A warning light came on just as we merged onto the beltway, and I tried not to worry as I identified it. Low tire pressure. We were driving to a farm about 40 minutes north of home for a Sunflower Festival. I’ve put air in a tire by myself, but I have a kind of terror that I’m going to overfill the thing, and it will explode like a pressure cooker—which, let’s face it— is also scary with that jiggly thing on the top that you know is about to fly in your eye any second. 

I didn’t want to stop, so we didn’t stop. I’ve learned to compartmentalize. Put fear in a box, put sadness in a box, put confusion and warning lights in a box to set aside and examine later. 

We pulled into a soft, grassy field at the farm without the tire having gone flat or even looking low once we had parked and examined it, so I continued to compartmentalize my worry. Sunflowers now. Possible flat tire later. Palm smack to forehead, it just occurred to me that’s called living in the present. See why we write? We figure things out! 

Stick with me, beloveds. Stick with me. 

We checked in at the farm entrance and walked up the dirt road to a designated pick-up spot. I wore a dusky pink sundress (sunflowers! festival!), sandals and brimmed hat—it was warm, but there was a breeze. We stood under a small grove of locust trees laden low by sweet white blossoms along with a few other people waiting for the wooden hay wagon that was going to transport us out to the sunflower fields. Within a few minutes, we were seated on parallel wooden wagon benches behind a tractor that lurched so violently every time the driver changed gears, we involuntarily grabbed at each other—strangers saving strangers from going overboard in bumpy seas. 

The sun bounced off the road as we climbed the hilly green fields, and our tour guide recited the same spiel every time someone new climbed onboard. “Don’t dance in my aisles” (stay seated), and “I’m going to turn the air conditioning on,” which meant the air would start flowing when the tractor got underway again. I smiled every time he said these things because his jokes were so terrible, and his shirt needed ironing. I hoped he had had a good life and that somebody loved him.

But I felt really sorry for our guide once we had jostled our way up the rise to the fields because there were about 4 sunflowers per acre and none higher than my waist, their sunny faces peering out from overgrown weeds. Festival, my eye. Now I felt bad that he probably felt bad about taking our money. There were also a lot of black sunflowers. They looked very, very dead but the farmer assured us those sunflowers were supposed to be black—they’d been planted for color contrast.

 I bought this—I’m not known for my skepticism. 

When we got down to the farm store, barn, and animal pens, we had the opportunity to wander about the little village and cuddle calves—three in particular had this job assigned to them—Snap, Crackle, and Pop. This is a thing. You can hug newborn calves for health and well-being. Yours. I’ve watched their massive, impassive faces, and I don’t think it does much for them. Or you, in reality.

Get a dog.

Or a cat.

We walked (quickly) past the essential oils, the scented soaps, macramé plant hangers, and dream catchers which made me think of college and not in a particularly good way. Stoically committed to having fun, we went into the farm store to prove I wasn’t thinking about the tire. We browsed casually amidst the goat tea towels, jars of local honey, hand thrown pottery, and ice chests full of steaks—those calves don’t get cuddled forever, I guess. 

And although I tried not to, I was thinking…tea towel/tire, honey/tire, tire-tire. We ran for the wagon when we heard it return to catch a ride back to our car, which to my relief, was not listing heavily to one side.

To be safe, on the way out of town we stopped at the first gas station with an air pump, but it required a massive number of quarters. We stared at each other. Dug around in the console. Do they even make them anymore? We drove on, and the next place had a sign that pretty much said, “My goodness, people of the world, air is free, help yourself.” 

And I thought about that. Air is free, love is free, joy is free—everything else costs you.

I looked at my face in the visor mirror on the way home. I wondered if, in my attempt to compartmentalize anxiety, I have inadvertently compartmentalized joy—as in, I’ve put happiness in a box to take out later. When I’m safe from criticism or ridicule. Or at that imaginary moment at which everything is perfect.

Maybe I have attached happiness to a person or situation I could lose. Is that why it’s never safe to indulge? Because attachment-sourced happiness contains fear of loss? But who is not attached? My goodness, I’m attached to you. Why is it I think that if I look happy, I’m going to have to prove it is warranted? Or worse, that I deserve it?

