Leslie Gray Streeter

One of my favorite parts of the holidays, for years, was David Letterman’s Christmas shows. First, he’d have the divine Darlene Love come and sing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” with a gazillion backup singers and looking younger every year. And then the late great comedian/actor Jay Thomas would come on and tell the same story about the Lone Ranger saving the day during a weed-fueled road rage incident and then knock a meatball off the top of a Christmas tree with a football. As one does.

These shows were always a tradition with my sister Lynne and I, watching it together or over the phone whenever we could. Now that it’s over, I’ve decided to institute my own holiday tradition of storytelling, spectacle and weirdness, also involving my sister. It’s the story of how master magician David Copperfield ruined my sister’s exquisite holiday hair. It’s not Darlene Love or the Lone Ranger or even a meatball. But it’s hilarious.

It was Thanksgiving 2003, and I had been living in West Palm Beach for about a year writing for the Palm Beach Post. I was 32, very single, and getting paid to write about going to movies, live performances and bars, while living on the water. This meant that many, many people I liked and a few jokers with a lot of nerve asked to come visit my tropical shoebox of a luxury apartment that I was renting for way cheap, because I’d been grandfathered into an introductory rate before they went condo. I knew that the management was waiting out my lease so they could sell said shoebox for a ridiculous price and kick my cute party-hopping self out on my keister. That would eventually happen several months later, but for the moment, it was gonna be Single Girl Disco Thanksgiving with Lynne and my college roommate and dear dear friend Sonali.

We didn’t have any particularly wild plans other than going dancing, maybe, and walking on the Palm Beach (we came across some PETA protestors screaming at the Neiman Marcus store “Neiman Carcass, No More Fur!” until they realized the store was closed that day) Our biggest event, the day before Thanksgiving, was to go see David Copperfield, who was performing at the Kravis Center downtown. I was reviewing it, and had a plus one, but since there were three of us, I think we all split the third ticket. I don’t recall anybody being a particularly avid magic or Copperfield fan, but it was an excuse to be cute for almost free, and we all liked a flourish.

To prepare, Lynne decided that she was going to get her hair blown out. Both she and I had been wearing our hair natural for about three years, meaning that we no longer chemically straightened it because we were sick of causing damage to adhere to ridiculous and racist beauty standards. Nobody needs that. Also, we were delighted to find that we loved our hair the way it grew out of our heads, because it’s so versatile, meaning it wasn’t hard to make an occasional temporary change. Again, flourish!

Lynne spent hours and lots of money having her hair blown out, an arduous process involving a blow dryer, a stylist with a strong wrist and having to hold your neck straight and tell yourself it was all gonna be worth it when you were cute later. I remember it being at a JC Penney, but she swears it was somewhere else. Memory is weird and it’s almost 20 years ago, and also it’s her money so I’m gonna go with what she said. Anyway, after all that, wherever we were, she looked really cute.

Blowouts, in case you’re unaware, have rules, similar to raising Mogwai so that they don’t become evil gremlins that kill poor Flo from “Alice.” It’s pretty simple – Don’t get them wet. Wet hair reverts back to its natural state faster, meaning your blowout becomes a fro-out. And we like our fros. (I still have one – Lynne wears her hair in locs now) But she paid not to have one for a few days. And it would have worked, too! If it wasn’t for that meddling magician! (Insert evil Scooby Doo villain here.) But she was trying to live that blowout life for at least a few days.

I don’t recall a lot of the illusions and whatnot before the big finale. I know we had pretty good seats, sort of in the middle of the theater, and I know that we were in the middle of the row, meaning it would be hard to run out of the door to protect your fresh ‘do in case, say, water fell out the sky on it. But that would never happen, right? We were sitting in a fancy concert hall on Thanksgiving Eve with a lot of rich old people, inside, enjoying a pleasant evening of magic with a famous dude making mysterious hand and eyebrow gestures.

