, stopped by the 40 pounds of dog attached to my right leg like an anchor, and shocked at pain’s intrusion into my romanticized moment. At this point, his owner, a British woman about my age, huffed up, calling out, “Oh Toasty, don’t do that.”

“Oh. My. Gosh! I exclaimed. “Your dog just bit me!” I stood there in shock, a bit disoriented, mano-a-mano with a panting Toasty, who looked a bit malevolent up close. “Heh-heh-heh-Who’s toast now?” he seemed to say.

“He bit me!” I repeated somewhat stupidly, balancing my weight on my left leg. The owner looked at me calmly.

“No, he didn’t,” she said. We stared at each other. “Toasty doesn’t bite.”

“Like hell, he doesn’t,” I said, still balancing on my good leg. Then I said something worse. A lot worse.

“Oh. You’re American.” She bent down to pet the Toaster.

“That’s right,” I said, suddenly insanely and inappropriately proud for no reason at all except, and I’ll just say it, who was first to the moon? 

“You don’t have to be crude,” she admonished. “Show me.”

Pain, fear, and injustice broke down a lifetime of propriety, and I exclaimed, “What?? I don’t have to prove it to you! Your freaking dog just sunk his teeth into my calf.” But I canted my leg toward her so we could both inspect the perfect crescent of canine teeth marks eight inches above my ankle. She glanced down, then looked directly back at my face. 

“No, he didn’t,” she repeated. 

Now I was in a small rural town where the cops plant evidence and the judge is corrupt. Where all the citizens are in on the creepy conspiracy to convince you of an altered state of reality, and they’ve impounded your car. 

“How about this?” I said, shaking now and wondering why my own anger was scary. She was as calm as the queen. 

“How about we find a policeman and ask him what he thinks?” I looked pointedly at a sign requiring dogs to be leashed.

She glanced around the empty park and said, in her British accent, “Well, darling, you can try.” But she turned away quickly and, with Toasty by her side, set off down the avenue in the opposite direction. I had no recourse but to limp along after them with my burgeoning case of rabies and onset of hydrophobia or continue my run home where I could scrounge for hydrogen peroxide. 

Why hadn’t I taken a picture of the perpetrator? I had my phone! I could have posted his little mugshot on every telephone pole in Southsea. “Toasty. Bites!” Instead, I took a photo of my leg with its rainbow arc of punctures and progressively purpling bruise, as what? Proof to myself I’d been victimized?

It’s shocking how little it took for me to lose my manners. I’m a bit alarmed at how fast I devolved. How thin the veneer was between tourist and well, gunslinger. 

She didn’t look back as she hurried away, clearly the more culturally composed of the two of us, but could she also have been as scared as I was angry? Or scared because I was angry? I’m still looking for a point of empathy. A story I can imagine that will make this okay.

I tell myself an Englishwoman and I both love Southsea Commons. And we both love dogs. And from that I can extrapolate that we both love our kids, and our friends. In fact, in another era we might have been handmaid to gentlewoman, servants at the same court. In another circumstance, there alongside the ancient Solent, we might have been friends. 

But. I read a book lately with a whole chapter on it being okay not to like someone. That learning to love everyone is not a requirement of the universe. 

Although I think it is. 

This is why I’m still trying not to feel like a colonial upstart victimized by a subject of the queen. 

Is it really okay not to like someone and to leave it at that? Surely the answer is just to try harder! Isn’t that the American way? 

I may be laughing now, but as she disappeared near Southsea Castle, I was still spoiling for a fight. I wanted to yell after her, Hey! Toasty’s Mom!

Forget the moon. 

Who won the Revolution, darling? 

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.

 

Clustered around two tables at a Chinese restaurant, I am one of 12 women ostensibly here to have lunch and to learn more about feng shui, the Chinese art of rearranging your possessions to change your life. In reality, it is the promise of a personalized forecast for the Chinese New Year that inspired most of us to ante up the $40 fee. 

The predictions are nested in little boxes of tokens left at our place settings, like gift bags at a birthday party. I bypass the red silk ribbon, jasmine candies, and the fake coins to reach for my reading. 

