Restart Your Device

Part One: Have You Tried Restarting Your Device

I started it last Sunday morning. I’m pretty sure it was Sunday. But was it the Sunday after the shootings or the Sunday after the bombings? I’m never going to remember if I don’t remember today. And it will never matter more than it does right now. In fact, for purposes of completion, I’m going to pretend I’m straining to remember all these events about ten years in the future, when it will all be different. I’m thinking of ten years ago. Yes, it will be different.

No, the start was before either of those Sundays, because I still hadn’t finished the dispatches from Salem. I went to Salem, Massachusetts, and it was a long time ago, last month, ten years, three hundred and twenty four years ago. Ten years ago it was different. Three hundred and twenty four years ago, it was the same.

It won’t always be this hard if you can bear with me. I always see the bear when I hear that command. I will see an actual bear with me. Or you. Whomever is crying out in alarm. But it’s not the angry, real bears I see. Not Winnie the Pooh, either, and not the bear in the empathy video we watch in annual training sessions. Maybe the bear who climbs into backyard pools. He’s not here to make trouble. He’s not. Don’t start none, won’t have none. You can swim later.

On Sunday morning, I got up before everybody in the house so I could walk before it’s hotter than a McDonald’s coffee from hell’s drive thru. One of my neighbors has a pool, but there’s potentially a bear in it. I can’t let it go. Any of it. Things I said six months ago that I even thought were exaggerations to get my family’s attention and care. To raise awareness, right? That’s the way to do it. I tend to see crops when people say “raising awareness.” Why not children? Well, pilgrim, that’s because you rear children. You raise crops. My grandmother reared me, and she didn’t believe in synonyms. What does a field of awareness look like? It looks like the tall, leafy potato plants we reared when I was ten years old, and though we dug and dug and dug, the only ovoid object we found was a rock pretending to be a tuber.

This is the problem right now. Today. Everything is happening, I mean everything, so much and all the time. I’m in the potato patch with my grandmother. It’s hot. She takes off her glasses and wipes them with the dishrag in her hand, the one that holds a single potato-shaped rock caked with reddish brown Carolina clay. It’s really hot. The neighbors, they have a pool. Do you know them? I put on my glasses, the sunglasses that are about five prescriptions back, but have enough going on so that I can read my phone. I only watch old movies and I only listen to brand new songs. Anything else, in light of, you know (makes a wide, waving gesture). It’s too sad. But I’m distracted on Sunday and I don’t isolate myself in the new releases. I ask a sinister platform to decide for me, and for once, it does not shove Lana Del Rey or Arcade Fire at me. A stopped algorithm can be right twice a year, and Linda Thompson coaxes the bear out of the neighbor’s pool. She offers it a potato.

1. I’m so tired of: check.

2. There’s crazy people: check.

3. Why doesn’t anybody ever cover this song?

4. The big boys are all spoiling for a fight: check.

5. There are not enough tubas in pop music, or there are the exact right amount. No, bear, stay out of the pool.

6. Between the potato field and the neighbors’ bear, there was a time in Atlanta, and if you got tired of hearing nothing but the Grateful Dead, people usually had this record. Then Cosmic Thing came out and the air turned to lemonade.

I’m marching up and down. I take a picture of the turtle who flung himself from the sidewalk into the bushes. He thinks it’s the end of everything. I tell him it’s going to be okay.

Part Two: Does the Barista Really Like My Dress

She squints at me and tells me so. But it’s nothing special. I’m meeting a client, and it’s a black dress with short sleeves and a zipper. My car said it was 117 degrees (I thought Subarus were practical, but mine’s got a dramatic streak. “Check your engine!!!! I mean, gas cap. Check that gas cap for me, honey.”) and my phone keeps making a noise I’ve never heard out of it. It’s an alert. “Yes,” I say to the phone. “I am alert.” “No,” the phone says. “You are in a wrong and bad place. A place not meant for humans. You need 8 liters of water now. Your duodenum has turned to dust.”

When I worked as a waitress, if somebody seemed a little stressed, I complimented them.

