Paper and ink

I’m keeping up my daily writing habit, but for the last few days, I’ve been using a notebook and pen rather than a keyboard and a screen. The flow is different. It’s a nice change, but a temporary change, because I can’t sustain legible handwriting for any length of time. 

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I don’t even know what I’ll do with the pages that I’m writing by hand - I suppose I could transcribe them here. But I probably won’t. I’ll just see how long it takes me to fill that notebook, and then I’ll put it away and probably never pick it up again. I save all of my old notebooks and very seldom refer to them again. 

Saving those notebooks is probably a waste of space, but writing by hand is definitely not a waste of time. Words come to me quite easily when I have a pen in my hand, and the physical act of scratching that pen across the paper is oddly therapeutic. My brain is making connections, and my powers of concentration are improving a tiny bit. And it’s just fun. Notebooks are among my favorite things on earth, and it’s nice to use them for their intended purpose and not just as decorative objects. Plus if I write in a notebook every day, I’ll go through notebooks even faster, giving me a perfectly valid and legitimate reason to shop for more notebooks. 

*****

It’s Saturday morning now. The sun is shining and my husband is cutting the grass and I’m sitting here typing on my keyboard. I would not characterize what I am doing right now as writing, but it’s words on a page, at least. That’s all I have today. 

*****

Later in the day, I filled several notebook pages with whatever was in my head at the moment. I don’t even remember. I’m very depressed, and I don’t have much to say. That won’t stop me from writing (and at considerable length) but I don’t expect anything that I write in the next few days to be worth reading. 

Why am I depressed? Oh who knows. It’s recurring depression combined with the change of season combined with empty nest syndrome combined with exhaustion combined with all of this (gesturing wildly at everything). Even when I’m doing something, I feel like I can’t get off the couch. It’s a figurative couch, but I’m glued to it, even when I’m in motion. 

*****

My poor mother-in-law had a migraine last night, and the pain was so bad that she was in tears. My husband was working and my sister-in-law was out with her kids and I was home doing not much of anything so I changed out of the pajamas that I had just changed into, and I drove over to her house. She was in the kitchen, standing over the sink, so I got her to lie down and I put a cool compress over her forehead and eyes. I held her hand in the darkened room and got her to breathe deeply. After 15 minutes, she was well enough to sit up again. I got her some ibuprofen and water. My sister-in-law came a bit later, with more ibuprofen (she was running low) and some melatonin to help her sleep and some Gatorade. After some Gatorade and another cool compress and some quiet time, my MIL felt much better and she ordered us to go home. I’m glad we were able to help. The headache would have gone away on its own, but the presence of two people who love her - the fact that we showed up - made it bearable. And I felt much better too. It’s nice to be needed. 

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I have a lot of ideas now. There are lots of words in my head demanding to get out in front of the reading public, but they’re not quite ready. I’ll get my notebook and my Bic 4-color pen, and I’ll see what happens, and I’ll report back later. 

Five copies for your mother

I was on my way home from work one day last week, and “Cover of the Rolling Stone” came on the radio. I hadn't heard that silly song in years - decades, maybe. “What a fun song,” I thought, singing along happily. I remembered the chorus but not the verses, so “We got all kinds of blue-eyed teenage groupies/who’ll do anything we say” came as kind of a rude shock. 

I mean, what? You can’t even sing along with the radio without some predatory man being a predatory man. No wonder I’m like this. No wonder we’re all fucking like this. 

But on one thing, Dr. Hook was right: people do like to see their pictures in print. I write and edit the medical school’s annual report, and we overdid the print order this year, so I made a list of all of the students who appear in the report and emailed them to see if they’d like a copy, and the response was quite enthusiastic. I’ll have that box of annual reports out of my hair in absolutely no time. I'll give them all five copies for their mothers. 

25 and 61

Do you remember the first time that someone mentioned a thing that happened 25 years ago and you realize that you actually remember the thing and that you are now a person whose memory spans a quarter-century? Did you feel old? 

