I didn’t have a clue about such scenarios, until I was standing in the sun a couple weeks ago, on one of those first warm days that finally appeared in Western Oregon. The honey bees seemed as happy as I, and we were all drawn to the color and scent bushing over the white brick walkway (last summer Tim bought larger bricks for a good deal somewhere and improved the walk). The afternoon purred along, until I was shaken from my reverie by a change of movement in the lavender.

Three bees had morphed their cadence from the usual land here, stick face in, zip over here, check next flower. Now they were at arrowy attention, in close proximity, pulsing a message with their bodies. From three angles they strove toward something, as if pointing.

The thing was a bee, but not. It was stuck on a stalk where all had gone wrong. I jumped back as the well-known alarm in my middle went off. Spiderish movements! Black and hairy! Eww! I was quieter than the bees, since they kept buzzing, but my anxiety matched theirs. The bee was captive; the spider (likely a jumping variety) jittered and jagged, securing his grip.

The free bees must have smelled the captive’s pheromones. Their language contains “Help me!” better and more eerie in silence than any Vincent Price creepshow. But the scent-call must have ended quickly. Sure as the spider knew his business, the struggling bee quieted, and its hivemates returned to more fluid toil at the lavender blossoms.

Since then, in my mind, I keep returning to this gruesome vignette. Of course the truth of its morality is a matter of perspective. For the spider it was all in a day’s hunt. And spiders, though my phobia screams differently, have the right to dine, even to prefer honey.

The workings of nature and my nature buzz around me. I am human. To me, that fact shouts responsibility. I’d have saved the poor bee if I could’ve. That’s me, today in my backyard, where life has plunked me.

Also, though, sad as it is, if I had been someone educated toward inventing things to help make the world run more efficiently (or whatever scenarios have driven the people who’ve changed our food), I could have invented some of the biochemical stuff Monsanto employs — the stuff that extinguishes millions of bees because the hybrid blossoms it produces don’t look right to the critters and they miss their chance to dine. I would have acted in terms of my perspective.

Yet there’s always the hopeful chance I’d have happened upon the afternoon when, sunshine-starved, I’d have wandered out to my lavender bush. There, perhaps wrestling with deeper morality, I’d have noticed three bees when they pointed.

The 1991 Dodge Dynasty is fine for me. I think it has plenty of power, though Tim says its engine’s got nothing on his ’66 Falcon in its glory days (I think his speedometer showed high numbers for real a couple times on Illinois back roads). The Dynasty runs and is paid for, however there is the speedometer problem. There is also an occasional right turn signal glitch, in that its light comes on, but without the click, click. It shines steady and makes no sound. Is this legal? I’m not sure. Today a sheriff’s car followed me briefly, and I turned to the right in from of him. He didn’t come after me, so if I’m in the wrong it’s at least not a big enough infraction to warrant immediate action by law enforcement.

Something happened last weekend, though, that brought the authorities to our doorstep.

Tim and I were alone most of Saturday, so of course we were highly stimulated to clean the kitchen counter. Then Tim, in typical fashion, made his way to the garage while I went online and tinkered with my blog. After an hour spent cajoling HTML widgets and thingies to do what I wanted I took a break and wandered through our living room, past the front window, where outside the green trunk of a sheriff’s car showed, its front obscured by Tim’s work truck. The sheriff, his back to me, was jotting things on his clipboard and talking to a man who had his hands behind his back.

I stepped quickly past the window. “Tim,” I called to the garage door. “You should look out front. A sheriff’s arresting someone on our driveway.”

I felt rather like Mrs. Kravitz from the old TV show, Bewitched. I kept peeking to see what might happen next. Amused, Tim offered to go out and ask the arrestee (a middle-aged guy we didn’t recognize) what he’d been handcuffed for. “I can tell him my wife wants to know,” Tim said. “My wife, Deanna, who frequents the jail to visit her cousin.”

I rolled my eyes. “Thanks, anyway.” Still, it was hard not to check the scene every few minutes.

It was Tim who noticed when a couple of city police cars parked near the sheriff. Things were serious, yet also quite familiar. The guy being arrested had the dazed look of the usual Cops felon. Tim has watched that show for years, and we could guess the sort of dialog transpiring. Criminal: “Why’d you stop me? I wasn’t doing anything.” Policeman: “What did you toss out when you saw us behind you?” Criminal: “Nothin’. This is my friend’s car. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And so it tends to go.

Why we had this particular episode out front was a puzzler. Our house sits in the middle of the block on a quiet street. Such drama doesn’t transpire here. Had this man fled to our home for some reason? Conceivably, my cousin in prison could have given him our address.

I sure hoped not.

At last I made it back to my computer, just before the doorbell rang. Uh, oh. I skittered toward the front door, glad to see Tim there first. I peered over his shoulder at two state patrolmen.

“Do you recognize Ken out here?” one of them asked.

“No,” Tim said. “We checked, and he isn’t a neighbor or anything.”