But I do remember that finale. There was, David Copperfield said, a man in the audience…let’s call him Floyd. Come on up, Floyd! I don’t believe his name was really Floyd, but it’s a fun name to type. Floyd. Floyd. Floyyyyd.. I think there was a dude named Floyd in Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem in the “Muppet Movie.” Different dude. I’d have remembered him. Anyway, Concert Floyd was apparently a nice guy who had been estranged from his father for years. I don’t recall why. I don’t think David Copperfield said. It didn’t seem to be important.

The point was that Concert Floyd and his dad hadn’t spoken in years, but somehow, they knew that his dad was on a certain beach in Phuket, Thailand. And obviously it would be nice for them to be together for Thanksgiving, but that’s not possible because there’s Dad there on the screen in Thailand and here’s Concert Floyd here with us in West Palm Beach! How would that even work? Does anyone know a magician with a big finale coming, like, right now, who might be able to help?

Whatever the story, we were all invested now, and the people who paid for their seats were close to getting their money’s worth. We all leaned forward in our fancy velvet chairs as David Copperfield promised to send Concert Floyd to Thailand. The music started swelling, and Concert Floyd looked excited, and we were like “We don’t know how the hell he’s gonna pull this thing off, but this is gonna be good!!! Send that man to Thailand! Celebrate him home! Where’s Kenny Loggins? Let’s goooooo!”

And then came the whooosh .

Said whoosh was both audible and tactile, which is to say we heard it with the dramatic music, and also felt it with the dramatic actual cascade of water that somehow swept over our heads as Presto-Change-o, Concert Floyd was swept in a wave of magic and emotion out of the Kravis Center and onto that screen to greet his dad in Thailand. There was hugging on the beach, and cheers in the audience. And a wild panicked shriek from the seat next to me.

“NOOOOOOOOO!” Lynne screamed, as she simultaneously tried in vain to shield her fresh blowout from the water and wedge herself under her seat. “My HAIR! Dagone David Copperfield! That’s why Black people don’t come see you!” To be honest, I have never heard that Black people, by consensus, feel one way or the other about Dude – I’ve interviewed him and he’s very pleasant, and he puts on a nice show.

But imagine my poor sister, who had never gotten a blowout before and splurged on a fun thing. And she had stayed out of the pool, and out of the ocean. Who would imagine that some magician would bring the actual beach inside a fancy concert hall where you’d imagine, at the very least, that you were safe from spontaneous rain? Also she was in the middle of the row and there’s nowhere to go unless she wanted to run over some old rich people delightedly watching a family reunite magically onscreen. We can’t be going to jail for assault over a blowout.

All I remember is Sonali and I trying not to laugh at her distress, because it was funny and also we are horrid people, as Lynne clasped her hands over her hair until she could make a beeline to the bathroom and try to smooth it down. It didn’t look bad, but it was never as straight or sleek as it was before Concert Floyd and his dad reunited in the most exciting and most moisture-rich way imaginable.

To this day, if you mention David Copperfield in front of my sister, she will say “Did I ever tell you about the time he ruined my hair?” She may not have.

But I just did.

After almost two years of doing book readings from my home office couch with my ring light plugged into my MacBook, hoping my kid doesn’t saunter in looking for someone to make him a PopTart, I am doing my second live reading of the year, at Tatnuck Bookseller in Westborough, Massachusetts on Saturday, Nov. 20 between 1-4. I’ll be joined by other authors of Lockdown Literature, whose books came out in 2020 during the beginning of the pandemic. We banded together, supported each other and promoted ourselves and the group in the most creative ways. It was really special.

Come say hi if you can!

By the way, did you know I started a Substack email newsletter, which is a lot like my old email newsletter, but on an easier platform?

My finger looks weird.

“Weird” may be too mild a description for what’s going on with the ring finger of my right hand. It looks like someone tinted oatmeal brown, put it in a hand mold, dumped it out and then stomped on that finger. It looks oddly liquid, misshapen. Wrong.

But that’s a good thing. A bittersweet thing that’s resulted from being widowed, the worst thing that ever happened to me. But you might as well make good things out of the bad, right?

