Horror and Heartbreak in My World This Week

One friend had just been been putting on her shoes to head out the door, grocery list in hand. 

Another friend had pulled into the parking lot but hadn't yet left her car.

A third friend was in the store when she heard pop-pop-pop sounds and took off running. She found a tall stack of crates by a back door to hide behind and managed to cover her crouched-down self with a pile of King Soopers aprons. Only later was she escorted out of danger by the SWAT team.

And then there was the friend whose husband went to the store to pick up a few things and never came home. Victim photos show Kevin Mahoney, age 61, walking his daughter down the aisle last year for her beautiful wedding; she is pregnant now with a grandchild he will never hold. When I heard his name read out two days later, as one of the ten slain, I committed the crime in my heart of hoping it was somehow some other person with that same name, as if that other person's life was mine to wish away instead. 

And then there was 51-year-old Teri Leiker. I didn't recognize her by her name, but did by her photo. We all did. She had worked at King Soopers as a bagger for thirty years, serving faithfully on the front lines during a global pandemic, mowed down as she served customers for the last time. Everyone is sharing memories of how Teri always remembered, with a smile, that they wanted paper not plastic, or wanted their bags packed not too heavy. 

I was out walking my dog half a mile away when I got a friend's text about an active shooter at our neighborhood store. Maybe the sirens had already been wailing and I hadn't noticed, lost in my own thoughts. But I heard them then, and saw the helicopters circling overhead, and got another text, this time from my son telling me to go home NOW and stay there. It wasn't much later that my phone began exploding with frantic texts from loved ones across the country: "Are you okay? Please let me know that you're okay."

I was "okay" in the sense they meant, but in another sense none of us here in this neighborhood is okay. Gun violence can't touch the lives of anyone and leave them "okay." 

This store was a community hub. It was almost unheard of to go there without bumping into friends or neighbors and having a chat in the produce section or checkout line. My older son had his first job in the Starbucks there. My two little granddaughters used to love riding in one of the store's shopping carts that had a little plastic car affixed on the front of it: extremely unwieldy to maneuver in crowded aisles, but the joy of the preschool crowd. Rides (price: a penny) on the little horses by the checkout were another huge treat. At least two King Soopers checkers invariably ask after the girls when they aren't with me: "When are you getting your girls? Will they be here for Easter?" 

This store is now surrounded by yellow tape as the crime scene where ten people were murdered this past Monday. 

I created this blog in part to process my experiences and offer myself little life lessons that I can share with the rest of you. This time I have none. Yes, tragedies like this show that life is fragile and precious. Yes, make sure you tell friends and family RIGHT NOW how much you love them. Yes, America has too many guns and too little political will to make sure tragedies like this stop happening. If we didn't do anything after 26 people, including 20 children ages six and seven, were killed in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary, why would we do anything when another ten more people are killed at a grocery store? Yes, these tragedies feel vastly more real when they happen to you, but now you know that all tragedies happen to some real, actual human beings. Yes, start savoring every moment you spend shopping in your own neighborhood store with groceries packed up by your own cheery bagger. 

I have nothing to add to this list. It's actually a pretty good list, I guess, or as good as any such list can be.

 

Oh, and yes, love is powerful, and beautiful, and a world with love in it is a better world for that reason. Here, two final photos of the outpouring of love for the victims of the King Soopers massacre in 

Boulder, Colorado, on Monday, March 22, 2021, and for their families, their community, and our broken world.

What to Do While You Are Waiting to Hear from the Universe

You are waiting to hear back from the universe about something that matters to you a great deal. 

You might hear this month. Or next month. Or the month after that.

The longer it takes for you to hear, the less likely it is that you will hear what you hope to hear. 

You are fairly good at estimating probabilities about this sort of thing, and your best guess is that you only have a 5 percent chance of getting good news, anyway. 

Good news would bring a small jolt of much-needed joy to your life and reassurance that your career is not over. 

Bad news would spell the end of your career, or at least you think it would, but you have a feeling you may be exaggerating a wee bit in thinking this.

So the question is what you should do while you are waiting to hear.

This is STRATEGY NUMBER ONE: 

1. Check your email every few minutes. If you are sitting by your computer, which for some reason gives a little ding if an email arrives, listen for the ding. If you are out and about, just keep checking your phone. Occasionally make yourself wait a full ten minutes before checking. Surely if you do this, the universe will reward you with good news, right? 

2. In between dings, lie on the couch and do Sudoku puzzles on your I-pad, even though this always makes you feel terrible about yourself. 

