A few days before Christmas, my husband and I packed our kids into my minivan for the annual pilgrimage to Cleveland, Ohio. For the thirteenth time, he and I (and now our three offspring) were making the journey home to the city we’d grown up in and where our parents still lived. The kids were thrilled; they’re the only children on earth who grew up believing Cleveland was the greatest city in the world, a Shangri-La of Malley’s ice cream and Sokolowski’s pierogi and every imaginable West Side Market delight, to say nothing of the promise of late nights, Christmas presents, and snow.

The drive was nearly eight hours, but they’d trained for it their entire lives; at ages ten, seven, and four, they were pros. Strapped into their various restraints as my husband queued up a playlist on his phone, the children’s moods were high. Mine was in the toilet.

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Three weeks earlier, my husband had informed me that he was moving out. What I had seen as the ordinary dissatisfactions of a marriage that included workaholic dad, creatively frustrated stay-at-home mom, and three young kids with big personalities was, in his opinion, proof that we were not happy and never had been. To say that I was blindsided by this announcement would be an understatement; if he’d made it in Sanskrit, it would have made more sense to me.

I asked the most obvious question first: Is there someone else? Is it that student of yours? Not because I’d ever suspected he would cheat, but because that’s what the people on TV always ask when their spouse announces they’re leaving. Also, I’d soon discover it’s what everybody asks you when you tell them your husband is leaving. Of course not, he said — even seemed offended — then proceeded to list his grievances. I was always annoyed with him; my whole life revolved around the kids; we lacked emotional closeness. Privately, I wondered whether he’d ever had a conversation with another married parent.

My response was to insist on therapy; I wasn’t going down without a fight. We assembled a veritable team of professionals — a his-mine-and-ours of therapists — and a standing schedule of coffee dates where I’d grovel for our future together. He wouldn’t come out and say he wanted a divorce, and I fixated on this spark of hope. I took it as tacit acknowledgement that he had doubts, that maybe he still loved me enough to want to try and build something better from this wreck.

It wasn’t.

We’d briefly considered telling the kids about the separation right away because the reality of living together in one house with this information roiling between us, while acting like everything was fine, felt a lot like I’d imagine shelling pistachios feels after someone has pulled out all your fingernails with pliers.

But one night our youngest demanded we both put him to bed – maybe he felt the strangeness permeating our household – and sitting in the darkness looking down at our kid, imagining the great everlasting crack we were about to cleave through his world, we chickened out. We decided we would wait until after New Year’s. My husband helpfully (and with suspicious speed) devised a schedule for us to split time with the kids so we didn’t have to be in the house together. For the first time, he was getting home early enough to feed them and handle bedtime three or four nights a week... and my only job was to gtfo.

I moved through December in a fog of terror, grief, and shame, unable to eat, sleeping twelve hours a night, my brain spiraling perpetually around the central question of my life: how to save my marriage. While he had the kids, I would go sit in a coffee shop pounding out analyses and strategies and pleas to the universe (or my husband) on my laptop — over our ten-month separation, I wrote two hundred thousand words about my marriage — or I’d go to an AA meeting (I’d been sober almost 25 years) and cry.

Three weeks of this routine had already taken its toll. I’d lost ten pounds; I routinely burst into tears in the checkout line at Whole Foods; and midway through wrapping the Christmas presents, I disintegrated into something like a panic attack writing out a gift tag from “Mom & Dad,” wondering if this would be the last year I ever wrote those words. (It was.) But this? Driving to Cleveland with my family, performing the joy of the holiday season for three small people who didn’t know what was happening, and a legion of relatives who did? This felt like it might actually kill me.

While my kids pawed through their backpacks to eat their best snacks first, and my husband drove, I defaulted to the worst possible pastime: staring out the window, thinking. The fantasy I nurtured constantly was that if I could figure out how to change, my husband would stay. On my most hopeful days, I imagined we might come through this separation with a better, stronger marriage. Maybe I’d even get him to acknowledge there were areas where he could improve! But one of the cryptic, crazy-making things he would say over those first few weeks was that I didn’t have all the information. There were things I didn’t know and that he wasn’t ready to tell me, but when I heard them, I might realize I didn’t want to stay married either.

The most important thing I didn’t know, staring out at the slushy highway, was that my marriage was already over. Though many excruciating revelations would emerge over the months to come, it would be nearly a year before he finally gave me an honest answer to the question I’d asked, the night he said he was leaving. Of course there was somebody else. Of course it was exactly the student and protégée he so admired. Of course he was not going to walk away from a shiny new life with someone who saw him as a brilliant hero, to slog through the mire of seventeen years’ worth of accumulated baggage with someone who’d seen him at his worst. I didn’t know yet how effortlessly he could lie to my face, or the lengths he would go to in the hope that I would be the one to lose patience, cry uncle, and call it quits, all to spare him from having to be the bad guy.

All I knew that morning was that I couldn’t imagine a life without him. He was my best friend, the love of my life, the person who made me feel complete and at home. Our kids needed us to stay together. I needed it, too. Watching the world fly by outside my window, choking back the acid that had burned my throat since the night he spoke those words, I truly did not believe I could survive losing him.

He reached out to skip a song on his playlist. I watched him press the button on the dashboard, then pop his thumb into his mouth and begin gnawing at it while he stared out at the road. After a few seconds, he peeled a slim crescent of fingernail off with his teeth, then plucked the sliver between two fingers and held it out to examine, turning it side to side. I stared at it too from the passenger seat, mesmerized. Then he took the sliver and began using its pointy tip to pick something from between his teeth, still gripping the wheel with his other hand, eyes back on the road. He dragged the little crescent of nail up and down between each tooth and when he was finished, he flicked it with his thumb and middle finger; I watched it arc through the air between us and fall to the floor.

The voice that spoke to me in that moment was so clear it might have been sitting right behind me, except it wasn’t anyone else’s voice; it was my own. Seriously?! that voice exclaimed. This is the guy you’re gonna die without? The guy your entire world and happiness revolve around? This fucking guy?! I blinked. Closed my mouth. Turned back to the window.

Over the course of our separation, every single fear I had about my marriage and my future came true. I still feel so sad for that version of myself: for everything she had yet to go through, all the ways she believed she had failed. But another thing I didn’t know then was that losing him was a step toward becoming the version of myself I longed to be. Maybe it was that future me, the one who knew how it would all turn out, who spoke to still-married me from the great unknown and gave her a glimpse of the strength she didn’t yet know she had. Because for a brief moment as we hurtled toward our final family Christmas together, I saw it: I was going to be just fine.

Victoria Crane has a master’s in creative writing from Hollins University, and her short fiction has been recognized by Glimmer Train, The Masters Review, and New Millennium Writings, among others. Most recently, a story of hers appeared in Tulip Tree Publishing’s Stories That Need To Be Told anthology, and another is set to appear in the spring issue of Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose. She’s a Cleveland native now living in Charlottesville, VA with her three mostly-grown kids and an ultimate mastiff named Roxanne.

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My mother was sick from the time I was 4. Whenever she had “a bad turn,” I was sent to my room or to my grandmother.

The year I was 8, my father, who was a doctor, moved us to a house in the country outside our small town “to start over without nosy neighbors.” For the first time, I heard the word whiskey.

After we moved, Mother could no longer get in and out of her regular bed, so my father got one that raised and lowered with a crank. She had a little rolling table for her phone, mirror, pills. A nurse came twice a week to bathe her. Grandmother moved in with us. I asked her what Mother was sick with.

“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” she said.

Every morning before school, I went to Mother’s room. The small, sharp faces of her dogs poked out of the covers, their teeth bared. I kissed her cheek. Her breath smelled like nail polish.

In the afternoon, Grandmother said, “Go in, tell her about your day.”

Usually, Mother didn’t say anything. Sometimes she didn’t even open her eyes. Sometimes she’d look at me, and I could tell she was mad. Then she’d start to cry, and I didn’t know what I’d done.

