A Secret Time Machine

Susan was a wife and mother. She was a member of the PTA. She was not the type to go around breaking and entering. Yet here she was, doing just that.

Entering, anyway. Someone else had already done the breaking.

She couldn’t help herself. Every time she drove past the abandoned hotel, she felt it calling her. One day last month she’d poked around the outside, wandered the grounds and peeked in the windows. She’d hoped that would satisfy her itch to explore the place. It had—for a while. Now the itch was stronger.

She wanted to walk through the arched doorways she’d seen from the windows. She wanted to close her eyes and envision what it had looked like in the ‘40s, when it was a gathering spot for the beautiful people. She couldn’t have explained it to anyone—and hadn’t even tried—but she was tired of fighting the urge. Today she’d just do it.

She parked a couple of blocks away, in case an empty car outside would trigger a call to the police. For the last few days she’d struggled to come up with a way to sneak out of her house at night to explore the hotel under cover of darkness, but she’d finally decided that would look more suspicious anyway. She would walk up in broad daylight, as if she had every right to be there.

On her last visit, Susan had discovered a back door with a broken latch, wedged shut with a block of wood. Teenagers or street people or someone had obviously been there. “Not breaking,” she whispered as she toed the wood away and pulled the door open. “Just entering.”

The air inside smelled like the pages of ancient books. Appropriate, because she thought the hotel was like a book with its own story to tell. She’d come into what had once been the kitchen. She closed her eyes, blocking out the sight of decay, and heard pots clanging, a chef yelling, the clatter of dishes against countertops. Susan smiled. She could make her own mind-time machine in this place of history.

Susan spent two hours wandering the hotel. She found evidence that others had been there, but she found no one there now—another good reason to visit in the middle of the day. She walked through the lobby, danced in the ballroom, made her way into one of the guest rooms and imagined all the living and loving that had happened there.

By the time she left to pick the kids up from school, Susan felt calmer than she had in months. Her time wandering amid the ghosts had revived her in a way no afternoon at the mall ever had. “My own time machine,” she whispered, then met her gaze in her rearview mirror and smiled.

It helped, in the middle of an ordinary suburban life, to know where the escape hatches were. 

All the Ways to See a Tree

This photograph has been more divisive than any other I've taken.

I love it. I can’t look at it without giggling a little, or at least smiling. I see a big-time opera singer, or maybe just a wannabe, puffed up and singing his heart out. He thinks of himself as Pavarotti and wants everyone else to think of him that way, too. It reminds me of the silliness of life.

My son says the picture scares him. He sees someone screaming in terror as an axe murderer bursts into the room. He can’t figure out how I see it as a happy picture, because to him, it’s horrifying.

My husband says the photo reminds him of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Rather than finding it scary, though, I think he’s a bit offended by it. It takes something that should be realistic—a tree—and turns it into something it was never meant to be.

In this strange little photograph, I see a picture of the reasons it’s so hard for people to get along with each other. If three people can look at the same image and see three completely different things, how could we help but clash over bigger, less well-defined issues?

Each of us can only see an issue from the perspective we bring to it. I have always loved fantasy and magic and happy endings, so that’s what I see. My son likes his fantasy a bit darker, so that’s what he sees. My husband prefers realism, so the whole idea of this picture bothers him.

However.

Even though I will never see this tree screaming, I can understand and accept and appreciate that my son does. Even though I’d hate for all my fiction to be about things that could have happened, I can understand and accept and appreciate that my husband prefers it that way.

This is how humans get along with each other. This is how it’s possible to form connections and relationships and communities. We have to be able to understand and accept and appreciate that other people see things differently, and that’s ok.

The internet has made it too easy for each of us to seek out others who believe the same things we do. We band together in little groups and mock those who think differently. We moan about how horrible life will be if  people with different beliefs get their way. We strengthen our positions by finding others who approve of them. We create a feeling of belonging even while the distances between groups grow from cracks to canyons.

The results are fear and hatred, division and a splintering country.

It makes me sad to get on Facebook most days. It doesn’t matter what the current hot button issue is—I’ll inevitably see half my friends spewing hatred disguised as sarcasm from one side, while the other half does the same from their own perspective. I want to say, “Look, this isn’t helping, just stop,” but I know that either side would only see that as support for the opposition.

It’s probably too late to say we should all just get along. But then, what’s our other alternative? 

The Wise Old Turtle

When Annie was a little girl, still young enough to want to go on meandering walks with her grandfather, he told her about the wise old turtle who lived in the blow down on the stream at the back of his property.

“No reason those branches are still there,” he told her. “They should have washed away years ago, but the turtle keeps them arranged just so.”

Annie giggled. “How can a turtle keep branches arranged?”

“He’s a magic turtle. If you ever see him, he’ll tell you what you should do with your life. He’s very wise that way.”

“Well, let’s find him,” Annie said, starting to hop down toward the stream, but her grandfather stopped her.

“It doesn’t work that way. You won’t see him unless you can understand him, and that only happens when you really need his wisdom.”

Annie giggled again. “You’re silly,” she said, and they continued their walk.

She didn’t think about the wise old turtle again until many years later. Her grandfather had died, and she was taking a meandering walk on his property, thinking to honor his memory by revisiting the places he used to take her. She was also at a stage of life where meandering walks had become important to her. They gave her time to think. She hoped, with enough time to think, she might figure out what she was supposed to be doing with her life.

In other words, she needed wisdom. So maybe it was inevitable that, while she had forgotten about the turtle and wasn’t looking for him, she found him.

