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May 12, 2025

Talbot Spy

Nonpartisan Education-based News for Talbot County Community

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1 Homepage Slider 3 Top Story Point of View Laura

Fifty-seven Octaves Below Middle C by Laura J. Oliver

July 17, 2022 by Laura J. Oliver

Dr. Brown, a musical virtuoso from whom I took piano lessons as a girl, had just announced that I was going to be performing in an April recital. He was a keenly-intelligent man, with tortoise shell glasses and fine dark hair that flopped down on his forehead when lost in the passionate performance of a Liszt sonata.

That afternoon we were going to find something “fun” for me to play in front of 20 other students and all their friends and relatives. As a third grader, the very idea of this kind of public exposure was like swallowing ice. 

I never crossed paths with Dr. Brown’s other students, so I had no idea of what to expect. My mother just dropped me for lessons at the Brown’s split-level behind the mall and left me for 30 minutes every Friday afternoon. I wanted to please Dr. Brown, but not enough to practice. All week I’d pound out pieces I already knew and then, sick with fear, go to my lesson and stumble through the piece I hadn’t attempted since it was assigned.         

Dr. Brown always said, “I can see that you’ve practiced,” which made me wonder if Dr. Brown was testing me, being sarcastic, or was perhaps, terribly poor and in need of the $6.75 he was paid each time I showed up clutching my Bach Inventions. 

On the day of the recital, I was nauseous with anxiety. We gathered in the very utilitarian educational hall of a church on Route 2, with its linoleum floor and high windows—much like a gym. Or a prison. The piano had been angled so that the audience could see your fingers. It was blond—which seemed wrong.  

Dr. Brown’s other students sat on the aisles, scattered throughout the rows of metal chairs. I checked them out as if I’d just discovered siblings when I had hoped I was an only child.

The girl performing just ahead of me sported a silky ponytail, wore nylons and clearly practiced. She was playing “Rhapsody in Blue” with an orange. Fun! In her left hand, she grasped the leathery fruit and every time she crossed her left hand over her right to hit a note, she did it with the orange. The applause was spectacular.

I heard my name called from very far way, having pretty much left my body by then. I walked to the front of the room in my short white socks knowing I should adjust the bench but to prolong the attention would have been unbearable. 

My mother thought this experience was good for me because 1) girls should know how to play the piano and 2) she believed suffering makes you a better person. Suffering gives you substance. Depth. Wisdom. She also believed that if there are two ways of doing something, you should choose the hardest way. That too, would make you a better person.  It is a philosophy a lot of us were raised to believe.  That life is a school, adversity builds character; loss makes you real.

I’ve been unlearning this of late and it was not Dr. Brown who made me reassess this theory but my friend Ed who happens to be a minister. I was flopped on an easy chair in his office going on about how hard I was working to improve, when Ed said meditatively, “Hmmmmm, I’m pretty sure the universe doesn’t require perfection.” Ed actually said “God,” but “universe” seems more inclusive.

I walked to my car a bit stunned at the ramifications of that thought. If perfection isn’t required, maybe life isn’t a school with tests for advancement. Maybe school is an overly simplistic, very human paradigm, placed over something too great to comprehend—a perfection that has always been there, can’t be earned, that doesn’t recognize hierarchies. It just is.  

Last summer I was in my office listening to a webinar on intuition. The instructor put us through a guided meditation, and out of nowhere Dr. Brown popped into my head. I had not heard his name, nor thought of him in 45 years, but a wave of energy moved through me like music, and his name stayed with me like a refrain. 

Later that night I went online to see if I could find him. Brown is a common name, I added, “composer, performer, piano,” before I found the right man. He had died leaving behind an adopted son I remembered as an adorable little blond who played quietly in another room during my lessons. 

In May, NASA released the sonification of the black hole at the center of the Perseus Galaxy. It is spinning through space in the key of b-flat, 57 octaves below middle C. 

I read years ago that Earth itself rotates through the solar system in the key of b-flat.  I wish I could ask Dr. Brown if this is true. 

What I suspect is true, is that life is not a performance up for unforgiving review. 

It’s a symphony, it’s a ballad.

It’s a love song.  

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. 

