vignettes.

stranded at the medspa, a free matcha, prison yoga, & baby wood ducks.

Hello. Here are four true stories from the past couple of weeks when I felt god in my interactions/observations with humans and other animals. <3

may||catawba rhododendron||ohio

1. My car dies in the parking lot of the med spa. My car—Goldie we call her—is what my people call “a junker,” but I don’t like to say that about my sweet little Hundayi who has held me through two states and a breakup. She is, at this point, worth less than it would cost to fix her properly, so instead I do cheap band-aid fixes that make her functional, and safe-enough as long as she never gets on a highway again. And yes, I understand the irony of being at the medspa in a junker, but femme priorities are guided by heart and contradictory ideological commitments, not logic.¹ Anyway, I am stranded at the medspa and in the old days I would have really lost my shit about this. Car issues are always a trigger, and I think it’s probably because I’ve created the conditions for a curse. Despite my animist attachment to Goldie, I have, in general, really negative energy toward and disdain for cars and driving. I am definitely afraid of them, given the whole dad getting hit by one and mom getting hit by one and having plenty of my own close calls. So when car stuff goes wrong, I have a history of really falling apart. Like, very movie scene of someone screaming and crying in a car and hitting the steering wheel. I’ve been that girl! In more than one instance I have taken my car trouble stress and called whoever was my partner and somehow made it their fault, and if not their fault for the car trouble then their fault for not taking care of me in the exact right way I needed. I am not proud of this, but it’s true, and if I can just be a commercial for Therapy for a second: I do not do this anymore!

   
   So I am in my car that won’t start and I know P is at work (landscaping, the kind of work that doesn’t allow you to text and take calls), and I decide to be a grown up, which is what people say when they actually mean “be an adult who came from a stable childhood.” Fake it til you make it, people also say. Anyway, I call Triple A, a company that makes me proselytize like a grandpa because I really believe they are a Trustworthy and Reliable Company, and better than anything insurance will ever offer. AAA has gotten me and mom out of binds my whole life, they’ve genuinely never let me down. AAA is Daddy.²

   
   When the tow truck pulls up, the man inside is not Daddy, but a classic Ohio skinny white guy with tattoos and bad teeth who looks legitimately like he could be anywhere between 22 and 45. I mean, it turns out he is a Daddy, but I don’t feel any kind of swoony energy toward him. He’s so nice though, and hooks up my car so skillfully; with just a couple clanks and clicks and buttons, Goldie slides gently onto the tow.

   
   I am in the passenger seat and it smells like my dad’s garage smelled, all gasoline and blue shirts with name patches. We are driving through almost-rushour and he is telling stories of all the people he meets. People go through so many hard things, he says. I ask if people are cranky with him, in a bad mood since he meets them when their car is fucked. Sometimes, he says, but not always. It was harder when he worked for an impound lot.

   
   “I didn’t always do my job at that place. Sometimes I’d meet moms who lived in their cars with their kids. I’d tell my boss I couldn’t find the car,” he tells me.

   
   “You saved some people’s lives,” I tell him because I think it’s true.

   
   “This world just needs more empathy, you know?” he says this kind of urgently, staring ahead.

   
   I agree with him, so relieved that this classic Ohio guy who is the exact target demographic for manosphere land is saying the exact opposite of the Andrew Tates and Charlie Kirks and Nick Fuenteses.

   
   Then he tells me his wife got hit by a car when she was eight months pregnant. They saved her and the baby, but the baby was in NICU and now his wife can’t work. “God gave us all another chance that day,” he doesn’t say this in an evangelical way, more in like a factual way. He brightens and turns to me: “And that’s what I named him. My baby’s name is Chance.”
   

2. I’m at the community table at the coffee shop which admittedly I would never choose if I had access to a solo table, but it’s crowded that day, so I’m sitting across from one of those coffee shop laptop people who work like they are at a Standing Desk. I am also working on my laptop, but in my occasional glances over I try to get a read on him. His hip is sort of popped in a way that seems homosexual, but his haircut is bad, so it’s confusing. I am busy grading papers, reading some really beautiful final projects, many of which include poetry. One of my students has a line about pottery smashing against a wall that they turn into a metaphor for identity shifts, and it’s really good. Another student writes about resenting that he needs to think about the shoes he wears to school— he has fashiony ones he likes, but he could run away from ICE a lot faster if he wore sneakers everyday. (I had a really great group of students this semester.)
   
   I’m distracted by my table partner again when the Barista— (who is a hot sporty dyke who made direct eye contact with me and said my name TWICE—“what’s a good name for that?....great, Raechel, we’ll have that right out for you.” and then a few minutes later: “Hey Raechel - that green tea is up.” with EYE CONTACT.)—approaches Standing Desk guy with a mug full of matcha. I don’t hear what Barista says, but Standing Desk guy is suddenly elated, reaching for the matcha. He says thank you and Barista is smiling, and then he does a voice to text into his phone saying, “Nevermind, they just gave me a free one!” I am tickled to realize he was bitching to someone via text, and that whoever is on the other end loves him enough to care about this update.
   
   A Coldplay song from that first album is playing in the background. That album dropped right before I got punk enough to refuse mainstream album spins, and I personally think it still holds up.³ Yellow is probably the worst track on the album (and it’s still kinda good!). The one playing in the coffee shop is “Sparks,” which was maybe on the Garden State soundtrack? It’s pretty!

   
   Standing Desk guy sips his matcha and makes an audible noise of delight.
   