One afternoon I found her actually standing by the bed in her nightgown. “No one else is home,” she said. “We’re going to have some fun.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Go wait for me in my car.” She had a big old Oldsmobile. She hadn’t driven it in a year. “Go on!” she hissed. “Wait there for me.”

A few moments later, she slid behind the wheel. Her hands were shaking, but she’d combed her hair and put on lipstick. It made a red slash across her face. One of Daddy’s coats hid her nightgown.

“Now we’re cooking with gas!” she said, and we were out of the driveway, turning onto a dirt-and-gravel road.

She stomped on the gas pedal. The tires spun. Gravel spat and clanked. We were flying! From side to side, we whipped like a snake. I hung on to the armrest.

“Laugh!” she yelled. “Why aren’t you laughing?”

I was pressed against the seat, digging my toes into the floor. I couldn’t catch my breath. I laughed. But we were going like the wind.

“What if a car comes?” I shouted.

Mother slammed on the brakes. My head cracked against the door. All the way around we whirled, till we were facing the way we’d come.

“Bootlegger’s trick! The revenuers’ll catch you if you don’t watch out!” She hit the gas again, and off we roared.

“Laugh, dammit!”

“I bumped my head,” I said. It felt like a big bump.

“You’ll get well before you get married! Laugh or I’ll put you out on the road!”

Thump! went something.

“That wasn’t me,” I said.

We skidded to a stop.

“Jesus. I think I hit a chicken. Hop out and look.”

I sat frozen.

“What is the matter with you?”

I got out. I thought for sure she was going to drive away and leave me.

Behind us, in the middle of the road, was a rag.

“Go get that chicken,” she said.

I saw the feathers.

“Oh, you hopeless twerp! I’m in my goddamn nightgown. I can’t get out.”

Wind ruffled the feathers. But the thing under the feathers was still. Please, I prayed. Please, God, make the chicken hop up and run away. I could smell it: blood and whatever chickens squirt out their bottoms. I’d never been this close to something dead that wasn’t food.

Mother backed the car up and got out. She pulled Daddy’s big coat tight around her. She didn’t touch the chicken. Instead, she reached into the car to her purse and handed me a bill. Five dollars!

“Take this to that house,” she said, pointing.

Down a little weedy driveway stood an old building.

“Who lives there?”

“The person whose chicken I ran over.”

She bent down, picked up the chicken, pushed it into my free hand. The feathers were warm and sticky with blood. I tried to jerk away, but she held me tight.

“Take it!”

I held the chicken in one hand, the money in the other, trying not to throw up. For the first time in my life, I felt like two people. I could see myself. And I could see the me Mother was looking at.

“I want you to go to that house. Take the hen and the money. Give them to the woman.” I watched her red lips form the words.

“What woman?” I asked.

“The woman on the porch. Tell her we’re sorry we killed her chicken.” She shook me. “Wake up! I’m teaching you the responsible thing to do. I’ll be watching! So don’t you dare forget the money!”

I remember the woman taking the chicken. And the five dollars. I don’t remember what I said or what she said. Maybe we didn’t say anything.

I ran back to the car, got in.

Squeezed my eyes shut. Squeezed my whole self tight as I could, till there was nothing left outside.

Sallie Reynolds is a near-nonagenarian who has published here and there for many years. Some of Reynolds' recent work has appeared in Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Oldster, and elsewhere.

This essay was guest edited by Erica Youngren.

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The book wasn’t mine. This feels important to establish right away. Colloquial Serbian: The Complete Course for Beginners sat in my tote bag from Book Culture, wrapped with a note that said, “Hold for George,” secured by a rubber band. George had paid $54.95 in cash. I know this because the receipt was tucked inside the front cover like a bookmark to someone else’s life.

I don’t know how it ended up in my bag. I’d bought three books with my own money that day: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, The Descent of Alette, and a bright turquoise book called Born to Slow Horses. Books I chose. Books that belonged to me. But here was George’s Serbian textbook, and here I was at 2 AM, eating Organic Trek Mix Simply Cashew Almond and Cranberry (14 ounces, 397 grams, USDA Organic, Kosher), drinking Sparkling Lime Spring Water (sodium-free, 33.8 ounces), and opening to page one.

Maybe it was the Gertrude Stein biography I’d been reading earlier that week. She’d written, “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.” She hated nouns. Called them unnecessary. Said they were names that got in the way of seeing.

Chapter 1: Upoznavanje (The Meeting)

The first thing Serbian teaches you is the verb “biti” – to be. Before hello, before thank you, before “Where’s the bathroom?” you learn existence itself. Ja sam – “I am.” Ti si – “You are.” The book warns that Serbian grammar “may appear complicated at first, as it contains so much new to the English speaker.”

I thought about George, whoever George was. Did George know their book was missing? Were they somewhere conjugating existence in the wrong language? I am lost. You are learning. We are strangers.

Gertrude Stein would have loved Serbian’s approach to questions. In Serbian, you can make any statement a question just by your intonation. No question mark needed in speech. “What is your name” becomes “What is your name” becomes “What is your name,” each rising inflection creating new uncertainty. My computer’s grammar check threw a fit, green squiggles everywhere, but Stein knew: punctuation is just another form of possession.

Chapter 2: The Traveler

By 3 AM, I’d learned that Serbian has three genders for nouns (masculine, feminine, neuter), seven cases, and two aspects for every verb. Everything you say must agree with everything else, gender matching number matching case. A linguistic democracy where every word votes.

The textbook presented a dialogue: Tanja and Ljiljana meet on a Belgrade street. Fill in the blanks. Make meaning from fragments.

I wrote:

“Mislim da ste umorni” – “I think you are tired.” “Ja sam umoran” – “I am tired.”

Was George tired? Was I? In Serbian, exhaustion requires gender agreement. A tired woman is umorna, a tired man umoran. Even our fatigue must declare itself.

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Chapter 3: Possession and Its Discontents

Here’s what I learned about Serbian possessives: they’re everywhere. The language has possessive adjectives, possessive pronouns, and a whole case, the genitive, dedicated to showing ownership. Čija je ova knjiga? – Whose book is this?

George’s book. But I was the one reading it at 4 AM, wasn’t I? Possession, Stein might say, is just another noun pretending to be important.

The book explained that certain countries in Serbian aren’t nouns at all, they’re adjectives. England is Engleska, literally “the English land.” America is Amerika, but Americans are Amerikanci. We are not our countries; we are descriptors of place. I liked this. It felt honest.

Chapter 4: The Double Negative

“Double negatives in Serbian do NOT make the sentence positive,” the textbook announced with an exclamation point. “On the contrary!”

Nikad ništa – never nothing – means absolutely nothing, emphatically nothing, nothing with conviction. In Serbian, you can pile negation upon negation: Nikad nikome ništa nisam rekao – I never said nothing to nobody. Each negative reinforces the void.

I thought about all the things I wasn’t saying. I wasn’t calling Book Culture to report the mistake. I wasn’t trying to find George. I wasn’t not learning Serbian at 5 AM, my mouth full of cranberries and contradictions.

Chapter 5: Aspect and Time

Serbian verbs come in pairs: imperfective and perfective. Every action exists in two states, ongoing and complete. Čitati (to read, continuously) and pročitati (to read completely, to finish reading).

Was I čitam-ing George’s book or pročitam-ing it? The distinction mattered. One suggested process, the other completion. One left room for return, the other closed the door.

The book offered practice: “Ben asks Dejan, ‘Are you interested in traveling through Serbia?’”

Was I? I’d never thought about Serbia before finding this book. Now I was learning that parks are considered closed spaces (use u) while airports are open spaces (use na). Central Park, enclosed by buildings but open to the sky, which preposition would capture that contradiction?

