No Proof Required by Laura J. Oliver

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.