I was born in the Year of the Snake, I discover. It is unappealing by Western standards, but then the woman to my immediate left was born in the Year of the Rat. Is that any better? We Snakes are the most beautiful women in the world my reading claims. How can that be true? I glance around the table, wondering who the Snakes are

The workshop leader is wearing red, which suits her warm smile, while I am wearing black, which I’m pretty sure is not the best feng shui color to have on, but I think I look better in it. 

Look, I’m a Black Snake, I joke to the Rat.  

My companion doesn’t respond; her focus is riveted upon our hostess, who explains that everything in the material world rests spatially next to something else. Therefore, where I place each object in my home impacts the energy flowing to me. The result? Proper arrangement of my belongings can facilitate the realization of my dreams.

Many of my dreams have already come true: my dog, who was once prescribed Prozac, has never actually bitten anyone. My children’s father has 1) become a gourmet cook who 2) thinks cooking for others is fun! But if feng shui is both art and science, I have one nagging question. Where can I place the past so that it does not interfere with the present?

What if now I want to say yes to being “Room Mother?” No to working all weekend? Yes, to taking Advanced Conversational French with Mrs. Proccacini?  

What if I wish I’d gone on more vacations when the kids were young, danced at my own wedding? Been braver, less self-absorbed? What if I want to do it all over again—career, being a parent, a sister, a friend, being human– knowing what I know now?

Our instructor can’t hear what I’m unable to ask, so she offers more specific instructions. I should put something gold in my prosperity corner and add a plant with friendly round leaves. I’m advised to keep water near my fireplace and to aim all sharp-cornered furniture away from my bed.

Servers arrive laden with bowls of steaming, brothy soup. Silverware and china clatter as the restaurant fills with the bubbling conversation of other diners. A water feature in the lobby creates the sound of perpetual rain, and I lean forward in order to hear as our instructions continue. 

I should bury a red string in the front yard and write down everything I want to bring into my life and everything I need to release. My gift box includes two small pieces of paper on which to do this. They are thin and delicate, emblazoned with gold leaf symbols and red Chinese lettering I cannot decipher. When this task is accomplished, I’m to burn them. 

I start to write. I want my children to remain happy. Healthy. I want to do good work in this world. I want to live with transparent authenticity. I want to be instinctively generous. Compassionate. Thoughts come faster now as I suddenly feel as if it’s all true: I can change the past and forge a bright future, so it is imperative that I leave nothing out. I want to live up to my potential, to know that love honors our intentions, forgives our mistakes, that a benevolent force is at the heart of the universe.

The woman next to me glances over as I cover my second paper’s surface. “Is that all?” she asks dryly, but I’m not finished. Rotating the page, I write in the tiny margins. 

I want to know that I am not alone, even when I feel alone; that in some way we have yet to rightly imagine, all is well. 

At home, I step outside. Pulling the two small pieces of paper from my pocket, I kneel against the winter wind. A match flames against each fragile corner, and I lift them skyward. As I watch, regret disappears, at least in this moment, and all I still long for ascends like hope in the pristine air.  

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.

This is a story about memory. New evidence indicates that it’s not what you think it is and even photographs don’t tell the whole story.

In the earliest snapshot of a childhood Christmas, I’m nine months old and my parents have placed me in an open gift box under the tree. My two older sisters kneel next to me on the braided rug posing as if I’m a present they’ve just opened. Sharon, the oldest, dutifully holds the wrapped lid of the box with gentle goodwill. My sister Andrea looks stunned with disbelief, so I’ll say it again. I’m sorry I wasn’t a pony.

In a later photo I’m a happy diaper-clad toddler packing a six-shooter in a holster. My western ensemble includes a red neckerchief, a cowgirl hat, and a gigantic emergency-room bandage taped to my forehead. I’d fallen down an entire flight of wooden stairs, hit the landing with unstoppable momentum and tumbled headfirst down the remaining steps where I’d cracked my head open on the coffee table our father had made in his basement workshop.