Chapter 6: The Locative Case

“The locative case MUST be used to describe static location,” commanded page 56. Static. Unmoving. Fixed in place.

But nothing felt static at 6 AM. I was in my apartment but traveling through someone else’s textbook. George was absent but present.

Gde si? – Where are you? Ovde sam – I am here.

But where was here when you were reading someone else’s book in a language you’d never needed before this exact moment?

Chapter 7: Cardinal Numbers and Counting

All compound numbers ending in 2, 3, and 4 (22, 23, 24, 92, 104, etc.) are followed by the genitive singular. Another rule. Another exception. Serbian making poetry out of mathematics.

I counted: One book that wasn’t mine. Two languages in my head. Three genders to memorize. Four cases learned so far. Five hours without sleep.

Jedan, dva, tri, četiri, pet.

Stein wrote: “There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistence.”

Chapter 8: In the Restaurant

Chapter 8 taught restaurant vocabulary: orah (walnut), prženi sir (fried cheese), punjene paprike (stuffed peppers). A feast of words I’d never use. When would I need to order moray eel (murina) in Serbian? When would I discuss vinegar (sirće) with a Belgrade waiter?

But I learned them anyway. Kruška (pear). Kajsija (apricot). Dinja (melon). Each word a small possession, a thing I owned that belonged to George.

Chapter 9: Future Tense

“To learn the future tense is easy,” the book promised. “You only need to learn a new auxiliary: to want.”

Hoću da učim – I want to learn. Hoćeš da putuješ – You want to travel. Hoće da razume – He/she wants to understand.

The future is just want plus verb. Desire plus action. Need plus possibility.

But what if what you want doesn’t happen? I wanted to understand why I kept reading. I wanted to know who George was. I wanted Serbian to reveal something essential about language, about ownership, about the 6 AM light now creeping through my window.

Hoću da znam – I want to know. Neću da vratim – I don’t want to return (the book).

Chapter 10: Kinship Terms

By Chapter 10, I was learning family relationships: deda (grandfather), baka (grandmother), ujak (maternal uncle), stric (paternal uncle). Serbian has different words for aunts and uncles depending on which side of the family they’re from. Precision in kinship. Clarity in blood.

But I had no Serbian family. No tetka or ujna waiting in Belgrade. Just George’s book and my insomnia and Gertrude Stein whispering that names don’t matter, that nouns are just there, that we become George only when someone calls us George as we depart the womb.

Chapter 11: Village Life

The vocabulary turned pastoral: magarac (donkey), tele (calf), koza (goat), vo (ox), tigar (tiger).

Wait. Tiger?

I flipped back, sure I’d misread. But there it was among the farm animals: tigar. What Serbian village needed the word for tiger? What textbook logic placed predators among livestock?

This was the moment I understood something essential: language wasn’t logical. It was human. Messy, contradictory, inclusive of possibilities that might never arise. We learn words for things we’ll never see, prepare for conversations we’ll never have.

Chapter 12: Discoveries

I never finished the textbook. Around Chapter 15, exhaustion won. I closed Colloquial Serbian with its promises of fluency, its assumption that George would return, its faith in linear progress through grammar.

But here’s what I learned:

I learned that possession is complicated. That a book can belong to George and exist in my apartment. That knowledge can be stolen accidentally, absorbed without permission, integrated without intent.

I learned that Gertrude Stein was wrong about nouns. They aren’t unnecessary, they’re insufficient. Every Serbian noun demands agreement, context, relationship. Nothing exists alone. Knjiga (book) is feminine, so its adjectives must be too. Lepa knjiga – beautiful book. Njegova knjiga – his book. Even objects have gender, even possession has grammar.

I learned that languages encode different anxieties. English worries about time (twelve tenses!). Serbian worries about completion. Did you finish? Will you finish? Can anything ever be finished?

I learned that somewhere in New York, George might be wondering about their book. Or maybe George had forgotten, moved on, bought another copy. Maybe George was never going to learn Serbian anyway. Maybe the book was an impulse purchase, a dream deferred, a gift for someone else named George.

Epilogue: The Subjunctive Mood

There’s no subjunctive mood in Serbian, but there is a conditional: the bih and bi of the hypothetical, the grammar of “If I were George” or “Had I known.” I never reached it. I quit the textbook before it taught me how.

But here, in English, I can wonder:

If I were the kind of person who returned things to bookstores. If George were still waiting. If language were truly about communication instead of collection. If Gertrude Stein had learned Serbian, would she have changed her mind about nouns?

The book still sits on my shelf. Sometimes I see it there, spine among my legitimate purchases, and feel a pang of something: guilt? curiosity? linguistic longing?

Knjiga koja nije moja – The book that isn’t mine. Jezik koji učim – The language I’m learning. Čovek koga ne poznajem – The person I don’t know.

In Serbian, relative clauses require case agreement. Even our uncertainties must follow rules. Even our questions must declare their relationships to the world.

But I keep the book. Because possession, like language, is ultimately about use, not ownership. Because George’s loss became my gain in ways that no grammar can capture. Because at 2 AM, with organic trail mix and sparkling water, I needed to learn something new about existence, and Serbian was there, waiting in someone else’s bag.

Hvala, George.

Thank you, George.

Whoever you are. Wherever you’re not learning Serbian. Whatever language you’re discovering instead.

Tamara MC is an award-winning memoirist, essayist, and poet with a PhD in applied linguistics. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Salon, The Independent, the BBC, and Ms. Magazine, among others. In 2026, she received a Bronze Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalist of the Year. She writes at the intersection of language, memory, and survival, and she advocates for girls and women to live free from gender-based violence. She can be found at www.tamaramc.com.

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I’ve made a career of poking logical holes in things: bugs in computer programs, gaps in software requirements, areas for improvement in a user interface. I like to say that my science education helped. College science courses taught me how to do controlled tests to evaluate hypotheses — that is, how to objectively determine whether something is true or false. You vary the experiment conditions, one factor at a time, to see if A and B really do necessarily lead to C. Rather than trusting a single observation, you gather data to see what’s really going on under the surface.

I apply this framework in my tech job and because my brain never really turns off, I approach nearly everything in life with a level of skeptical questioning. This annoys my husband when he tries to make conversation about anything with a remotely scientific bent, but when used appropriately, skepticism is a useful skill to have. Don’t trust what people are selling you without doing a little digging for independent verification, especially in a world that’s rife with scammers.

I thought it was unlikely for a youngish adult who has all her mental faculties and the benefits of automated spam filters to fall prey to a scammer. My Google phone and email are great about routing suspicious messages to spam folders. My job makes me take phishing awareness training at least once a year, and I never get fooled by their orchestrated phishing test emails. I’m in the habit of never answering calls from unknown numbers. But one day I saw the words “Marion County Sheriff’s Department” on the live transcript of an incoming call. I picked up the phone.

“Hello ma’am,” the man said, then stated my correct full name and address. “I’m calling because our records show you failed to appear for jury duty.”

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My internal alarm system went off; not alerting me to the possibility of a scam, but stoking the adrenaline that comes when I think I’ve done something wrong. Whenever a problem occurs in my world (an incident at work, my son breaking a rule at school), these adrenaline surges push me instantly toward the conclusion that I am the cause of it and that I need to make amends. It’s part of being a high achiever who’s terribly afraid of being less than perfect. This Honor Student would certainly never ignore a jury summons. In fact, I’d received my first one ever about six months previously and was excited to get a peek at the judicial process. I want nothing more than to be a good citizen: a neutral, objective, rational tool of justice.

But I didn’t get officially called up the first time, and I never saw a second summons come to my house. Could it have gotten lost in the mail? I suggested this desperately, to the caller from the sheriff’s office. He could hear the Pollyanna panic in my voice.

“Oh yeah, yeah, we’ve heard about that happening, it’s not uncommon. Don’t worry about that. However, ma’am, you do owe a fine of two thousand dollars. You need to come and pay it in person.”