 

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The Wall of Last Scattering Laura J. Oliver

July 10, 2022 by Laura J. Oliver

Before my grandfather died, accidentally struck by a 16-year-old driver in broad daylight as he walked to his Wednesday-afternoon bowling league, he built a 6-foot-long telescope to study the heavens. It took a year just to grind the lens. When completed, he mounted the telescope on the wheel drum of a Model A Ford so it could rotate. I was 12 when he was killed so we didn’t have a lot of time together. I wish I could have known better the man who built a telescope longer than I was tall, to see out into space and backwards in time.

I carry on his legacy as an Astro-fan—a participant in an ongoing astronomy class that originated at the local community college. We are retired NASA scientists, physicists, biologists, and one embarrassingly exuberant math-challenged writer. We seem to have nothing in common except a fascination with the grandeur of space, the beauty of the cosmos, and an unending curiosity about where it all came from and how it will end. 

Every week I learn something new about the origins of the universe, rogue planets, dark energy and quasars. Fascinating facts I presumptuously assume everyone will want to know. A charismatic writing client once asked, “What lights you up?” And I thought, “Well now, that’s a cool phrase,” and I knew the answer immediately—learning is the light– and like our ancestors before us we have learned to carry the fire when we travel, and, like Herb and Denise, who teach this course, to share the flame.

My astronomy class has seen the black hole at the center of the Milky Way and studied the evidence that smaller galaxies have merged with ours at least 7 times. 

Ten billion years ago, Gaia Enceladus crashed through the Milky Way and more recently we collided with Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy, although to say we collided is a misnomer. In the vast reaches of space, galaxies pass through each other routinely with virtually no direct impacts —just wild disruptions of orbits and redistribution of planets. It’s a cosmic dance, and our next partner, the much larger spiral galaxy Andromeda, will lead. 

Astronomers estimate there are 20 sextillion planets in the visible universe. I memorized that fact last week, so I could imagine the immensity and so I could tell you.  

So much wonder in the world. I like to stun myself with remarkable discoveries so I can experience one of the few characteristics that is unique to humans.

Self-awareness, language, altruism?  

What sets us apart is our ability to feel awe.

We grow silent in the giant redwood forest—catch our breath at a mountain vista. There is a documented universal outcry at the moment of totality in a solar eclipse and a feeling of communal euphoria afterwards. 

Wait! Did you know that our ability to witness a total solar eclipse is time-limited?  

  Cup the match. Pass the flame. 

You witness the totality of the moon blocking out all but the ring of the sun’s corona because of a mathematically uncanny synchronicity. The sun’s diameter is 400 times greater than that of the moon, while the moon orbits precisely 400 times closer to the earth than the sun. 

But the moon is moving away from the earth at a rate of 1.48 inches a year. In some distant future she will slip from earth’s embrace and set sail into infinity. Some discoveries are about letting go.

The James Webb telescope will begin sending back to earth its first pictures this week. We will be able to see almost to the beginning of time—back 13 billion years to what astronomers call the “wall of last scattering”—the impenetrable plasma that existed until some 380,000 years after the Big Bang when photons were released to begin their journey from then to now. From there to you.

Prepare to be astounded. 

Prepare to feel your intense insignificance and your connection to what is limitless at the same time. Prepare to be awed.

A friend once said to me at a dinner party, “Oh I get it. You study this stuff because you think you are special—  that you are somehow connected to something infinite.” It was simply an observation and not a wrong one. Why did it feel like a challenge? There is nothing to argue. Ever. Only new things to learn.

 Light me up.

I took a sip of my wine and admitted, “True. And I think that love powers the universe in ways we don’t understand. And that love is refracted in the human spirit.” 

So, let’s look at the numbers again because reverence is evoked by vastness. There are 7.7 billion of us on this planet—the only planet in the solar system not named for a god. That’s 7.7 billion of us looking up at 400 billion stars in a Milky-Way sky.  

It’s not that I think I am special. 

 It’s that I think you are. As is the mysterious, uncanny, ever-changing universe that holds us in its arms.

 And I’m in awe.

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.

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

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Cows on the Lam by Laura Oliver

July 3, 2022 by Laura J. Oliver

This is about cows with boundary issues, and if you read this column regularly, you’re already saying, “No it’s not.”