She was following the stream along the back of the property. She wasn’t thinking about much of anything until she saw the blow down, and then the whole childhood conversation with her grandfather came back in a rush. “The wise old turtle,” she murmured. She started to smile, but it quickly changed to a frown.

Annie didn’t know a lot about nature—she was a city girl at heart—but she was pretty sure a pile of brush and branches in a stream shouldn’t stay the same for twenty years. Either the force of the water should have washed them away, or the same current that brought them here should have carried other branches and added to it. But this pile was exactly the same as it had been twenty years ago. She was sure of it.

She made her way down the bank without letting herself think too much about why she was doing it. By the time she got to the edge of the water, the turtle was there, sunning himself on one of the upper branches. One moment he wasn’t there, and then—while her attention wandered for a second—he was.

Annie shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She resisted the urge to clasp her hands like a schoolgirl. “Hello,” she said.

The turtle dipped his head. It might have been a greeting, or it might have been a normal turtle motion.

“Can you tell me what I should do?”

The turtle stretched his head toward the southern end of the water. “What’s a mile down the river?” he said.

His voice had the consistency of melted chocolate. Though he looked like a regular turtle, Annie discovered she wasn’t at all surprised to hear him speak.

Annie looked in the direction he’d pointed. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s too far away, and there’s a bend blocking the view.”

“And how would you learn what lies ahead?”

Annie hesitated. “I guess I’d just have to walk down there and see.”

The turtle dipped his head. “Exactly,” he said. And while she wasn’t quite looking, he disappeared.

Bee Stings and Guilt Trips

A bee stung Brianna when she was six years old, and after that she had a terrible fear of them.

Her mother tried to be sympathetic at first. Bri was only six, the sting had swelled up badly, and it made sense for her to be afraid. After a year of listening to her daughter shriek every time a bee came near, though, she lost her patience. The final straw came during an attempted picnic at the zoo. Bri made them switch tables three times, screaming that there were too many bees and she would get stung.

“Listen, Chickie,” her mother said—a nickname that might have been cute, except she only used it when she was angry and pretending not to be. “You’re going to sit down and get over this right now. Just be still and don’t bother them. A bee won’t sting you unless he has to. It rips his stinger out and kills him.”

Brianna froze where she was. “Kills him?”

“Yep. So just sit still and be quiet and no one will get hurt.”

Even years later, as an adult, Brianna couldn’t decide what her mother’s motivation had been. Was she being nice and trying to help her daughter over a fear? Or did she know her daughter well enough to understand those words only implanted a worse fear, one that would ensure peace and quiet rather than shrieks and wailing? Bri had been an extremely sensitive child. A moment’s pain was one thing. A creature’s death on her conscience was quite another.

After Brianna married, she and her husband tried their hands at hobby beekeeping. Jeff liked the idea of fresh honey. Brianna felt, somehow, that sheltering a hive of bees in her yard made up for the bee death on her conscience from childhood. Perhaps she was still extremely sensitive.

When her mother came to visit, she regaled Jeff with embarrassing stories from Bri’s childhood. Of course, she mentioned the bees. “You wouldn’t believe how scared she was, crying like a bee sting would kill her. Guess we got you over that, though. Look at all the bees back there. You’re fearless.”

And Brianna still couldn’t decide—was her mother paying her a compliment, or mocking her? Did she know the truth? And if Brianna couldn’t figure out her own mother, how could she ever understand anyone?

She sometimes wondered how people dared to leave their houses at all.

How To Shoot an Armadillo

You might think this is a picture of an armadillo. You’re wrong. This is a picture of determination.

Or desperation. It could be that.

I took this photograph beside a trail I walk a few times a week. The past two months, I’ve seen armadillos out there almost every time I go. That is, every time except when I bring my camera.

At first it was funny. I’d tell my husband, “The armadillos are shy. They hide when they see the camera.” But after two months of that it started to seem less funny and more strange. Surely they couldn’t know when I had the camera. It had to be a coincidence—except how could it be when it happened every single time?

I started trying to trick them. I’d bring the camera but wear it slung around behind me, trying to forget about it. No luck. I’d bring the camera but stick it in a bag so they wouldn’t know what it was. They were smarter than that. I’d get frustrated and give up and go walking without the camera. Then there were armadillos everywhere, prancing right beside the path, silently laughing at me.

I started to think about shooting them with something more lethal than a camera.

Psychologists call this magical thinking—the idea that our thoughts or actions control things they couldn’t possibly control. I tried to remember I was giving the armadillos way too much credit, that this was coincidence, but as time went on it got harder to believe.

Finally, yesterday, I determined I was going to shoot an armadillo no matter what. I took my camera, and I walked the path slowly. I didn’t see any armadillos, but going slowly I could hear one snuffling through the undergrowth back off the path. It was time to hunt him down.

I’d tried tracking one into the woods before and only succeeded in scaring him away, so I decided to be sneakier this time. I found a downed tree near where I heard him, so I scaled my way along the trunk, arms out for balance, wishing I’d stayed in gymnastics longer. It worked, though. I wasn’t crackling any leaves, and I snuck up on the cheeky bugger before he knew it.

Snap! Click! Whatever you call the noise a camera makes, it was louder than I’d expected. It alerted the armadillo to my presence. He sat up, I grabbed a couple more quick shots, and he jumped straight in the air before zooming off like a cartoon character. He looked so funny it startled me into falling from the tree trunk, scaring a lizard that had been at my feet. I hurried back to the trail before he could try to sell me car insurance.

But I was triumphant! The picture you see is my trophy, a near-perfect shot of an awfully weird-looking critter. That photograph is the proof of my determination.

Or my desperation. I’ll leave that determination up to you.