He gave me the address of the local county courthouse, as well as a docket number for my case.

Crap! I thought. That large sum of money set my heart to racing. Ignorance is no excuse when it comes to the law, but maybe when I get to the courthouse I can explain what happened.

***

I’m glad to pay restitution when I’m truly in the wrong. I only argued with the law once when I got a sixty-dollar ticket for failing to feed an unseen parking meter at a grocery store that I went inside for ten minutes, tops. It was the only time I’d been cited for anything car-related. I’ve always been a safe and law-abiding driver, the kind who occasionally gets dirty looks and middle fingers for going five above the speed limit. I felt it unfair that the parking cops had chosen me when I’d spend a lifetime being compliant. So, yes, I asked for an exception and was granted a reduced fine.

However, this must have been serious if the sheriff’s department was calling me directly. I couldn’t slow my thumping heart enough to hear the skeptical questions that should have been forming in the higher-functioning parts of my brain. How likely is it that the postal service lost an official jury summons in the two miles between the county courthouse and my mailbox? Why didn’t they send a second one or call me when they hadn’t heard from me? Isn’t there a website I could use to verify the docket number the caller gave me? I had written that number on a slip of paper and figured I would get it all straightened out during my lunch hour. I was working from home.

“Actually, we need you to come to the courthouse immediately, ma’am. There is a warrant out for your arrest. We need you to stay on the line so we can verify that you’re getting into your vehicle and heading to that address.”

The implication was that an officer might show up at my door any minute with handcuffs or pull me over and arrest me if I decided to wait and drive myself freely later that day.

My inner Pollyanna shouted at me. No time for questions! I sent a quick message to the co-worker I was chatting with, telling her (truthfully, I hoped) that I’d be back soon, and I assured Sheriff Guy that I was heading to my car. Sheriff Guy No. 1 brought Sheriff Guy No. 2 onto the call, because apparently my case was so severe that they needed backup.

“Hello, ma’am,” said Sheriff Guy No. 2. I noticed that he had a light Southern accent like the first guy, and both men called me “ma’am” quite a lot. I’m in my forties and I have been referred to as “ma’am,” but not very frequently because I do not live in the South. I started to think it strange that two Oregon sheriff’s deputies, both working the same case, would be from the South. But they were polite, and I’m conditioned to respond in kind when people, especially men, make polite requests of me.

***

As I turned on my car’s engine, I started to ask some vague questions about the legitimacy of this process.

“Yes ma’am, don’t worry, we’ll walk you through everything. Just keep us on the line.”

Their patronizing tone felt like a withholding of information and my anxiety started to shift from I’m in trouble with the law to I might be dealing with criminals. Still, I knew where the courthouse was and I had my docket number and I figured I would just let the court clerk explain this whole thing and hopefully not get booked into a holding cell. I started driving and put the Sheriff Guys on Bluetooth.

Half a mile away from my house, they changed their story. “Ma’am, just so you know, this fine needs to be paid in cash. All you need to do is go to Walmart and start a wire transfer. We’ll give you the account number, are you ready?” There was a newly urgent tone to their voices.

My tide of adrenaline ebbed, freeing the skeptical part of my brain to do its work. I grew quiet and started asking myself questions. Most of them were obviously rhetorical. Why did they start reading off an account number when they know I’m driving? Does the sheriff’s department really send people to Walmart as if they have a brand partnership? Why are two deputies spending so much of their valuable time on me?

“Hello? Ma’am?”

I stopped answering them and pulled off the main road to park. Sheriff Guy No. 1 or No. 2 tried to tell me, slightly menacingly, that I’d better not hang up on them. I hung up. They called back and I declined it. No screening necessary.

Just to be absolutely sure, I continued in the direction of the courthouse, parked nearby, and fed the meter. I glanced around nervously, still wondering if there was a real deputy waiting to pounce on me. Part of me still thought I might have hung up the phone on a law enforcement officer, so I called the sheriff’s office directly. The receptionist said they would absolutely never do that to somebody who missed jury duty. She was kind, but sounded a bit incredulous when she explained that I would not get a warning phone call if I was about to be arrested.

Even after that reassurance, I couldn’t quite relax until it became clear that the scammers weren’t going to call me again and that a cop car wasn’t going to pull up next to me. No Sheriff Guys, real or otherwise, intercepted me as I walked to a restaurant near the courthouse. While I sat down to eat lunch, I thought about the experiment I had just been subjected to.

I was ashamed that I’d fallen for it. I watch John Oliver; I’m savvy, smart, and technologically literate; I don’t share fake news or AI slop on social media. Nevertheless, some calculations had told them that I, a mid-career homeowner with a moderate income, was likely to yield a payout if they used the right social engineering tactics and wielded the power of authority to tweak the knobs of my nervous system. They had operated with their own kind of science, analyzing reams of data that are available through public records and social networks, determining which characteristics make someone a good target.

It’s frightening how close they came to proving their hypothesis about me. I used to think that such scamming tactics were ridiculously transparent, but now I understand why they keep at it.

Kristen Martin is a systems analyst who likes to counterbalance the logical nature of her career with bouts of creative writing. She lives in Salem, Oregon, with her husband, son, and crazy pets. Find her reflections on life and parenthood at www.thisunquietmind.com.

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Previously on How I Learned

When I was kid, just six or seven, I used to work in my father’s pharmacy on Sunday afternoons. This arrangement only lasted a short time because my father’s pharmacy failed. Later he bought another pharmacy, and that one failed too. I believe he owned four pharmacies in all, each of which failed.

One of my jobs at my father’s pharmacy was to dust the empty prescription bottles. My father had hundreds and hundreds of such bottles, in various sizes and shapes, arranged in rows under the counter where he prepared prescriptions.

Another one of my jobs was counting pills for prescriptions. It was illegal for me to do this — you have to be a pharmacist to count pills — so I could only do it when my father and I were alone. Looking back, I see it as the pharmacy equivalent of sitting in my father’s lap and steering his car as he drove.

Pill counting required a special plastic pill-counting tray. The tray was blue and had an alley on one side into which you slid the counted pills. Since you couldn’t touch pills with your fingers, you glided them into the alley with an implement much like a butter knife. The alley had a clear plastic flap that closed over it. After counting the pills, you shut the flap and poured the pills into the appropriate bottle or vial. My father let me do the pouring, but I wasn’t allowed to type the label. That’s where he drew the line. You have to be a pharmacist to type the label.

My father’s pharmacy had a back room where he liked to sleep in the afternoon. Another one of my jobs was to wake him every half-hour and have him tell me to wake him in another half-hour. With the exception of these periodic attempts to wake my father, I wasn’t permitted in the back room.

But then one day while dusting empty prescription bottles, I said something to my father that compelled him to take me to the back room and shut the door behind us. I don’t remember what I said, but it must have been pretty interesting, because as soon as we got to the back room, he sat me on the cot and told me the craziest thing. He said that sometimes he and my mother want to be close, as close as they can be, so what happens is that he puts his penis inside her vagina, and then some stuff that isn’t pee comes out of his penis and goes into my mother, and somehow this stuff finds an egg and makes it into a baby.

My father asked me if I understood, and I said that I did, and then we went back to what we were doing before my father decided to tell me all this.

Naturally, I knew my father was lying. I may have been only six or seven, but I wasn’t so easily fooled. The question, though, was why my father had lied to me. Or more to the point, what his lie was meant to conceal.

Michael Barrish was a writer and a freelance web developer. He died in 2023 from pneumonia after being diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of early-onset dementia.

How I Learned periodically reprints select stories that appeared on Michael’s website, Oblivio, between 1999 and 2020. The about page read, “Etymology: Oblivio is Latin. Often translated as ‘forgetfulness,’ it suggests a profound lostness, something akin to the English word oblivion, but more oblivious.”

