The subtitle of life

Humor and hope in hair, jeans, and toilet paper

Enjoy listening, if you prefer. ⬆️

It started with the lady in the red pickup.

White hair like a full-fledged dandelion, or maybe a freshly groomed poodle, head just peeking over the steering wheel. She was zipping down the road like she had a coupon about to expire. For a second I thought I was seeing things. But no. She was absolutely real, probably on her way to meet someone exciting, and I suddenly understood that it was my worldview that needed adjusting.

Turns out, things are almost never what they seem. The subtitle of life.

Photo by Dan Williams on Unsplash

Her hair and determination somehow reminded me of Buffy, the patriarch of my childhood’s two-toy-poodle dynasty. Late one night, in the twilight of his life, Buffy didn’t get up from his usual spot by the patio door. Distraught, mom found dad in the bedroom, in a T-shirt and boxers. What is it with dads and underwear in times of crisis? Anyway, he was a big man whose anger could scare the stripes off a zebra. With my whimpering mother behind him, he loomed over the dog.

“BUFFY!” he thundered, stamping his foot.

The dog shot up like a furry Lazarus—clearly no longer dead. We still say he left the Pearly Gates behind in fear of my father.

Miracles aside, often it’s the details of existence that bedevil us most. Recently, my husband spent extra minutes scrubbing a takeout lid that refused to come clean. Baffled by the laws of grease and physics, he laughed when he realized he’d been washing two tops stuck together. He was working twice as hard to accomplish nothing. Welcome to the domestic version of modern life.

Like the time he came home complaining that either his jeans had shrunk or his body had expanded. Neither was true. The jeans were mine. He’d worn them all day, never processing that the zipper was on the scenic route and the waistband was cutting him in half. At the time, I questioned both his powers of observation and the realities of my mom-body. Years later, it feels like a reminder of how uncomfortable it is when we try to squeeze our lives into proverbial pants never meant for us. Confusion, apparently, is our love language.

Then there was the duel I fought at a weekend beach house. Each time I used the bathroom, the toilet paper roll was running the wrong way, so I flipped it around. Someone else clearly disagreed, because each time I returned, it was reversed again. Three days of silent combat, two invisible opponents waging war over the orientation of the two-ply. I never discovered my challenger, but I’m sure we both walked away feeling victorious.

If I can get that riled up about toilet paper, no wonder the rest of the world can’t agree on anything. Perhaps that’s why I’ve grown wary of ever thinking I have the final answer. We live in a world where every argument escalates quickly. The distance between deciding there’s a right way to hang toilet paper and believing there’s a correct way to think at all is surprisingly short. And oh, how quickly we dig in when someone rolls the other way!

That stubborn need to be right seeps into every nook like spilled milk. I sit down meaning to write about love, or laughter, or aging, and somehow end up in the thicket of politics. It’s strange to live in a country where truth depends on the channel, and outrage feels like the national pastime.

Photo by Brian Stalter on Unsplash

I’m not a political writer, and I have no appetite for shouting matches. But I do know this much: I’m tired of watching decency get filibustered. I believe in the rule of law. I think money should never outweigh morality, and that cruelty is not a governing strategy. Both major parties—and the movement convinced it’s purer than either—fail us in ways that go deeper than policy. We’ve allowed a few people with deep pockets and deeper insecurities to convince us we are small, fragile, and owned. But we aren’t. We’re the Wi-Fi that works in the basement, the wool sweater that’s survived a lifetime of winters, the wildflowers growing in concrete.

One thing that keeps me going is the conviction that there’s more to humanity than the people in power. When the systems meant to support us fall short, we show up for each other. It’s messy, inefficient, and it doesn’t reach everyone, but it’s all we have to offer. So we do.

Sometimes a reassessment, an attitude adjustment inspired by dandelion hair, is the best place to start. Which brings me to Ireland.

Seven months after my father died, my mother took me there. It would have been their 59th anniversary, and she wanted something else to think about. A seasoned traveler at 82, she booked a bus tour—no logistics, no stress, just along for the ride. The guide, by his own accounting, didn’t drink, didn’t swear, but regularly summoned his pals:

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” he’d exclaim at roads too narrow for either a bus or a confession.

I was not yet 50 and, except for one couple with a teenage son, I was the youngest on the bus. From the looks of them, Leslie and Betty were closer in age to my mother. They sat in the front seats, fingers entwined. When we stopped to explore Yeats’s grave, Donegal Castle, and the Cliffs of Moher, they held hands, whispered, and smiled at each other.

The real Betty and Leslie. He went by Les.

I admired them and found myself hoping my husband and I would be like that someday, if we were lucky enough to live that long.

On the last day of the trip, I squatted down in the aisle beside them and said, “I just have to tell you—you two are adorable. How long have you been married?”

They giggled, looked at each other, and said in unison, “Six months.”

Of course. Of course the people I envied for their years of devotion had barely figured out whose turn it was to do the laundry. The universe cracks itself up, doesn’t it.

Somebody’s always scrubbing the wrong lid, wearing the wrong jeans, fighting silent toilet paper wars, electing people who promise more than they deliver. And yet, amid the swirl of daily personal mishaps and colossal political betrayals, I keep finding reasons to be hopeful.

Last night, the Northern Lights were visible where I live and all the way around the globe. Light pollution in my town kept them from my view, but the camera saw what I couldn’t. Meanwhile, friends from near and far shared pictures in a group chat, all of us on a device that can be as problematic as it is purposeful. One wrote: “How miraculous to instantly see on this magic little box in my hand the Aurora Australis from a friend’s yard on the other side of a giant ball we are flying on around the sun and our home galaxy. One of billions.”

Life is rarely just as it seems. It’s always more—so much more.

~Elizabeth

All righty, friends, now you get to hold the mic. If something in this piece made you think about the last time your jeans were too tight, I’d love to know about that. If you could rewrite one painful misstep (personal or political) into something hopeful, what would that be? What surprises you most today?

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Thanks again for being here. Until next time, keep seeing, keep wondering, keep believing.