Things my baristas have liked lately:

1. This dress

2. My glasses (two different pairs, three times each)

3. My boots

4. My shoes

5. My hair

6. My notebook

7. My “vibes”

And see, here’s where I part ways. My vibes are ass right now. You and I both know they are, I mean, how are your vibes? Ass, I imagine. We’ve all got ass for vibes right now. The vibes are worse even because you have no excuse: everywhere you turn, there are endless offers to help with your vibes. You can go to therapy with an app on your phone. There may or may not even be other people in that transaction. Could just be you and your vibes. Blow into a fancy kazoo and diagnose your mineral deficiencies, because those are definitely affecting your vibes. This raccoon will tell you which ones to take.

1. L-Theanine

2. St. John’s Wort (this one makes you a Medieval monk of serenity)

3. Ashwaganda (Say, do you happen to have that Richard and Linda Thompson record? No, no. Okay. Yeah, the Jerry Garcia Band is fine, for a change. Thanks.)

4. Which Magnesium? How much D3?

5. Do you drink this or pour it on something?

6. Well, yes, I used to have a skin care routine. I still do, but it’s this: sometimes I remember I have skin, and in those moments I put something on it, depending on the time of day and the conditions at my geographic location.

7. I’m sorry, what exactly did you say this coffee is made from?

Fungus coffee isn’t doing a thing to the news, though. You can put the phone down—oh, wait, you can’t. But we have this device so that you can keep holding it but it won’t do a damn thing. Isn’t that great? Think about the vibes.

I’m too hot to fix my vibes. The rabbits aren’t even running from me this morning, the unlucky little fuzzballs. There’s four of them. How many feet? Do you count the front ones, or are they hands? Rabbit hands. It doesn’t matter. Superstitions have been cancelled. We’re in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Right? Did we check the math? I think maybe we need to check the math. Is it… ten years from now? Was it during the potato famine, and I missed it? I want to let the sunshine in, but the heat index is melting the buttons on my shirt. I am uncomfortable with everything. This is the dawning of the age of agribusiness. Age of an inequity, um. An age of Aquafina. I’m not hydrated, and I can’t be expected to do anything right now.

Before potato plants, before UFOs, before the Girl Scouts of America, before Brook Farm, before, before, before the Trail of Tears. Before Bacon’s Rebellion. It was so far that on the way I had to break my cardinal travel rule and get gasoline in New Jersey. Weird as always. We listened to the historian tell us to replace the word “Witch” with something else. He said “terrorist.” I said, “Immigrant.” Hawthorne huddled in the Custom-House (there it is, real as a rabbit or a bear) and he said “artist.” He said “woman,” and he said “American.” He said, all of these things really happened. Here, take this rose, reader of the future. Remember? The roses by the prison door. The prison is an office building now. But there are rose bushes! Reader, see. I hold the flower out to you.

Hawthorne was a modern man, looking back at ancestors farther behind him than he is behind us. They started it. Except they didn’t. They brought behavior they did not mean to bring, and even they knew it was out of hand. But how to stop it? You can’t stop it. They said to one another, we have to come together. We have about a hundred people in jail waiting to die. Are we just going to kill everybody in the colony? What are we doing? Look, pretty soon we’ll all have lightning rods and telephones. We’re too smart for this. Except for those people over there. They are idiots. Their vibes are ass.

1. No witches were burned in Salem.

2. No witches were hanged in Salem, either, but some human beings were.

3. All the menace went down in Salem village, which is now a town menacingly named Danvers. Like danger. Salem sounds like spices and silk and menthol cigarettes. Salem smells like weed and mint and black pepper, and the vibes are Stevie Nicks and the Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

4. For all the gloom, there is so much ice cream.

5. Not all the accused were women. Giles Corey was stoned to death, and may have inspired that story we read in eighth grade that gave us nightmares.

6. People be peopling. Puritans be peopling.

7. Y’all, they reversed everything, all of it, within a few years. They knew they broken the community, possibly over a teenaged girl’s seizure.

Except it started before her seizure. They were Puritans, not Unfrozen Cave Men. But they were afraid. Afraid of not being Visible Saints. Afraid of being killed by the natives they knew they were displacing. Afraid their crops would fail and they might starve to death while their neighbors blamed their starvation on character flaws, a lack of work ethic, and an inability to pull themselves up by their shoe buckles. They were afraid of wild animals, and the sea. They were afraid of what was happening in England, afraid they’d have to go back and also that they might never go back. They were afraid their project would fail, and they would be a by-word throughout the world, evidence in an argument against the power of their God, the one they so wanted to glorify, the one they feared.