The entire Oblivio archive is available in book form on demand. Massive thanks to Mickle Maher and David Isaacson for preserving Michael’s work.

NOTE: The stories are reprinted here the way Michael wrote them, though source links may be added and some pieces may be slightly edited for clarity.

OPEN CALL FOR FEATURED ESSAYS

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Check out the Submission Guidelines and hit me with your best shot.

The other day, at midnight, I received a phone call from my mother; she’d been stopped by the police and told me to stay on the line in case something happened. I recorded my screen until the interaction was over. Thankfully, it was nothing. This week, while trying to resolve a conflict between two first-grade boys, one White, the other Black, I heard the white child call the mother of the other child a Nigger. Flabbergasted, I attempted to explain to him the meaning of the word Nigger, why it was hurtful and dehumanizing. He proceeded to use the word three more times after my explanation.

Some weeks before, while waiting on a friend in downtown Minneapolis, I saw a man and woman huddle into a corner to unwrap a small white stone, which they put into a glass pipe, heated up, and then smoked. I looked away as soon as they’d finished, feeling I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to; everyone else around moved as if this were a regular occurrence. That same day at around midnight on a bus, I sat in the center of a trinity; in front of me two men were arguing and behind me sat a man nodding with drool running down his face, struggling to keep his head upright. I witnessed one of the trinity flash a large combat knife to threaten the other. I feared for my life and very desperately wanted to run away but felt any movement from me would agitate him, so I sat still, my heart screaming as it attempted to escape my chest.

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On Monday, a second grader I work with called me a monkey because I’d done something to upset her. I don’t think she knew what that word did to me. Her intent was to hurt, but I don’t think it was to hurt in the way that I ended up feeling hurt. I didn’t know how to explain to her why you don’t call black people monkeys. A third-grade student of mine, upon seeing a picture of my mother, exploded into clamorous laughter, screaming, “Why are her lips so big!?” I acted unoffended and attempted to explain anti-blackness and society’s skewed beauty standards to him; my words fell to the ground, swatted by his laughter; I was very sad and ashamed. A little girl, upon finding out I was African, proceeded to tell me how her mother had taught her Africa is where poor people come from and that she was better than them because she was black and not African. I tried to add nuance to the perspective, but she didn’t seem interested in my words; I felt foolish.

Lately I’ve been angry, exhausted, and agitated. I didn’t realize this until my mother called me yesterday while I was at work; she was asking me to help her with something involving technology. I became irritated and impatient at her being unable to follow my directions after one explanation. I waited a few minutes, then I lied and said something urgent came up and I hung up due to frustration. I felt disappointed in myself soon after; I’m usually more patient than that. I called later to apologize to my mother; fortunately, she didn’t take my behavior personally. I took note of what I felt that led me to act the way I did and, later during the day, after work, sat and wrote the mess above. Putting these interactions on paper, I’m realizing that lately I’ve been sitting with a profound sense of humiliation about my identity. I have felt, and continue to feel, extraordinarily repressed and lacking in self-determination. To put it more bluntly, these days I’ve been made to feel like a Nigger.

Half a year ago I wrote a journal entry prompted by similar circumstances and emotions. I expressed in it how I felt like a Nigger because in many ways (as I’ve highlighted with the words above) this is all society had been telling me and continues to tell me. I don’t actually know the definition of the word Nigger; I doubt many of us truly know. Yet when I ruminate on my experiences as of late, and attempt to make vivid this feeling of ontological insignificance that I am faced with daily, Nigger is the only word that succinctly captures what I feel in my navigation of this society. I’ve found myself, for example, ruminating on the strangeness of this screen recording I now have of my mother; blue and red lights flashing in her face as she awaits the officer to return with her license. I have yet to go back and watch the video; there is an indescribable sense of humiliation at witnessing my mother in that position — helpless and at the mercy of someone she doesn’t know — that’s keeping me from doing so. I feel humiliation and rage at the fact that typically, it is my mother who tries to reassure me that I’m overreacting when I go on my tangents about my distrust of police officers. There’s a strangeness at experiencing my mother, of all people, feeling afraid enough to call me at midnight so I can be witness if anything tragic were to occur. I am disillusioned; my perception of reality feels tampered with; I never imagined to ever see my mother this vulnerable.

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It is strange to suddenly realize that she too is afraid and feels somewhere within herself this same sense that I do. This sense that my life is at the mercy of strangers who do not know me, and do not care to know me. It is demoralizing to come to this place of perceiving reality, only to be presented with an even more cruel realization that there is nothing profound in anything I’ve shared thus far. This is simply what it is to exist with black skin. To have happenings that would otherwise make for a well-written ending to a tragedy be our daily bread.

I’m noticing this disillusionment very often these days — this notion that reality isn’t what I imagined it to be. It is laughable in a way, how I am only now coming to these realizations about the world. I feel exposed, standing in front of reality in this way, because I don’t have anything to say. I am now seeing what many have known, and I don’t have an answer. I am only left to laugh at myself as I think back to moments when I’ve spoken with such passion about somehow bringing about change to the world. I feel a bit embarrassed by the fact that I still think about the world as though there is some ultimate answer that we, as humans, have not found. That if someone were to find this answer, the world would be a gentler place.

Confronted with this realization, I am left with the question: Where to now? A question — if I am being honest — I am not sure how to answer. I do suppose, however, if there is anything to be gained from this arrangement of words, it is the very rudimentary understanding that people, past and present, when faced with tragedy, have continued venturing on.

Heshima is a Zimbabwean-born artist currently based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work navigates the intersection of the African experience with Western culture and attempts to create meaning in the contradiction created as the two cultures converse with one another.

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More HOW I LEARNED:

Current location: In a big chair in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn

Eight-word memoir: Generally very Kermit-y both in voice and attitude

What's your favorite dad joke?

What kind of pants do ghost hunters wear? Just a paranormal jeans.

What is magic?

Everything quiet is magic. Iced tea in the sunlight. Biking on Governor's Island.

What’s your secret talent?

I make very good scrambled eggs, and I don’t want that to be a secret. Please tell everyone. The trick is that you separate the eggs and scramble just the whites slow and low until the curds and liquid separate and then come back together to look like a cloud or maybe grits. Then, you fold in the yolks and just give them a kiss of heat. So, you get these creamy, umami-forward scrambled eggs that are still cooked through all the way.

Who was your first crush?

There was a girl named Tessa in third grade. I made her cry when I told her I was going to grow up to be a werewolf and she was going to grow up to become a witch. She’s a somatic therapist now, so...

Who's your latest crush?

I showed my kids the Josie and the Pussycats movie. I think Tara Reid got a bad shake. She was delightful in that movie. Why did Natasha Lyonne’s partying get a pass but Tara Reid’s didn’t?

What question do you wish I'd ask you?

I wish you'd ask my top 100 dirty limericks I've ever written.1

Andy Ross is a humor writer and designer based in Brooklyn. He has performed with The Moth, written for The Onion, and contributed comedy scripts to variety shows around Chicago and New York. His long-running humor reading series Real Characters at McNally Jackson Books featured TV writers, storytellers, and comedians like Kate McKinnon, Rachel Dratch, Simon Rich, and Cole Escola. Andy is a former Art Director at Condé Nast and currently illustrates mystery book covers. You can see him host bingo in Bryant Park every summer.

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Previously on My Next Ghost

Everyone said the same thing: turn yourself in on Monday. It’s the best day. The magistrate is there. The judge is there. Things move faster. You’ll be released on your own recognizance. I listened. What they didn’t say: sometimes the magistrate decides to deny bail, and when that happens, it can take days before you see a bond hearing.

The sheriff who put the handcuffs on me looked stunned. He studied me like something in the paperwork didn’t quite match the person standing in front of him. A 6’7” clean-shaven white guy with no prior offenses who had just pulled up in a new BMW X5, apparently wasn’t what he expected that morning.

