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One of my favorite books used to be Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.  It was the go-to gift for graduations, birthdays, all sorts of occasions.  No more.  I do have to keep in mind that it was written in 1964, long before the issues cropping up in it became problematic.  We simply didn’t see them as problems.

Many of you are probably familiar with the story of the little boy who approaches a tree and asks for her apples.  Later, he wants money, so she gives him her apples to sell.  He grows up and wants a house, so she gives him her branches, then later, her trunk so he can build a boat.  Nothing is left but a stump.  Soon, the boy is an old man and only wants a place to rest, so she gives him her stump to rest on.  The story ends by saying the tree is happy.  See the pattern here?  In 1964, neither the author nor the readers gave a second thought to the fact that the tree is portrayed as female, and the boy takes and takes and takes.  The tree gives and gives and gives, and gets nothing in return.  In 1964, her making the boy happy was accepted as enough.  Now, the idea of anyone giving everything to someone else has become objectionable, whether it’s a woman giving it all, or a man in the same situation.  I no longer give The Giving Tree to anyone.

It took a while, but I finally found a worthy substitute.   In Patrick McConnell’s book The Gift of Nothing, Mooch, the cat from his comic strip, is trying to come up with a birthday gift for his best friend, Mutts, the dog.  But Mutts already has everything he could possibly need.  After searching and searching, Mooch decides he doesn’t have to give Mutts some-thing.  He wraps an empty box and gives him no-thing.  It ends with the two of them sitting together, and sharing the no-thing that is their love and friendship.  Like Mutts and Mooch, we don’t need things to tell the people we love how valued they are.  We only need no-thing but the time to enjoy the stars, a meal, each other’s company.

Now’s the time to reach out to the people we love, the friends we value, the people we’ve reconnected with from our pasts.  It’s a good time to send them The Gift of Nothing.  And get a copy for yourself too.

There’s a difference between Giving and Gifting.

In these days of continued quarantine, serendipity seems to occur often.  I think of an older friend who lives alone.  Has she been walking or biking?  What’s she reading?  I go to the phone and, as my hand picks up my cell, it rings.  Guess who’s on the line?  The friend of my thoughts.  We joke about being able to communicate without the phone company. Merely thinking of the other is enough to bring on a phone call.  With so many people reaching out to one another, it’s almost inevitable that such serendipity happens more and more.  Delightful.  Serendipity.

Serendipity crops up all the time.  Probably the most dramatic surfaced when I ran into the pope.  Well, not literally, but close enough.  Heading into St. Peter’s basilica in Vatican City years ago, I was accosted by a Swiss Guard.  No entry with bare shoulders.  We left in a rather un-Christian huff, but returned the next day attired as the dress code defined.  Voila!  A packed church.  The pope’s last public audience before he left for his summer villa.  Not only that, but here he came, carried aloft on his big red chair, not ten feet from where I stood.  If I’d been dressed appropriately the day before—no Pope sighting.  Serendipity.

When the weather turns a certain way, it’s criminal not to take advantage of any sunny day without wind.  At first call, I pack up and move outside to read.  On one of those days, Mark Adams’ Turn Right at Machu Picchu—which is a really good read, by the way—had me squirming in sympathy as he tried to sleep through a barnyard symphony of moos, clucks and an especially loud rooster.   The book apparently came with sound effects.  Into my fantasy world, the neighbor’s resident rooster added a nice layer of realism.  Serendipity.

Serendipity.  A dear friend in Indiana pops into my mind, because…  Oops!  Gotta run.  The phone’s ringing.

Lately, it’s taking forever to dry my hair.  Must be because I can’t get in to get my hair cut, due to the lockdown from coronavirus.  Probably won’t get in for another…well, who knows?  Nothing is open that brings people together.  Okay, essential stuff is open, like doctor offices—but not dentists; grocery stores—but not restaurants; pharmacies—but not libraries.  That last one is a real killer.

But I diverge.  My hair.  I suppose I could go back to cutting it myself, considering that it’s short and ragged at the best of times.  It wasn’t always that way.  In college I had hair down to my shoulder blades.  I also had my very own personal hair trimmer: my roommate.  Fresh out of the shower, I could comb my hair flat onto my back and Pam could trim off a nice even line.  I did the same for her, but it was even easier, considering her hair, when plastered down wet, almost reached her waist.  Easy-peasy.

Before I flew off to spend a college summer in Europe, I chopped off my hair into a pageboy.  One nice length, no frills.  But then I got to Paris.  Paris!  Where I could get a Real French Friseur to cut—no, no—to Style my hair.  The French family I stayed with set me up, and I floated off to get a Real French Haircut.  Only one disturbing fact.  The stylist (note the lack of capital letter) spent several years working in New York City and spoke flawless English.  If I wanted an English-speaking stylist from New York City, even if he was French, I would go to New York City.  But to make a long story short, he did a more than satisfactory job.  I ended up with a very short pixie-cut.  I loved it, I really did.  All was forgiven.