As I write this it occurs to me that a resigned, pony-less cowgirl may have dressed me up in her Annie Oakley outfit to compensate for having been unable to stop my unsteady approach to the top of the stairs.

I don’t remember the fall, but I do remember being on an exam table where a kindly male doctor with white hair pinched the profusely-bleeding wound closed with butterfly clamps instead of stitches to avoid leaving me with the large scar I now have. I remember being asked how many people were in my family and knowing the answer, five, although of course that is a trick of memory and not possible. But in my mind at least, I identified us on my fingers by name if not number, and the doctor gave me a grape lollipop for each member of my original posse.

And then there’s the photo above of my sisters and me in angelic white choir robes with red bows at our necks, gathered around the piano. I’m nearly three now. Sharon is poised with her hands above the keys playing carols and we all are singing. At least our mouths are open and we’re holding sheet music, but in my memory, we’ve been instructed: “Just act like you’re singing and stop hitting each other.” On the back of that photo my mother has written, “The girls love to make music together!” Did we? Could Sharon play then? I don’t know.

That’s the thing about memory. Neuroscientists have discovered that every time you remember an event from the past you change it. So, the more you recall an experience or relationship, the more you distort it. Researchers did a test with 9-11 survivors. Each time they told their stories the details changed until just one year out from the event their accounts of that morning were significantly altered. Imagine what a lifetime of remembering does to experience. And what is true? The event or the memory you make of it?

I remember my sisters slipping our presents to each other under a tree we’d cut from the woods, while the others hid their eyes on Christmas Eve. I remember the ringing of a strand of red, green, and silver bells, passed one to the other, to signal that it was time for everyone to look, to gasp at the magical transformation, the growing abundance. With each ringing of the bells and moment of revelation, the little heap of presents grew.

I remember a midnight worship service in a white clapboard church where a flame was passed candle to candle to the accompaniment of “Silent Night,” until the countenance of an entire congregation was bathed in light. And I remember three jostling sisters crammed together at the top of the stairs on Christmas morning while my sleepy parents opened the curtains so the river could watch, lit a fire in the fireplace, turned on the tree lights, and poured their coffee before we thundered down the steps.

The December dawn cast its soft rose light over snowy swans in the icy cove as we opened gifts, but were they there? I don’t know.

If memory can’t be trusted, what of our Christmas recollections is true? Maybe this: the unbearable excitement of believing in the unseen, in miracles; in thinking that just for one night the impossible is possible. Reindeer can fly, and if you believe, love will heal the world.

Happy Holidays.

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 friend, Sheryl, has Christmas gift-giving down to a science. Each member of her family of four writes down three things they would like to receive, then emails the links to the entire family. 

“So, we always get exactly what we want,” my most practical friend says. “No returns, no waste.” We are walking up the street past Old Woman Cove.

“But no surprise?” I ask, trying to make criticism sound like a question while admiring the mirror-still perfection of the creek in December. 

Sheryl shrugs and smiles. “The surprise is… you don’t know which person is giving you which item!”

That feels like Surprise’s second cousin twice removed. Barely a blood relative. 

Surprise isn’t always welcome, of course. Sometimes it arrives with fear, jeopardy, and resignation in tow. Sometimes, it is napkin holders made out of pine needles (my paternal grandmother’s specialty one year). But if there is magic in this world, it is sourced in what cannot be predicted. 

When I was in high school, my sister and her husband were living in Sulzbach, Germany and when my first niece and my mother’s first grandchild was born, Mom decided the two of us would use the opportunity to both visit family and see Europe. It was Mom’s first transatlantic trip and mine, as well. She was 49. I was 17.   

As passengers boarded the aircraft, a charter flight for Army relatives, a man with a pencil and clipboard asked each of us how much we weighed. I said 110, but the real number was 115. I looked at the line behind me as he added my weight to his calculations, wondering how many liars it would take to bring down the plane. 

My sister, her husband, and baby girl met us in Frankfurt, and the five of us took off on a road trip through Germany, Italy, Austria, and Switzerland–crammed in an Alpha Romeo. 

