If the house catches fire, I’ll knot my twisted bedsheets together and scramble to safety from an upstairs window. Plan B? Jump to the mulberry tree after rallying the family for evacuation. If the pilot has a heart attack… if the brakes on the car fail…you get the idea. From the time I was in elementary school I have strategized the means by which I will save my family if disaster strikes. Tidal waves, earthquakes, collapsing bridges—there’s a plan.

In novels and short stories, it’s called “saving the cat”—the moment when the protagonist–who may have some pretty overt failings, redeems himself by running back into the burning building to rescue the cat. But when I was 8, I learned you can’t plan for these events. You have to already be a hero, and if that’s what you’re made of the moment finds you.

Summer was stir-fry hot. My older sister, her pretty friend Patty, some neighborhood boys, and I were crabbing off the end of our pier while our collie, Beau, kept an eye on us. Normally, we combed the seaweed for doublers within wading distance of shore or searched for unwary crustaceans clinging delicately to the pier pilings. But this time we’d procured chicken necks and that’s where the trouble began.

The smell of creosote baking in the midsummer sun, the saltwater breeze off the river, dragonflies flitting about in the beachgrass, all conspired to create what could have been a typical July afternoon. There were more kids than crab nets so there was the usual jostling at the end of the pier as we tied thick twine around each boney crook of chicken, securing the other end to a piling with an untoward number of knots before tossing the bait in the water. I’m not sure, but I may have been vain about my knot tying. I may have thought they were exceptionally tricky or tight. Someone, my father or perhaps a Girl Scout leader, had taught me to tie a slipknot, a bowline, a half hitch and a square knot.

Ernie, or more likely, Reese, peered over the end of the dock where we had several lines dangling and yelled, “Doubler! Give me the net!” We clustered shoulder to shoulder as he began gently tugging the string, inch by slow inch, towards the surface. The crabs, which had begun the ascent as mere murky outlines, were now crystal clear just inches below our own rippling reflections. A 10-inch hard shell with a softy attached. With one quick scoop of the net and a flip of the wrist, Reese had the pair scrabbling in our rusty bucket. The chicken neck lay on the splintery dock, a boney hook on a homemade line.

In that split second, before anyone could stop him, the enterprising Beau lunged between our legs and swallowed the chicken neck whole, the string still secured to the piling. Six kids shrieked with excitement at the new development as the dog began to take huge, panicked gulps of the string, in an attempt to finish it off now that the chicken was stuck in his gullet. We desperately tried to unknot the twine as the distressed dog retched but the string had gotten wet, then dried in the sun. That chicken neck might as well have been soldered to the piling.

As we realized we couldn’t pull the chicken out, and no one had a knife, what had been exciting, was fast becoming an emergency.

Suddenly, the resourceful Patty fell to her knees, grabbed the string as close to the dog’s mouth as she could get, and started to chew. Time slowed as the dog gagged, Patty chomped away, and the rest of us stared, silenced by the gross ingenuity of this development. The sun beat down, the dragonflies danced for their lives with only a few months to live, and after an intense minute the string gave way. The dog polished off the last couple of inches with a happy bark, and we erupted in a rousing cheer.

It has taken me years not to live as a strategist. To cross the Bay Bridge admiring the sparkling shimmer beneath the span-shadows, instead of wondering how long I can float on my back when the guardrail gives way.

I don’t know if this daydreaming was a hope for attention or a childish savior complex. Or perhaps it was where the mind of a child goes who, for good reason, has learned she has absolutely no control over what happens to her. Who has learned that fear is a required course in childhood, but fun is an elective. Who has learned to prepare for the worst because no one’s coming. But for all my preparation, research shows heroes don’t stop to plan or to reason. They act instantaneously and intuitively on an innate urge to serve. The good they do is instinctive.

I hope if the moment ever presents itself, I save the cat. Or the dog. Or someone’s baby, or an old man with a cane. I want to cure Juvenile Diabetes, to end addictions of every kind. To feed the starving on a global scale, foster abandoned children, bring laughter to the sad of heart.