3. In between Sudoku puzzles, eat squares of raw cookie dough. Right now you have available Annie's Organic Oatmeal Raisin and the ever-reliable Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip.

4. Also work your way through a bag of Reese's peanut butter Easter eggs.

5. Repeat daily.

This is STRATEGY NUMBER TWO:

1. Do anything OTHER than 1-5 above. Take a walk. Read one of the half dozen enticing library books you have in a pile by your couch, including the extremely engrossing new 900-page biography of Sylvia Plath. Do the 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of Amsterdam that you bought as a treat for yourself. Work on the delightful online course you are teaching. Read a friend's manuscript and give her insightful comments. Revise that darned article (see previous post)! Write a poem. Write ideas for a possible new book. Write anything at all. Call a friend. Call two friends. Call three friends. 

As you may have guessed, I've been following STRATEGY NUMBER ONE, and I have to confess it isn't working as well as I had hoped. I'm thinking tomorrow I might at least try STRATEGY NUMBER TWO.

What do you think?

Just Suck It Up and Revise the Darned Thing!

My new year's goal for 2021 was "Bliss, Not Dread." Spelled out a bit more fully: Do more of what I love, less of what I hate. Well, I retreated from the "bliss" ambition in the face of some personal heartbreak, but I was still holding on to the "dread" part of the equation. Why should I, in my depleted and diminished state, seek out any projects that would make me even more miserable? 

In my trusty little notebook, I made two lists, one of THINGS I LOVE and one of THINGS I HATE, so I wouldn't get confused. Included under THINGS I HATE were: 

1. anything that makes me feel bad about myself

2. pretending to be an expert

3. trying to please reviewer #2!

For those of you who are not academics, let me explain about "reviewer #2." Articles submitted to academic journals are sent out for double-blind peer review. Two experts in your field read your paper and write up their comments and recommendations for or against publication. You don't know who they are, and they don't know who you are (except that sometimes your field is small enough that it's easy to guess, on both sides). A very common verdict is "revise-and-resubmit": heed the reviewer comments, revise accordingly, and send it back to the same journal (usually with the same reviewers) to see if they are happier this time. Almost invariably one reviewer is fairly enthusiastic and wants only minor changes. And the other reviewer . . . is not. That reviewer has come to be known as "reviewer #2." 

Well, last summer I received comments on a children's literature article, and sure enough, reviewer #1 was fairly positive and reviewer #2 was downright scathing, though still recommended that I revise "substantially" and resubmit. Here is a sample of "scathing": "One of the key issues the author should consider addressing in revision is the essay's overall lack of purpose and coherence"!!!! That was one of FIVE similarly damning comments. And even reviewer #1's comments were annoying, pointing out grievances about how I used semi-colons and parentheses. 

I am retired. I have no need of any further items on my c.v. And in fact, the universe as a whole is remarkably indifferent to whether there are any further articles published by me about anything. I do NOT need to engage in the enormously dispiriting work of trying to deal with problems regarding purpose, coherence, and semi-colons!

And yet . . . I just discovered that my little granddaughters aren't coming to us this month because of their recent COVID exposure. I had cleared an entire week to take care of them, a week that is now given to me as a gift. I haven't been able to face any creative projects right now. How should I use that week? Hmmm... well, maybe I could at least try to revise that article... maybe I should at least TRY.

So here are my stern-but-encouraging thoughts to myself as I gird up my loins for revision.

1. I have published MANY academic articles in my life, both in philosophy and children's literature, at least several dozen. With only two exceptions (one outright acceptance and one outright rejection), I have ALWAYS received a revise-and-resubmit verdict. The comments have ALWAYS been scathing. But I have ALWAYS managed to do enough to address them that the paper ended up getting published.

2. It was work for the editor of the journal to recruit these reviewers. It was work for them to read my (purposeless, incoherent) article (with its flawed use of semicolons); reviewer #1 (the nice reviewer) took the added time to send very helpful line-by-line comments, particularly on the introductory section. It feels moderately wrong to blow off their efforts and just walk away.

3. I myself spent several months on the article and poured a lot of love into it. Doesn't this article deserve another two weeks of effort to find it a home? Also, in the past, despite much wailing and gnashing of the teeth, I've always thought the reviewer-prompted revisions strengthened the paper enormously. 

4. I am spending most of my days moping and brooding. Isn't it better to do something useful? And whenever I send something off into the universe I have a lovely little tingle of anticipation that something nice MIGHT happen.

I am going to do this thing! I am going to please reviewer #1 and make at least a stab at pleasing reviewer #2. I am going to suck it up and revise the darned thing!

Wish me luck!