Then he did something that took me a long time to understand.

The magistrate had just informed him I was being held. Instead of quietly processing me into the general population, he leaned over to the county jail clerk and said I knew someone inside and should be placed in isolation.

I didn’t know anyone in the jail system. Period. It wasn’t true.

Eventually they gave me my first phone call.

Three minutes. That’s all you get.

Three minutes to call the person who might help get you out, three minutes to explain things to a lawyer, three minutes to tell the people you love you’re okay, three minutes to somehow tell your job that you won’t be coming in. Pick one.

Except you can’t. You don’t know a single number by heart anymore. And what they don’t tell you: they take everything. No phone. No paper. No electronics. Memory becomes the only tool you have. I sat there trying to force numbers out of my head like they were buried somewhere behind my eyes. You realize quickly how much of your life lives inside a device in your pocket.

I spent four days in isolation.

Twenty-three hours a day inside a cell by yourself. One hour in the day, though they don’t tell you when, they let you walk the bay. That hour had to cover everything: shower, phone calls, stretching your legs, reminding your body you still existed outside a concrete box.

They don’t tell you about the sounds you hear inside.

Someone screaming for twenty hours straight. I still don’t know how that’s physically possible. Another inmate banging on every surface of his cell like he was trying to break the building down with rhythm alone.

The guy who had my cell before me had apparently decided, during his hour out of isolation, to punch the television mounted on the lower floor. My next door neighbor filled me in on that detail. The only way I could see the TV was by squinting and leaning as far right as possible, trying to catch a glimpse through the three-inch-by-fifteen-inch metal-mesh window in the door.

And there are the conversations you overhear.

One voice calls down the row of cells.

“Did you say Paula? Paula that lives on the corner of Palm Street?”

A pause.

“Yeah, Paula that lives on the corner.”

“I know Paula. She watched my kids last month.”

The world outside suddenly feels very small.

After a while you stop trying to understand everything happening around you. The noise, the shouting, the stories passed from cell to cell. Your world shrinks to what you can see through that narrow strip of window and what arrives on the tray three times a day.

I had felt something similar before in military training. Basic training and officer training both have a way of masking time. Days stop feeling like days and start becoming routines. Wake up. Formation. Meal. Training. Meal. Training. Meal. Sleep. Repeat. You learn to measure progress by what comes next, not by what the clock says. Jail felt similar on the surface, but the difference mattered. In the military, there was a purpose attached to the structure. A mission. A graduation date. A reason you had agreed to be there.

In jail, the routine did not feel like discipline. It felt like suspension. Meals were the only reliable marker of time. And time was not moving you toward something. It was simply passing over you. Each tray was mostly the same: some bread, a piece of meat you vaguely recognized, a canned vegetable you wouldn’t serve to a beloved pet, and a plastic bag of juice or milk, depending on the day. No salt. No pepper. No seasoning. Just food that technically qualifies as food. But when you’re hungry, you eat it.

Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner.

Time isn’t measured in minutes or hours. It’s measured in meals.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky, mashed potatoes.

Not the instant kind that slides around like applesauce, pretending to be food. These had structure. Thick, creamy, but not perfectly smooth. Small chunks breaking through the mash like little reminders that this once lived in the ground.

They’d sit in your mouth longer than most jail food deserved. Not because you were savoring them exactly, but because swallowing meant the moment was over. And once the moment was over, the quiet sinking feeling in your stomach would return. So you held them there a second longer than necessary, trying to freeze time before the tray was empty again.

I had them twice.

Both times, I gave them five stars.

Was it the chef? Or was it the hunger? Hard to say. Or at least that’s the positive spin I’ve learned to put on a chaotic stretch of time. A way to help people laugh through the hard parts of the story. Not at me, but with me, at how quickly a life can turn sideways.

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The spork you ate with was issued to you. If you left it on the tray when you slid the meal slot closed, you didn’t get another one. It was yours for as long as you were there. Not to be lost. Not to be misplaced. Unless you planned on using your hands in its place. Small rules like that reminded you where you were. They were tiny, unbreakable anchors keeping you tethered to the reality of the cell.

I was there because of allegations tied to a marriage that had already collapsed in almost every way, except legally. The charges would eventually be dropped, but I didn’t know that when I turned myself in. I only knew what I had been told: show up on Monday, let the process work, trust the system.

That part matters because I had spent most of my life believing the system worked.

I grew up around the criminal justice system, but always from the visiting side of the glass. My sister and both of my brothers had criminal histories. As a teenager, I sat in visitation rooms and watched them navigate something I didn’t understand. In their cases, they had committed the crimes they were charged with, so from where I stood, the system appeared to be working as intended. Justice felt simple then. You did something, the system responded. That belief was easier to hold when I had never been the one in the cell.

My brother told me before I turned myself in, “Maybe it’ll teach you a lesson.”

I hated hearing that. But he was right, just not in the way he meant.

Somewhere between counting breakfast trays and guarding that plastic spork, I found out what “innocent until proven guilty” actually feels like. It feels like waiting. Waiting for the clock you can’t see. Waiting for the call you can’t make. Waiting for someone outside to remember your name.

It taught me that a system I believed was fair is much harder to trust once you’ve been the one in the cell.

Inside, the machinery is mostly invisible. You don’t see justice moving. You feel hunger. You feel the walls. You feel lonely. You feel the distance between who you are and what the system has decided to call you for the moment.

Inmate.

That word comes fast. Faster than answers. Faster than court. Faster than anyone explaining what happens next.

Four days. That’s all it took.

The sheriff didn’t have to invent a reason to keep me separate, but he did. As a 6’7” clean-shaven white guy with no prior offenses who had just pulled up in a new BMW X5, I was lucky.

The thing I remember most clearly is the mashed potatoes. In a place designed to strip away normal life, they were a fleeting taste of it.

Warm. Familiar. Temporary.

Sean Covington is a writer and cybersecurity professional based in Texas. A military veteran with a background in cyber operations, he now works in security engineering and writes personal narratives about memory, identity, and the moments when life abruptly shifts direction.

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Previously on How I Learned:

I know how to write about rain. I know how to write about fire. I can spin you a poem about how it smells at the end of the world. I can write five thousand words right now about deep secrets and dark notions, but I don’t know how to write about desire.

I was never meant to feel it.

In the church where I was a child, desire was not a thing allowed a girl. An appetite was only meant for men and for whores and I was groomed to be a virgin until someone walked me down an aisle. In that church, wanting could light a girl up like an emergency flare. That kind of attention is dangerous; the same kind of heat that got witches burned on pyres, so I learned to keep my head down and cool my heels in the ashes.

My mother was a nurse who believed in using the proper terms for body things. It wasn’t pee, it was urine. Not poop, but a bowel movement. A stomach, not a belly. A head, not a noggin. A mouth, not a trap. Rectum, not butthole. Penis and scrotum, not cock and balls. Genitals, not private parts. But then the wheels fell off her lexicon when she got to my girl-body bits. The whole of my genitals was vagina, said quickly and without eye contact. There was no discussion of clitoris, vulva or labia, no differentiation between inner and outer, between majora and minor, or even that I housed three holes between my legs.

These facts I learned later from textbooks and the Catholic school girls who worked at the Dairy Queen. I’m ashamed to say how old I was when I finally met my own cunt in a mirror.

I was never meant to wonder. Never meant to touch. Never meant to do more than lie pliant on my back and think of Jesus while a man pushed himself into me and then a baby pushed itself out. I was never meant to want.

So when puberty hit and my mother heard the squeaking springs as I rode my fist to oblivion in the dark of my twin bed, she had no language for the voltage that shot through me. All she could say when she opened my door and turned on the lights was that I should pray more. Should dress modestly. Should purify my thoughts. Should surrender all to Jesus.