I came back from the sunflower fields, reminded that there will always be unpredictable events we can’t control. Like a flat tire. We will never be safe from change.

Happiness is simply trust in the long game—a choice to believe that everything is working out perfectly—but on a cosmological scale you can’t comprehend– like the size of the universe. The speed of light. 

I have boxed up joy because its real source is too intimate. Too fragile to expose. It’s my personal conviction that loss, time, and separateness are instructive illusions. 

That unconditional love is the engine of creation, the power source of the universe. 

When all the stars have burned out, and the last atom has dissipated, love will remain.

And that makes me happy.

No proof required. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

There are so many things you do in innocence as a child that you can only hope you’re forgiven for once you realize what you’ve done. And by “you,” I mean “me,” and by “things,” I mean this.

My parents’ idea of a vacation, our respite from the river and woods when I was a child, was ocean camping at Cape Hatteras with another family. Fun! Our thick canvas tent weighed a bazillion pounds, was as hot as all get-out, and if you touched any part of it with a tentative finger when it rained, it formed an immediate leak. My father perfectly crafted wooden tent stakes in his workshop that had to be hammered into the sand with a pneumatic pile driver.

Sand infiltrated our sleeping bags, hairbrushes, and hotdogs; there was little to do. We cooked on a camp stove, sat around bonfires at night, roasted marshmallows, and made s’mores. The other mother insisted we put apple slices in our s’mores, which kind of wrecked them, but she was our minister’s wife, my piano teacher, and my sister’s Girl Scout leader, so we complied. We waved the occasional sparkler (my first experience with cool fire) and bobbed about in a cold ocean.

Highlights: I’d been given a rusty pocketknife, which I closed on my little finger while setting the picnic table for dinner. Seeing the line of red seeping from the wound, I instinctively stuck my hand in someone’s drinking glass. Blood curled like smoke in the water—it was quite interesting, almost artistic–but also gross. This was to be a theme of this year’s vacation. The gross and the intriguing. (Like apples in your s’mores.)

The other family had 3 kids, just like my family, and one of their sons was also about 7 years old at the time. Danny and I made a restaurant on the beach out of mounded-up sand, offering seaweed and dead crab shell delicacies to accommodating adults. Tired of that by the third day, we decided to spend the morning exploring further down the windswept beach.

As we crossed the dirt road to the dunes, we passed a Cape Hatteras sanitation truck and a young man, no more than 20, emptying sewer from the Porta-Potties. A huge black hose was stuck inside one, the truck engine humming as the outhouse contents were pumped to the tanker for removal. This young man was probably pretty unhappy with his career choice at that point and on a short fuse. But, to me, he was an adult. As we walked past on the other side of the road, I smiled at him to be polite, but instead of smiling back, he glared at me and yelled, “Hey, kid! How’d you like to suck this up with a straw?”

I was horrified.

First, at his suggestion. (Was I supposed to answer? He was, after all, a grown-up with some authority.) And secondly, I most certainly would not like to suck that up with a straw. It was, in fact, a gag-worthy proposition. But would that be rude to indicate? Mostly, I was horrified that he’d called me “kid.” He might as well have called me “Bub.” The question felt like an assault, and like all subtle violence, it left an indelible impression. What you say to a child is what you do to a child.

I think I shook my head, murmured no thank you, and took back my smile. Danny and I hurried on over the dunes to the shoreline, where the outgoing tide boomed and rushed up the incline of the beach, then shushed in submission as the waves lost purchase and slid back into the ocean’s embrace.

Our parents had established a kind of daily encampment on the beach with brightly colored towels, chairs, and perhaps an umbrella. We stretched a beach towel between us like a hammock so that we could collect shells in it and struck off without telling anyone.

The tide had left a ribbon of mostly broken shells lacing the beach until an hour into our walk, we spotted a perfectly whole sand dollar. Excited, we stopped and started digging in the wet sand, and within a few minutes, we had dug up maybe a dozen more. We put our treasure in our towel and meandered on—our family’s beach chairs long forgotten and out of sight.