So what I’m saying is that I took my wedding rings from my marriage to my husband Scott off this week. For the last time. And while it feels important and big, it wasn’t a tortured decision, or one made with any pageantry or ceremony (and y’all know I love pageantry.) I just looked at my hand a few days ago and realized it was the right time. So I did it.

It feels like the end of a chapter, because it is. And endings are sad. But beginnings are hopeful.

It’s not the first time that the rings have moved, and there are some funny stories attached to them. When Scott and I got married in 2010, he gave me an inexpensive band that was a placeholder for what he said would be something wonderful. And not long after our first anniversary, he walked me down the steps at the Gardens Mall in Palm Beach County, pretended to head towards the Champs Sports store (his second home) and then doubled back to Zales, where he’d picked out a vintage white gold band with diamonds. Classy, that guy.

The ruby ring that now sits with that band in a box on my dresser isn’t the one he gave me, at least not directly. The pink topaz stone he’d proposed with at the Zales in the Galleria Mall in Fort Lauderdale (shout out to South Florida Zales, y’all!) popped out while I was running, not long after our fifth anniversary. I told him to replace it at Christmas. But he was dead before Labor Day. So when Christmas came around, I used some of the life insurance money he’d left to buy a new ring myself. I put it right on top of my wedding band, right where he would have put it. It seemed right.

About a year later, I moved both rings to my right hand. I was no longer married in a legal sense, and I was beginning to date a little, in the most halting and stupid way. But I wasn’t yet ready to let the rings go. I was still grieving. And they were really pretty rings. And I was used to having rings, to look at and to fidget with. So they stayed.

About a million things happened since then – my son’s adoption was finalized. A dumb relationship that was my first confirmation, nevertheless, that I wasn’t dead in my heart and lady parts. A book. A pandemic. A move, a career change, the purchase of my dream home and then another career change to go into business as an independent writer and 50-year-old rock mom about town. And through it all, I healed. I began to feel less married to Scott, right now. I will always have been his wife, he will always be my love and I will always be his widow.

But I am not married to him, right now. I wish that wasn’t true. But I am living right now. I am attempting to date. I will not find a replacement for Scott, because he is irreplaceable. Still, I’d like to have a partner or at least a non-idiot man in my life. And I just decided that I have to do that without holding anything back. Including my finger. It’s just an external symbol, but it is a symbol, not just to myself but to others.

“How does a man know you’re not married?” my friend Adam asked me a few weeks ago as we were having dinner in Oregon where I was visiting him and his wife Libby. I was complaining that I didn’t get asked out, and Adam was like “Men don’t know what hand a ring goes on. They see a wedding band on your finger, they think you’re married.”

Adam has always had an infuriating way of being right, and he was, in this case. I sorta went “Huh” and finished my cocktail. It wasn’t a conversation that loomed large over me, or that I kept wrestling with. But it did pop up this week as I was texting with a guy from an app who hopefully will not be a disaster. I glanced down at my ring and thought “I should probably take that off.”

It wasn’t about this man. I don’t even know him. It was just like “I am a single woman dating single men and I’m wearing a wedding ring. Huh.”

I am not telling anyone they ever have to take off their ring. You don’t have to do a damn thing you don’t want to do. Your grief and recovery are on you and for you and at your pace. It was weird holding the rings in my hand and not on my finger, and for a few seconds I was like “I will never wear these rings this way again” and that hurt a little.

But then I kissed them and put them in a box, and took this photo of my finger. That indentation will heal. My heart is healing. That loss will never be OK. But I can’t do anything about that, so I can just move forward.

There is no telling if I will ever wear another wedding band. And that’s fine. I got to wear this one. And I am grateful for it. And I am grateful to be here to tell its story.

There is nothing wrong with admitting that you need help as an adult. It’s even OK to ask from help from your mom – I asked mine to help me co-parent my kid, so obviously I’m cool with that.