But I think most of us don’t get the opportunity to save the cat. Instead, we have to live with the cat. Long days and unremarkable years of loving in the most ordinary of ways, steadfast and unacknowledged. Commuting insane hours on the beltway to provide for a family, rising repeatedly on sleepless nights to soothe fevers, and one day, reminding the parent who named us, of our name.

If you were loved this way, by anyone, may you be inspired to love this way in kind. That will make heroes of all of us.
*****

The third time my carry-on suitcase didn’t quite make it over the lip of the overhead luggage compartment and slammed down on my head, I blinked back tears. I had already been enroute 14 hours, rising at dawn on the east coast to make a flight from Dulles to LAX, where I’d waited out a seven-hour layover on a plastic chair by the gate before boarding this flight, which would be another 13 hours over the Pacific to Auckland, New Zealand.  I no longer had the strength to hoist the bag over my head and was quickly losing my grip on not being a crazy person, the kind who sees no reason to put her shoes back on after clearing Security, or once, and I actually did this, hisses, “Get out of my way!” at a startled woman changing direction innocently but abruptly in front of me on a crowded concourse.     

Passengers already seated watched me struggle with placid disinterest. I was getting hot and the line behind me was beginning to bulge when a handsome bald man in Ray-Bans reached around from behind me, lifted the suitcase as if it weighed nothing and deftly tucked it in the bin.  “I was going to cry,” I told him, but what I meant was, “Will you marry me?”

 “I could tell,” he said, and was gone.

People you meet while traveling are assigned to you by fate, like neighbors, but travel is a transient neighborhood which makes for fast alliances, quick disclosures. And unlike neighbors, those sharing your journey are willing to help not because of any chemistry, history, or potential payoff, but because it’s the right thing to do. 

Like the time I flew to Bermuda because my midshipman fiancé was crewing on a Swan 44 in the Newport- Bermuda Race. Unfortunately, I landed while the fleet was still 100 miles offshore and the guesthouse where I’d be staying didn’t acknowledge my reservation. I was young. I’d paid in advance with cash at a shady travel agency in Norfolk. There were no vacancies anywhere.  

The gentle guesthouse reservations clerk took pity on me. After making a call, he put me in a taxi and sent it to his “friend’s” house. The friend was a tall, inexplicably generous Bermudian who happened to hold the position of Running Back for the New York Giants. This world-class athlete owned a beautiful cliff-side home he often made available to team members. I explained my predicament as the taxi idled and he said I was welcomed to stay at his house—no need to compensate him. He’d bunk with his girlfriend in town. Looking back, I am still stunned by the magnitude of this man’s generosity. I remember being grateful, but was I grateful enough?  

My fiancé’s yacht, Shadow, crossed the finish later that afternoon. We celebrated on the grassy lawn of the Royal Bermudian Yacht Club where tan yachtsmen sported shorts and knee socks, bejeweled women wore floral dresses the color of coral and the sea at noon.  We spent a week in a beautiful residence where 122 wooden steps led down to a private beach.

Then there was the time I flew to Madrid in order to avoid spending my first married Christmas alone. My new husband had been deployed six weeks after we were married for the better part of a year and although the destroyer escort on which he served as Damage Control Officer was docking in Barcelona, he’d arranged to meet me in Madrid when my plane landed. 

But he wasn’t there. And neither was the luggage in which I’d brought all the Christmas gifts from our families at home. In fact, the ship itself was missing. No one could tell me why the USS Pharris hadn’t docked because in reality, the ship had been delayed 72 hours by a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game with a Russian sub. 

I hadn’t thought to make a backup plan, but a young Spaniard, with rumpled dark hair and a winsome smile, overheard my predicament. In short order he had me on the next flight to Barcelona with him, without my luggage, yet when I arrived my suitcase was sitting there waiting. Having gone through Customs without me it had been pried open and searched. Christmas wrapping and ribbon protruded in colorful abandon from the broken locks, but to my astonishment, everything was intact.  I turned around to show my Spanish friend this miracle, but he was gone.

I’ve been told the universe always offers assistance in times of change (which I interpret as times of stress), and travel certainly qualifies. These are the people with whom you have the briefest encounters but remember for the longest time. 