When I was growing up, our parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents would tell us that they remembered exactly where they were and what they were doing on November 22, 1963 when they learned that President Kennedy had been shot and killed. I heard about it so often that it took on the quality of myth. When other kids my age went through their ancient Greece and Egypt phases, I had a Kennedy assassination phase. The assassination happened about two years before I was born, and even though I couldn’t claim any memory of November 22, 1963, it was still a fixed point in history for me, a clearly marked line between a before and after. I suppose that 9/11 is that for young people, even the ones who weren’t born yet and who have no real memory of the day itself. 

I remember 9/11 and lots of other things that happened 25 years ago very vividly, of course, because I was a 36-year-old working mother and not a child just old enough to retain memories. This is when you can call yourself old. 

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And I am old. Wednesday was my birthday. I turned 61. There’s no particular significance to that number, but I do think that it marks the official descent into old age. 60 was the end of the 50s, which a lot of extremely optimistic people still consider middle age (I mean, do the math, right?) 61 is the first step toward 70, and 70 is old by anyone’s calendar. People can say that 60 is the new 50 (I don’t say that, but some people do) but 70 is just the old 70. 

The word “descent” might leave you with the impression that I’m sad about my age, but I’m not. I actually really like the peaceful, settled quality of early old age. And I’m sure that there are still (God willing) lots of interesting things ahead. 

*****

I know it seems a little solipsistic to tie the 9/11 25th anniversary to my birthday, but both things happened during the same week. And memories are all about us, anyway. Unless we are one of the few people who happen to have been there or who lost friends or family members, we talk about the 9/11 attacks in personal terms. We talk about where we were and what we were doing and who we were with. And our children listen and wonder what it was really like. 

Winter is coming, eventually

As terrible as things generally are in 2026, one little nice thing is that the pool water temperature was just about perfect for six weeks or so. Even after rainstorms or cool nights, the water retained its warmth. I didn’t have to brace myself before entering the water, and I didn’t have to swim desperately fast (in relative terms) to recover from the initial cold shock. The water was soft and temperate. It was perfect. 

It couldn’t last forever, and it didn’t, which is fine because I actually like swimming in chilly water. It’s fun to be the person who’s willing to get in the water when it’s cold. It makes you feel alive. Still, I miss the warm water. 

*****

The pool closes in less than a week. I’m on the clock. I went swimming after work on Monday night, with the skies cloudy and a little threatening. Although it had been hot, the pool was quiet when I checked in at 6. With school back in session, the neighborhood kids had gone home to have dinner and do their homework. The other swimmers were exactly the people I expected to see; people like me who love outdoor swimming and who grab every available chance to get in the water.  Every time I run into one of my fellow pool denizens, we talk about how fast the summer has gone and how much we’ll miss the pool and how we’re all planning to swim every day between now and Labor Day. We’ll be having that same conversation all week long. And of course we’ll talk about the thing that outdoor swimmers always talk about - water temperature. Today, the water was cold. 

*****

Tuesday was a genuinely hot day, midsummer hot, almost as hot as 4th of July weekend. I had to attend a neighborhood board meeting but the meeting didn’t start until 7:30, giving me plenty of time to swim after work. I was tired and out of sorts and overheated, but a 30-minute lap swim was just the thing. I could have stayed in the pool all evening, but I went to the meeting. 

It’s Wednesday night, and I’d planned to swim tonight, too. The weather forecast predicted another very hot and sunny day, very much like Tuesday. Then at 3 o’clock or so, the sky darkened very suddenly, and we had several hours of on-and-off thunderstorms. But I pivoted. I got my weekly old lady resupply trip out of the way so that I can swim on Thursday, which is expected to be hot and sunny. 

Of course, today was supposed to be bright and sunny too, wasn’t it? Weather forecasts are just guesses now. Walk outside - that is your forecast. 