Sometime in the midafternoon, a breathless Park Ranger found us miles down the shoreline, still walking with our bounty, completely unaware our panicked parents thought we had drowned.

When we got back, I showed Danny’s mother the sand dollars, which were flawless but the color of tent canvas. She told me to bleach them in the sun on the picnic table. I carefully laid them out, and over the next several days, they whitened. What I didn’t know until later was that they had mostly likely been alive, and I was slowly killing them. I was appalled when I learned what I’d done.

I’m so sorry, sand dollars. I had no idea. Are any of us surprised I still feel bad about this?

Danny’s mother told me that the five slits in each sand dollar represent the wounds of Christ, and the flower pattern in the middle is the star of Bethlehem. If I broke one open, she said, I would find little doves inside, and by releasing the doves, I’d release goodwill and peace in the world.

And Danny’s mother was right. There were indeed doves inside.

How many things die in the service of beauty? If there is goodwill to be released in the world, I hope it is the goodwill of forgiveness for this and so much more.

There is another legend that says sand dollars are the coins of mermaids. And another that claims they are the coinage of lost Atlantis.

If sand dollars are currency, let me buy back every mistake I’ve ever made. Heal every child to whom I ever said a harsh, impatient, or thoughtless comment. Let me ransom joy from regret and spread the wealth of kindness throughout the world.

May love be the coin of the realm.

******

There are things I’d rather not admit to, but full disclosure will make us closer, so here goes.

I don’t understand the logic of washing your hands in a public restroom if you have to touch the faucet handle when you’re done.

I sometimes speak very harshly to Alexa, my interactive voice assistant. When she doesn’t answer fast enough or hears incorrectly, I talk to her as if she is very, very stupid and it feels really, really good.

I often advise friends who have missed a television show to “just stream it.” I have no idea what that means.

Thirty years ago, I took a course in “Transcendental Meditation.” Five years ago, I broke down and told someone my secret word. It was her word, too. Turns out it’s everyone’s word.

I believe I can make stoplights turn green faster with my mind.

Can to.

I understand what tidally locked means, yet I still don’t totally comprehend how it happens that the same side of the moon is always facing the earth. (Don’t tell me. I’ve already stopped listening.)

There is a website called thispersondoesnotexist.com in which AI creates faces that look totally real but are not. It’s only a matter of time before a client presents me with a story about a woman who logs on and sees her face there. I’ll wish I had written it.

It took years for me to learn to redirect a conversation to the other person. I found my own life so interesting it just didn’t occur to me to stop telling stories and ask about my companion. I know, I know. I can’t believe it either. (How are you doing?)

I tell the dog I love her and smother her with kisses while she yawns (dog language for “I’m not digging this”), but I don’t walk her in the rain or when I’m tired, I just let her out in the backyard and hope she runs around a lot.

I pray for my writing clients every single day—right after being grateful for them. This includes current and former clients I should have long forgotten by now. I think they would be shocked to know this.

When Mr. Oliver wants to make me laugh, he talks in the dog’s voice—it is high-pitched and breathy. It was my last dog’s voice as well. Oddly enough, it’s my son’s dog’s voice, too. No matter how distracted or annoyed I am, this cracks me up every time. Turns out dogs are hilarious.

If a doctor leaves me waiting in the exam room long enough, like a really really long time, I’ll climb down off the table and look in the drawers.

Sometimes, I’m just so sad, my heart is so heavy, I feel so misinterpreted, I just want to go home. Not home to my house, home-home. But I’ll wait till someone comes for me.

The city has put a really obnoxious parking sign smack in front of my house. Then, the city added a gigantic yellow bicycle symbol on the pole. Then they tacked on “share the road.” I have been contemplating digging it up and throwing it in the creek. At night, disguised. You can apparently go to jail for this. So, if it “goes missing” (air quotes), it most certainly wasn’t me.

When I go to lunch with friends and we split the bill, I don’t know why they ask me, “how much are we tipping?” I’m tipping 20%. You can tip whatever you want. One of my best friends doesn’t ask. She just always tips 100 % because she’s a better person than I am.