But sleeping in my new contact lenses until she could get home and help me take them out? Not my proudest moment. At all. The moral is that sometimes you need help and it’s OK to admit it even when it’s super embarrassing. And boy, was it.

I’ve worn contact lenses since I was almost 16 years old – I’d graduated from bifocals I’d started wearing at 5, along with my twin sister, gaining us the unfortunate nickname Eight Eyes, because, you know, four eyes times two. Children are evil.

My parents, realizing that we needed a self-esteem boost and that we had actual nice eyes no one had ever seen behind all that giant 80s framed Coke bottle situation, got us contacts as an early 16th birthday present. We started with rigid gas permeables, basically hard lenses. They were not the most comfortable thing in the world, because they are literally a rigid piece of plastic in your eye. My first couple of years as a glasses-free being were a combination of high self-esteem – I was that real-life cute girl hidden behind those massive lenses! – and terrible discomfort and trips to Baltimore-area ERs and optical centers to extract an errant contact stuck in my eye.

OWW.

But I kept wearing those suckers anyway, for 34 years, with some pauses to wear glasses now that I had money to pay for frames I actually liked. I’d asked about soft lenses – even wore an emergency pair that wasn’t anywhere near my actual heavy prescription for like a week in the 90s while my real replacement lenses were rushed to me – but was told that my astigmatism was too advanced for them. Or my eye shape wasn’t going to work, or something. Always a no.

That is, until this year. Right before we left Florida in the summer of 2020, I’d lost one of my brand new RGP lenses right before my book launch at the Colony Hotel on Palm Beach and ordered a replacement, only to realize that it was the same lens I already had, and wearing the wrong lens hurt my head. So I mostly wore my glasses for a year to the point that there is an indentation in my face (!) that I have to cover with Rihanna’s finest makeup products. Because we are still in that pan pizza, it took me a while to get myself to an optician.

But when I did, she told me that she had no idea why no one had put me in soft lenses. Actually, she thinks she might – one was that the RPGs sometimes had more sharper vision clarity, although not so much that the soft ones wouldn’t be helpful. The more insidious reason, which I asked about and which she wryly said was probably not wrong, is that I and my insurance had been paying for the more expensive RGP lenses for more than 30 years to various doctors up and down the East Coast, and that they saw no need to save me money. I hope that’s not true. But…you don’t know.

Anyway, she ordered me a pair of trial lenses, which I happily got and, after a few tries in bathroom at her office, got into my eyes (they’re slippery little suckers) and then drove to Annapolis to visit my sister and her family. I learned two things very quickly – these were not quite my prescription. And I didn’t know how to take them out. With the harder lenses, you either yank your eye sideways and let the pressure pop them out, or use this little suction cup thing I was always losing. But these were harder to dislodge. There was pinching and pulling and glancing and not blinking. I felt like I was trapped in the damn Safety Dance.

It was a whole ordeal. My mother and my sister, now a soft lens vet, took turns literally trying to yank that thing out of my eye. It got to the point where my son was standing guard outside of the bathroom for moral support, yelling “You can do it Mom!” (Oh that kid.) My sister finally got it out, and flung it triumphantly into the trash, thinking it was a daily (it was a monthly. We had to fish it out. Insult to injury.)

And then I woke up and realized I would have to do it again. And, friends, it did not go well. Once I finally got the right prescription, there would be days I wouldn’t wear them because I was afraid of not being able to get them out. I had to go to the doctor once for a tutorial. And there was, yes, that terrible moment when I slept in them till my mother got home from a weekend trip so she could help. TERRIBLE.

I almost gave up and called to go back to the gas permeables. They aren’t comfortable and they’re too expensive, but they’re the expensive discomfort I know. It was my mother, who has become the hero of this tale, who talked me out of it. “You can do this,” she says. “It’s just a hard thing you haven’t done before. But you don’t give up. You can do this too.”