Five heifers from my sister’s farm recently went on the lam. The jailbreakers are young, just weaned. They don’t even eat grain yet, but they’re brave and bold and maybe highly incentivized. How’d they escape the pasture? They didn’t jump the fence (though I’ve seen this). They didn’t find a break in the fence. They went under the fence at a stream.

Now they are their own herd of guileless youngsters, out past curfew, and it’s a bigger problem than you would think. They’re black, and even this young, they weigh close to 600 pounds. If a motorist were to suddenly come across one in the road at night, it would not be a good thing. Law enforcement was notified, animal control, neighbors, a veterinarian. It took days to even figure out if they were still on the property. Proximity to an airport precluded the use of a drone and the farm’s 80 acres feature a lot of wooded hillsides and sheltered hollows of oak, maple, and pine. But eventually they were located on a neighboring farm having a drink and some recreational weed which is cow-equivalent to water and real grass though I picture them having a beer and a smoke behind the barn.

It’s a serious problem. I love my sister and brother-in-law and would fix this if I could. As a mother, my theory is that the calves are heading for their mothers on the farm where they were born 100 miles south in Amherst. But that’s because mothers want to believe they are lifetime homing beacons for their offspring when it’s likely your offspring hasn’t thought about you in weeks, maybe months, and rightly so.

So cowgate has become a thing. My other sister and I check in periodically to see if the cows have come home, but I swear every time the answer is no, there is sincere concern for my sister, new brainstorming of solutions, and (I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry), a little fist bump for the cows.

As I write this 3 have been recaptured by experienced cowhands. The mastermind heifer and his cohort are still at large. They are all going to be shipped out west. Once a jailbreaker, always a jailbreaker, my brother-in-law says, and he should know. He’s been successfully raising cattle for decades. (Irrelevant fact: he is very handsome which makes you want to believe him.)

The cows can’t run forever. We know their freedom is limited, they’re on borrowed time. But I guess there is something about an underdog we can’t help but champion.

If you are an American, you are here because of another group of rebellious underdogs. The colonies, of which Maryland was the 4th largest at the time, took on an enemy 4 times their size in terms of population and one armed with incomparable resources. American Revolutionaries endured over 1,500 military engagements with a professional army over an excruciating 8 years. And unlike conventional wars, the War of American Independence was fought for an ideal. A principle.

Once declared, there was no going back. We’d be free or die trying. And we did die trying–25,000 men lost their lives in battle or from disease.

A ragtag army fought in below-freezing temperatures without coats or adequate clothing, marched for days without shoes, without medicine, shelter, adequate weapons, or food. Recruits could enlist at 15 years old with parental permission, 16 otherwise. A lot of teenagers fought this war.

George Washington’s biography, which details these years, will bring you to your knees in awe and gratitude. When you come to understand the sacrifice exacted, you come to appreciate more fully the absolute miracle of this or any republic.

We are surely as imperfect as a nation as we are imperfect as individuals. How could it be otherwise?

Yet what an astonishing privilege it is to live in a democracy. Happy Birthday America. I’ll be grateful long after the cows come home.

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.

 

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Dance with Me by Laura J. Oliver

June 26, 2022 by Laura J. Oliver

The littlest among us will become the stars of the show tonight. Have you seen them?

Parents bump babies in strollers over brick sidewalks, tow toddlers like dinghies by the hand. Teens pause to check out the action. Tourists perch on pier pilings drawn by the electric anticipation in the air. 

For years, the United States Naval Academy Band has performed free summer concerts at the Annapolis City Dock. Pristine yachts bob on their moorings while a saltwater breeze diminishes the flame of the setting sun.  The bricks in the courtyard of Susan Campbell Park still hold the sizzle of summer but that’s just mid-Atlantic Maryland in July. This gathering begins as a desire for entertainment, but it becomes a desire for something else– something bigger and difficult to identify.

The band is made up of Musicians First Class wearing their immaculate dress whites for the occasion. A cap only partially conceals the lead singer’s shiny blond hair, her crisp shirt tucked neatly into the A-line skirt which ends professionally at her knees. 