And I did. And I did. And I did. All the time. But the public library had a romance section, and on Saturdays I’d hide in the stacks with a pile of smut in my lap, scanning the text for any mention of lips and memorizing the way the words fired a violet trail from the back of my throat to the cleft of my legs. Feeling the way my face would blaze when I took my favorite selection to the lending counter. My entire body a pyrotechnic emergency flare.

In previous lives, LaDonna Witmer was a newspaper journalist, advertising copywriter, brand voice expert, editorial director, public speaker, and poetry slammer. She now tends her dogs, dahlias, and daughter on a small quinta in rural Portugal while writing essays, poems, and memoir. LaDonna has work published or forthcoming in KHÔRA, Literary Mama, Zero Readers, and Take the Fruit: An Anthology of Religious Trauma. She is writing a book about fundamentalism and fire. You can find her on BlueSky and Instagram — @wordsbyladonna — and on Substack at The Long Scrawl.

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More Good Things:

I have to file tonight. That’s it. Last chance. It’s a gift to have been invited to contribute and the editor IS A SAINT. Today, she reminded me of Tom Hulce in his final scene of Amadeus, and she told me not to die. I heard her and loved the reference (the trailer alone is miraculous), but also I was like, wait is she expecting fucking Mozart?

I think I know why this assignment has been murder for me, despite it being a humor piece(!). But that is another essay (optimistic) for another time (optimistic), about knowing what kind of writer you are (derogatory).

ALL TO SAY: Jill Talbot, though. Jill Talbot has been key to my survival for keeping this damn thing pushing. Her piece “All Or Nothing, Self-Portrait at Twenty-Seven”* has been my inspiration.

It’s holding fast. It’s all keeping on.

xo Blaise

*You can also read it on Brevity.

Previously on How I Learned

If you’re alive long enough, memories become like a burlap bag of rocks you lug around, with some hunks of silver and gold occasionally glinting through the rubble. Over time, as the bag increases in weight, the fibers fray and give way and some rocks fall out, along with the occasional chunk of precious metal.

Case in point: My memory sucks so badly that I recently PM’ed a close friend from junior high, desperate for details about spending my 13th birthday at The Go-Go’s and A Flock Of Seagulls concert at the Boston Garden to write what could’ve been a moving essay about my budding adolescence, only for her to politely reply that she wasn’t invited.

What Belinda Carlisle or Charlotte Caffey wore onstage that night, the particulars of the setlist, or how the band sounded, are details that have long tumbled out of my burlap sack. I also don’t remember what I could’ve possibly said to my parents to convince them to buy me and a few of my friends tickets to this show. I clearly don’t recall who went with me, or what happened when we got there, but what did make an indelible impression on me is the rapturous joy I felt when watching the music I love so much performed live, because it’s a joy I pursue as often as humanly possible to this day.

When The Go-Go’s first got national attention in the very early ‘80s, they made jangly pop music that appealed to teen girls and young women without sanded edges and a lacquered sheen. Natives of the L.A. late ‘70s punk scene, their first album, Beauty and The Beat, was chock full of catchy, scratchy tunes about self-preservation, lust, longing, and a no-tolerance policy for bullshit held together with jangly guitars and, of course, the beat.

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To wit: The single “We Got The Beat” was a poppy anthem about the joy of music, but the album’s other major hit, “Our Lips Are Sealed,” was about a clandestine hook-up between guitarist Jane Wiedlin and Terry Hall, Brit singer of the Fun Boy Three and The Specials. A listen to the lyrics could lead one to speculate that one darker track, “This Town,” was about the underbelly of the Los Angeles punk scene; “Lust to Love” was about being dickmatized; and “Automatic,” the darkest, most hypnotic song on the record, is about mechanical, loveless sex. Vacation, subsequent to Beauty and The Beat, would be a markedly glossier effort, all punk predilections and day-glo aggression made smooth and palatable for mass and major label consumption. But, as poppy as it could be, Beauty and The Beat preserved elements of the darker, feminist edge of their grittier punk roots.

The Go-Go’s were something of an anomaly at the time — an all-female band — and despite the frothy femme image they were reluctantly shoved into by the media, they had preserved a rebellious edge and a firm resistance to patriarchal mores, ways, and means that resonated deeply with my misfit teenage spirit. That night, they showed me that women could (literally) band together and make art without giving a shit what guys thought. Being in that crowd that night felt more like being in a movement than just taking in a concert.

Meanwhile, their openers, A Flock Of Seagulls, were a British band that looked and sounded like the future. With his awesome blond skyward coif, singer Mike Score made rhythmic pop set to shimmering synths that inspired thoughts of what our lives might look and sound like as we moved toward an existence akin to an episode of The Jetsons. It felt passionate and deliberate, yet rife with possibility. This made clear that, though Led Zeppelin and other Boomer relics were intent on dominating radio, the path forward for me would be as femme-y and futuristic as a Thierry Mugler bustier.

To the male music critic in attendance that fateful night, The Go-Go’s were relegated to the inside of a pink, transparent, Bubble Yum bubble. “Whoever thought the ragamuffin Go-Go’s, who started on a wing and a prayer four years ago, would become such trendsetters?” wrote Steve Morse, the Boston Globe music critic, in a review of the show I attended (again, thank you, Internet). After describing the show as a meeting place for “flocks of teenaged girls” who were “fashion conscious” but “too young to go to a disco” and intent on invoking “bedlam pure and simple” (well, true), their music and performance were relegated to deeper paragraphs. He did accurately compare aspects of their sound to an ‘80s version of The Beach Boys in terms of planting fantasies in their listeners’ minds, but that’s all the kudos they would get. “It’s light and fluffy stuff,” he wrote, reductively, “but thoroughly entertaining.” If someone wrote that about Taylor Swift today, a large army of Swifties would assemble and doxx them within an inch of their life.

Maybe Morse didn’t get The Go-Go’s because they had no intention of placating the male gaze, and this was right up my alley. At 13, I already knew deep down that I wanted to live my life that way. When you’re 10, 11, or 12, turning 13 feels like an initiation, a first foray into the soft shadows of who you’d grow into. It was of the utmost importance to me to stray as far as I could from the objectified, indentured version of womanhood I saw all around me, at home and in the media. The womanhood I wanted to experience was closer to what The Go-Go’s represented. By sheer virtue of being an all-female band, The Go-Go’s (along with predecessors Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders and Joan Jett) gave me evidence that it was possible to make the kind of art I wanted, in the company of supportive women, without having to drape myself seductively in a bikini across a GTO to sell it. After seeing that tour, countless budding teens, such as myself, were inspired to put down the hairbrushes they sang into and instead pick up a mic or an instrument. Even if just for myself, I’ve made music, written music, written about music, and been inspired by music ever since.

Decades later, as fate would have it, The Go-Go’s and their scrappy punk rock spirit would trickle down to my 8-year-old daughter. She was dedicated to learning the drums — a pursuit I was quick to endorse despite the confines of our minuscule Brooklyn apartment. In my daily travels, I stumbled across a copy of Tom Tom magazine, a now-defunct (in print) publication that celebrated the female drummer, featuring an interview with Gina Schock from The Go-Go’s. How could I not bring that home for my daughter to check out? With only a cursory glance at its contents, I handed it to her and she ran off to her room to crack it open.

“Hey Ma!” she called out — all of 8 years old back then. “Did you know that Gina Schock moved to L.A. in a pickup truck with $2000 and a bag of cocaine?” How did she know how to pronounce ‘cocaine’?!

I had to summon a tricky age-appropriate explanation, and I had to do it fast. So I did the opposite of what Morse did, and quickly addressed it head-on, without fanfare, before shifting the conversation to how special it is to be a female drummer, because there were all too few. Schock was a solid drummer, and my innocent child would go on to play for years as she grew into an inspirational, wildly creative young woman, preternaturally aware of the power of her own self-expression.

