While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

*****

"It was in the spring, a very chilly spring, that Aunt Jimmy died of peach cobbler."
———Toni Morrison
——--The Bluest Eye

I perfected GK’s favorite dish, chicken paprikash, a dish that required authentic Hungarian paprika, not to mention the nearly impossible-to-learn skill of blending sour cream and flour into a velvety sauce, with time to simmer for a few hours after working all day. After the 216th time I set the meal in front of him, it occured to me he’d never made my favorite dish (hot fudge sundae with chocolate mint ice cream), indeed hadn’t known it was my favorite dish, among an eighteen-year myriad of details he’d failed to notice. In year eighteen, rather than subject him to death by scalding with Authentic Hungarian Chicken Paprikash, I divorced GK.

I pressed play on the audio file of my hypnotherapy session. Julie’s voice started midsentence. “—sending gratitude and love to your miraculous body.” Wait a minute. My miraculous body was still fidgeting for the sweet spot on the bed. I start over. Found sweet spot. Memorized it. Rolled onto my side, stretched to reach the computer on the nightstand, pressed pause and then play again. The headphones slipped off my ears when I lay back down. I made a mental note: buy a remote for the laptop. Do they make remote controls for laptops? Rolled over, hit pause, rewound, pressed play. One hand clapped to the headphones.

After two Zoom sessions with Julie and numerous replays of the audio files, I was ready to declare hypnotherapy a failed experiment, if not a scam. As hard as I tried ( and tried not to try) I could not remember Dr. Agnes Jackson. She was starkly absent from my dreams, oblivious to nightly invitations as I climbed into bed, oblivious to the playlist I’d created for the year she’d reportedly mentored me, and oblivious to her photo tucked under my pillow. I’d printed the photo from the internet. It came out an off shade of green with vertical white lines running through it—Dr. Jackson caged behind my subconscious.

I settled into the well-established routine of the therapy session. I knew Julie’s bits by heart. She would count me down: 5 “drifting deeper … ” 4. “Your brilliant intellectual mind …” (I appreciated that she saw my brilliance.) 3 “… will know exactly when to come back to the sound of my voice.” 2. “… down, down …” 1. bla bla bla. She would suggest I think about (or not think about, hmm, confusing) events that were kind of (subconsciously speaking) next door to the missing memory. She would end by reversing the count to bring me back to conscious awarenes, 0. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Eyes open bla bla bla.

I usually listened to the entire session, because, at the very least, I loved being the center of another person’s attention, even previously recorded attention.

However, my scepticism at ten out of ten, I took the passive aggressive route. I fell asleep. Sleep overtook me right in the middle of a math problem: How many books could I have published with the dolars I’d spent on hypnotherapy? It was a stellar nap. Deep and silent, quieter than four in the morning quiet. Of course, I didn’t know that until after the nap ended. Well, specifically, I couldn’t say the nap ended. Specifically, my eyes opened.

Opened, just at the second Julie’s recorded voice was saying, “Eyes open, wide awake, back in the here and now.”

While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

*****

"I've got no problem not seeing what I don't need to see."
———Hanif Abdurraquib
——--There’s Always This Year

A gravel drive led from our cabin to the main road, cutting through a pasture where a dozen cows grazed. As I hiked toward the bovines, I hesitated, leery of anything wearing four legs and a tail. A calf looked up at me, then ambled closer to its mother. (My apologies to the cows for being presumptuous about their relationship.) The little one was cute, until she was obscured by her bigger, meaner mom.

I stopped. My knees quivered.

Mama cow squared herself to the drive, ready to attack. Further ahead, cows were lying close enough to swat me with their tails.

My knees got very fluttery, in addition to the quivering.

Other mooing beasts had closed in from behind. They would definitely breathe on me.

My knees were buckling, in addition to the fluttering and quivering. I prepared to die from cow cooties.
The monsters got bored and wandered off. And when they left, all the activity in my joints wandered off as well.

I was grateful for such a close-up look at fear. How it rose and fell and passed away. How judgments piled on top of anxiety will spiral you into panic. Maybe I’ll take this as a starting point, to accept my whole self once and for all. Yes, from now on, a new mantra: compassion for anxiety.

As we were packing up at the end of our get-away, my friend said, “I saw a bobcat yesterday.”

What?

Note to my knees: Are you nuts? You wasted my scaries on cows? There were bobcats out there.