“He told us his cousin lives here,” the officer said.

“Hm, Ken…” I think Tim was smiling by now. “Cousin Ken…I could go look up the family tree.”

The officers’ laughs relieved me, but I tensed again as Tim started making more comments, mentioning kissing cousins and the like. The first officer said they would get his truck out of our driveway, and the two of them moved away, while Tim swung the screen door wider and made to say more. I motioned quickly for him to get back inside. “Enough,” I whispered. I love my funny guy, but the troopers might have stuff to do.

A big tow truck pulled up in front. That’s when I saw the newish truck “cousin” Ken had been driving being backed out of the slot my Dynasty normally occupies. I’d all but forgotten Victoria had taken the car to work, and Tim’s truck had been hiding Ken’s vehicle. Now the situation made better sense. Ken had been fleeing the troopers and had turned down our street and found what he thought might be a hiding place on the other side of the large-wheeled Dodge Ram Tim drives up to transmitters. If the troopers had been snoozing, perhaps Ken’s plan might have worked. Instead, a crime was foiled, for which I’m definitely grateful.

I’m pretty sure he wasn’t in trouble for a faulty blinker. But next week mine’s getting checked at the garage, along with the crazy speedometer.

His response: “So you’re the one who took the Falcon and trailer!”

Seems he had dreamed he was at a conference and had pulled a load of electronic parts in a trailer with the Falcon. They were meeting at a hotel, and when he went out to the parking lot, the car and trailer were gone, and he was upset.

Peanut butter jar in hand, I stared at him.

Tim’s 1966 Falcon sits in our garage beside my ’68 Mustang. He runs it very rarely anymore, because it needs rear body work we can’t afford. It’s the car he learned to drive in and bought from his dad. It’s not like we’ve had conversations about it lately.

We don’t usually tell each other our dreams.

I suppose, after 31 years together, things like this happen.

I asked him five times, “Really?” We shook our heads and smiled.

Tim said, “Tonight, I’m coming to get you.”

It looked rather like Texas. He couldn’t quite get it in the stove, as, you know, being Texas makes you large and dippy and gangly in some places.

I asked someone recently about her years in Texas. She was there as a little kid, and I had been a little kid in Oklahoma. I had mostly a most excellent time living in Moore, near Oklahoma City, but the person I asked about Texas hadn’t liked it. Bad things seemed to be everywhere: weather (hurricanes–she lived near the Gulf); creatures (rattlesnakes, in particular); industry (oil drilling rigs). She is happy to now live in Oregon.

I’m sure I would rather be here in hippie/forest land, too, but I don’t know for certain. It’s been so long since first grade and learning reading and tornado drills and monarch butterflies and tag across neighborhood lawns and lovely, lovely heat. Yesterday I asked Mom for her viewpoint. She gave birth while we lived in Moore and killed ugly spiders and tried to live up to impossible, preacher-wife standards. She was all too glad to move away.

Wikipedia tells that Moore was originally Verbeck, Oklahoma, but that a railroad worker in the new community put his last name, Moore, on a sign on his boxcar home so the postman wouldn’t miss him and then people started associating his name with the town and it stuck.

People still live in Moore, even after four significant tornadoes since 1998. I guess liking where you live, or not, is a matter of perspective.

This morning Tim took the slab of Texas away and returned a while later with a sawed-off piece of it, more like Nevada this time.

I told him he was burning Las Vegas. I guess some would mourn. Many wouldn’t cry, though, I suppose, if he did.

Students, like a herd on the move, passed our table, with its small, felt-lined case containing fetal models, and then they passed the table over to the right, which was sprinkled with colorful buttons and condoms.

We had candy (some Hershey bars melted before we scooted the dish to the shade). They had suckers. Both of our tables–Pregnancy Support and Planned Parenthood–were manned by two women. I looked their way many times, curious as to whether we could smile at one another. They didn’t make eye contact, or if they tried, they only caught me looking away, as well.

The University radio DJs set up and turned on music. Between classes, students and older people, maybe professors, trickled past. Being my usual analyzing self, also conscious of my recent thoughts about generational differences, I watched for signs that people my age were sending me condemning stares. It was hard to tell; they glanced away real fast. The younger folk paid little attention at all. So much for research.

“Frog,” a local man nearly everyone knows, stopped at each table with his hand-made joke books. We all smiled at Frog. He pulled a wagon filled with rubber chickens of more varieties than I knew existed. Both of us at our table declined his offer, but we gladly offered him candy, and Frog was pleased. He stopped back later in the day for more.

Finally, I stood and stretched and awkwardly moved closer to the Planned Parenthood lady closest to me. I wanted to say something. We’re really so similar, you know? We care about young people. We wish things in the world were better. In a sense, we’re both cogs in machines of war. And in a sense that’s really silly. But it’s human nature. I think the differences between us boil down to one thing: you believe abortion is generally helpful; I believe abortion is generally harmful. All the other services we share with women and men are incidental and overlapping. In the lyrics of the song by (of all bands) War, “Why can’t we be friends?”

