Nomadland and "Nomadland" (SPOILERS AHEAD--Don't say you weren't warned!)

When I was young, meaning 10 or so, I began to worry about how people survived in the world. Yes, that was me, Little Miss Sunshine, skipping merrily along through my carefree, happy childhood. Age 10 or so was when I came to realize that adults had to work every day, AND that no one’s job was safe. People could lose their jobs or their money at any time, through their own fault or through the caprice of forces beyond their control. This was a sobering realization. It didn’t seem fair that people could be thrown into poverty for any reason or no reason, and that a person or a family might go hungry just because the economy no longer needed a certain set of skills or because a person made a mistake or grew too old or sick to work. Like all ten-year-olds, I was preoccupied with fairness, and this seemed very unfair. More than unfair, it seemed cruel. It still seems cruel. 

This was what I thought about as I read Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. I saw the movie first. “Surviving America” might seem hyperbolic or inflammatory to a settled middle-class American raised on the myth that all you have to do is work hard and do the right thing and be a solid citizen, and you’ll be rewarded with a dignified and comfortable life. But for most of us who do enjoy a middle-class life with a house and a car and decent healthcare and Wi-Fi and easy access to consumer goods, good luck is a big component of our so-called success. I work for a living, and so does my husband. We both work pretty hard, actually. But even the most casual observation of the last 20 years or so of American life makes clear that hard work is no guarantee at all that we will stay as secure and comfortable as we are. One lost contract, one serious illness, one bad investment, and the whole operation could fall to pieces. 

*****

Nomadland's true-life nomads live in RVs, trailers, vans, and even cars. Like the itinerant farm workers of John Steinbeck’s Depression novels, they wander from job to job, spending the summer working as campsite hosts in national parks, and the fall months working 10-hour shifts in Amazon warehouses. They harvest sugar beets and they operate rides at carnivals and amusement parks. They prefer the term “houseless” to “homeless.” One of Bruder’s nomads is a man named Bob Wells, who created a website that teaches people how to live in a vehicle. He considers vehicle-dwelling as both a lifeboat  for those who slip through the cracks of middle-class security, and a form of rebellion against middle-class norms. Rather than think of themselves as homeless vagrants, Bruder writes, nomads become “conscientious objectors to the system that had failed them.” 

Wells likens the illusion of middle-class security to “The Matrix,” explaining that people on his side of the illusion, the people who fell out of the middle class, have suffered a “radical pounding,” an event that opened their eyes and forced them to abandon the illusion and accept the reality that most of us don’t want to accept, that we’re all just one big medical bill or one lost job away from losing what we think of as our place in the world. “At one time,” he says, “there was a social contract that if you played by the rules...everything would be fine. That’s no longer true today. You can do everything right...and still end up broke, alone, and homeless.” For most of us, Wells points out, downward mobility is now just as likely as upward mobility. 

*****

A determined, resolute optimism is characteristic of the nomad, vehicle-dwelling subculture. Many of the people Bruder writes about are relentlessly upbeat, afraid that if they drop the smiling veneer, they will become objects of pity. Media coverage of people who live this way tends to stick to this script, too. As Bruder writes, articles and broadcasts on nomad workers, or “workampers” makes “workamping sound like a sunny lifestyle, or even a quirky hobby, rather than a survival strategy.” The nomads themselves like to perpetuate this image. Bruder writes of nomads who speak in “cheery platitudes” when describing their very difficult lives. They urge her not to write about them as “Americans in crisis,” and they are proud of their “no whiners” ethic. 

*****

Among Nomadland’s real-life characters, Linda May is the most prominently featured and the most endearing. Linda May has been through some things. She spent a good part of her early and middle adulthood doing what she was supposed to do; going to work and taking care of her home and her family and paying her bills. And then a series of misfortunes forced her to move in with her adult children, who were also struggling to pay their bills. And then she decided to buy a mobile home and hit the road. A veteran of Amazon warehouse work, sugar beet harvesting, and camp hosting (among other jobs), she is the exemplar of the workamper lifestyle, and of its smiling, no-nonsense, no-complaining philosophy. In her case, the cheerfulness is not forced or faked. She is a naturally optimistic and resilient person, perhaps as ideally suited to life as a nomad as anyone can be. But reading between the lines, it’s clear that this life is hard even for a hardy soul like Linda May. 