Until today, I thought my blood type, O-positive, was the universal blood donor. I just learned it’s O-negative, and I somehow feel like I have a gift I can’t give now.

Sometimes, I wish someone would adopt me. I miss my mother.

I just took my dog for a trial play date at a new kennel where I hope to be able to board her. I told her to play well with others and be kind. But I was actually talking to the two girls who led her away.

When I pray, I can’t get the words “thank you” out before a request slips in. “Thank you, and please.” Followed by “help.” It’s really difficult for me to tease apart what I am grateful for and what I long for.

But today, it is easy. I’m grateful for you.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Once, my father said, a little girl was watching her father mow the lawn. It was an early evening in June, and the air was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and the fresh cucumber smell of damp grass clippings. Fireflies drifted at knee level, blinking on and off beneath the magnolia branches. The little girl wore navy shorts, a striped tee shirt, and had a brown ponytail. “Just like yours!” my father said, giving mine a tug.

The man was just starting the last pass across the yard when he looked back and saw the little girl had dropped face down in the grass. He shouted her name and ran to her side. She lay still as death. As he carefully turned her over, ten bloody stitch marks bloomed across her chest.

The lawnmower had hit a croquet wicket someone had left in the yard. Shrapnel had shot like bullets from its blades, dropping the girl where she stood. 

My father often told me stories to keep me safe. Never play near a lawnmower in use, he said. His voice was deep and rich, like a radio announcer.

Stories to keep me safe studded my childhood with the dramatic indelibility of fairytales. (And they didn’t call them the Brothers Grimm for nothing.) Like once, my sister told me, a girl caught snooping in her older sister’s room without permission just exploded into flames. “Spontaneous combustion,” my sister said, eyeing me over her cereal bowl. “It happens.”

And one afternoon, when I got bored digging a hole to China in the wet sand on the beach and buried my leg in it from the knee down, a neighbor boy told me that was a torture method the pirates used. They’d bury you in the sand at low tide with just your head sticking out so you would drown when the tide came in. 

I imagined timing my breaths so I’d live. 

Vowed I’d never invade someone’s privacy. 

Or walk in front of a lawnmower in use.

It was my mother who told me my father was leaving. We were sitting on the pier, our legs dangling over the hot, splintery planks, our bare toes swinging above the green water, when she said, “I have something to tell you.”  We were facing west, towards Pumphreys Point, where the summer day had already surrendered to dusk. “Your father is moving to Baltimore.” He worked in Baltimore. And she said, moving. This didn’t seem like too big of a deal. 

But the next day, in the murmur of conversations about the house, I overheard the word “divorce,” and that new information morphed to become the unsolvable conundrum of my existence to date. “If someone loves you, how can they leave you?” This is an equation my heart still can’t reconcile even though I understand intellectually that love sometimes means you must go. 

A brilliant writer and war correspondent, you might remember Sebastian Junger as the author of “The Perfect Storm.” In his new book, titled, “In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife,” he describes confronting his own death in the middle of a medical emergency. At that moment, his father, a physicist with no belief in an afterlife and dead many years, appeared to him as a benign, loving presence, conveying the message, “You do not need to keep fighting; it’s okay to let go.” But Junger had a wife he loved and two little girls he adored and found the invitation more appalling than appealing. He chose to fight, to return, to live.  

Once he has recovered, Junger tells his little girl that he loves her, but she is so very young he is uncertain that she understands what love means, so he asks her. Without hesitation, she answers, “Love means ‘stay here.’”

Twenty-seven years after my father left, I learned he had died. That, too, was hard to emotionally compute. That, too, didn’t seem possible. My grief was primarily for lost opportunity. With death, the door of possibility had closed. There would never be more between us. Or so I thought.

I reviewed our last phone conversation and felt good; I felt lucky because my last words had been I love you. Not so much an expression of tenderness as an acknowledgment of commitment. I knew I would stand by him as he aged and give him whatever help I could to the end of his days. If that wasn’t love, it was close enough. Love isn’t always a feeling. As he had requested, we scattered his ashes at sunset, where the bay meets the ocean. 

