On strength and Sunday dinner

and eating cake with friends around a table

What do I know about fear? About discomfort? About displacement?

“The news is just awful,” I say to my spouse Janyce, standing in the doorway. She watches me pull the earbuds out of my ears and roll the wire up on the bedside table near the radio. I shift myself to a sitting position.

“Why do you listen to that at night?” she says.

“Where’s our girl?” I say, looking around the room. Morning light has already seeped through the cracks in the curtains, flooding the room, and the coffee pot has beeped maybe a full half hour ago already.

“She’s out there on her throne,” says Janyce, still in the doorway, watching me as I slowly make my way to standing.

My joints hurt. This happens sometimes, intermittently. Just a week or so ago, I was back to an easy weight routine at the gym and feeling pretty good. I woke yesterday and felt stiff and brittle again, an autoimmune thing that comes and goes, but then I think about all those stoic people half a world away, sitting on the cold concrete underground.

“We have to listen,” I say, suddenly remembering Janyce’s question. “And I guess I feel more safe listening at night like this in the dark under all the covers.”

“I can see that,” she says, nodding.

Last night, our new rescue dog jumped on the bed and snuggled up right beside me, her snout burrowed under my arm and her cold, wet nose just touching my armpit. She stayed that close for about an hour before moving down to the end of the bed, to curl up in a tight round ball. She’s been having dog dreams during the day on her chair in the living room, twitching and barking, her strong muscular legs making running motions. She fell into an instant dream last night, too, with her whole body pressed up against me. I was stroking her fur while she let out little yipping noises. I can’t help but wonder what she is dreaming about. She’s a migrant, too. Displaced from the life she knew in a much warmer climate, in a more rural setting. During the day, she sits upright in the driveway in the weak winter sun, hitched to her long lead, a good safe distance from the street, and watches the cars stream by on our busy road. Cars are as scary to her as tanks would be to me, if they were rolling down my street right now.

I sent a friend a text the other day. “Ugh, the news,” I said.

She texted back right away. “I feel useless,” she said.

What do I know about fear? About discomfort? About displacement? When I scroll through my Facebook and Instagram photos, this is what I find: smiling selfies of me and Janyce, so many of them, and cakes—the best cakes I have ever eaten— deep with sugar frosting, pungent with lemon rind, rich with sweetened cheese spread thinly onto a spiced surface, and whipped with cream slathered in the middle of chocolate, layered with tangy cherry goo. I’ve taken as many pictures of cocktails too, close up, with amber firelight glinting on the edge of the glass against an orange blurred background, and lots of nature scenes of serene places I’ve travelled to, and achingly beautiful sunsets dipping behind tree branches right in my own backyard. And then there are all the smiling faces sitting around a candlelit table. I linger over those.

Janyce and her childhood friends of 40 years

Where are all the people of Ukraine having dinner? In the subway? I marvel at their strength, at their stories. I think about them, and all the other migrants and refugees, while I listen in the dark. I don’t know what else to do except to be a more loving person every day and consider giving from my resources, making a dinner on a Sunday and eating with people around a table, and sharing my bed with a scared, smelly dog.

And rereading a Jane Hirshfield poem, letting the power of her words remind me about life’s tiny fleeting moments—about my kids when they were small— back when everything seemed strong.

Things seem strong.
Houses, trees, trucks—a chair, even.
A table.

You don’t expect one to break.
No, it takes a hammer to break one,
a war, a saw, an earthquake.

Troy after Troy after Troy seemed strong
to those living around and in them.
Nine Troys were strong,
each trembling under the other.

When the ground floods
and the fire ants leave their strong city,
they link legs and form a raft, and float, and live,
and begin again elsewhere.

Strong, your life’s wish
to continue linking arms with life’s eye blink, life’s tear well,
life’s hammering of copper sheets and planing of Port Orford cedar,
life’s joke of the knock-knock.

Knock, knock. Who’s there?
I am.
I am who?

That first and last question.

Who once dressed in footed pajamas,
who once was smothered in kisses.
Who seemed so strong
I could not imagine your mouth would ever come to stop asking.