They feared what they did not understand. They feared people outside their community. They feared, believe it or not, looking stupid.

All of that fear wrapped up and baked in a cake in fire ashes generated a smoke thick enough to blind all of them to any kind of curiosity. They barreled through arrests and trials, and they accepted “spectral evidence,” Fox News, and the ramblings of embattled but powerful families at odds with one another. They coveted land deals. They saw disabilities as the devil’s handiwork, and they made lists of people. They decided the value of lives they in theory believed their God had created. They didn’t wonder why he made difference. Generations later, they’d refuse the lightning rods Benjamin Franklin told them to plant. “If God wants to burn my house down, it is a sin to interfere.” “I sent three boats,” Franklin roared at them.

Everywhere we went, people wanted us to meet their families. They told us which shops to go to, what time to visit places, and once they knew we had gone to Danvers, not just the souvenir shops on the waterfront, they’d tell us everything. “No doughnuts today; my brother had dialysis. Come back tomorrow for doughnuts. But we have danishes…” “My daughter works at the Visitor Center…” “Who is your relative? Oh, the Mariner!”

William Cash, my ancient ancestor, departed the earthly plane two years before the trials. Every Cash in the United States has a connection to him, even Johnny and W.J. William the Mariner was the first, but he set up his nephew in coastal Maryland, and that’s our direct line. Not a Puritan himself, he made his way in the world by sailing the trade routes. Maybe his wider view of the world would have set him outside the community-destroying mania of the spring of 1692. I can console myself with that interpretation, I think, as I take unsteady pictures of the recent monument erected where he may or may not be buried. Between 2019 and 2022, like many people, I lost what seemed like an avalanche of important people. I looked at a Facebook memory last week (or month) and all seven commenters are now deceased. What is the point of posting a devastating portrait of Carole Lombard when I know Lazaro will not see it? When I wake up at 3 AM, I expect to see a message from Falesha, who would have so many things to say about last Saturday. And the one before. And she’d have things to say about Sunday morning, and she would have loved to hear about William the Mariner Cash. I don’t know if she ever made it to Salem, Massachusetts, but I expect it would have resolved a lot of questions in her mind, as it did for me. Some questions I brought with me and some that came up. (The medium had red lipstick and nails, and she had wild old lady hair. “There’s a man,” she said. Huh, she laughed to herself. “He says, I don’t know why you are at a medium when you know you can talk to me any time. I am always there.”)

I’d say, well, that could be true for anyone. But it was the little lift of the shoulder. Bear with me.

Part Three: Betrayed By the Therapy Dog

What seems like a million years ago but was between getting gas in New Jersey and the neighbors’ bear executing a perfect flip turn, I went to see a school functioning the way I always imagined an ideal school would function. The founder and I talked all day, and I spent time with the students. I hope she’ll expand this model, I told her. Start later in the morning. Spend one day a week on a field trip or project. Since many of the students have anxiety-related issues, they even had a therapy dog, a polar bear (with me) cub-sized Golden Retriever who glued himself to me the entire time I was in the building. If I sat down, he would put his paw on my foot and then drape himself across me like a living weighted blanket. “Oh, he likes you!” one of the teachers gleefully announced. At the end of the day, this gorgeous beast planted his noggin on my knee and stared up balefully into my eyes. They director sighed. “I feel like I should tell you,” she said, “he’s trained to detect high levels of Cortisol. He really can smell fear.” The dog’s eyes rolled her way, then back to me, then back to her, his shaggy skull rooted to my patella. “Look, I got her,” he’s trying to say with every shining muscle, “but she’s far gone.” If I never hear from them again, bear in mind, I’m blaming the dog.

Do you remember that one bear on the security camera, the one playing the piano? You can Google it. That’s him. That’s THE bear in mind for me. That’s the bear with me: no idea what he’s doing, rolling on vibes alone. All hope and claws out there, trespassing, taking on an artistic endeavor far beyond his reach. And killing it.