And she’s right, of course. I am a stubborn sort who hates being told “No”, who doesn’t quit things because they’re hard, but because I’ve decided they’re a dead end holding me back from something better, be it men or jobs. So I kept at it. Sometimes it took me an hour of literally taking a break and walking around the house with a glass of wine until I was ready to start over. And then one day, I just sat down and plucked those suckers out, first try. Just like that. I of course yelled downstairs to my mother and she treated my proudly and not like a sad old person who had failed Remedial Contact Removal until now.

What is the point of this, other than to tell you again how cool my mom is? It’s to remind you that we should never decide we’re too old to try things we might be bad at. I tried a new job last year and it wasn’t for me. It wasn’t my passion and I wasn’t good at it. So I left it and made a full-time job of the thing I excelled at, which is writing and speaking and advocating for the grieving. Being bad at a thing opened a door. Being bad at contacts didn’t cause me to quit them, because I realized there was something in it that was good for me.

Never quit if you think there’s still a good reason not to. And always be nice to your mom. You might need her to get a contact out of your eye.

My first assignment in the annual NaNoWriMo project, which encourages writers to finish a novel or at least get pretty close during the month of November, is to stop calling it “Yah Mo Be There,” which is a James Ingram/Michael McDonald song and is absolutely not related. However, both are fun to say, so much fun, in fact, that I spend my time snickering about it like a toddler and not writing.

Which is why I need this thing.

I’m not going to be super forthcoming about my project at this time, as it’s a work in progress that’s in a specific stage, and because the Internet is full of people who like stealing other people’s ideas and I just don’t have time to be coming to find word thieves when I’m trying to write. I will say that I am a person who works well with accountability, whether it’s run training, Noom, or writing. (I once wound up in the dedication of my friend Kim Walsh Phillips‘s bestselling business book because she used it to GET ME TO STOP FACEBOOKING ABOUT ‘GREY’S ANATOMY’ AND FINISH MY BOOK.)

So I’m not going to be overly sharing details on this project but I will check in, because if at least one person knows to check for me, they will encourage me and, if all else fails, shame me into doing this right. Because it’s a really good book brewing, you guys. I just have to keep it moving.

So if you’re a writer, or just a person who consumes words on the Internet, you have likely heard of the “Who Is The Bad Art Friend?” a New York Times Magazine story. It appeared to be about an obsessive narcissistic writer who may have donated a kidney for attention and fixated on a more successful writer and the story she may or may not have written about said kidney donation, to the point where she stalked her and tried to ruin her career over plagiarism that she might have exaggerated. And maybe there was some White saviorism and racisms happening, as well musings about how unfair it is for writers to have to limit their imaginations when it comes to real life ? Also again stalking and antagonistic lawsuits.

And if you kept reading the words about this situation, you may have found that the story behind the story is actually about plagiarism that the successful writer actually admits to the point where she had to go back and change details, a confirmation of who the actual originally litigious party was (note: The more successful writer) and a shocking amount of gaslighting, escalating bullying back and forth in private emails and text threads from the organization both writers worked with, including an administrator vowing to destroy the less-successful writer and kidney donor, and the discovery that she’d been referred to with an abbreviation that includes an expletive. Lovely. Also there’s healthy use of charges of racism that seem, as we look into it further, to be a reflective defense meant to shut down all discourse. As a Black woman, that obviously plays into people who like to use words like “race card” to dismiss all inferences of racism, real or not.

Writers, of which I am one, come off looking petty, gate-keepy and shockingly dumb about something very basic, that maybe their elitism clouded for them. What is shocking to me is not that adults, even successful ones, can’t stop being jackasses to people they consider less important than them, but that they were apparently so sure of their superiority that they kept receipts. Like, extensive ones. And they kept going, which is where the information that seems to exonerate the kidney donator comes from because they couldn’t help themselves.