A ripple of applause greets her as she takes the stage. The crowd is on alert now, water bottles stowed, panting dogs drop belly down.

Strangers flash smiles at each other as the drummer turns on the magic, tapping the opening beat on the edge of his snare. The guitarist takes a run, and our formally attired lead singer opens the set by belting out Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance. There is such a disparity between her uniform and the music selection that it’s disarming. 

Charming. A boundary breaker. 

Like seeing your British Airways pilot rapping to Kanye on the flight deck. Like seeing your cardiologist singing karaoke in his scrubs.

But the real performance is in front of the stage, where about a dozen children have gathered—most under the age of 5. They swing and sway. They hop and up down like tiny lunatics. They are completely off the beat. Strangely expressionless, too. 

They spin like little helicopters that have lost their tail rotors, collapse into each other both unselfconsciously and without acknowledgement, then pop to their feet to spin some more. 

They are too small to have ever made a mistake, too young to bear the weight of regret, too innocent to need forgiveness. It is as if each is dancing in his own separate world, maybe the world from which they so recently arrived, and yet the proximity of the other children is required. 

When I’m feeling isolated it’s as if I too need to step into the same stream in which others stand though I’m fishing on my own. I take my computer to Barnes and Noble or a coffee shop to be in community but not engaged. Alone but a lesser lonely. 

It’s some kind of invisible energy that connects us—something that we need as much as the food that sustains us, or the air that we breathe, but can you name it?

If we could see magnetism or radiation, we might see goodwill sparking off every surface in the park on Tuesday nights. If affection was a vibration, if inclusion rose like heat off these bricks, or could be heard like the bells of St. Anne’s—if love were a color, or wellbeing a wavelength—we might see a reality we can feel but not prove. 

There is no distance between us, and no one dances alone.  

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.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

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I Am Reading Your Horoscope by Laura Oliver

June 19, 2022 by Laura J. Oliver

I have a confession. I read my horoscope (Pisces) every day in The Washington Post because (must I really spell this out?) the ones in the Post are completely accurate!

I also read the horoscopes of former flames to see if they’re suffering. 

Capricorn: “You will want to move on today but persistent thoughts of a certain someone make it impossible.” Yes!

Also in the confession category: my best friend mispronounces my name. She’s called me “Lora” for 15 years and I’ve never corrected her. Now I can’t. But it’s worse for my writer friend Brian Doyle who has been referred to as Drain Boyle, Brain Doyle and Brian Dooley.

Besides answering to the wrong name, I listen to books on tape and report that I’ve read them. And I think keeping a secret means you only tell one other person. Okay, two.

But back to horoscopes. Do I believe this stuff? Of course not? But I do know that words are the power tools that change experience into feeling. Because it’s not what happens to us as much as what we tell ourselves about what happens to us that creates our mood and determines our futures. That’s powerful stuff. And it’s all just story. 

Remember I told you I’m a student of neuroscience?

Well, did you know that when you hear the words, “I have a story to tell you, ”your brain sends out a flood of endorphins in the belief that intriguing information is on the way?

Research shows our brain believes what it hears, even when the words contradict the facts. For instance, we are affected by false flattery, even when we know it is false! (By the way, you look terrific today.)

The placebo effect makes people get better on the power of belief alone (cool), but recent discoveries show health improves even when patients know they’re getting the sugar pill! (Cooler.)

Don’t believe me about the influence of words? 

I have found your horoscope.

You are filled with joy when a burden is lifted today. A financial windfall is coming your way. Exciting news arrives before noon.

I know what you’re thinking. She just made this up! And yet…

We are affected by the story we tell and not just about ourselves but about others. Sure, the guy who cut you off in traffic could be a jerk. But the story you can write in response as you merge onto Route 50 is this. 

His mistake was unintentional. He’s as embarrassed as you are annoyed. He’s late to pick up a frightened 4-year-old. He’s distracted by his lab results. He would give his life for his children, just as you would for yours. 

Feel the difference? You are the author of all that you feel, and it so often is a judgment when it could be a gift. 

It’s not just an emotional sleight of hand. The primal brain is ego-centric and sees all action as inner-directed. When you criticize, you feel criticized. When you forgive, you feel forgiven. When you offer understanding, you feel understood. 