*****

Every time I read a memoir or a true-life story, I imagine myself living that life. Everyone does that, right? Well, I do. And I know without even thinking hard that I wouldn’t last one day on the road with Linda May and Swankie Wheels and Bob Wells. It’s not the lack of material comforts that would bother me so much. I do enjoy comforts and luxuries, but I think that I could live, and pretty happily, without lots of the material comforts and things that I have. It’s the moving from place to place, and the driving a heavy and unwieldy vehicle through rough desert terrain and up and down treacherous mountain roads, and the unexpected breakdowns and flat tires that would do me in. And then there’s the work. Don’t get me started about the work. I know my physical limitations, and I’m pretty sure that a week working in an Amazon fulfillment center or harvesting sugar beets would just about kill me. And I’m not as old as Linda or Swankie. Respect. 

**** 

Like lots of other fortunate, employed, middle-class people, I spent a lot of money during the pandemic. In my defense, I donated a lot of money, too--about $5,000 so far, to food banks and diaper banks and disaster relief and other emergency causes. But I also bought a lot of unnecessary handbags, and a ton of clothes to wear to places where I no longer go, and a lot of books, and another streaming service subscription. 

I thought about all of these things, the momentary enjoyment of opening the packages and looking at my new purchases, as I read about Linda May and all of the other nomads who thought that they were fine, money-wise, until a combination of events and circumstances left them near-destitute, near-homeless, near-the-edge-of-the-proverbial cliff. Many of the itinerants whose stories appear in Nomadland thought that they were on solid middle-class American-dream ground, and that the lives that they took for granted were secure, and that homelessness and poverty were things that happened to other, less careful people. And then they found themselves on the street; or on the road, as it were, working long and physically exhausting hours for low pay. It could and did happen to them. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to me. 

*****

For five minutes after I finished reading Nomadland, I thought “that’s it. No more spending. No more takeout food, and no more books that don’t come from the library, and no more jackets, and absolutely no gosh-dang handbags ever again.” And I knew that this resolve would last no more than a week, because I know myself better than that. But I also looked around my house, my cheerful, colorful, but slightly shabby old house, and I decided that the worn-out family room couch has at least another five years of useful life, and the ugly-but-serviceable tile in the master bathroom is just fine, and the old-fashioned not-at-all modern kitchen is still a perfectly good place to store, cook, and eat food and so it’s all going to stay just the way it is for the foreseeable future. 

And I’m also going to think twice before I buy unnecessary stuff, and not just because I don’t want to spend myself into penury. It’s because there’s too much stuff; not just here in my house, but in the world. And there’s a huge human cost to producing and shipping and storing and selling and delivering all of that stuff to people like me. And because what do I do with all of that stuff if things hit the fan, and I have to hit the road or move myself and my family into a tiny apartment? We could have an estate sale, I suppose, but there’s no guarantee that anyone else would want all of our stuff. And sometimes, when I look in a closet or a drawer, it all feels like a burden. It feels like we’re carrying all of this stuff with us, all the time, even when we’re not home. And it’s heavy. 

*****

Nomadland the book and “Nomadland” the movie are very different, and it almost doesn’t matter if you read the book first or watch the movie first and read the book afterward, as I did. Oh, but HUGE SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t watched the movie: 

SWANKIE DIDN’T ACTUALLY DIE! The book came out several years before the movie was made, of course, and I thought that perhaps Swankie had become ill during the filming, and that the producers wrote her death into the story. But this event was fictional. 