   

3. On Thursday, I cut my finger with a serrated knife and it feels like a deep, jagged paper cut, all sting-y. I put on neosporin and a bandaid and go through that thing post-injury where you suddenly realize how important it is to have full access to whatever small thing you can no longer use. Typing is harder, brushing my teeth is harder. And Friday morning I teach my Yoga Sculpt class, stretching and weights and cardio in a heated studio, where I offer “hands on adjustments” to anyone who consents. My favorite hands on adjustments are for head massages and a sort of reiki-like energy practice that I do during savasana. I love providing it, I can feel everyone get deeper into rest, and I think whatever witch energy I have does some real magic for those bodies when I hold them in an imagined force field of protective light. Woo for woo!
   
   But this particular Friday, gross sweaty bandaid on my finger, I realize I simply cannot put my hands in people’s hair. They will feel the gross sweaty bandaid, and my energy will be self-conscious about that, and it will be bad for everyone. So this class, for the first time ever in a studio, I sit on my mat the entire savasana, and I get an intense sensation of déjà vu. When was the last time I didn’t massage anyone’s head during savasana? Whatever it was, I feel halfway there again.
   
   Then I realize: the only times I didn’t do savasana adjustments was when I was teaching inside of jails and prisons, and I am suddenly right back there, staring at bodies to whom I cannot give the comfort of touch. For years, I taught yoga to juvenile boys in pre-trial detention.⁴ This specific population of boys were ones who were going to be tried as adults. This gutted me for so many reasons, one being that they were the most childish, goofy, playful kids. Just full of antics, always cracking jokes. In all the training and paperwork required to enter the jail, I signed many times over that I would never, under any circumstances, “touch an inmate.” It’s obvious to say there was intense surveillance in the prison, but god the unique mix of “these animal inmates are a threat to you” and “you are a slutty temptress threat to these inmates” was just so distinctly fucked. I was not allowed to wear pants that were tight, but I was also not allowed to wear pants that were baggy. (For someone with thighs, this is a very difficult task.) No touching, no swearing, no tight clothes, no loose clothes, nothing in your pockets, nothing “revealing.” Thank goodness they had male guards to dutifully inspect my clothes and body. Prison guards, those neutral arbiters of appropriate behavior!
   
   So anyway, the boys didn’t always get the poses entirely right, often because they were goofing off and not paying close attention to the verbal cues. One time–even after verbalizing and demonstrating and pointing at a spot in space for him to shift his foot— one of the boys absolutely could not understand what I was trying to say. This happens to the best of us, sometimes a pose just doesn’t click without the help of someone physically putting your body part where it’s supposed to be. The other boys teased him. “C’mon Buddha, man, just move your damn foot the other way!” (His nickname was Buddha “because I’m wise,” he said, while his friends said over him, “because his belly!” I don’t want to romanticize any of this, but when I tell you this exchange was full of real love, I mean it.) Anyway, Buddha needed help and so I looked behind the glass to see how closely the guard was watching us (he wasn’t). Then, I knelt down and touched his foot, clad in the prison socks he was required to wear, and I adjusted him.
   

4. Two mama wood ducks are raising their babies on our little neighborhood lake. We count ten or eleven in one brood and five in the other. Baby wood ducks are such fuzzy, adorable little adventurers. Every year, P and I get most attached to the stragglers, the ones who explore and get left behind because they are so excited about some fish or bug or flower. But these are also the ones we know are most at risk of becoming hawk dinner. Inevitably, within the first few weeks of counting the babies, there are fewer than at the start. This year ten or eleven turned to a steady nine, and the other mama now has three little ones trailing behind. Do you know about baby wood ducks? How they are hatched in high up nests and must bravely leap from it just one day after hatching? I love this fact, it crosses my mind probably a few times a month; I like thinking of an act that is actually ‘brave’—leaping from a high up nest when you are barely a day old!—and not the way people call certain kinds of writers ‘brave’ when they actually mean, ‘I am embarrassed for you, you should feel shame for doing the thing you are doing.’ Writing about sex from my cozy writing chair is not brave; baby wood ducks are brave.
   
   This day on the lake we also see fish flapping and a cormorant hunting and a heron stalking. We hear robins and cardinals and a northern flicker. We stop at the tree where we symbolically put our miscarried baby to rest. I’ve been walking to this lake almost daily for nearly five years. It got me through the most painful breakup of my life, it got me through new love and the simultaneous pain of that, it got us through P’s cancer treatment. It’s held so much grief, but also so much joy, the daily kind, the “idle and blessed” strolling through the fields kind.
   
   They⁵ want to drain this lake, and we are working with neighbors to stop it, but I don’t know that we can. I hope if there is a way to save the lake that will actually work—even if it’s scary or illegal—that I will be brave like the wood ducks and do it.
   
   

1. For the haters (and I understand why one might be a hater), may I at least share in my defense that my two times a year skin treatments at the med spa would get me, like, maybe the tires of a new car.

2. Yo, if anyone at AAA wants to collab on some sponcon I think I could really drive the damaged millennial girl demographic.

3. There is an exploding brain meme to be made of the “pop music is good” to “only punk/indie music is good” to “pop music is good” pipeline. Obviously I am back to enjoying mainstream album spins again.

4. I also taught in a women’s prison and at a rehab center that was mostly formerly incarcerated folks. I wasn’t allowed to do adjustments at any of those institutions.

5. They are the city and the sewer district and they are saying a lot of bullshit. P wrote about it here.