I have a story to tell you…

You are exquisitely compassionate, infinitely kind. In your heart of hearts, there is only goodwill– for yourself and for others. Love prevails. Goodness and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life.

That’s a story that could heal the world. Share the news. 

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.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

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The 8th Wonder by Laura Oliver

June 12, 2022 by Laura J. Oliver

I found something cool the other day and my first thought was to share it with you. 

My mother died at the age of 95. She married at 22, gave birth to three daughters. Moved us from the Midwest of her youth to a river on the east coast. She remained married to my father for 20 years, and then?

She lived alone for the next 53 years of her life. That’s 19,345 days.

She was a psychotherapist and a poet. To combat the isolation, she wrote in journals to review the events of her day the way partners share anecdotes in the evening over grilled salmon and a glass of wine. To have a witness, a place to explore her fears, resolve anxieties, to express her opinions. A place to store memories, and often, to receive inspiration from a spirit greater than her own.  On North Carolina beaches, in blinding blizzards, waiting for the brake pads to be replaced, Mother recorded her thoughts. Often those observations were about my sisters and me—who was pregnant, not speaking, had bought a new car–and I admit this practice was met with an eye roll more often than not. 

I picked up a journal from 2002 the other day. If she hadn’t written it down, I’d have not remembered that was the year I blew out a disc in my lower back. I’d been hauling 15-foot Leyland cypress trees from a nursery and 40-pound bags of mulch around the yard for days, my theory at the time being that if you can lift it, you should lift it. I was in excruciating pain, unable to even walk. The ruptured disc had been confirmed by an MRI but mother-the-therapist penned, “I think Laura’s back pain is emotional.”

I blew out my back because I was …mad?

I hadn’t blown a disc; I’d blown a gasket?

Sigh.

But I am writing to share a different entry and you’ll see why. In a marbled black-and-white, wide-lined composition book Mother wrote: I want to put down something I thought was very interesting. A group of students was asked to list what they thought were the present Seven Wonders of the World. They ended up with:

  1. Egypt’s Grand Pyramids
  2. The Taj Mahal
  3. The Grand Canyon
  4. The Panama Canal
  5. The Empire State Building
  6. St. Peter’s Basilica
  7. China’s Great Wall

One girl was having trouble completing her list. There were just so many, she said. The teacher asked her to read what she had so far, maybe the class could help. She hesitated and then read; The Seven Wonders of the World are:

1. To touch
2. To taste
3. To see
4. To hear

She paused again, then added:

5. To feel
6. To laugh
7. To love

My mother characterized the anecdote as interesting, but I suspect she found it beautiful and there was no one to give it to—and don’t we all have the impulse to share what moves us?  What is that instinct to press wonder into another’s hand? To say, “Wait till you hear what I saw, what I heard, what I found!”

If gratitude is joy, love is generosity. Pass it on. 

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.

 

  

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Look With Your Eyes. See With Your Heart by Laura Oliver

June 5, 2022 by Laura J. Oliver

Have you seen this? An unshaven man in crumpled khakis and a worn shirt, sits cross-legged on a cold, DC street corner with a tin cup at his feet. In his hands, he grips a square of cardboard upon which is printed, “I’m blind. Please help.” 

Well-dressed professionals clip past in their Stuart Weitzmans and Cole Haans on their way to professional jobs in plush offices with fake Ficus trees in accent-lit lobbies. Pretty women pause, dig in shiny shoulder bags, then toss in a quarter. Other passersby rush on, eyes averted. 

A slim young woman with dark hair pulled back in a bun—maybe 18, 19– passes the man as well, but stops and turns back. Kneeling in front of him she gently pulls the cardboard from his hands, extracts a marker from her backpack, and flips his sign over. As the bewildered man waits, unable to see what she’s doing, she scrawls a new message on the reverse side, hands the sign back and walks on. 

Over the course of the day, elapsed in U-Tube time, people stream past the blind man as before, except now, nearly everyone stops to place cash in his cup. Coins drop like rain, a flood of thoughtful compassion. The afternoon wears on and the perplexed man continues to hold up the sign the young woman has written. His cup overflows.