Even though many of the characters (including Swankie, Bob Wells, and Linda May,) are real people, played by themselves, much of the movie is fictionalized, including Frances McDormand’s entire character, Fern; and Fern’s sort-of boyfriend, played by David Strathairn. I don’t think the movie would have worked as well otherwise. I suppose it could have been a documentary, and Linda May and Swankie Wheels are more than engaging enough to center a whole movie around, but the addition of fictional characters allowed the filmmakers to tell the story as the story of a life and not the story of a lifestyle. Does that make sense? It’s the best I can do, other than to advise everyone to watch “Nomadland,” the most beautiful movie I’ve seen in a long time, and to read the book, and to think about the people who pack our Amazon orders and harvest our food and work seasonal jobs at resorts and amusement parks and ski resorts, and who deserve a decent paycheck and a decent place to live, whether it's stationary or mobile. 

Plan B

I should be working right now, and I will be working again in just a few minutes. But I have too much stuff to write, for both my paid job and my several and sundry volunteer jobs, and the obvious solution to this dilemma is to stop writing so that I can write about how much I still have to write. 

This is what happens when you gain a reputation as a competent writer. You end up with every writing task, small or large, that needs doing. I guess that this is what it means to be hoist with one’s own petard. Well, not exactly, because writing is not (usually) an explosive device and even if it was, I wouldn’t be trying to blow anyone up, but you get what I’m trying to say. I’m captive to my own brilliance. I’m a victim of my own success. 

OK, that’s enough of this foolishness. I’m going to stop complaining about work, and get back to work, so that I can finish work, so that I’ll have time to do more work. 

OR I could just publish this, because as soon as anyone reads it, they’ll realize that I’m not that sharp a writer after all. Plan B. A person always needs a Plan B. 

Sanguine

It's 8:20 on a gloomy and damp Wednesday morning in March. Actually, it's March 17, St. Patrick's Day. I'm in my car, in the parking lot of a medical lab, waiting for someone to call me and tell me that it's time to come in and submit to a blood draw. 

I haven't had blood work, as the medical profession calls it, in a long time. This lab does not take appointments. You show up, you sign in, and you wait. So that's what I'm doing. I hope it won't be long. I haven't had any coffee yet, and I sorely need some. 

*****

I don't like to dunk on old people. First of all, it's mean. Secondly, it's stupid. I'm not young myself, after all, and it won't be long until I'm legitimately old and the damn young people will be mocking me. 

But even though I don’t like to make fun of old people in general, as a broad demographic, I will point out that many of the most senior of our citizens have what I would politely call a proprietary attitude toward doctor's offices and hospitals and pharmacies and labs (and the confession line at St. Patrick’s RC church on a Saturday afternoon, but that’s a story for another day). The medical facility is their territory, and they are not particularly welcoming toward intruders. I know the stink eye when I see it, and the old people behind me in the sign-in line definitely gave me the stink eye. Next time, if they want to protect their turf, they'll just have to get up a little earlier. Because you have to get up early in the morning to get past me. 

*****

An older man was also ahead of me in the sign-in line. He turned to hand me the clipboard after he signed in. Let me digress again and mention that the floor was marked off with blue tape placed at six-foot intervals, and all patients were instructed to sign in and then return to our cars to wait for the call to be bled, but we had to pass around the same germ-infested clipboard with its pen attached with a little beaded chain. The COVID procedures are less than consistent. The man, who was probably in his mid-70s, was very outdoorsy looking in a practical, farmer/gardener way; not a recreational, rock-climbing or mountain-biking way. White-haired and bearded, tall and imposing, he wore a dark brown canvas barn jacket, mud-caked work boots, and John Deere-style hat that looked like a giveaway from a feed store. He nodded politely at me as he handed me the clipboard, and he headed out to wait in his car. 

I wondered what, if anything, was wrong with the man, and what the lab was supposed to detect in his blood. Maybe he wondered what was wrong with me. Blood is such an intimate, private, messily human thing; and here we were, a group of strangers, all waiting to have it extracted from our bodies by a crisply efficient professional in a white coat. 

*****

I’m not especially afraid of needles. I don’t enjoy them, but I’m not especially afraid of them either. When it was my turn, I sat down as instructed, rolled up my sleeve, watched the phlebotomist tie a tourniquet around my arm, and then I turned my head. I’m not afraid of needles, but I don’t need to see a needle enter my arm and I definitely don’t need to see the blood coming out. A few minutes later, I turned my head again to see a tray with four neatly labeled vials of my own murky red blood, warm and viscous and dark. I walked back to my car, drove to the nearest cup of coffee, and went home. 