I never saw the man in Ray-Bans, the compassionate reservations clerk, the Running Back, or the empathetic Spaniard again, and the sense that I was too young and self-absorbed to take in the magnitude of their kindness weighs on me. Surely, I thanked them; please God, let me have thanked them, instinctively, wholeheartedly, but why don’t I remember expressing my appreciation? It makes me want to do so now.

But not just to them.

The driver who let me merge, the roommate who let me borrow her car, the stylist who fixed the haircut I gave myself, the stranger who got the lug nuts off so I could fix a flat tire—there are so many people traveling together for a brief time. Who’s sitting next to you? 

 I remember what I received, what I felt, but not what I gave in return, and this haunts me. 

 So, I can only tell you, how very grateful I was and how grateful I am, now and forever. 

 And offer help to every lost and weary pilgrim whose path crosses 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.

This is a piece about the insecure souls most writers possess. I said “most” but I mean me. And by writers, I mean you.

When I publish a piece readers respond to? I get an inch and a half taller and shinier hair. I become present, compassionate. But if I publish a story to silence? I’m personally worthless. Changing careers.

The brain, bless its heart, has a proven negative bias. Let me tell you a story.

If I tell you something delightful about a neighbor you haven’t met and one negative thing, you’ll believe the negative thing. If you hear 9 compliments about yourself and one complaint, you’ll stew on and believe the complaint. You will pick an angry face out of a happy crowd, faster than you’ll pick a happy face out of an angry crowd.

So knowing this, I’m careful when I discuss a writer’s work but I’ve found they (and by “they” I mean “we”) are all the same.

I’ll say, “Bob, your novel is complex, intriguing. I love the voice and plot! Add just a bit more tension to the opening and we’ll start looking for an agent.” As Bob walks away, I’ll hear him murmur into his phone, “Might as well trash it. No tension.”

What is that selective negativity?

When I was a girl, the single most horrifying breach of social protocol was to be labelled conceited. This was a very girl-specific felony. Boys were never accused of such a crime.
A classmate could have flirted with your boyfriend, cheated on the math test but wait! Was she conceited?

Full of herself? Steer clear.

That need for humility was primarily fueled by fear. At ground level, no one can take me down a peg, knock me from a high horse. And anyone who has ever experienced that kind of shame will do virtually anything to avoid it.

We were on a 7th grade class trip to NYC—on a coach-type bus—not the big yellow boxes with worn-out shock absorbers we rode to school, but a silver behemoth with huge windows and hissing airbrakes.

I was so happy, so excited to be on this adventure with my classmates. We were chatting away, laughing, full of good cheer. I may have even felt pretty that day with a plaid skirt, red sweater, a highly organized purse. I know I was high on the electric intimacy of middle school friendship and telling a funny story when a chaperone in the front of the bus lost it.

She had probably been gritting her teeth for 100 miles, teetering on the edge of tolerance enduring the cacophony of this rambunctious, joyous bunch of 13-year-olds, when somewhere just over the New Jersey state line, she twisted about in her seat and roared, “Shut UP! SHUT THE HELL UP!” And then, to demonstrate that her wrath was justified, she looked over the seats, zeroed in on me, and proclaimed, “You! I can hear your big mouth all the way up here.”

I was horrified. It wasn’t just that she’d singled me out—I was only 4 rows from the front and one of the few kids making eye contact with her—it was the word “hell.” It was the phrase, “big mouth.” Her outburst was aggressively personal, and worse, just slightly base. I was as shocked by the lack of manners as by the accusation.

I had never seen one of my parents, or any adult, be rude in public. It just wasn’t done. And in that instant, I intuited a class distinction. Although it’s a judgment I would not make now, in a moment of genuine conceit, I felt socially superior to the woman shaming me and for that I am sorry.

So, I’m wondering whether you, and by you, I mean you, have any of these pocket-shames tucked away.

If you don’t empty your pockets, you’ll carry this energy your whole life. It will fuel your response to things completely unrelated. “Might as well trash it. Why’d a big mouth like me think he could write a novel?”