As shadows lengthen at the end of the business day, the woman returns from the opposite direction. When she greets him, the man recognizes her voice. “What did you do to my sign?” he asks helplessly. He is confused by his new success, the magic of what she has done. She responds, I wrote the same, but in different words.

As the camera pans out, the sign becomes visible. In black block print, the girl has written, “It’s a beautiful day and I can’t see it.”

Words change everything. Luck, energy, desire, vision—the way you see the world and those with whom you share it. 

Last Christmas I had one of those circle-of-friends candleholders on my coffee table, only the ‘friends’ were 3 elves, facing inwards, their little backs to the observer, holding hands around a lit votive. As I moved them to put a pizza down, I mentioned to my friend Rick that the little guys appeared to be circled around the glow of a burning log in a cold forest. 

Rick, whose job description includes words like “covert,” “Pentagon,” and “flight schedule,” said dispassionately, “Yeah? I think they’re hiding something.”

Perspective. Like everything else, it’s a story we tell ourselves based on our experience of the past. That doesn’t make it true, nor a prediction of what’s to come. 

My three kids have lived all over this country and all over the world, and I have missed them. My son left home at 17 to live in New Zealand for more than a decade. One daughter lived in New Orleans for years, then Vermont. Another daughter moved to the United Kingdom 12 years ago, and I can’t imagine she will ever live closer than an ocean away. I have missed weddings and births. Friends with kids nearby have felt sorry for me. I felt sorry for me, too.

Then I wrote the same story but with different words. 

The kids are happy. They call home. They have created meaningful lives. They have found people they love. 

It’s a beautiful day. And I can see it. 

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.

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

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What Do You Know by Heart? Laura J. Oliver

May 29, 2022 by Laura J. Oliver

Here is what I know by heart: the multiplication tables, the planets in the solar system and the Pledge of Allegiance. I know what you’re thinking: 

That’s it?

My friend Margaret knows The Gettysburg address, all the state capitals, and can list all the Presidents of the United States in order. That’s the difference between Holton Arms and public school.

I’ve had to resort to tricks to learn things by heart. I know the notes on the musical staff because the space notes spell “F-A-C-E.”  Mr. Brown taught me this at my piano lessons in his home behind the Harundale Mall, where every week we pretended I had practiced. 

I know that “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” contains every letter of the alphabet.

I also know the difference between a fox and a dog in the first place: 3 beers.

 But I’m wondering why, if we use our brains to memorize, we say we know something by heart?

I can recite all the verses to, “Mandy was a little Bahama Girl” because my older sister used to sing me to sleep accompanying herself on her ukulele. We were probably around 5 and 9 at the time. No one could doubt the sincerity of her performance which was awesome, although the song was unbearably sad. Spoiler alert. Mandy dies. In childbirth, yet! 

I also know all the lyrics to, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” for the same reason. Spoiler alert. They’re dead, too. (Gone to graveyards, every one!)

 And that all-time hit, “What Have they Done to the Rain?” I’m thinking you can guess what they’ve done to the rain.

I’m not as good at memorizing as I once was. A few passwords. My son’s new address. My youngest daughter sings on Wednesday nights at a neighborhood music venue called Slam Run. I made it a point to unobtrusively memorize both night of the week and location in case I could slip in the back unnoticed some evening to hear her perform. Only it’s not Slam Run. It’s Slash Run! See? 

And my poor daughter-in-law tries to teach me easy, memoizable steps for posting on Facebook, then Instagram, then LinkedIn, in her beautiful, lilting New Zealand accent, and when she’s done, I’m staring at her thinking, “My goodness you’re pretty.’” 

It was insufferably hot in the house in which my sister sang me to sleep. No air conditioning. Our parents had moved east from the Midwest in order to live on tidal water. Unable to afford a waterfront house, they’d bought an old barn and racing stable on 3 acres of riverfront near Gibson Island. The barn was dark green with white battens and sat on a rise above Rock Cove. From November to March migrating swans blanketed the inlet, pink lady slippers bloomed near our forts in the woods. 

Our parents spent the next decade of our childhood renovating the barn, constructing an exquisite home with built-in window seats, a breakfast room, and handcrafted cabinetry. My sisters and I each had a dormered bedroom of our own. 