A decade or more later, having thought very little about him, I went to see an Intuitive, out of curiosity more than anything. I’m always open to what we don’t know about life, death, consciousness, and spirit. I hope to discover there is more to life than it appears, but I have no need to discover anything. 

The woman’s name was Allyson—heavy set, blunt cut brown hair, a sweet smile. She welcomed me into her home, and we sat on opposite sides of her desk. She knew nothing about me, not even my name, so to give herself time to get her bearings, she began talking in somewhat general terms about the current state of the world in astrological terms. I nodded, a little impatient. This was nothing I cared about. 

Then she abruptly stopped, looked up and to my left, and said, “Your father has passed, hasn’t he?” I nodded. “Well, he’s right here, and he’s making my heart hurt. I don’t know what he did, but he says you didn’t have his attention in some way. He says he’s still no saint but that he has learned, on the other side, what this has cost you. He is so sorry. He wants to make this up to you now.”

We talked for an hour as Allyson told me things about my life no one could possibly know. At one point, she said, “Your father is showing me a train station. He says you are about to begin a new age of discovery. Like you’re a train leaving the station.”

My car was hot from being locked in the sunny parking lot of Allyson’s townhouse. I lowered myself onto the leather seat and checked my phone to see that it had successfully recorded our conversation. Do you think you choose your parents? On the drive down Route 50 I thought I could make a case that you do, in order to become who you are. It’s a way of saying the things that have happened to you have happened for you.

Maybe my father leaving happened for me. Maybe every loss you have ever endured happened for you. What do you think? Help me figure this out. 

Because here’s what else happened. I make no claims about this experience. No proselytizing that this is reality with a capital “R” or truth with a capital “T.” Make of it what you will. 

My grandson had a Melissa and Doug Sound Puzzle he had left at my house. It is a wooden puzzle the size of a small placemat. The painted picture of a train leaving the station had been cut up into 8 shapes that make the sound of a train whistle when the child correctly places each piece back into the picture. There is a battery housed in the back. The sound is triggered by movement when the pieces are removed or replaced, or more accurately, the sound is triggered by the change in exposure to light. I had put the puzzle in the toy box, all the pieces snuggly in place, enclosed in the dark. 

But when I got home that day, as I entered the front door, the sound of a train whistle filled the room. I opened the toy box and took out the completed puzzle, all pieces in place, puzzled myself, at how that could have happened with no movement in the dark. 

Ten years later, whether the puzzle is in a drawer without the pieces, lying on a bookcase with the shapes all in place, upside down in a dark closet, or buried in a suitcase on vacation in England, the sound of the train whistle goes off when I think of my father, I am in need of reassurance, or asking for help. It makes me smile. If it’s not Dad, we’re going to have a good laugh about this someday. 

I always say hi, and I always add thanks. Because if someone loves you, they don’t leave you, even if their ashes are scattered at dusk on an outgoing tide, and the prevailing theory is they have died. 

My father didn’t need to tell me stories to keep me safe because there is nothing to fear.  

Love is the only story and love has no end.

Happy Father’s Day.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

My upstairs office, where I write to you and review client manuscripts, has three huge windows overlooking the street. I often pause what I’m doing to gaze out over the sidewalk, which, I swear, makes passersby instinctively turn and look up. The energy of observation appears palpable, but it causes some pretty weird behavior.

Like quantum particles, these people live in a world of infinite possibility of being normal until they suspect they are being observed. Then, they freeze up in contrived configurations. Couples suddenly stare straight ahead: “That woman up there is watching us! Don’t look! Keep walking!”

Dog walkers get stuck at the boxwood hedge along the sidewalk, feel the vibe, and after studiously staring at the pavement, glance up apologetically and wave their bags. I wave cheerfully back. 

In fact, I’ve begun to know people by their dogs—Mary has twin dachshunds, for instance, who can’t really be walked (short legs, high curbs), so she puts them in a stroller in sunbonnets, just their little brown snouts poking out, which has caused at least one baby-loving tourist from Delaware to recoil.  