*****

It’s Friday now, and I have my results. The clinical lab at my doctor’s office shipped my blood straight to a specimen lab in North Carolina, where it was processed, analyzed, and (presumably) disposed of, all in two days. (I do wonder what they do with it, but not enough to look it up and find out. Maybe I’d rather not know). 

I read the lab report. All of those numbers, the white and red blood cell counts and differentials and oxygen levels and platelets and blood chemistry in infinitesimal measurements--it’s amazing to think that all of that is happening within my body, within everyone’s body.  I don’t know what any of the numbers mean, though, except that my cholesterol is high. I suppose I’ll have to do something about that. My doctor will have to decode the rest of it and tell me what it means. I hope that we’re all well and healthy; me and the rest of the Wednesday morning blood extraction gang. I feel connected to them somehow.

One Year

This is the week, isn’t it? This is the week when everyone in the United States is looking at their calendars and remembering the last restaurant meal that they ate, the last public event that they attended, the last party or gathering, the last haircut, the last whatever until the country ground to a halt. Everything is reminding me of last year at this time. The sun is in the same position in the sky and the same distance from the earth and the days and nights are the same length, and the birds are singing the same songs and the grass is just starting to turn green and the forsythia are just starting to bloom the tiniest bit. 

And 2021 has also been an eventful year: an insurrection, a new President inaugurated, an old President on trial, a mass vaccination campaign, and a momentous anniversary, all in just two-plus months. It’s a lot to take in. Is there such a thing as TSD? Just Traumatic Stress Disorder, without the “Post-” part? Because that’s what this feels like sometimes. 

*****

Today is Friday March 12. I always think of March 13, 2020 as Day 1, which means that today is Day 365.

March 13, 2020 was also a Friday. We all went about our normal business, knowing that it was the last day of our usual, normal life, but not knowing what that really meant. The announcement that schools would close for two weeks had been made the previous day, but students were permitted to come to school on Friday to pick up their belongings and check in with their teachers. I went to work not knowing for sure how or even if we would be working the following Monday. I'm a contractor, and it seemed possible and even likely that our government agency would suspend contract performance until the shutdown ended. Thankfully, they didn't, and we were all told to begin working remotely on Monday. We’ve been doing that ever since. 

My older son is a student at our local community college and a lifeguard at an indoor pool. He worked that Friday night because he always worked on Friday nights, and when he went to work at 4 o’clock or so that day, no decision had been made regarding pools and parks and recreational facilities. But by the end of the day, the county had decided that all of those things had to close, too. The pool remained open until 10 that evening, and then the lifeguards went home for what they thought would be the next two weeks and what turned out to be the next three months. 

I had a doctor’s appointment this morning. The doctor’s office is next door to the restaurant where my younger son and I picked up takeout that night. He and I always had dinner together, usually at a restaurant, but sometimes takeout eaten in front of a movie or a Capitals game, on Friday nights because my husband and older son were always at work until late on Friday. I thought about those Fridays as I drove past the restaurant to my appointment. My younger son is popular, and he’s never short of social opportunities, but he chose to spend almost every Friday evening of his freshman year in high school hanging out with his mother. Even as I lived those Friday nights, I knew that they were a gift to treasure. I’m glad I knew that then. Everyone’s schedule has changed. Everything has changed, period. We might not have another Friday night like that, ever again. 

*****

Now it's Saturday, March 13, 2021, meaning that we are officially entering year 2. It’s a sunny, bright March day, just like last March 13, 2020. The sun and the birds and the grass and the flowers--blah blah blah, all just like last year, like every other early spring. 

*****

It’s Sunday now, March 14: Year 2, Day 2. Yesterday was a typical pandemic Saturday; pleasant enough, but slightly sad. I ran errands, I did household stuff, I did this and that; nothing memorable. At 4:30 or so, the sunlight shifted and turned golden as it does toward the end of the day, forming geometric shapes, intersected with shadows, on the rug and the wall and the furniture. I wanted to go for a walk, but I didn’t want to leave my family room because I didn’t want to miss that light. It only comes once a day, and only on the right days. 