One night in Lake Como, we checked into a grand but worn hotel, where the rugs were frayed and evidence of maid service scarce. My mother and I shared a room, my sister and her family shared another. These kinds of accommodations challenged Mom because she had developed a severe mouse phobia in childhood. Farm. Brother. A foot race with what the cat dragged in. I won’t say more, but it was traumatizing. 

So she assessed our room warily. I dropped a shopping bag containing half a pastry, a cameo, and a coral ring I’d purchased in Venice on the nightstand, and Mom went into the bathroom with a jar of cold cream to start preparations for bed. I was pulling a nightgown from my suitcase when I turned and saw the bag on the nightstand moving as if something alive was in it, and then it sort of scooted off the table and dropped to the floor. Without investigating, I shrieked, “Mouse!” and leaped on the bed. Mom came flying out of the bathroom, and within seconds, we were both high-stepping on the mattress like it was on fire; then she jumped off, grabbed her purse, and was out the door.

Not knowing what to do, I followed her out to the car, where I found her hugging her handbag like a life jacket. “I’m not staying in a room with a mouse,” she said, looking both stubborn and like she was going to cry. She opened the door to the Alpha Romeo, climbed in, and closed it. I stood there staring at her as cars whizzed by. She grimly arranged herself in the front passenger seat, then, eyes locked on mine, she slowly reclined it. 

By now, it was 10 pm and completely dark. We were off the main thoroughfare but still quite publicly parked. I heard a wolf whistle from a dark alleyway. Then another. 

I weighed my options. Mouse? Mom. Mouse? Mom. “Move over,” I said through the window, then opened the door and folded myself into the backseat for the most uncomfortable night of my life. 

In the morning, I woke up, looked at Mom where she lay limp and unmoving, and realized, to my horror, that she no longer appeared to be breathing. Her face, white, had aged ten years. Her chest was still. Not even an eyelid fluttered. 

“Mom!” I cried out. 

“What ??” She jerked awake; her eyes flew open.

“I thought you were dead,” I muttered. 

“I only feel dead,” she said.

We checked out of the hotel and continued our trip, my brother-in-law driving with my sister in front, Mom, the baby, and me in the back. We rode in torrential rain, Mom and I dozing a bit, until after dark. 

At some point, we crossed the border into Austria, though the view outside the car had been opaque for hours. We waited in the cramped car while my brother-in-law checked us into a lovely little hotel on the edge of town, right on a rushing river. When he signaled from the door, we covered our heads against the rain and dashed inside. Exhausted after having not slept the night before, Mom and I went straight to bed, the room heavily draped and quiet—no sound except the rushing river and pounding rain. 

I awoke the next day to silence; the storm had moved on. I slipped out of bed, threw open the drapes, and stood stunned in the Austrian sunlight. Because we had arrived at night, I’d had no concept that we had been climbing into the mountains. Instead of a town square or quaint city park, alps shouldered our hotel room and towered into the sky. I h ad never seen mountains so magnificent or been so close. I could have reached out the window and touched a peak that grazed heaven. It was like waking to find the beanstalk had grown over the roof– like gazing at the Grand Canyon or Hubble’s Pillars of Creation—the shocking magnitude of size alone, humbling. 

I have felt something similar under a midwestern sky, but knowing these peaks were once an ancient seabed, raised from the floor of an ocean, inch by inch into the clouds, I stood there equally astonished by their beauty and the incomprehensible evidence of geologic time. We are such fragile, brief beings. We are only sparks flung outward from one great light. It was like experiencing mortality and immortality simultaneously. It was like unexpectedly encountering the face of God. 

I don’t want to remove surprise from this life–— to offer only what has been requested to preclude disappointment–because while surprise means you’ll get some things you don’t want, it also means you’ll receive gifts you don’t even know to ask for. 

And some things that feel like disappointments will turn out to be gifts—that transfer, that layover, that annoying coworker you would marry again, every day, for the rest of your life. The illness that heals you. 

I don’t know if there is a divine design for my life. Or yours. I’ve asked so many times. Just tell me what you want. But the answer is always and forever the same.

“Surprise Me.” 

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.e