There are power walkers, “No! Who said you look silly?” and those squadrons of tourists who, until last year, sped by on Segways, always in groups, as if to say, “Don’t judge. This is not weird! Lots of us are doing it.”

But it was weird. Not enough of us were doing it. 

It just seems that anyone going that fast should be making an effort. This is now true of the city’s newest offering: electric scooters. I’ve been thinking about this. Does “scooter” refer to the vehicle or the person riding it? I mean, if I say, “Do you bike?” would I also say, “Do you scoot?” And if I say, “Are you a biker?” would I also say, “Are you a scooter?”

But when the traffic beneath my window is nonvehicular, I try to transmit fleeting goodwill. We are all born with a sixth sense—our most exquisite means of perception– allowing you to receive and send flashes of intuitive insight. It’s that awareness that someone is looking at you or about to call. That you should turn left at the next intersection when you’re lost. Thoughts, and their accompanying feelings, are a form of energy and I am endlessly curious about the possibilities. 

There are young mothers in groups of two and three pushing plump babies in red strollers, and I beam them the message, “Pay attention, pretty mamas. These are the best days of your life– you will not pass this way again.” The mothers are often followed in the afternoon by grandmothers pushing the same strollers, who clearly do know the transitory nature of our days.

I admire the platinum shine of a middle schooler’s ponytail, the gray-blue of my neighbor’s new running shoes, the stoic efforts of the parent lugging the 30-pound toddler who has had a meltdown. “You are all so beautiful,” I think to myself. “Live long and prosper! Wheels up! Carry on!!”

 I imagine the man with the long beard who walks by leaning on his cane every morning at 10:00, tossing it aside unneeded, the runners from the local high school getting a second wind, running in unison until they are running to the same beat of their hearts. And you know what? With every good wish deployed through the air, I’m the one who is transported without effort. I am the one who is blessed.

We are a people, a nation, a tribe, a collective, a family of man intricately connected on energy waves you can’t see. Here’s the magic. If you think it, they sense it. If you feel it, they know it. We are all sender/receivers, but love is a ricochet. 

Can you feel it? 

Can you feel it now?

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

I’m at JT’s for my weekly workout and we’re catching up on what’s transpired in the week since I saw him last. I plop down in the chair next to his desk and draw my feet up to sit cross-legged.

A friend has shown me “before and after” photos of her friend, who had a minor procedure done under a local anesthetic that smoothed out her jawline. I point to my face, then stretch my cheeks back with my palms. “She looked like this! It was amazing!”

He snorts. “That’s ridiculous. Why would anyone do that?” I point to my resting jawline, raise my eyebrows, cock my head.

“I don’t even see those things until you point them out. Stop always pointing them out.”

I look at him sadly. He will never understand. I suggest he add face yoga to his gym offerings just to make him crazy and to delay the start of my workout another minute.

“Face yoga! What’s that?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. It’s a thing. I show him a video. There’s a book, too.”

He rolls his eyes, and I smile at him, mentally casting through last week’s events one more time to see if there’s anything else new in my life to share, although after a year of this, I’ve come to realize these few minutes of story-swapping do not mean I’m special in any way. JT is everyone’s confidant. Confessor.
“Does everyone tell you their secrets?” I ask.

He looks immediately cryptic. “I know some stuff. I hear stuff for sure. Who am I going to tell? I’m a vault. Men are vaults.”

I think about this. Men are vaults, as a rule. But… I once asked him whether my friend Carey, who works out twice as much as I do, lifts more than the 17-pound free weights I struggled to get over my head for the 45th time.

I could never reveal such personal information, JT said, simultaneously shaking his head as he took the weights from me.

We would gossip, but we don’t know any of the same people, except Carey and she’s such an upright citizen there’s not a lot to say. So, I tell him things I’ve learned recently that are actually far more interesting. Isn’t the best kind of sharing pressing a piece of wonder into another’s palm? Passing on something you’ve learned? Something of the gob-smacked variety? I hope so because every time the world stuns me with her beauty, with yet another meticulous miracle, I think of you.

“Did you know that a blink is .25 of a second?” I ask. JT is immediately suspicious. This is a man who pays with cash.

“How do they know? Who measures that?”