People were out and about yesterday. It felt like the world was opening up again, returning to normal. And it is. And that’s good. How could it be anything other than good? Why would anyone dread the thing that she’s looked forward to for a year? Who would do that? 

This is what happens. A person spends months thinking that she can’t live this way anymore, and then she gradually comes to realize that she doesn’t know how to live the old way anymore. I forget what it’s like to get out of the house at a set time every morning. I forget what it’s like to drive in traffic. I forget what it’s like to see people without their faces covered. I forget what it’s like not to think about what’s normal or not, and what it’s like not to think about life as a series of events before and after a huge cataclysmic change. I’m afraid that I’ve gotten far too good at living in this smaller and more circumscribed way, and that I won’t be any good at the old way. 

Normally, I’d chalk this up to me just being me. Low-level dread is my default state. But I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way. I think that we all have some kind of re-entry fear. I think that we’re all a little anxious. It’s been a long time. It’s been one year. 

Blinded with Science

A few weeks ago, I took my mother-in-law to get her first COVID vaccine dose. It didn’t go too well. My husband made a mistake with the online registration form and although he corrected the mistake, and called the hospital to explain the mistake and confirm that we could still proceed with the appointment; and although we checked in without incident and a volunteer escorted my mother-in-law to the room where the shots were being administered and she waited there for 40 minutes with her sleeve rolled up, the hospital staff decided that the error on the paperwork was significant enough to force them to send her home without the shot. 

It’s a long story, and there’s no way to make it short so that it still makes sense. But no matter. It was several weeks ago, and she has since gotten the vaccine and has an appointment scheduled for her second dose. All’s well that ends well. 

*****

I wrote this a few days ago, with the idea that I'd tell you all about the people I saw at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, and how they looked and dressed and behaved. I never tire of people watching, and a hospital is people-watching central. But now I'm in the car, waiting to be called in for my dentist appointment, and I'm thinking about the vaccine itself. I'm listening to NPR's "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, who is interviewing Walter Isaacson, who just wrote a book (The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race) about Jennifer Doudna, who discovered a thing about mRNA that made the COVID vaccine possible. 

Jennifer Doudna won a Nobel Prize for her work in mRNA research and gene editing; and as Isaacson says, she wasn't looking for a vaccine or a gene editing tool or anything else, really. She was doing pure science, trying to figure out what mRNA could do, and what it was for. I'm sure she thought about the possibility that she might discover something useful. But she started out by trying to learn something about how something works, just for the sake of learning it. 

I haven't read the book yet, but I think I need to add it to my list. What I got from the interview is that Doudna's work contributed to the invention of the gene editing technology known as CRISPR (clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). I won’t even try to grasp what this actually means in terms of the nuts and bolts science, though I do know what a palindrome is, and I suppose I could start from there. I’m more interested in the audacity of the very idea of editing genes. 

Editing genes strikes me as a classic example of a thing that we should not necessarily do, just because we can do it. Of course, there’s the miraculous possibility of editing bad genes to treat or even cure disease; and who wouldn't want to do this? But there is a worrisome and slippery-slope downside, too. We can also edit genes to select for what we would consider desirable traits and to eliminate less desirable traits, giving rise to the obvious question of who gets to decide what is desirable, and what is not, in terms of human traits. The possibility of productizing people is very real. Vladimir Putin, who would naturally consider himself an arbiter of desirability in human traits, thinks so too. During the "Fresh Air" interview, Isaacson said that Putin suggested that it might be possible to edit a man's gene sequence to make him a better soldier. Vladimir Putin has almost limitless power in Russia, and it’s easy to imagine him ordering involuntary gene therapy on unwitting subjects so that he can create a master-race army. 

Jennifer Doudna anticipated this misuse of gene editing science, too. She had a nightmare in which a man asked her to tell him more about gene editing. When she looked up, she saw that the man was Adolf Hitler. Because of course he was. 

