Remembering How to Be Human

July is filled with human interaction. 

My niece (15) and nephew (11) come up to visit for a week with me and my mom. It was niece’s idea and she’s pulled it off.

The weekend before they arrive, my mom stocks up the pantry and fridge with food and prepares the guest rooms while I check in with my niece about her expectations. She says, “I don’t know if there’s anything we are set on doing. I know (11) likes birding and photography so I thought maybe he could do that with Lainey (my mom). I was gonna bring my laptop and I just thought it might be fun to write together or share what we are working on or whatever.” Which sounds great.  

But because my brain loves order and control, and has, in the recent past, had a tendency to lean toward anxiety when plans are too amorphous (and sometimes even when they’re not), I begin to prep myself for a disruption to my routines. I can probably get my workouts in. If I write at least one word a day in my current work-in-progress, that counts as writing and if my niece does want to write together that will be fun. I don’t have to stay up past my bedtime. I can get up at the usual hour.  

These days, too often, I feel that I’m as tricky to handle as a baby on a schedule. Worse, too often I worry I’ve lost the ability to have fun, be fun, appreciate fun.

In spite of myself, after (15), (11), and their mom arrive, I do have fun while we talk, prepare food, watch movies, do artwork, write, eat, and observe the birds and squirrels through the windows.

After waiting out a storm and watching a World Cup game, their mom leaves the next day in the late afternoon.  

Over the following days, I do manage to work in my workouts, write some words, and mostly get to sleep at a decent hour. I interact and respond. Look at how adaptive and flexible I am.

My older sister joins in on Thursday, coming to town by bus. As do my other nephew (7) and niece (5), brought to the house by their dad, my brother.

My mom treats us to a visit to the Dallas World Aquarium.

We’ve had to go in separate cars, so I’ve got the nephews. As we enter the DWA and loiter in the curving entryway to wait for our full party to arrive, gazing into the enclosures holding birds and into the streams of water below us featuring turtles or fish, my nephew (7) clings to my hand.

“I’m scared,” he tells me. One of the birds is loud. And noise has always affected my nephew to some extent.

“You’re fine. It can’t get to you. You’re safe. It’s only being loud,” I tell him.

But I get it, I’m often overstimulated by noise, activity, and (less now than before, probably because my eyes have gotten older) bright lights. I definitely get it. I’ve been having stress dreams this week and the previous one. As he’s always been, (7) is better than I am at vocalizing his feelings in the moment. My internal tendency is to ask myself, “What is wrong with you?” which is not a kind or necessarily helpful question to ask.

I should tell myself, the way I tell (7), “You’re fine. You’re safe. I’m here with you.”

We are all fine and safe at the Dallas World Aquarium and see many interesting creatures.

As we go from level to level, (7) alternates running free, holding my hand, taking my phone to snap photos of things like the axolotls and the manatee, and getting (11) to hold his hand (which is adorable and I wish I’d gotten a picture of it). 

Her eyes bright and her enthusiasm unmatched, (5) is thrilled to have her older cousin’s hand to hold and drags her all around the Aquarium. She doesn’t like things, she loves them.

 

 

(11) is most thrilled by the ocelot.

(15) likes the flamingos.

On Friday, after I manage to get in my morning walk which I grumpily alter to accommodate (7) who thinks the walk we are taking is his walk (can’t I be less grouchy and more fun even as I do everything he wants to do? I shouldn’t need two hours of morning quiet and a thousand cups of tea to be human) and my workout (by the grace of my mother who takes over breakfast prep because (5) cannot be persuaded to eat Cheerios and wants pancakes and I told her I’d make them for her after my walk), and (7) and (5) are picked up by their mom, I drive the correct ones back to the Hill Country and stay the weekend watching movies, World Cup games, coordinating meet up places with siblings, playing games, and sitting on couches together to read or chat. (11) graciously gives up his bed so I have a place to stay (I can’t quit manage driving the extra 50 miles to stay with my other brother in San Antonio and have to remind myself this is okay and not some kind of failure on my part). I manage to preserve a relatively good bedtime.

Sunday morning, I wake before everyone and do my best to be quiet as I make tea and try to keep the dogs happy while I read. I breathe in the aloneness. I breathe out the peace of solitude.

I’m reading another of Connie Willis’s books called Crosstalk which is all about communication, privacy, telepathy, and relationships and (with the main character constantly trying to find a place to hide to have enough time to simply think) is even more frenetic than my brain has felt recently.    

Thank goodness no one can read my thoughts or sense my emotions. What a mess that would be.

When the rest of the house wakes, I breathe in togetherness and breathe out connection.

Then it’s time to go.

With an audiobook to keep me company and a few stops along the way to get matcha lattes or fill the car with gas, I drive the 215 miles home.