Have I taken part in some text threads that I would never, ever want people to see, that I am not proud of? I do. Do any of them involve bullying people, or things that admit actionable activity that could be subpoenaed? I DO NOT. Because I’m not a bully and because I don’t write that stuff down. Because I am a writer, and also a Black woman, and I understand the concept of receipts, both the “Per my last email where you agreed to pay me” kind and the “GIRL, DON’T TRY IT BECAUSE YOU SAID WHAT YOU SAID AND HERE’S THE TEXT” kind. I try to be the person with the receipts, and not the one being handed them. There’s a good T-shirt slogan.

The “Bad Art Friend” story has probably taken more of your time that is necessary, but I can’t stop thinking about it as a writer who is not famous but does have a reputation that I hope to never use to gatekeep, intentionally or otherwise. Also, as a writer, I know that so many of us became writers because we’re sometimes insecure used words to write about that insecurity, and it’s interesting that we use that to exclude other people.

Don’t do that. But if you do, don’t keep receipts that prove it.

Little darlings, it’s been a long, weird lonely pandemic. And we’re still in it. But my dance card is filling up with appearances, both in person and otherwise. Some are things you can come to (maybe masked, with a vaccine card) and others you can visit via our old pal Zoom. Either way, it’s nice to see you.

October 31, 2021: Good Grief Festival, virtual

November 11, 2021: Zibby Owens’ Moms Don’t Have Time To Travel retreat (now virtual private event)

November 20, 2021, 1-4 PM EST: Lockdown Literature Author Reading, Tatnuck Bookseller, Westborough, MA

I will be doing a really cool event tonight online for the Enoch Pratt Free Library with my bestie Melanie Hood Wilson at 7 PM, and then signing books this Saturday at the Ivy Bookshop at 1 PM. Live events. Can you imagine?

https://www.theivybookshop.com/upcomingevent/25087

Warning: Spoiler alert for a recent movie and some frankly depressing speculation about death. Sorry.

Widowed parents have to deal with a lot of “What if” moments that don’t solve a daggone thing. But they cycle through our brains anyway because our lives didn’t work out the way we’d planned, so it makes sense to ruminate on this stuff. Like…What if our partner was still alive? What if our kids could have had the opportunity to have two parents? What if our partner had died when our kids were a different age – I mean, if they had to go and die on us anyway – so that there’d be more memories?

Having just watched Kevin Hart’s delightful, if comfortingly predictable widowed father movie “Fatherhood,” I’m reminded of my biggest “What if” – What if I had died and my husband had lived?

Yeah. I told you it was depressing. You were warned.

In the movie, which is based on a true story, Hart’s character is widowed shortly after the birth of his daughter, and decides that rather than move them both to Minneapolis, where he and his wife were raised, or just letting his in-laws take the baby, that he’s going to do it himself.

This sets up the usual flailing single father montage – he can’t get the baby, whose name is Maddy, to sleep. Her poop confounds him. Strangers not expecting a single dad ask where Mom is (RUDE). The all-mom parenting group he seeks help from initially assumes him to be looking for the nearby AA meeting because they’ve never heard of a single dad, which makes me want to punch them. Snooty moms.

As I watched Hart’s character, Matt, gamely navigate the wonders of doing a little Black girl’s hair, or try to look good with a baby sling, I think about my husband Scott, and what it would have been like if he’d been left to raise our son, Brooks, who was not quite two, when the stupid widow event occurred. What would he have made of having to deal with a baby Afro? I was the primary diaper changer – would he have mastered it? Would he have taken the baby to the Ravens bar by himself to watch the game each week without me there to take him home at half-time?

Here’s the thing: Scott was an amazing dad. Awesome at it. Lived for it. Still pisses me off that it was stolen from him. So when I think about how he would have fared without me, I chuckle and know he’d have knocked it out of the park. It would have been a smelly mess up in that house for a minute, but he’d have been an ace.

Dude was the most loyal person I’ve ever met, and he loved me like a champ, so I know that he would have done everything in his power to honor me by stepping the hell up. He’d have sought help – I’m sure my mother would have moved in, just like she did when Scott died. He would have bought every single baby book and contraption. The child and he would have matching Ravens jerseys for every single day, and Brooks’ current knowledge of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and the Hallmark Channel would have been replaced with wrestling and NFL scouting guides.

