Notes from the week

 

Our friends Lisa and Ozier brought us those lovely tulips last Sunday when they came over to watch the Super Bowl with us. We all enjoyed Rihanna's half time show in the sky, her swollen belly front and center, setting off a flurry of coast to coast texting: Is she pregnant again? She definitely looks pregnant. And so she is. More power to her and hers. All day Monday I kept photographing my tulips as the light played across them through my kitchen window. The colors were so delicate as the buds opened and bowed their lovely heads. They gave me hours and hours of joy.

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All my wordsmithing mojo is going into work right now, but I don't want to neglect writing here. It allows me to keep in touch with you dear friends, while also affording me writing practice. Nothing will go very wrong if I express myself inartfully here, though it will help to keep the connection between mind and fingers-on-keyboard, staving off the dreaded writer's block. If I'm being honest, I don't really believe in writer's block, at least not for myself. Writer's block is really fear of being judged and found wanting, but my parents buried even more deeply than that fear (which I do possess in abundance) the idea that one must honor one's commitments, and so if I have a deadline, it would actually be worse to blow past it than it would be to turn in a piece of writing that still needs work. Writing, after all, is always in process. I once read that a book is never truly finished, only inked. And indeed, in every book I have had a part in, even after it is inked, I still see edits I wish I could make, ways to make the narrative flow more effortlessly, carrying the reader along. That is the goal anyway. Writing is a kind of progressive sight, as new things rise into awareness that you hadn't thought of before. That's why those books that take ten years to finish end up being so brilliant—case in point: Isabelle Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns. And look, I have banged on about writing again, when that is really not what I intended to do when I opened this page. 

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I've been thinking a lot about Senator John Fetterman, the new Democrat from Pennsylvania, who checked himself into Walter Reed Hospital this week to be treated for worsening depression. I admire so much that he did that, despite being a public figure, knowing all the vitriol it would draw from right wing doomscrollers, who have said and posted the ugliest things about him since he suffered a stroke at the height of his Senate campaign. He won the seat anyway, because voters saw his humanity. I want to wrap this big, huge man with his valiant heart on his sleeve in emotional safety. I wish I could protect him from the world. A story by Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic reflected on what the senator has been dealing with since being sworn into Congress in January. The piece might be behind a paywall so I'll quote part of it here.

It is said that he was unhappy that he missed out on (and still hasn’t gotten) the time he needed to properly recover from his stroke. And now here he is, in one of the most public-facing jobs imaginable—possibly even more so than the presidency, where you have the luxury of retreating into the antiqued seclusion of the White House, away from reporters and constituents.

On top of this, Fetterman was spending his weekdays alone, apart from his wife and three children, who are still in Braddock, Pennsylvania. For most of the week, he doesn’t have his loved ones by his side, the people with whom he could safely pull off the mask. Instead, he had to perform all day long, then return to an empty home.

Illness, too, can be cruelly isolating. Fetterman was trying to adapt to a demanding, high-intensity job with closed-captioning at his desk and audio-to-text transcriptions of committee hearings; he carries a tablet that converts what his colleagues say into text. This technological wizardry might make his work easier to do, but it also sets him apart, accentuating how different his lot is from everyone else’s. I’m guessing it isn’t easy to experience this difference during every interaction he has—not when his condition is so new, not when he hasn’t had ample time to adjust.

Fetterman has basically been forced to contend with the effects of a severe brain trauma while working an absurdly demanding job in one of the most polarized and toxic political climates the country has ever known.

It breaks my heart, thinking of what these past months have been like for him. I pray he takes the time he needs to heal and gets everything that he requires medically and emotionally, including renewed immersion in the life of his beautiful wife and three children, who seem to anchor him.

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Bathroom update—it's finally done! It was a lot, especially since the first tile I chose for the floor looked wrong. What I thought would be gentle watercolor swirls of gray in the 6-inch white hex tiles, ended up being hard black slashes in every direction on random tiles, and most of those tiles happened to end up in the middle of the bathroom. In a larger area, it would probably have been okay, but in that postage stamp-sized space, it was jarring. It had been laid when I was away in D.C. for work, and when I got back and saw it, I realized I couldn't bear to live with it, that after already spending so much money to renovate that tiny bathroom, we needed to just go ahead and spend more to have the tiles drilled up and new ones laid. Here's a picture showing the tiles I hated, and the ones I chose to replace them.

My change order put everything back two weeks, but the contractor remained gracious, even as I worked myself up into a frenzy to express how much I needed to have the floor changed, as if I was afraid he might refuse me if I wasn’t emphatic enough. He reminded me that the goal was for me to be happy, and so if I needed the tiles changed, then of course he would make that happen. I felt so guilty about making him do the work twice, my husband merely rolled his eyes, but now I am indeed happy with the new floors, simple white 2-inch hex tiles with platinum gray grout. 

I'm happy with the rest of the bathroom, too, though it is true what my friend Lisa said, it is still only a bathroom, nice and clean and new, nothing rusty and broken in there anymore, yet it changes nothing essential about my life. But it has been accomplished, this thing I have dreamed for some years now, and I am relieved to no longer be looking at woefully discolored grout and grungy looking, worn through enamel in and around the bathtub. I am planning at some point to also redo the other bathroom, though I think I need a good long break from construction happening in the background of my life. The tiny hallway bathroom ended up taking two weeks longer to complete than the kitchen. I suppose that's just how these things go.

Here are a couple of pictures, but they don't really reflect what I see in real life, as the bathroom is so small it's hard to get a good perspective. But it's done at last, and I'm grateful.