“And that in that space of a blink,15,000 new stars will be born, and 300 old stars will explode?”

“No, they won’t. Says who?”

“And 15,000,000 rogue planets will form, drifting through space untethered to a star? Just drifting, lonely, and dark?”
He looks skeptical and grim. JT’s daughter just graduated from high school and leaves the family orbit in a few months. She is on life’s precipice—her horizon is limitless. He shows me her photo from last weekend’s senior prom. She is absolutely stunning in an emerald dress draped like silk.

The stable planetary system that has been JT’s life for the last 18 years is losing a heavenly body; the circular orbit will become elliptical at best, I know. These things happen so gradually. The way the moon is easing away from the earth an inch and a half a year. Then, in one moment, the inevitable will happen. There will be a tipping point—when the earth will be forced to relinquish her embrace.

“And 30 black holes will form in the space of your next blink,” I add as he puts away his phone with his daughter’s photo. Then, to change the topic from black holes, which steal even hope and memory, to something brighter, I say, “But space will expand 527,250 kilometers.”

“Nobody knows that for sure. Come over here,” he says and hands me a resistance band.

Who’s resistant, I’m thinking.

But I’ve been where he is, and I still wrestle with the knowledge that change is the only constant. Not good news, not bad. Just news. Every time someone leaves, there is an adjustment, a reconfiguring of the remaining bodies in the system. Gravitational forces respond in kind to increased distance.

The kids leave home, and you relearn who you are. Grandchildren are born, and you relearn who you are. Friends leave your orbit, and you relearn who you are.

People love and forgive you, and you relearn who you are or become a new star entirely; you burn hot and blue.
A galaxy that can no longer produce stars is called a Quiet Essence. In astronomical terms, it is an epoch, but in life, it is a choice I don’t intend to make. I want to light up my world with new experiences and understanding to the end of time.

To the end of my time.

I step into the resistance band and pull it just above my knees. “People who are lying tend not to blink,” I tell him. “But here’s a fact: over the course of your life, you’ll blink 650 million times.” I blink so he’ll know I’m telling the truth.

After my workout, I leave him looking at his phone again, maybe at the prom photo of his beautiful daughter in the green dress.

He is far from the era of Quiet Essence, but I turn back and look at him through the glass door as I leave. Traffic is heavy on Forrest Drive, and I want to get home in time to call my first-born daughter. The one who lives in Woking, England. The one who travels through this galaxy 3,000 miles and five hours ahead of me with every turn of the earth. The daughter, who, like her brother and sister, I held as close as the moon for a time.

“Don’t blink,” I whisper to myself as I head down the stairs.

It is difficult to see.

Don’t blink.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

I didn’t know what to do about Mr. Oliver. He refused to believe in the Pet Psychic. The short-lived show on Animal Planet had me laughing, too, but I was trying to keep an open mind.

“Look at her,” he hooted as I stared at the television transfixed. Consuelo, an animal telepath, was communicating with Miss Piles, a pony who had bitten her owner. The previously docile horse wouldn’t allow the man to touch her, and Consuelo had been consulted as a last resort. The Brazilian telepath sat on a hay bale in the pony’s stall and communed with the animal.

“She’s saaaad, dahling,” Consuelo relayed to the owner. “And she’s maaaad!” The psychic turned raised eyebrows to the barrel-chested man in the red ballcap holding the pony’s rein. “She wants to know what you did with her baby.”

The owner flushed a bright pink, shuffling around in the barn straw to avoid the accusing stares of Miss Piles as well as Consuelo.

“Sold him,” he muttered.

Consuelo didn’t translate tone of voice, but narrowed eyes indicated she was clearly the pony’s advocate. “Miss Piles says you took her baby too soon and in front of her. That was excruciating, but she feels better now that she’s told you what’s wrong.”

And bitten you, I thought.

“She could say anything!” Mr. Oliver exclaimed, unmoved. “Who’s to contradict her? The horse?”

But what if she’s right? The ramifications are enormous. Not just that animals have feelings but that they have thoughts and opinions. To explore this, I googled “Does your dog love you?” The search resulted in:

“Does your dog love you BACK?”
“Does your dog love you more than itself?”
“Does your dog love you if he sleeps with you?”

