I don’t remember anyone getting a ride (back in my day) but now, at all the schools, there are long lines of cars at drop-off and pick-up time. We got in the line and inched our way around the track and the auditorium until we approached the disembarking spot. The principal and a teacher were greeting cars, moving the line along, playing 80s music, kind of dancing, and greeting all the kids by name. Literally, they knew the names of all the kids.

Historically, peppiness or anything vaguely resembling it has made me annoyed. When I was in high school, I made it a point to be absent whenever there was a pep rally. I chose a college famous for its lack of school spirit (or at least, lack of traditional school spirit — lots of people proudly wore shirts that said “Where Fun Goes to Die” on them, but not me, because even that felt too much like being peppy about the lack of fun) and when I taught high school, my little corner classroom became an unofficial haven for kids who dreaded their own pep rallies to hide out and read a book instead of wearing face paint to a thundering gym. When I got my first Sprint PCS flip phone back in the waning years of the Clinton administration, my outgoing voicemail message was me reading the line from The Catcher in the Rye when Holden describes one of the many boarding schools he’s been kicked out of: “One of the reasons I left Elton Hills is that I was surrounded by phonies. That’s all. They were coming in the goddamn windows.” (So, someone calls 17-year-old me to see if I want to go drink Mike’s Hard Lemonade in some suburban woods, and, I don’t answer—obviously—and, since this is pre-text messages, they have to leave a message and this is what they hear??? Why?)

So, even though I loved the learning part of school, even though I would fly across the country at this very minute for any of my college teammates, and even though I loved my years teaching and coaching high school students, collective displays of joy or fun at school bring out my inner Daria (or Holden).

What I’m getting at (after indulging in some nostalgia for my younger and more cynical years) is that I was not expecting to cry in the school drop off line. After Thea was out of the car, I sent a voice text to my mom with this anecdote and began to cry as I was dictating to Siri. Then, for reasons I can’t really explain except that perhaps I was really in need of some catharsis, I voice-texted my book club about the 80s music and earnest kindness at the middle school door and cried again!

This morning, before the drive to middle school, I met my friends at 5am. I’m training for a half marathon. They’re not, but when I said I needed to do 14 miles with six at a very specific-to-me race pace, they put on their reflective vests and said encouraging things to me when I was lagging. All week, I’ve been collecting silent auction donations from friends and even people I don’t know all that well for our big fundraiser at work. I have long known how lucky I am to have been born to loving parents, to have good friends, to have had a wealth of positive adult influences in my school years, but this week I’ve been thinking a lot about kindness and caring that might appear (or even be) lower-stakes.

The front page of the paper feels incredibly bleak from top to bottom and many days I feel guilty when I want to bury my head in the sand. Will robots end the human race? How prohibitively expensive will absolutely everything get? We live in a world where there’s a group chat with 57 people on it about what? Which I think is why I have been feeling moved to tears by the little moments of care.

(The only thing those pastries pictured above have to do with all this is that last time my friends met me for a 5am run, I stopped for them on the way home.)

A few years ago, one of my students wrote a poem about poaching an egg as a metaphor for parenting so beautiful that it startled me out of my distaste for food preparation and changed, forever, the way I think about making breakfast and packing lunch (even if it didn’t also change forever, or even for often, the way I go about making breakfast or packing lunch). I start the rice cooker and look for the small Tupperware for the strawberries and think about how soon you will be taking much less thoughtful lunches to school.

Outside, I take our traditional first day pictures, but for the first time, I don’t get one of you together because the middle school bus is pulling up and the elementary school won’t start for another hour. It’s humid, about to rain.

I don’t go with either of you to school anymore, which I like because I can avoid the kind of small talk expected at the school door, but on this morning in particular, the house abruptly quiet and lamplit on the overcast morning, I feel more than a little sad about it.

My run is slow and plodding and three miles in, the rain finally starts. I think briefly about how I’m glad that at 44 I still have occasion to be inconvenienced by the weather, getting wet and frizzy and hearing the sound of raindrops on the leaves of trees that line the trails by the marina.

As I turn at the end of the fishing pier to cover the last stretch toward home, I think about all the other first days. On the beach, the town tractor is raking the rocky shoreline into striped submission and I think of the hazy stretch of days between the elementary’s school start and the preschool’s we’d have the playgrounds and the beach mostly to ourselves. I think of that first kindergarten drop-off, bright and sunny, in the months before COVID and a PTA meeting I felt uncharacteristically compelled to attend. I think about what a relief to have relinquished that particular strand of socially-driven obligation, but even as I think it, I have a feeling skipping the PTA meeting is the only thing I’ll think about all day that doesn’t make me sad about time’s passage.

Back at home I already know it will feel good to catch up on work. To not feel always like I am neither working nor parenting well. To have quiet. I will see friends and hold a meeting at work and have no one to feed but myself. And all day, a hope I always feel but sometimes ignore will ring a little louder due to it being the first day of a new year. It’s a hope that while I’m writing or talking or reading or meeting you are not feeling the loss of ice cream for lunch or late-night swims the way I am. A hope that you’ll come back home changed and challenged but unmuted.

