Speaking of Umbrellas, Yours & Mine
Week Two | For the Joy & the Sorrow | Do you ever think of yourself ...
I hope you’re all enjoying these delight essays as much as I am—both week one, your “:What you don’t know …” essayettes and last week, the “Something I’ve noticed …” vignettes have just blown me away.
They’re wonderful, and not just because they are coming through the lens of delight. They’re wonderful because the writing is so good, so complex, so layered, multidimensional, surprising, and true. I like to think this is in part thanks to the kind of community we’ve built here at WITD, a community that
described yesterday on Notes:Writing communities? [Writing in the Dark] is hands-down, the absolute best, most challenging, yet gentlest and safest. I do not exaggerate when I say [Jeannine]’s transformed my writing, and she’s a killer writer to boot.
Thank you so much, Tiffany. That means a lot to me, especially the part about challenging and gentle + safe. That’s a combination I believe in for creative vibrancy! And vibrancy is certainly what I find in these essayettes. You’ll see what I mean in this handful of first lines from the first two weeks’ essayettes. I selected these randomly from the most recent ones (I could easily just choose them all, they are so magnetic!)—and remember, these are just first lines! The full essayettes are bursting with surprises, humor, human frailty and decency, grit and light and honest-to-god revelation:
Week One: What You Don’t Know …
What you don’t know is Charlie was the reason I believed in Santa Claus as long as I did.
What you don’t know until you learn to feed a sourdough starter is how easy it is to fall in love with something that is barely alive, something you can’t quite see, but still need to feed, something that requires attention, not an inordinate amount, but attention all the same.
What you don’t know until you’ve taken a walk down the river Sava in Zagreb is how easy it is to get caught in an illusion and think that you, too, can become a florist.
What you don’t know until your mother has come halfway around the world to see you get your Ph.D. is that right before the ceremony she will take off her stunner of a diamond ring and press it into your hand, a ring she loves and never dreamed she’d own when she was your age, and that even though you think it’s too showy, and even though you are newly divorced and the man you love is married but you can’t give him up, you will keep wearing it, because it makes you feel that you have a future as a fiancée, and you will keep wearing it even after you have given up the married man and dared to be in love with a single man who wants to stay that way, and yet you will keep wearing it, because – and you know this is stupid – if you look enough like his fiancée he might change his mind.
Week Two: Something I’ve Noticed …
Something I’ve noticed is the human ecosystem of communal dumpster areas.
Something I’ve noticed in my five years on Michigan Avenue is the moat-like nature of the street as it pertains to meeting your neighbors.
Something I notice attending the play, Age is a Feeling, is how everyone watches with a certain decorum, quiet, hands cupping chins, heads turned slightly to catch the actor’s voice in the good ear.
Something I've noticed is that beneath the jarring shove and tug of parenting an adolescent, there's a sweet rawness, close to the bone.
Lately, I’ve noticed freckles appearing across my child’s flatly contoured fourth-grade cheeks, but it is the wrong season.
And the smaller morsels of goodness in the daily delight chat threads keep me smiling too—and if you’re not on the chat and want to be, you can join here, and if you’re not a paid WITD member yet but want to be, you can always do that here. This intensive is totally asynchronous; we simply study a selected Ross Gay mini essay each week and write in response to it, so anyone can start at any time—just join us when you’re ready!
Meanwhile, I have a little story for you—one I hope is in conversation with the Ross Gay essay we’ll look at this week, one that examines a brief human encounter—an encounter of and with imperfection—as a portal to self-examination, self-forgiveness, and, ultimately, self-love.
When I was twenty years old, one year before I got married and two years before I had my first baby—yet still barely teetering on the cusp of full-fledged adulthood—I applied for a recruiter position. I did not know anything about recruiting, except that the wife of one of my then fiance’s friends made a lot of money at it. Head hunting, she called it. Since I had just dropped out of college in order to work full time in order to make more money in order to help my fiance be less depressed (read: angry) about not having enough money, it seemed to me that a job that paid a lot made sense.