I also know that, like with Matt in “Fatherhood,” Scott would have found a cute new girlfriend, because widowers seem to be more attractive in the dating world than widows. And that would have made me happy, because Scott was all love, and that love deserved to be given and received. 

So why are we even talking about this? The movie reminded me, as most things do as a widow, that nothing in this world is guaranteed to work out the way you planned. But humans have a wonderful way of stepping up to challenges, a beautiful resilience that crops up from corners of our soul we barely knew existed. Our villages stay close. Our ability to pivot gets a workout. Our priorities change. We learn to go with the flow, even in a direction we don’t anticipate. We just do.

“Fatherhood” is a tribute to how we do what we have to do, whether or not anyone else approves, or whether we do it the way anyone else we love would have. We will get things wrong. We will say or do the wrong thing. We will try really hard and sometimes it’ll all blow up anyway.

Here’s the thing: I get a lot of credit for surviving something terrible that I don’ think I had a choice about. I did what I had to. I pulled it together. Scott would have, too.

“So! Any big plans this summer?”

In a normal year, this is a pretty straight-forward question. Are you taking a vacation, or selling a limb to pay for summer camp for your kids, or just hanging out in the backyard of the home you’re already paying for and inviting friends over for semi-expertly grilled foodstuffs? But since March 2020, nothing at all has seemed normal, and after a summer of mostly hiding in the house and trying not to contract a deadly virus, the very idea of plans that involve breathing around people you don’t live with seems…weird.

And yet – Quarantine Summer 2020 has, for many people, begotten Wilding Out Summer 2021, as isolated and now hopefully vaccinated souls try to make up for lost time by doing all the things. Taking all the trips. Going to all the crowded clubs. Eating at all of the buffets. DOING ALL OF THE THINGS. (Admission: I spent last summer hanging out safely and hermit-like on my porch in West Palm Beach, then moving my entire life to Baltimore, where I spent the rest of the summer hanging out safely and hermit-like in my friends’ guest house until we bought our own house and I hermitted there until my kid started school. So I was like a travel hermit.)

Suddenly, plans are a thing that you’re expected to have again, and not something you didn’t have to have…nay, were obligated not to have, because safety and stuff. I am a person who loves having plans – I may be naturally obnoxiously social. But the very real state of the world, virus and violence-wise, as well as turning 50 and being delighted about not having to do anything if I didn’t want to, made me reconsider. There’s a pressure that comes from suddenly being invited to do things – inside, even – and not being able to use “Y’all know I don’t breathe on people” as an excuse.

I mean, you still can use whatever reason you want to not go anywhere you don’t want to go, because nobody gets to tell you what to do. You’re a grown adult and “No” is still a complete sentence. But it’s not even about not wanting to go to specific things, but getting used to the fact that you’re allowed to go anywhere. I had kind of gotten used to assuming that all the parties and Happy Hours I was invited to would be on Zoom, so the first time I got an invitation that didn’t include a link, I was confused. You mean I’m supposed to leave my house for this?

So when I was asked about plans, I really had to think about it. We do have a few plans – I managed to pile together enough pennies to pay for a week of baseball camp and then theater camp for The Kid, and we are taking a week’s staycation during the week of theater camp in a nearby city we stay in all the time, but this time in a hotel I actually paid for in advance and didn’t try to Hotwire the day before. I mean, I actually PLANNED it.

But I’m not afraid to say that a large part of the summer is going to involve sitting on my front stoop writing pop culture stories for various publications while my kid plays with neighborhood friends down the street. I’m going to train for a half-marathon while my knee yells at me and I try not to notice the “You go girl” responses from well-meaning fellow runners surprised by a larger woman running. I am going to create new potato salads. I am going to watch Patrick Swayze movies. I am going to change up my wine of the month selection.

And then I’m going to plan not to plan, unless I decide I want to.