The surefire remedy to pain is story. So, I tell myself one. That chaperone was exhausted. She had taken a day off work without pay because not enough of the well-off, stay-at-home mothers had volunteered. By New Jersey she had a splitting headache fueled by seething resentment.

And once, though she doesn’t remember this, she was a beautiful little girl feeling exuberantly happy—high on a moment of loving camaraderie with her friends—and someone had made it a point to bring her down to size.

All she knows now is that she boarded that big silver bus with the best of intentions and in the silence of the ruined ride, she pokes her glasses back up on her face feeling justified and confused. Deeply self-conscious and not quite done.

I see her not from the eyes of an embarrassed adolescent but through the eyes of a mother who has yelled at kids, too. Totally, indelibly, regrettably lost it. And across time, I want to tell her it’s okay, I want to tender memory with mercy. She was doing the best she could. As am I. As are you.

As I recount that story, I feel taller with shinier hair. Present and compassionate.

I feel full of myself.

And finally, finally, finally, that’s a good thing to be.

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.

The distinction between writing, which is therapeutic, and actual therapy is often thin, but I try to stay in my lane. I’ve lived with therapists, coached therapists and (good news, readers!), had a lot of therapy, but I’m an editor—the analogy being that although I’ve seen the ads for Hair Cuttery I’m not qualified to trim your bangs.

Of the many excellent reasons I’m not a therapist is the requirement to keep a secret. This is also why the new rule my sisters have put in place is requiring discipline. We zoom every week and often talk about our families. I used to pass on updates among cousins, children, aunts, uncles—as gifts, really. Stories are the currency of our intimacy, and we exchange them in kind. None of us is interesting enough to be the whole story. We need other characters, sidebars. A few mistakes, tragedies, and romances not our own 

My extended family doesn’t see each other often so my impulse has only been to connect the outliers. But it’s come to our attention in sister-zoom that this is a slippery slope to betraying a confidence, so now there is a new rule to keep from misunderstandings. If any one of us is sharing something that has to remain in zoom-room, we have to identify it like the security access zone around a nuclear power plant, smack a Top-Secret label on it.

Of course, we’ll all honor the agreement but at a cost. Science proves secret-keeping rachets your amygdala into overdrive, making you more irritable. The energy of self-censorship compromises the hippocampus as well, due to the release of excessive cortisol. This compromises memory, learning and the immune system. 

Neuroscientist David Eagleman reports that when you have a secret, the part of your brain that wants to tell is in constant conflict with the part of your brain that wants to keep the information hidden. Keeping a secret is spelled s-t-r-e-s-s.

Yet according to Forbes, 97% of us have one or more secrets at any one time and most of us routinely have as many as 13. Some are positive. I look into my best friend’s face and though my lips are zipped my brain is shouting, “I bought you that necklace from Sundance!”

I learned my first secret at the age of five. My father drank. I’d discovered little vodka bottles stashed in the pantry behind 5-pound Domino Sugar bags. I knew from their location the bottles were a secret—and because they were secrets, they were a source of anxiety and shame. I think I’d already imbibed the idea that there is only one sin: unkindness. And to expose someone’s vulnerability by revealing something they wanted to hide was unthinkable. 

And though I now understand that my father was self-medicating and the victim of his body’s chemistry, the weight of this secret bore down with a shame and sadness so great I’m surprised I could walk. I had my own gravitational force field ten times that of the earth’s until the night I finally confessed this knowledge to my mother. 

She was attempting to rock me to sleep but I had a secret. The part that wanted to tell was in a battle to the death with the part that needed not to. And we were both 5 years old.

It seemed to take hours before I could finally whisper, “I know Daddy drinks.” My mother kept on rocking me, and finally said, “Some things are too heavy for little girls to carry. Give this to me. I will carry it for you.”

I don’t think there’s a perfect, one-size-fits-all formula for this conundrum: the need to hold sacred other’s confidences versus the need to be transparent, free of subterfuge. 