Eventually, I pull into the driveway and cart my things into the house. I’ve done it, I’ve been social. I’ve survived a week full of activity. I’ve gone and come back again.

Now I want to live under a rock for the next month. I want to hide away beneath a book’s covers. I want to drink another million cups of tea. And yet, on the other side of that coin, I want to be more “normal” so that I don’t need so much recharge time.

There are all kinds of ways to be. There are phases of life that are easier or harder than others.

I think of the friend I stayed a summer with who told me, “You’re helping me remember how to be human.”

I think I need to be reminded of that myself as I continuously contemplate and act upon what it is to be alive and to live.

I think of what it is to be me. At this time of life. As who I am now.

It’s not always easy. But I’m doing my best. Which, sure, could be better (sometimes much much better), but, like my writing, I’m a work in progress. If I can get this draft down, I can improve upon it.

 

 

 

 

String Theory and the Joy of Recommendations

In the middle of a conversation with another author about favorites books and re-readable stories, she mentions To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis and tells me that it, out of all of Willis’s other books, hit all her buttons (she does not use that exact phrase, but my memory is a sieve and I can’t remember her precise words though I took away their meaning).

I check it out from the library.

As I’m thumbing through the first pages, I stumble across the dedication which reads:

To Robert A. Heinlein

Who, in Have Space Suit, Will Travel first introduced me to

Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog

Instead of continuing on to the next page or going to get Heinlein’s story, I check out Jerome’s book from the library and start it instead.

It’s a hilarious novel slash memoir slash travelogue published in1889, part truth, part exaggeration, part make-believe, and rife with rabbit trails (aka ridiculous tangents which, to be honest, are sometimes a bit much). And it hits all my buttons.

When I’ve finished it, I then reopen Willis’s book and, this time, make it past the dedication page.

To Say Nothing of the Dog also hits all my buttons.

It’s a hilarious time travel novel in which the main character-narrator is sent to 1888 to recuperate from time-lag (think jet-lag but for time travel, an affliction which causes the sufferer to speak with sentimental expressions and/or poetry as one side effect and to need quality sleep as another). Naturally, he’s given one task to accomplish before he can settle into his recovery time. Of course, that one task isn’t so easy to accomplish.

The narrator is charming, funny, overworked, sleep deprived, and through his voice and the adventures and misadventures that occur the book references Dorothy Sayers (and her characters), Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, spiritualism, Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, the river Thames, the Victorian era’s trending items that are penwipers (also a main theme in Jerome’s book), and much, much more.

Willis/the book/narrator probably references Heinlein, but since I haven’t (yet) read Have Space Suit, Will Travel, I don’t know that for sure.

Getting to this book (or rather these books) reminds me of that game of six degrees of separation or the way the brain can run a labyrinthal path from thinking about what was had for dinner the night before and end up trying to envision string theory or the metaverse. Leaving one to think, “How did I get here?”

I guess when it comes to string theory everything is connected. One string touching or connected to another.

(I really have no idea how string theory works or even what it really is, except that it’s theoretical mathematics and way over my head, but I always imagine it as a bunch of strings that intersect and overlap like the children’s string game Cat’s Cradle or as strings which, sometimes, are wound together like a ball of yarn.)

All this to say, if Jerome K. Jerome hadn’t gone on a boating holiday with his friends and then written about it (with exaggeration and at the encouragement of his wife), Heinlein would have never done whatever it was he did in Have Space Suit, Will Travel which led Willis to read Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) and then write her own book in the style Jerome used (which includes silly, summary chapter headings explaining what each chapter will address) as well as using the parenthetical part of the title To Say Nothing of the Dog as her own title. If she hadn’t done all that, my author friend would never have read it, liked it, or recommended it to me (which doesn’t even get into all the strings that had to exist and connect for me to even be talking to my author friend in the first place). If she hadn’t done that, I would have been deprived of two books’ worth (so far) of delight and joy.

(And no one should be deprived of a book’s delight and joy any more than they should be deprived of sleep.)

Time travel stories, like trying to trace back how one gets from thinking about last night’s dinner to how string theory (whatever it actually is) affects the metaverse (whatever that is), always hurt my brain a little bit.

Can there be parallel time lines? What happens if a person meets their past or future self? Can history be changed? If so, which of the infinite strings of events is the one that will change everything? Can someone become a Time Lord after applying for citizenship to Gallifrey?

One of the many, great, beautiful benefits of books is that they make time travel possible. By simply reading a book and buckling in for the ride, I can time travel to nearly limitless locations and times. I can be in two places at once. The best part of it is, I don’t have to personally worry about time lags, slippage, penwipers, falling into the Thames, or ending up in the wrong time and destroying the space-time continuum.

And if I recommend a book, such as Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog, I can maybe extend the string yet another link. One more one-dimensional string moving through the glittering expanse of space and eventually connecting us all, strand by strand, to each other.