They enclosed the pasture so we could get a horse. They built a pier so we could have a boat. 

But as my parents built their dream on a tidal river, they deconstructed their 20-year marriage one disappointment at a time. A month after my tenth birthday, they divorced.

Maybe that’s why my sister’s songs were so sad. 

I think maybe how the brain memorizes and how the heart memorizes are two different processes. One requires effort, and I’m not good at it, but it’s useful. You might need to know how to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius one day. 

But the heart memorizes without conscious effort—the way it beats to keep you alive. That’s why, though the barn is gone now, hundreds of swans still bob snowy-white in the icy cove.  I smell creosote on the pier pilings, know where pink lady slippers grow in the woods. 

And a sister still sings in a dormered bedroom.

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.

 

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Come! Stay. By Laura J. Oliver

May 22, 2022 by Laura J. Oliver

This is where my story begins. The trouble comes later. My yellow lab of 15 ½ years died so I took the hole in my heart to a volunteer training class at the local animal shelter where I could do some good for the less fortunate in Kaya’s name. For the past five years, I’ve been a volunteer dog walker, showing up several times a week to walk the temporarily incarcerated on the wooded, 11-acre trail on Back Creek.

There were 14 of us in my class, including a retired CPA, a mother and her teenage son. A kind of sketchy guy in dark glasses who turned out to be fine.  From our facilitator we learned how to recognize aggressive behavior. We learned to stay 50 yards away from each other walking our unpredictable charges. We learned that if your dog bolts off the wooden pedestrian bridge over the stream, you’re going in after it. 

We got t-shirts. 

Since this is a no-kill shelter, they take returns and there were one or two frequent fliers— like Chase, who got adopted (yay!) and then reappeared a few weeks later. (Ruh-roh.)  

Like Jet. 

As you make your way down the cement run past the kennel cages to retrieve the dog you intend to walk, the other dogs compete for your attention of course, yelping, somersaulting, leaping like toddlers in need of a bathroom break. Except Jet, who sat with patient dignity amidst the rabble rousers, posed at a slight angle to the cage door, the way high school photographers made you cant a shoulder and tilt your head in an impossibly awkward position no human boy or girl ever assumed for your yearbook portrait. Only on Jet, the pose was remarkably debonair. A handsome hound, his white chest and black martingale collar could have been a tuxedo. A calculating flirt, you could almost see him raise both a martini and a suggestive brow as you walked by. 

I loved Jet so I was particularly sad when he was adopted and returned. Evidently, he was hiding anxiety issues. Aren’t we all? 

So, it took me five years of walking dogs who rescued me from lonely days at the computer with no human contact, to finally bring one home. This is where the trouble begins. 

She was an underweight terrier mix surrendered with external and internal parasites. A year old, her facial hair had grown so long she couldn’t see, but it was thin, so she wore a ratty pink sweater. She’d just been spayed, so she had a giant cone on her little head. I couldn’t actually see much of her except two shiny bright eyes.  How could an animal so sick and neglected radiate only goodwill? An old soul in a puppy’s body. Love with her high beams on.  

I was so moved by her need I didn’t research her breed. Heads up. Big mistake. She barks incessantly at the television and has this weird preternatural ability to know when you’re changing channels, even on mute! Even with her eyes closed! Even sound asleep!

She chases squirrels from inside the house! She can climb trees when incentivized. She can fly. There is a five-foot-tall brick wall enclosing the back garden and I’m sure the neighbors, enjoying a glass of prosecco on the other side, have been startled to see her head sail by in pursuit of her quarry.

In the car on the way home from the shelter the little dog was aquiver, trembling, a coiled spring spotting squirrels from the car window and maniacally digging the glass to get at them. I felt more ambivalence than love for her at that moment. I hadn’t thought this through! I’d never owned a high-intensity dog before. I suddenly felt more anxiety about the commitment than devotion to the cause. 

And this is how my story ends. 

 I have this theory that you grow to love what you serve. That nurturing promotes bonding. That love follows action because love is not a feeling, until, well, it is.

“I could never work at a shelter,” friends proclaim. “I’d take all of them home!”