I’m looking at an oil painting my mother gave me as a wedding present when I was 22 years old. It is 24 by 26 inches in size, in a gold frame with a linen liner. It is the most creative, intimate, and loving of gifts. It’s of downtown Annapolis from the top of the State House on State Circle looking down Maryland Avenue towards the Naval Academy Chapel where the wedding would take place in a matter of days. It is a painting of the town in which I’d live most of my adult life. Give birth to three children. 

And it is a terrible, terrible painting. The artist was so unskilled that the buildings and street are painted without perspective, no vanishing point—you can’t tell the State House is actually on a hill. Storefronts are flat and angled the wrong way, signs float unattached to the businesses they were meant to detail. One building has been painted in and then erased, leaving a brick-colored smear in the sky.

Brain science says secret-keeping disconnects you from your sense of self, but maybe sometimes your sense of self depends on keeping a secret. My mother was so pleased with her choice. I hope I never gave away how I felt about it. 

I trusted her with my first secret, but I’ll keep this one to the end of time. 

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.

 

A theory floated at the time I first started teaching creative writing workshops at St. John’s College, claimed that your first memory is a paradigm for your life. I doubt this is true, but it made a good writing prompt, and it got me to thinking about my own earliest recollections. Now I’m curious about yours.

When my mother’s mother was dying, Mom left my two older sisters with my father in Maryland and took me, then 2 or barely 3, back to Illinois to say goodbye. 

We flew from BWI to Chicago, and somewhere over Ohio, I fell asleep.  When I awoke, my mother lifted me to the window and said, “Look, Laura! We flew right through the clouds while you were sleeping.” She must have been enchanted despite our sad mission. She was barely 35. It was her first time on a plane. 

As instructed, I gazed out the window as the engines droned westward. Snowy-white, cotton ball clouds solid enough to walk on floated beneath us. Flew right through them? Not possible. So, my earliest memory is of trying to process a contradiction—someone I totally trusted, someone holding me in her arms 38,000 feet above the earth, was telling me something that could not be true. 

We had flown from Baltimore but returned by rail. My second memory is of a porter offering my mother a pillow for me to sleep on. I remember lying there with my eyes closed but not asleep. The porter returned and I heard him say, “I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s an elderly lady in the back who needs a pillow. Since your baby is asleep, do you think we could slip the pillow out from under her and let this woman have it?” 

I heard and understood every word. And I wanted to help! I wanted the old lady to have the pillow! But I was a baby. And when they lifted me up and took the cushion away, I wailed. Sobbed. I was inconsolable. Even while I was crying, I was thinking, Why am I doing this? The spirit was willing, the baby body was on autopilot.  

Looking back, I wonder who the tears were for. Hours before, my mother had left her mother dying of a slow paralysis in a hospital ward. Had she yet cried for the loss that was coming? What is repressed in one is expressed in other. Grief by osmosis. Grief by proxy. 

Eventually a flustered porter brought the pillow back.

These two memories have taught me something about myself and something better about you. 

In the first, someone I totally believed told me something that could not be true, but I didn’t trust her less nor doubt myself. This was my introduction to the mystery of contradiction, when two things that can’t both be true, must be true. 

Case in point: how does a puffy white, 500-ton cloud float in a crystal-blue sky? And for that matter how is it that air weighs anything at all? 

Some people call the acceptance of a paradox faith—but maybe it’s closer to humility. The recognition that try as I might to puzzle things out, I won’t, and the world neither requires nor longs for my understanding of it. 

And in the second memory? Innocence gives way quickly to so many emotions— judgment, criticism—I’ve experienced and expressed them all. So, I like remembering that there was a time in my life when I sincerely wanted to give all I possessed to someone in need in the back of the train. This still seems like an excellent plan.  

I like thinking, “Ah, that’s the you who came into this world.” The blank slate wasn’t blank! It was kind. And you know what? You were kind, too. Research shows we’re all born with compassionate hearts.

Harvard Professor Felix Warneken designed an experiment where babies observe an adult appearing to struggle with a task. Without training, prompting or rewards, eighteen-month-olds gallantly retrieved his dropped teaspoons, stacked his books, and pried open stuck cabinet doors so he could reach inside.  They would even sacrifice something they wanted in order to help those in distress, the very definition of altruism.