To prepare for the interview, I put on a navy blue dress made of a thin acrylic. The dress had two rows of blue plastic buttons up and down the front, like a suit coat. It also had lapels, because it was supposed to look business-y (thus the navy blue). It had three-quarter sleeves and was meant to be fitted, but wasn’t. That’s because to me, fitted would have felt tight, and I never wore anything tight. Most of my clothes, including underwear and bras, were at least a size or two too big for me. I didn’t know this at the time, though. I thought my clothes fit me the way clothes were supposed to fit. This was because I had pretty severe body dysmorphia from growing up with long-term childhood sexual abuse by my stepfather. I couldn’t see or feel my body in any normal way at all. So, all to say, the dress probably hung on me even though it was “fitted.”
I also had these little pleather flats I wore for work-ish things, the kind that dug into my heels if I walked too far, especially without nylons. But I’m sure I wore nylons that day, because I would never have gone to an important interview for a headhunting job downtown with bare legs. Besides, it was raining. I still remember how, as I was leaving our tiny apartment in Stevens Square, the one with the warm maple floors and clanky radiators, my fiance said, “You should bring an umbrella.” The one he handed me wasn’t one of those travel ones—it was red and white had a full-length crook-necked wooden handle. I never carried an umbrella and in fact did not own one. I was a person who only discovered what kind of day it was—hot, cold, rainy, windy, slick, or otherwise—once I was already halfway to the bus stop. But I took the umbrella. And by the time the bus dropped me off downtown, it was pouring hard, and the wind was whipping. The whole sidewalk was a sea of black coats under small black umbrellas. So I was happy to have an umbrella, too, even though managing it was a bit of a struggle due what I had come to recognize as its unusually large size.
When I found the building where my interview was to take place, I fought my big colorful umbrella through the door before struggling for a few minutes to collapse it from its expanded position. Once I got it closed, I brushed the remaining raindrops off my dress and found my way to the small and not very impressive office. A heavily made-up woman with very tall hair—she was wearing actual business attire—sat behind a metal desk near the back wall. She motioned me to the green upholstered chair on the other side of her desk. I set my giant umbrella near my feet, next to the black leather briefcase I had purchased for myself in preparation for finding a real job that paid real money.
As for the interview itself, I do not remember a single thing that this woman asked me, nor a single answer I gave. I do remember, however, the exact way I felt sitting in that chair—the unmistakable wrongness of my dress, my cheap flat shoes, my hair, stringy from the rain, my lipstick, too youthful and bright. Every part of me was wrong and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I would not become a headhunter that day. Nonetheless, I forged my way through the twenty minutes or so that the woman gave me, probably disassociating through most of it. My body was in the green chair, but the rest of me? Who knows.
That expert disassociation could be the reason I didn’t notice my foot was asleep. Or maybe it was just nerves, or the fact that I was so uncomfortable overall that a numb foot wasn’t enough to get my attention. Whatever the reason, it came as a complete and utter surprise to me when, at the interview’s conclusion, I rose from the green chair only to have my leg go out from under me. To my credit, I caught myself before I fell all the way to the floor, which made it look, I thought then and still now, as if I’d decided to honor our brief and awkward time together with a sudden, dramatic curtsy.
After my curtsy—to give my foot a little more time to wake up—I carefully slung the strap of the black brief case over my shoulder and arranged it just so, then gathered my circus-tent of an umbrella. “You know,” the woman with the tall hair said as I limped cautiously toward the door, “that’s a golf umbrella. Good luck out there.” I knew then, even as I gave a last defiant glance over my shoulder, that my headhunting job search was over for good, and I was glad.
Do you ever think of yourself, curtsying on your numb foot with your giant umbrella in your cheap dress at the end of an interview for a job you can’t imagine being able to do, do you ever think of that person and just adore her for that charming little curtsy and the way it suggests all she cannot yet know about herself or the life she will grow into, a life big enough to hold any umbrella she wants?
Okay, thanks for indulging my umbrella story. Now, here we go with this week’s Ross Gay essay—”Umbrella in the Cafe.” Let’s scrounge up a little delight to write toward, into, and through. And before we write, we read.
Close Read
If you are new to WITD and not familiar with close reading., that is totally okay. You can read about it here if you want, but you don’t have to. You can also just