I’ve been trying to come to peace with my 400 meter repeats being a little slower than I’d like, wincing at that persistently tight left hamstring while sitting in my chair at work, googling “44 aging cliff,” and then, in what might either be viewed as denial or acceptance, “USATF master’s cross country championships.”

Writing (well) about running is hard and there’s not much more for me to say about the battle between denial and acceptance of middle-aged racing except that the image of me getting on an airplane and flying to Huntsville, AL to put on bun-huggers (I wouldn’t actually wear buns but I do think they work well as a metonym for taking one’s athletic pursuits a little too seriously in middle age) and storm around a muddy field as fast as my tight hamstring allows unearthed a set of much bigger and uncomfortable questions about ambition and desire and vulnerability and aging.

Perhaps this—these questions—is why I woke up before three this morning, on the first day of my aging cliff. I knew right away that I was the kind of awake that would not let me go back to sleep.

For many years when my kids were too little to stay home alone even for short periods of time, if I wanted to run on my birthday (which I always did) I had to be out before the sun was up and home by 6:30. It’s been a while since I did much pre-dawn running, and today I had plans to meet friends for a run later in the morning, but once I was at the kitchen table with my single overly-strong cup of coffee (down from my previous pot-a-day habit—thanks, aging cliff) I knew I just needed to start running.

It was overcast and the sky stayed dark almost the whole time I was out. I ran a route I know well, one I’ve often done on early birthday mornings. I did not think about my hamstring. Nothing hurt. I missed the friends I’d hoped to run with but was also glad to be alone with my new audiobook, no watch, to stop at the halfway point and look out at the Sound, to be reminded that I still have access to this. To the world pre-sunrise, to the hill rising above the beach just over five miles from my house, to the slow lightening of the sky over the marina on a cloudy late-August morning. The 5k PR, the effortless 400 repeats, the buns—holding on to access to these, if possible at all, would require a kind of pathological clawing grasp, a desperate clinging. But what a relief to step out the side door into the dark humid morning and the run itself right there.

Hello! It has been a long time since I’ve written regularly here and I’ve missed it. Over the past eighteen months or so, most of my creative energy has been going toward my work, both as Executive Director and an instructor, at the Westport Writers’ Workshop.

Aside from the real, but perhaps not-the-whole-story fact of prioritizing the WWW work that I very much love, I also just haven’t felt like writing nonfiction and Substack seems very much like a medium for nonfiction. When I do have space to write, I’ve been working on a collection of linked short stories set in a fictional Connecticut town.

But recently, I’ve felt the slightest hints of essays longing to be started on long car rides or quiet runs. There’s the piece I’ve been trying to write for years about the rowan tree I somewhat unsuccessfully transplanted when we moved, or the alarming realization that having my kids at sleep away camp left me with an almost unbearable sense of rootlessness. This morning as I drove to the office, I found myself reflecting on the almost-too-intense-to-bear mutual sincerity of adult School of Rock performances and Master’s track and field competitions.

What I’ve realized as I’ve tried to begin drafting these pieces is, for me at least, there’s essayistic way of thinking that is nurtured, not only in reading widely, in drafting and revising said essays, but also in writing other essayistic things that don’t have the high-stakes feeling of being intended for literary journal submission or a book-length project. In other words—I missed trying out (essaying, to be a total writing workshop cliche) ideas here.

I’m hoping to get back to posting more frequently, starting with some reflections and questions about the “aging cliff” at 44, which I’m aiming to finish before Saturday when I turn…yes, 44 years old.

Thanks to anyone who is still reading here. I hope to be back more often!

A much-delayed and brief update: I’ve recently become the interim Executive Director for the Westport Writers’ Workshop. I’m so excited to be working with such wonderful colleagues and students and am having a lot of fun getting to know the ins and outs of this new role.

It has meant, though, that I have written zero new prompts for this newsletter. I hope to have the bandwidth to get back to doing that soon!

In the meantime, you can find a mix of publishing resources, prompts, and writerly musings in the Westport Writers’ Weekly each Monday morning. This week’s newsletter is about third places, spotlights some of our spring nonfiction workshops, has information about the upcoming Pitch & Publish conference, and includes news about WWW community publications.

Back in the locker room after my (boring, listless) session in the fitness center, I watched a mom towel off her toddler, lie her on the folding table, wriggle her into her pajamas and I could have wept.

I was thinking—of course—about how fast it all goes. I was thinking about the years of YMCA swimming lessons, my own towel-dried children. I was thinking of how for several years they both had swimming on Wednesday after school. I’d bring pajamas with me and they’d leave in snug long john sets, often matching, hair clean and wet, bodies and minds tired. At home I’d let them watch Wild Krats while I made dinner or sometimes we’d get takeout (the house was so tidy because no one had been in it all day! It was a treat to keep the kitchen clean). I loved this routine so much that I tried to avoid making plans, even with friends, on Wednesday nights.