*****

My 19-year-old son, who is very political, is also very sure that there is a man-made solution to every problem that plagues humanity; and that all we have to do is find and implement those solutions and we’ll have a world free of poverty, ignorance, illness, and suffering. And I remind him that it’s a fallen world, and that although we are obligated to serve others and to try to alleviate suffering wherever we find it, that we will never eliminate it altogether; and that every single attempt to create a perfect world has ended in disaster, in the gas chamber and the concentration camp. 

*****

I have great respect and admiration for science and scientists. I’m grateful that there are people who seek knowledge for its own sake and for the sake of its eventual benefit to humanity. I’m glad that a person is smart enough to  figure out that mRNA can be used to develop a vaccine that will confer immunity from a disease that has paralyzed the world for over a year. But I’m more glad that a scientist as brilliant as Jennifer Doudna is also thoughtful enough to know that science can be a tool for evil as well as good. I’m glad that there are scientists who understand that science without humility and without wisdom is a dangerous and potentially violent thing. 

Shuggie Bain

“The day was flat.” That’s the first sentence of Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, the novel that beat Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light for the 2020 Man Booker prize. I don’t judge books by the prizes they win, but that’s a big prize, and a formidable opponent, and a very well-deserved win, because Shuggie Bain is pretty extraordinary. 

“The day was flat,” Stuart writes, and a minute later, you are immersed in the cold stony gray poverty of a Glasgow boarding house occupied by destitute, alcoholic Scottish men; and one abandoned teenage boy, Hugh “Shuggie” Bain. How did a 15-year-old boy end up alone in a boarding house? Where is his family? Where are the authorities? You’ll find out, because the boarding house and Shuggie’s teenage life are just the bookends, so to speak; the beginning and end of the story. The middle chapters that form most of the novel are about his childhood and his family, such as it is. But for those first few pages, you feel the sadness and discomfort of the boarding house. You smell the dirty shared bathroom and you imagine the damp, mildewy bedding and and the cold water pouring out of the taps and the thin walls and the scarcity--of light, food, warmth, and especially love. And you feel the Dickensian loneliness of this friendless boy. 

Shuggie Bain is a very physical novel, very tactile and sensory. The darkness and menace of the cold Glasgow inner-city streets, and the bleak ugliness of the poverty-stricken Pit feel real. Dirt and cleanliness, hunger and thirst and eating and drinking, cold and warmth, pit-of-the-stomach fear and anxiety, humiliation and pain, are all palpable and immediate. A girl is chased and nearly gang-raped by a group of teenage hooligans, and your heart pounds with terror as she barely escapes. A woman sits in a hot bath, trying to wash away the physical and emotional pain of a rape that she just suffered, but barely remembers because she was drunk; and you can feel the bruises on her inner thighs and the pounding in her head. You can feel her shiver as the bath water goes cold. 

In fairness, the pleasures and comforts of Shuggie Bain are just as vivid, even though they’re few and far between. A taxi driver steps out of the stony darkness of a Glasgow street on a winter night, and enters the bright friendly warmth of the local chippy, and you can smell the food frying, and you can taste the vinegar and salt on the golden fried chips. A little boy, accustomed to neglect and chaos, comes home from school to find that his mother is sober and that she’s cleaned the house and made a meal for him, and he basks in the glow of the lamplight and the television set, luxuriating in the comfort and cheer of the kind of home life that he has only imagined until then.  

*****

Here are a few other things to know before you begin reading Shuggie Bain. It’s a page-turner, compelling enough that you can’t wait to put aside your work or your household duties or your blogging about nothing so that you can get back to reading; but it’s not fun to read at all, because it’s such a sad story. So don’t start reading it unless you have a little bit of free time; and don’t read it if you’re depressed and in need of cheering up, because this book will probably not do that for you. Although it might. No spoilers. 