*****

For example - the Thursday to Friday overnight storms in the DMV with what was apparently the most frequent lightning in a storm in years, along with torrential rain and 70 MPH winds in some places. Literally no one saw this coming, including the people who are supposed to see things like this coming. And oddly enough, I slept through the whole thing. I never sleep through monster storms. I never sleep through anything, but I slept through the weather event of the summer, which is fine by me. 

Friday was clear and sunny until about 4:30 when the sky started to darken just a tiny bit. I finished work a few minutes early and then put my suit on. I no sooner said the words “I’m going to try to beat the weather,” when the thunder started. Foiled again. Which brings us to Saturday. It’s officially Labor Day weekend, my least favorite holiday of the year. Barring any weather surprises, I plan to swim today and tomorrow and Monday. I’m trying not to think about how much I’ll miss the pool when it closes. 

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And I’ll miss it so much. It’s Sunday now, a beautiful sunny late summer morning, and I’m sitting outside listening to cicadas and watching birds. It’s almost completely still. The only way I can tell that there’s a slight breeze is that a few tree branches are rustling, ever so slightly. 

We’re having a cookout today, not for Labor Day, but to celebrate my husband’s birthday, which was on Friday. When I asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday, he said that the only thing he wanted to do was stay home and grill steaks and corn and hang around outside, so that’s what we’re doing. I’ll slip away to swim at some point. My niece and nephew (10 and 13, respectively) will be here so they can come and swim with me. They’re good company. 

I had declared a Trump embargo for the weekend, but after a friend showed me a picture of Trump’s new hairstyle, I couldn’t resist checking my social media to see the reaction. A photo captioned “They’re wearing the gophers! They’re wearing the squirrels!” made me laugh out loud, so it was worth breaking the embargo. We might be down and out right now, but funny people on the internet remain undefeated. 

*****

Well, it’s here. Today is Labor Day. Once again, it’s 10 in the morning and I’m sitting outside on my patio listening to cicadas and birdsong. It’s really perfect outside - sunny and warm but not hot and very slightly breezy. A neighbor behind me is hammering something, and someone at least a block away is mowing their grass, but otherwise it’s very quiet. 

Even though I hate Labor Day weekend, yesterday was close to a perfect day. We hung around with family all afternoon, eating and talking and half-watching baseball, and finished the day with a swim. It was a 9/10 day, with a point deducted because my younger son couldn’t be here. 

When our sons were young, we used to go to the pool at about 2 PM on Labor Day, and we stayed until the bitter end, watching all of the neighborhood kids bouncing back and forth between water polo and beaver and sharks and minnows and diving contests. At 6 or so, after the families with little kids went home, the lifeguards would take out all the lane ropes and the dividing rope marking the beginning of the deep end, and the kids would have the run of the pool with no lanes separating the two wings of the pool and no adult swim whistle to interrupt the fun. The lights would come on at 7:20 or so and the kids would play and swim frantically until the final whistle. They were pool kids and on Labor Day, pool kids squeezed every last drop of fun out of summer. 

And they still do. But I still miss seeing my own children in that mad scrum, so I don’t stay until the closing whistle anymore. I’ll go this afternoon and talk with my friends and swim my last outdoor swim of the summer, and then I’ll go home. 

*****

And that’s what I did. It’s Tuesday now and Labor Day has come and gone. I miss summer already. I missed swimming even as I was swimming yesterday. The water had gotten a bit colder after two nights of temperatures in the low 60s, but I was going to swim even if I had to crack through ice on the surface. And I did (swim, that is, not crack through ice), and it was glorious. I sat in the sun wrapped up in a towel for a few minutes, hoping to warm up enough to stay for a bit longer, and maybe swim one more time. But my teeth were chattering and the towel was wet and it was time to go home. I know that summer doesn’t technically end until the Autumnal Equinox but for me, it ends when I can no longer throw on a swimsuit, grab a towel, and jump into a pool for 30 minutes. But fall has its charms, I suppose.