No, you wouldn’t. There’s chemistry. There’s personality. And we can’t swap out loss quite so efficiently. It takes time. It takes love in low doses to reseal that container so it can hold risk again. Because when you love a pet, you are going to have 15 years of good days for which you will eventually pay with the worst day of your life. 

It’s the paradox we were born for. “Come!” is a command. “Stay” is a request. Grace holds the tension between them. You know going in, you will have to let go, yet as much as we are wired to avoid pain at all costs, we eventually choose to love, again and again. We fall hard. We are undone by our children. We bring the neglected home. 

Somewhere in love’s evolutionary past, fear became a recessive gene and hope prevailed.

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.

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The Third Dream by Laura J. Oliver

May 15, 2022 by Laura J. Oliver

You might as well know up front that I believe in life after death, mental telepathy, and mind over matter. Also, that I spent quite a bit of energy in my youth trying to make Purrfur-the-cat levitate, and that I have had at least two precognitive dreams. A third dream may have tapped into an unknown dimension as well. 

So, in the first dream, my boyfriend’s life was in danger. He was a winsome 2nd class midshipman at the US Naval Academy, and I was an angsty, song-writing sophomore at Washington College.  We had met on a blind date and hadn’t been going out very long, when I awoke in my cinderblock dorm room in Minta Martin Hall knowing my boyfriend and all his classmates were in mortal danger. The dream was just weird enough that I went to the phone at the end of the hall and placed a call. “You’re in danger,” I said. Then I shared the dream warning on a feedback loop in my head. “You won’t know who he is, because he’s one of you.”

“That’s weird,” my boyfriend replied. “Last night, we went on lockdown. A guy who graduated in June had a mental breakdown in basic training at Quantico and was driving back to Annapolis to settle a score. He had a uniform, of course. And a gun. And a DOD sticker on his car to get through the gate.” 

In the next dream, I was sitting in a circle with a bunch of other college kids from all over the east coast, listening to a tall, soft-spoken man with thick white hair, introduce us to his wife, a diminutive blond with a French twist and an authoritarian vibe. “Your purpose in life,” she explained, eyeing each of us in turn, “is to learn and to grow.” Not a week later, I arrived at the Craigville Inn and Conference Center on Cape Cod, where I would be waiting tables with other students from June through August. I can’t say the exact circumstances of the dream were replicated but as I reported to the front office, with its faux wood paneling and worn orange carpet, there they were. The man and the woman I had just dreamed of –only now they had names—Dr. and Mrs. Pierre Vuillemiere–co-directors of the conference center. 

Unfortunately, all I learned that summer was how to pack on a fast 30 pounds cutting up Boston Crème pies, and that true southern boys, who want to marry southern girls, think Maryland is a northern state. But the third dream is the one I hang on to. How can we know if it’s true?

I was thinking about guardian angels one evening just before bed. I was a young mother of three at the time, which probably is why the whole concept came to mind, as in, I could use some help here… Is there someone assigned to watch over them? Over me? Over you? Maybe an ancestor or relative we’ve never met? Or one we’ve lost? I thought of my Aunt Lenora, who had died at 104 with a cap of white curls and the sparkling blue eyes of a fairy godmother.

And that night I dreamed I did indeed have a guardian angel and that person was standing right behind me! I could feel the presence, a benign loving energy, close enough to touch. And I thought, all I have to do is turn around. A mystery of the universe is about to be revealed. Male or female, I wondered. Young or old? Familiar or stranger?  Slowly, slowly, I turned to meet my protector and guide. To say thank you, I’m so grateful, how can I serve?

And there was not one person in attendance behind me, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of souls standing there–smiling, compassionate countenances as far as the eye could see. As tightly packed as a crowd at a rock concert or a Superbowl, only lovingly silent,

The world is a mysterious place, and we are hardwired to learn its secrets. What is consciousness? Quantum entanglement? Dark Matter?  

We want to know how everything works but here’s the thing: until we do, we live in a world in which we’re not in charge. Where the inexplicable can happen. Where a girl can try to save a boy who’s just entered her future, where a stranger can weigh in on the meaning of life. Where you already possess all that you long for. Where in your scariest moments, you were never alone.

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.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

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