“He's not safe, but he's good.” ― C. S. Lewis
In this issue:
A story about coming home and waking up
Bad Sex Awards, Harry Bosch, and Guido Brunetti
The Blue and Yellow Kitchen
Breaking and Re-Entering
Hello, I’m back from our visit with our stepdaughter and her husband and here to report that a real-live hug beats Zoom every time. The visit was all about re-entry: to hugs, to laughter, to feeling useful in the small ways family can sometimes be useful to each other -- all things we’d been longing for.
Then the night after we returned, we were awakened around 2 A.M. by the sound of something striking the window just a few steps outside our bedroom. One minute, we were lost in our dreams and the next minute we were on our feet. Seconds later, my husband rushed for the door of our bedroom, and started roaring vile words in combinations I’ve never heard from him before.
They were directed at a man with a flashlight outside the window who decided not to stick around. I heard the thud of his shoes as he ran, then the roar of a truck engine, followed by the slam of what I presume was the passenger door. We never saw his face; our window shades obscured the upper half of his body leaving only his crotch and thighs. He was wearing khakis.
Welcome home, right? Adrenaline pumping, we reported it to the police who showed up thirty minutes later even though we all knew there was not much to be done. “We don’t get much activity around here,” the officer told my husband. So we went back to bed and spent a few hours watching the darkness give way to the grey light of early dawn.
We understood that on the scale of threats, this break-in attempt ranked low. The guy was no genius -- he was in the front yard, under a light, with no bushes to screen him. Judging by the marks and small dents we found the next morning, he was trying to pry open a window from the wrong side. In the light of day, it was almost laughable.
The incident was enough, however, to trigger an avalanche of what-ifs and random insights during those hours before dawn. What if I’d been alone? What if I’d forgotten to lock the door, something I never thought about when I grew up in rural New Hampshire. What if I’d been frail, sick, old? What if I lived in a neighborhood where the threats are far greater and the police less likely to respond the way they did for us? What if calling the police carried risks for me that it carries for people in my own city who are not white and living in a neighborhood where there isn’t that much “activity?”
When I told my mother about the attempted break-in, she told me it brought back a memory for her. For the first time, she told me of the weekday morning in 1959 when she was 24 and at home with me, then four, my brother, then three, and my sister, not quite two. We were all with her in her bedroom in the small house she and my dad built on my grandparent’s property, when she heard someone in the house. She left us in the bedroom and found a man coming down the hallway towards her. He was “huge.” He held a gun. He kept coming.
“What did you do?” I asked her, terrified for the young woman my mother had been.
“I advanced,” she said. “I started yelling at him. I said, of all things, how DARE you come into my house.” My mother chuckled a little, remembering her choice of words, although she didn’t laugh then. She kept advancing. She told him to get out. To her surprise, he did. “I didn’t think, I just responded,” she told me. Then she added in a quieter voice she told me, “I can still see his face. He was so big.”
I recalled the way my husband charged forward the other night and slammed the door of the bedroom behind him to keep me from following him. When he yelled at the intruder, I heard rage, fury, an edge of fear - the kind that sharpens the senses. I thought about his child and her husband who we’d just been visiting and how, for months now, my husband has been railing inside against the cancer that has threatened them not once but three times now, the most recent time hitting during the middle of the pandemic. He would have done anything to stand between them and this threat, to absorb its blows, to defend them the way he defended us, me.
Sometimes a threat backs down in the face of love and courage. Other times, it hides for a while and returns. Either way we can only face it with whatever we have in the moment. The rest of the time, we have to live our lives the best way we can and savor every minute.
In his own small way, our bumbling, khaki-wearing intruder helped to remind me that my sense of safety is woven of the flimsiest materials: random luck, health, and assumptions that come with living a privileged, comfortable life. None of these come with guarantees; all have an expiration date that will come without much warning. For now though, I am okay. And I am grateful.
What about you? What does safety mean to you? What does it look like? Have you had any encounters that have caused you to think about what it means to be safe?