I’d left the house wanting the time alone at the gym, but in that locker room I felt bitterly lonely. I missed my kids both as they were right then and as they had been back then. That’s not even quite the right way to say it. I missed their younger selves like I miss the people I love and know I’ll never see again. I missed people who don’t exist anymore, including the person I was then.

Then, last night, after the beginning of this post had been sitting in my drafts folder for a week, I came across Hannah Rosenberg’s poem “I take my daughter swimming at the YMCA,” which is written from the other side of the YMCA-years divide.

I loved these lines in partuclar:

I want her to know that, even though it was a lot,

all of it, there were at least three minutes during the six p.m. hour on

a dark winter night that she and I floated together, that I held her in

an empty pool, that she stopped flinging her toddler body and rested

gently on mine.

I loved working on this Cozy Books list for The Atlantic. While working on it at the public library, I reread Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These in one sitting, tears running down my face, and as is the case whenever I read any of her writing, left feeling grounded by the beauty of her language and hopeful—not just because of this particular story’s end, but because reading writing that’s that good at the sentence level makes me hopeful as well.

There are a few other short stories I’d have loved to include on the list and thought I’d share here:

Maile Meloy’s “O Tannenbaum,” which you can read if you subscribe to Granta or listen to on This American Life.

David Sedaris’s Holidays on Ice (the famous “Santaland Diaries” essay is also on This American Life). We listened to this essay in my high school creative writing class and I laughed so hard I cried. Then, someone in our class asked what “roaches and stems” were and our teacher wouldn’t answer, and, the internet not being then what it is now, I spent many years wondering.

Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I can’t explain why this feels like a holiday book, especially because it does not take place (for the most part) at Christmastime and it is not very cheery. It’s possible I’m being influenced by Kiera Knightly’s green dress in the movie adaptation. But—if you do read it, one of my favorite things about it is the ways in which McEwan (or Briony…) is self-consciously adapting To the Lighthouse. If you are the kind of high school English class loving reader I am, it’s fun to notice how the dinner party scenes, the war section, the role of art and the artist all kind of line up (or don’t).

Katherine May’s Wintering which I wrote about a bit for LitHub last year

And, for some reason, I tend to binge audiobooks while doing the final wrapping/baking/magic making of the holiday season and although the titles I’ve chosen in past years haven’t had a thematic connection to this time of year, I thought I’d list the ones I remember hating to put down:

• Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting

• Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead

• Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days

• Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road

• Eula Biss’s On Immunity

A few months ago I created a new note on my phone called “Stranger Than Fiction” with the idea that I’d fill it with bits of news I came across that seemed like perfect prompts. I’ve been trying to make the prompts in this newsletter useful across genres but I think this one is likely destined to be a fiction prompt for most readers.

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(I also learned about cholera when it killed Kirsten’s friend Marta on the journey from Sweden to Minnesota, which, come to think of it, reminds me that I also learned about migration patterns from Kirsten’s story—though I’m saying nothing new in pointing out how pivotal these books were for many girls my age in our understanding of American history—Mary Mahoney’s book and podcast have been making this point for years!)

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One of Hardy’s ideas I’m most interested in is the way that Tess is stuck between worlds. She was born to parents who are largely uneducated, but she herself went to school. She was born in an era before the vast changes of the industrial revolution, but she lives her adult life in its throes.

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The lump of coal my parents teased
I'd find in my Christmas stocking
turned out each year to be an orange,
for I was their sunshine.

Now I have one C. gave me,
a dense node of sleeping fire.
I keep it where I read and write.
"You're on chummy terms with Dread,"

it reminds me. "You kiss ambivalence
on both cheeks. But if you close your
heart to me ever I'll wreathe you in flames
and convert you to energy."

I don't know what C. meant me to mind
by her gift, but the sun returns
unbidden. Books get read and written.
My mother comes to visit. My father's

dead. Love needs to be set alight
again and again, and in thanks
for tending it, will do its very
best not to consume us.

-William Matthews

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But, as I got ready to go listen to the students this year—all strangers to me—I thought about how hard I’d have to listen, and how much work it is to really listen, not just to the words someone is saying but to how someone is saying. It was one thing when I knew the students well, when we had our own classroom jokes and personas to fall back on, when they’d seen me growing ever more pregnant and bumping into desks with my huge belly and jokingly predicted who would be in charge of running for the school nurse if my water broke in class. Carefully listening to a stranger is something else entirely.

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Anyway, a few hours later, AAA arrived and I was able to get to work in time, much to my relief. It was the second-to-last class of the semester and my students were working on portfolios and I’d have felt out of sorts if I hadn’t been able to check in on their progress.

Because I hadn’t planned to straight from overpriced garlands to class, though, I did not have my notebook, my planner, or my charged computer. I did have four postcards I bought at the Tate Modern and never sent, and after I’d checked in on my students, while I waited for my very kind husband to bring my charger to campus, I stared at these postcards, unaccustomed as we all are now to not having something—a notebook, a phone, a computer—between ourselves and the world.

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