Vivian Manning-Schaffel is an experienced, voracious New York–based culture and entertainment writer and human Shazam. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, the Los Angeles Times, Marie Claire, Cultured, and myriad other publications. Follow her at @vivtheemanningschaffel on Instagram and read her Substack, MUTHR, FCKD.

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Previously on How I Learned

I ran into my grandfather in the pool hall on Mott and Houston. I was just passing by and got the urge to play. My grandfather’s been dead over a decade now. He was by himself at one of the tables in the back.

He looked the same as I remembered and was smoking the same brand of cigars. I don’t know anything about cigars, but I recognized the smell immediately; that’s what made me look.

Funny thing: it was my other grandfather who liked pool. This one — well, I never saw him play a game of any kind, not even a card game. Aren’t grandfathers supposed to play card games? Basically all this man ever did was sit in a big black recliner and smoke cigars.

When I saw him back there, I thought that maybe I’d been mistaken about him being dead. It’s not as crazy as it seems, particularly since I don’t have much contact with that side of the family. Well, zero, I have zero contact. I guess it goes back to my dad, who calls me once a year and tells me he wants to have a relationship with me. Except he doesn’t quite say that exactly; instead he talks in this weird lingo he picked up from The Forum. Stuff like, “I want to acknowledge your willingness to put yourself out there and share your authentic truth.” I try to be nice about it, he’s a person with feelings like anyone else, but it’s hard to get around the fact that my authentic truth in this case is fuck off.

Anyway it’s my sister who keeps in touch with my dad, so it must have been through her that I learned that my grandfather had died. Oddly, though, I don’t exactly remember her telling me. Or I guess that’s not so odd, really. My memory’s not the greatest and I hardly knew this grandfather.

It was the other one I was close to. In fact he’s the one who taught me to play pool. We’d go to this place in Roosevelt Mall and play for a couple hours, but real slow and with him explaining what he was thinking on each shot. It was amazing. He’d have this whole elaborate plan in his head about where the cue ball needed to be four shots down the line.

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Given all this, it felt weird to see the other grandfather at the pool hall. Weird meaning confusing. And then on top of that, I had this awful feeling of wishing he was the other one. Because this one — well, I don’t know anything for sure, but my sister says he used to beat my father with a board or something. I don’t know how she claims to know this, but he certainly never hit me; in fact, he rarely even sat up in his recliner. Still, that’s what my sister says, and my sister usually knows what’s she talking about.

So I have to admit that this board thing entered my mind when I saw him. Not that I was worried about him attacking me with a cue stick or something. I just felt a little uneasy about starting a conversation with this person who I knew had done certain things — things I had no interest in broaching at this late date. Because what was he going to say in response? “Yeah, yeah, so I beat your father, what of it?” What would be the point? Because here he was, ten or more years past his death, playing a game of pool. Most likely he had long since forgotten all that — assuming it even happened — or even if he did remember, I couldn’t imagine him admitting it all to me and wanting to have a conversation about it.

Then I remembered this other thing my sister told me. Actually, this was the first thing. My sister says that my father used to hit me as well. I mean, as well as his father hitting him. Just not with a board or anything. Actually, I don’t remember what he hit me with, I guess with his belt. Anyway, I don’t remember it and can’t even say for certain it happened, except that my sister is pretty insistent about it.

So when I saw my grandfather again, I thought about him hitting my dad and my dad hitting me, and the whole thing just put me in a shitty mood, when just a minute before I was feeling pretty great. So I don’t know, I guess I overreacted, but after that I just decided to move on and let him play his game in peace.

On the way out, though, I had this crazy thought. My thought was that I was going to walk outside and immediately see my other grandfather coming down the street. I guess it was because I’d just seen the first one that I thought I could see this one. Well, that plus being in a pool hall, which always makes me think of him. So in my mind I constructed this cornball fantasy where I run up to him and embrace him and tell him how much I’ve missed him, although he’s always been there with me, and then he says something funny like, “Yeah, there were a few times there I kinda wished I wasn’t there with you,” and I laugh and say something funny back like, “If you only knew what I would have done if you just left me alone for a sec.”

Anyway, it was all so vivid that I started crying (I mean, in the pool hall) and then the guy at the desk said, “Hey, you alright?” so I said, “Yeah, I’m fine,” and got the hell out of there.

Needless to say, my grandfather wasn’t coming down the street when I made it outside. I didn’t have to look to know this, there are certain things you already know without having to look, but I looked anyway. He wasn’t coming.

Michael Barrish was a writer and a freelance web developer. He died in 2023 from pneumonia after being diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of early-onset dementia.

How I Learned periodically reprints select stories that appeared on Michael’s website, Oblivio, between 1999 and 2020. The about page read, “Etymology: Oblivio is Latin. Often translated as ‘forgetfulness,’ it suggests a profound lostness, something akin to the English word oblivion, but more oblivious.”

The entire Oblivio archive is available in book form on demand. Massive thanks to Mickle Maher and David Isaacson for preserving Michael’s work.

NOTE: The stories are reprinted here the way Michael wrote them, though source links may be added and some pieces may be slightly edited for clarity.

[ MORE Oblivio on How I Learned ]

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My Next Ghost is a growing collection of mini-interviews with people I like (small pool). Just a few scattered questions. Less “what’s your creative process?” and more, “have you ever seen a man slip on a banana peel?”

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Mariner Books. A contributing editor at The New Republic and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He was guest-editor for The Best American Essays of 2022.He is a full professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.

Current location:

Seat 19A, on a Delta flight from Boston to Baltimore for AWP.

Eight-word memoir:

This should be a novel, he said repeatedly.

What was your first concert and what did you wear?

Asia. Sunday, August 21st, 1983. I found a concert archive with all of the concerts at this one arena. I was with these two brothers I played D&D with. I don’t remember what we wore. If my mom had anything to say about it, I wore a maroon polo shirt. She was relentless about dressing me in that color.

Have you ever stolen anything?

Yes. In high school. I typically shoplifted gay pornography or the novels of Gordon Merrick with lavishly colored painted covers of their promiscuous gay male protagonists in bathing suits, sold often at Waldenbooks or in grocery stores in the 1970s and 1980s. They were popular with women as well as boys like me. They would be my introduction to a number of things.

Do you get tipsy or do you go from sober straight to drunk?

Tipsy, but people often don’t realize I’ve been drinking. I hold it pretty well.

Will you copy and paste your most recent text here?

“I just read a scene where everyone was gathering at the home of a woman who’d died, very private art collector, no children so her god child inherited, and they’re all realizing she stole things from all of them, a klepto. It’s hilarious and sad and really shrewd.”

—sent to our mutual friend the photographer Michael Sharkey,* who wanted to know what I thought of the Alan Hollinghurst novel The Sparsholt Affair.

* Blaise here. Incidentally, I spent yesterday afternoon with Michael Sharkey and his husband Jeffrey. We talked about Alex, and our old collegemate Kiran Desai’s new book (they recommend it), “The Great Muppet Caper” (I recommend it), and what our kids’ poop looks like (our kids are dogs). We probably talked about you, too.

Roller skating or ice skating?

Roller blades. Back in the 1990s in Brooklyn, you most likely saw me on them in Prospect Park or in the East Village.

What’s your deserted island book?

I have novels I’ve reread so often but if I were to really just be alone for the rest of life with one book, or at least alone until rescued, it might be Baldwin: A Love Story, by Nicholas Boggs, a biography of James Baldwin, or A Great Unrecorded History, by Wendy Moffatt, her biography of Forster. Or it might be this most recent O. Henry Prize anthology, edited by Edward P. Jones. I’ve loved every story so far, which never happens.

What was your favorite toy when you were a kid?

A Gumby doll, and when we lived in Guam when I was a small child, my father would throw it in the pool, saying “Gumby’s drowning!” and then my brother and I would race to save him from the bottom of the pool. Pokey was also thrown in, but I loved Gumby.

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