And now for something completely different: The Bad Sex Awards
Writing sex is hard and sometimes it goes badly. The good news: there is a prize for that which I knew nothing about until reading about it in Roxane Gay’s weekly newsletter, The Audacity. Established in 1993 by Literary Review editor Auberon Waugh and critic Rhoda Koenig in the UK, the award is for “the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel”. This link takes you to the 2019 winners; no winners were announced in 2020. You’ll find past winners like Elizabeth Gilbert, along with excerpts from the winning passages.
Feel free to share any candidates you’ve come across! Bad sex makes fun reading.
Long Reads: From L.A. to Venice
I’m not sure if Michael Connelly’s latest, The Night Fire, was the perfect choice for me this week given the givens but I read it, liked it, and was glad my husband had it handy when I ran out of reading material on our trip. His most recent (I think) novel features three of his ongoing characters: the aging and dogged Harry Bosch, the tough tent-living, paddle-boarding dedicated relative newcomer Renee Ballard, and Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer. Cold and current cases weave together to make for a lot of things to follow and think about which is fun because the characters, sadly, didn’t really engage me much. This most recent novel, like a few of Connelly’s other later novels have a narrative voice that reports rather than tells a story. I miss the liveliness of his earlier prose and the depth of his characters. There is a lot of emphasis on procedure and explanation. It made me feel that Connely was writing more for a professional police audience and not the general reader. I do like Bosch, the Amazon TV series which does a much better job of bringing Harry et al to life. Both book and show make a star out of the City of Los Angeles which is also fun.
I’m on to Donna Leon’s latest, Trace Elements, her latest Commissaro Guido Brunetti Mystery. Here, the star is the City of Venice, closely followed by food. As with all the Brunetti books, procedure takes a back seat to the cultural and idiosyncrasies of the city, the likeable complicated characters, and the problems faced by Venice in the face of climate change, politics, and rampant tourism. Water quality is the focus of the mystery here. I love reading this one. I love walking the canali with the characters, I love watching Brunetti swipe the last of the olive oil off a platter after eating all the fresh bufala mozzarella and tomatoes. Long time readers may find themselves comfortable rather than challenged, lille catching up with old friends. New readers should find lots to delight them in the way Leon tells a story and brings them to a conclusion that leaves them, like Brunetti and the platter of oil, wanting more.
Food + Books = Delicious Combo
Speaking of food and books — two things I love in combination — I recently discovered this series of interviews by Stephanie Weaver that she calls The Blue and Yellow Kitchen. Weaver interviews an author while she cooks a dish that is evocative of the author's book. I watched this one with Heather Diamond whose book Rabbit in the Moon is a “cross-cultural memoir, love story, and door into Chinese culture.” They discussed the book while Weaver made chicken congee and rice porridge.
Thank you
Before I go, I want to thank everyone who wrote after the Mother’s Day issue of Spark. I was touched to read your stories and also to learn about how the many ways some of you have helped mothers who struggle with challenges ranging from mental illness to finances to discrimination. It’s wonderful to be here together.
Please let me know how you are and what you are reading. As always, the books listed here (and the ones you send me) are, whenever possible, listed on the Spark Community Recommendations Page at bookshop.org where every sale supports local bookstores.
Signing off with this chant I learned a while ago when I first became introduced to meditation: May you be healthy. May you be happy. May you be safe. May you live with ease.
Gratefully yours,
Betsy
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And now… your moment of Zen: Sky Meets Water
Author Kristin Tsetsi caught this moment on an early spring day when clouds were above and below and the birds soared quietly between.
Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”
What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.
Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed.
I can’t wait to see what you send!
Both intruder stories were terrifying. I think one reacts with adrenaline and without fear when they fell those they love may be in danger
Oh man Betsy. Very scary with the close call break in. On a more positive note, I so enjoy your newsletter. It's great story telling and I lose myself in it from story to story. Thank you for that. I'm sending you a moment of zen I had this week. Be well! Leslie