I double-checked to be sure I had typed “dog,” … but I guess that’s the point.

In graduate school, I read a short story by Amy Hempel illuminating the animal-human sensibility that broke my heart. It was about Koko, the most famous of the western lowland gorillas who had been taught to communicate with researchers using sign language.

Born in the San Francisco Zoo on the 4th of July, she’d been initially named “Hanabi-ko,” which means “Fireworks Child” in Japanese. By the time she was a year old, she was KoKo, and her caregiver, Dr. Penny Patterson, had taught her over 1,000 signs.

The Christmas KoKo was 12, she asked for a cat, so researchers gave her a stuffed toy cat, but she wouldn’t play with it and kept signing, “Sad, sad, sad.” My theory? She was signing “sad” only because she couldn’t sign “lame.”

So, for her birthday that year, researchers brought her a litter of kittens and let her choose one as a companion. She picked a soft gray and white kitty she named “All Ball,” carrying it everywhere, even trying to nurse it, nurturing it like any human mother would nurture a child. As

KoKo became increasingly renowned for her language skills. Popular Science reported that she was so psychologically human she could use language to lie. Their example? Once, she ripped a steel sink from the wall, and when her startled caretakers discovered the damage, KoKo pointed at All Ball and signed, “Cat did it.”

Am I the only one who knows that wasn’t a lie but a joke? I think it’s hilarious. It grieves me that researchers assumed her similarity to us was the ability to deceive when in fact, she was demonstrating the best of us, the ability to make another laugh.

Sadly, six months later, All Ball was hit by a car. When Koko learned of the kitten’s death, she relentlessly signed the only words she had for grief: “sad, “frown,” “cry,” “bad,” “trouble,” and the heart-breaking, “Come baby, come.” She hooted in the manner of lowland gorillas in distress, a sound much like human weeping.

Koko joked, nurtured, loved, and experienced the pain of loss as any human would. Was she the exception or the norm?

I’ve read about animals’ exceptional intelligence and emotional lives for years, and we learn more all the time– how birds show affection, how curious cows are, how octopuses play pranks, dream, and hold grudges. And, of course, how animals grieve. A mother whale carried her dead calf for a thousand miles, unwilling to let her go. Is there a parent of any species who can’t relate?
I think there will come a time in the history of this planet when horseracing, dog racing, laboratory testing, slaughterhouses, circuses, and zoos have been vastly humanized or are things of the past.

The good news? I think KoKo was the norm. Bad news? Time is of the essence. Because Koko was the norm.

In the documentary “The Parrots of Telegraph Hill,” a homeless musician begins caring for a flock of wild South American parrots in San Francisco. No one knows where the birds came from, and Mark Bittner, a lost soul himself, begins feeding the flock. Over time, he names them and learns their individual identities, the most vulnerable being Tupelo, a cherry-headed conure who has become so frail he feeds her with a syringe and cradles her in his arms on walks.

One night, Mark is reading in bed when he suddenly feels an overwhelming sense of gratitude emanating from the bird, radiating towards him like heat, a wave so distinct, so intense, that it interrupts his attention on his book, as real as if someone had whispered, “I have something to tell you.” He picks Tupelo up and holds her gently next to him in bed as he continues to read. Eventually, he puts both the book and the bird on the floor so he can sleep. But as he sets the bird down, he feels a new rush of emotion flowing like a river straight from the bird to his heart.

Regret. And resignation.

In the morning, he discovers her body, and it is Mark who is filled with regret– that he didn’t understand the urgency of her message, “I must leave now,” and that he didn’t hold her longer.

The Pet Psychic has been off the air for years, but I was intrigued by the telepath’s most impressive gift — helping animals who have died communicate with their grieving human families.

Thank you,” they said. “I know you loved me,” they assured us. Thank you so much for my life.”

Animal or human, it seems what binds us is forever.

And real or not, the pet telepath healed broken hearts. The message between all creatures–

great and small, bright and beautiful—was universally the same. Love and gratitude.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.