Secondly, have a phone or other internet-connected Googling device nearby, because unless you grew up in Glasgow, you will run across a whole bunch of words that you won’t understand. I read Shuggie Bain just after I read Uncanny Valley, another book that drove me to Google more than once. Thanks to Muriel Spark, I already knew that in Scotland, “getting the messages” means “going shopping,” but “scunnered” and “boak” and “dreich” were beyond me. Shuggie Bain should actually come with a glossary. That’s a suggestion for future editions. Anyway, this book taught me quite a bit of Glaswegian Scots argot. Maybe I’ll go to Glasgow and try it out. 

Finally, rape and sexual assault are ever-present threats in Shuggie Bain, and that’s not for shock value. The working class Glasgow that Stuart writes about is a harsh and unforgiving place. Sexual violence is always prevalent in places where the strong run rampant and the weak have little protection and little recourse. This is true always and everywhere, sadly, and so it’s an unavoidably true part of the story that Stuart is telling. But if you are easily upset by sexual violence or the imminent threat of it in fiction, then you might want to think twice before you read Shuggie Bain. 

*****

So I promised no spoilers, and this isn’t really a spoiler. But in case I scared you away, you should know that although it’s a painful and sad story, Shuggie Bain ends on a hopeful note. Shuggie makes a friend and he learns how to survive; how to navigate through the world. We don’t get to see him as an adult but I closed the book thinking that if Shuggie were real, he’d probably be OK. He’d probably end up having a pretty good life. I hope so. 

A change in the weather

The weather has been much better lately; much better meaning “not freezing cold.” That’s the bar for weather, and everything else, in 2021. It’s pretty low. I still walk outside when it’s really cold but I tend not to notice my surroundings. I bundle up in as much clothing as will allow me to still move my arms and legs, and I plug in my headphones, and I concentrate on whatever I’m listening to, and on putting one foot in front of the other until I can stop walking and go back inside where I belong in the winter. Yes, it’s that bad. 

But when the weather’s nice, I keep my head up and my eyes open and my wits about me, such as they are, and I notice stuff. I notice the very beginnings of spring starting to poke out here and there. I notice odd details. A few days ago, I walked a different route than normal, and I walked past a house that had bird feeders hanging from every available tree branch. I stopped to count, and I stopped at 19. 19 bird feeders. Interestingly, I also counted zero birds, so I guess that the bird feeders were empty. Maybe the homeowner hasn’t gotten around to buying birdseed yet. Or maybe they’re just there for show. Bird feeders are very decorative. Bird crap, however, is not. 

*****

I passed one of my favorite houses, the site of the suburban encampment about which I wrote in some detail last year. I was hoping to see something interesting, and I wasn’t disappointed. There were political cartoons posted on the fence, and a glass or crystal bird perched on top of a fence post. I don’t know why it was there. It looked pretty, but a stiff wind (or a real bird, for that matter) could easily knock it from its perch and break it into a thousand pieces. I should have taken a picture, because the bird’s owner will probably come to the same conclusion and remove it from the fence post. Anyway, I’ll be watching this house with considerable interest as the weather continues to improve. 

I walked past it again, and took a picture. 

*****

In other bird news, the crows returned! Not to my front yard, but they’re in the neighborhood and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. I was walking again, on the day after I saw the bird feeders and the crystal bird, and I walked straight into a swirling, shrieking murder of crows. It was Friday, 5:15 or so, and the crows appeared to be having a very good time. It was crow happy hour, and I wanted no part of it. I zipped up my jacket, tightened my hood, picked up my pace, and got the hell out of there. Crows. Ick. 

*****

It’s Sunday now, rainy and cool, but not freezing cold. Saturday was a beautiful day, clear and sunny and almost warm. Not quite warm, but almost. We ran errands and got sushi and checked on my husband’s mother, who had just gotten her first COVID shot on Friday. And things seemed different. People were out, walking and running and stroller-pushing, and it felt like a holiday. 

We came home and watched the Capitals beat the New Jersey Devils and we talked about how we might get to watch our team in person in the not-too-distant future. This isn’t over but it feels like we might have turned a corner; like we might return to something like normal life. 

Later, I walked past the same corner where the crows had been partying on Friday afternoon, and there was nary a crow in sight. The party was over. Maybe that’s not the only thing that’s over.