I still have short hair, with a relapse of a year or two in between.  Now, once again, I’m headed toward Gloria Steinem hair.  Who remembers Gloria Steinem anyway?  Or her hair?  Just think long, straight, like a plunging waterfall.  That’s going to be me pretty soon.  My hair is white and I love it that way, but somehow I don’t think long, straight whitewaterfall is going to do it.  Years ago, when it started to turn, I had silver streaks above my ears, similar to a man’s sideburns turning white.  Then the streaks migrated, growing like comet tails, right on up to cover everything.  Fun to watch, and I liked every stage.

I wonder how long it will take before I can’t tolerate the long shaggy neckline that’s developing.  Or the bangs that are invading over my forehead, threatening to obscure eyesight.  The next time you see me, I may look like Cousin It from the Addam’s Family—all hair.  All white hair.

“Weave, weave, weave me the sunshine, out of the falling rain.“Weave me the hope of a new tomorrow, and fill my cup again.”

The old Peter, Paul and Mary song says it all nowadays.  There’s more than enough falling rain to go around, what with the Covid-19 virus, massive unemployment, fractured stock market, and a shortage of personal protective equipment for those who are protecting the rest of us.  One wonders how many other dominoes will fall.

Still, plenty of people are out there weaving the strands of falling rain into baskets and bowls of hope.  We have always risen to the causes on a national scale.  Companies ramp up production of hospital masks and gowns.  Volunteers appear out of the woodwork to help fill the need in food banks.  And on and on.

Sometimes it’s easier to look at the small gifts closer to home, so as not to get overwhelmed by the sheer size of the problems, and the helpless feelings that can generate, especially during a global pandemic when we are on virtual lockdown to prevent spread of the virus.  If you can’t go out, how can you possibly do anything to help?

Small gifts.  Going on a Bear Hunt had neighbors putting teddy bears and other stuffed animals in windows so kids can find them all.  Creating a scavenger hunt in a neighborhood, looking for all sorts of things from a devised list, although “fire hydrant” was on one list for a neighborhood in the country where there were none!  A daughter and her family purchasing two identical cakes, so they could have a birthday celebration for grandma, together on Facetime.  The cake had to wait two days in the garage to make sure no infection would be possible, but the party went on via social networking on the right day.  Neighborhood walkers aplenty, still laughing about something, even across the six feet of necessary social distancing.  

Even in a concrete jungle, tiny flowers manage to squeeze through the cracks and blossom.  So, continue to weave yourself some sunshine.  Hope for tomorrow. 

Working with words is in my genes.  My grandmother never wrote a simple note; it was always in verse.  In response to a request from her son for a loan, she scratched on an envelope, “You have been to me kind and true / So I’ll fork over a five to you.”  A generation down the line, my mother kept meticulous trip records.  Apparently, it really is hereditary as my daughter graduated with Screenwriting and English majors.   As for me, I remember beginning my first short story on a family trip when I was eight or nine.  It was one of those Bulwer-Lytton prize-winning gems, starting off something like, “The midnight clock struck in the village. Bong!  Bong!  B—“  You get the picture.  I know I didn’t get past the fourth or fifth “Bong!”.  So much for the Pulitzer Prize in literature.

From there I worked my way into high school poetry, filled with angst and word choice so purple as to be almost fluorescent.  Some of it I have since reworked, and, like Kafka, I hope the old stuff is burned.  Eventually, experiences I observed or experienced began a persistent knocking on the inside of my brain, and I had to get them down on paper. Writing essays taught me that I could slash and burn; editing didn’t leave scars.

Over the 25 years I spent in the trenches with beginning writers, teaching middle school and high school English, I complained about not having enough time to do “outside” things, such as reading.  Finally, I simply made time to read.  Similarly, I wanted to write more, but didn’t have the time.  However, a few years ago, that persistent, albeit infrequent, knocking from inside my head to write something down became poundings and hollerings.  Fortuitously, on an airplane from Los Angeles to Milwaukee, I had packed a yellow legal pad and a pen in my carry-on, and finally gave in to those demands.  By the time we landed, I had sixteen pages of frantic scrawlings as I transcribed the voices of the women talking inside my head.  It had begun with an offhand reminiscence by my mother: “I learned to golf so I could smoke.”  From that, lives began to emerge, and I simply had to write it all down.

At the moment, my own story, my writing life, continues to evolve, and that is the one story over which I have very little control.  That doesn’t bother me.  I am having far too much fun watching where all this is taking me.  I thought I’d somehow “dry up,” but writing seems to be a lot like reading; once you start, the first just makes you thirsty for another, and then another.  I continue to write because I am compelled to.