If we erased all we regret, if we distilled our life experiences back to our pure point of arrival into the world, who would each of us be? 

As unlikely as it seems, 500 tons of water can float like smoke in the air. 

And there is only love, indivisible, at the heart of 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.r

 

There are those who think serendipitous timing is a matter of chance and those who think nothing is. I’ll bet you have some thoughts on this but let me tell you what happened.

Mike was a laid-back, bear of a man, who wore a pale-blue oxford shirt with khaki pants every day and looked like a stocky Paul Newman. He’d left his job as an editor at Time/Life Books to start The Chesapeake Boatman when I came to work for the magazine as Associate Editor. A kind and generous mentor, Mike put up with a lot from his young, given-to-drama staff–rather like a long-suffering father shepherding a bunch of rowdy adolescents. We made him buy lunch a lot. 

The Boatman was a substantive magazine but struggled for three years in a saturated market. I was delighting in my second week of maternity leave when Mike came to the house to meet my new daughter, and to deliver the news that the magazine had folded. He was closing the office. I grieved for the loss of a job, a boss, and a routine that I loved, but I supplanted those losses with new motherhood, which I loved more.

We lost touch and I never saw Mike again, but 23 years later, I was waiting for the pasta water to boil one evening when he came abruptly, vividly to mind. Without pausing, I picked up the phone, asked the operator for his number and instead of giving it to me, she connected the call. A second later, a person I deeply valued and had often missed, came on the line as if we had just paused for breath. “Laura,” he said. “I’m so glad you called.  We just got back from Chicago. I’ve been part of a study there.  I have kidney cancer and it looks like I’ve got about 3 months to live.” 

It came to me then. Conversations from 20 years before.  Mike was an atheist. Mike had been born with only one kidney. 

My family was leaving for New Zealand in a few days where I’d be staying indefinitely—The Land of the Long White Cloud. Mike was soon leaving for parts unknown and was already well beyond visitors. 

We exchanged email addresses and I wrote to him as much as I thought his nurses would tolerate as the days counted down. He believed that at the moment of his death, he would cease to exist. Intuitively, I felt otherwise but kept to the facts.

I told him he was the best boss I’d ever had. And by boss I also meant friend. I thanked him for teaching me to play racquetball and by racquetball I meant how to polish a manuscript, how to make respect the point of origin for all relationships. I asked his forgiveness for redecorating his office over the weekend as a surprise, but getting paint on the carpet, a penalty he must have absorbed when the magazine closed. And by paint on the carpet, I meant, forgive me for every time I took your patient equanimity and generosity for granted.

From 12,000 miles away, I told him about being in New Zealand for the America’s Cup. I described the cheering crowds in the tidal basin, the excitement of watching mark roundings and tacking duels from the spectator fleet. 

Then an email arrived that he told me would be his last. A few days later, New Zealand won the America’s Cup, and I flew back to the States, reentered life here with 3 kids, organizing their activities, their return to school. I tried not to think about the inevitable news that was coming. A few weeks after that a woman who identified herself as Mike’s secretary called to say Mike had died.

I searched my inbox for his last email so that I could hear him tell me goodbye. Just above his name he had typed, “God bless you.” 

I don’t know if that was something Mike came to believe, said for my benefit, or just threw out there covering the bases for both of us. He had told me he wasn’t bitter or regretful about his impending death though he was young. He said, “I look at it this way: X number of people will die of cancer this year. If one of them is me, then one of them isn’t someone else.” Chance.  

But the fact that someone I loved and hadn’t spoken to in 23 years, came to mind at the exact and only moment in which I could have said thank you and goodbye, felt like something other than chance. With or without divine orchestration, it felt like more than an accident in timing. And his blessing felt intentional. 

Maybe we don’t have to believe that everything is chance, or nothing is. Maybe we don’t need to be that black and white. Maybe we aren’t going to know with such mathematical clarity what is a gift and what is a given. 

William James said, “No one knows the truth with a capital ‘T.’ The truth is what works.” 

Being open to possibility is the wild, tender nature of grace. And that works for 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.