I didn’t say any of that. I looked over my shoulder at the snickering sun. “It’s really warm today, isn’t it?”

The woman squinted at me. “Yes, it sure is.”

I want to embrace that warm wood as long as I get to and feel the breeze just lift my hair. I want to have summer remain.

But, I know. There comes a last moment to ponder the season’s transition, and then it’s get up and be going and living. I’ll do it, I will, like the little fellow did yesterday after letting me take shots of him through the closed window. (Later Victoria wondered if he had located a fermented apple. I wonder. And I think I’ll go locate some Merlot.)

I sat up, awake, not sure where I was. There was some urgency, something wrong, but I couldn’t think what. Maisa’s white bedclothes rose and fell slightly with her breathing. Only a dream. I slipped out of bed and found my socks. It was daylight out. The bedroom felt dim and stale. Maisa had pulled the curtain shut against the sun, though the window had been bare all night to the Ramadan moon. Yes, my friend was still breathing. It wasn’t too late. I didn’t have to be tormented by my dreams like Maisa was by hers.

My summer reading included Lisa Ohlen Harris’s book, Through the Veil, from which I snipped the above quote. I had read a few of her essays in their original form in journals, such as “The Pied Piper of Damascus” (Eclectica and Rosebud) and “Torn Veil” (Relief Journal). Separately, they wowed me. Together, they have brought me inside Lisa’s memories of people who are like me and yet who view life through different cultural lenses.

Her first trip to Damascus, Syria was with a group of ethnographic researchers, and in that group was Todd, her future husband. The two of them were only friends until after they returned to the U.S., but later, married and with one child, they returned to live in Amman, Jordan and set up housekeeping and have two more daughters.

Ever since I read James Herriot’s books in grade school, I have loved a story told in snapshots, in smaller stories. This is how we relate our adventures to friends and family, whether relaxed on warm evenings or aching for news in cold waiting rooms. Lisa’s book travels well. It has accompanied me to the dentist’s office, the blood bank, my work breaks, and our easy chair. Even after finishing it, I’ve returned to her stories as I’ve followed up on thoughts I didn’t have to think first time through (such as, what do ethnographers do, anyway? and, was Miriam from Chapter 7 Sunni or Shia?).

The best part has been getting to know Lisa, whom I had so far experienced in her editor and writer aspects, but whose heart and thoughts I recommend getting into through these essays. As she mentioned on her blog a while ago, “When you hold my book in your hands, you’ll be holding the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of my life. You’ll trace your fingers across pages that reveal my struggles and my dreams.” Her skill makes doing so very worthwhile.

One of the women who volunteer in my office had commented, months ago, about that loose-looking piece of ceiling. “Don’t you worry that might fall on your head?” she wondered.

“Oh, I think it just looks loose but really isn’t,” I replied. After all, the people before me had been working here for years, and nothing ever fell on them. At least not that they told me.

I’m sure the philosophical, political, and even theological implications I could express, if I took the time to scour them, would be various.

For now, I’ll simply reflect with gratitude. I can certainly come back to attend to work another day, but I must make an exception for the contingency that a ceiling tile happens to fall down and kill me; for in that case, I cannot attend.

For me, those days in the late 60s pulsed with freedom. I saw the sanitized, variety-TV versions of what was going on. But I had known the restraints, I thought, that were now loosed: girls no longer had to wear dresses to school; boys could have hair cuts other than crew-length. And I liked guys in longer hair. Oh, yes.

I hadn’t come from the 50s or the 40s. Didn’t really get the first-hand anger of those older kids who’d felt repressed by previous generations’ rules that lacked meaning for them. The ground had shifted under everyone, because it somehow had to. The kids had broken free; their way was so cool. And yet, the world wasn’t everything it should be, still.

We new crop of teenagers just needed to dance wildly, swing our long hair and macrame accessories, and hope the draft would end soon.

Young adults today, at least the ones I’m closest to, tend to think the peace-out children of the sixties had the right ideas, in some ways, at least. But they’re not going to react the same vociferous ways in the public arena. Times now call for lower case typing online and movie-watching etiquette. Subtlety. They don’t wish to expose every body hair on stage. It’s been done. Disillusionment was, I suppose, unavoidable.

But hair’s still long, and for this gift, usually, I say, “Right on.”

One tiny woman got to the semi-finals on her own, with no coach or sponsors, and she skied, flying down the twisting course, hanging on, to everyone’s amazement, til the final hill. She fell and slid across the finish line, a fractioned second off the time that would have sent her to the finals.

I hope she didn’t break any bones. I hope her bruises remind her of the value of perseverance. She did all she could. Her very best.

My blogging takes up again today far afield from where it’s been lately. Well, maybe not so far. Themes continue, relentless, and when I pause I notice them.

Life is funny. The quest for certain goals can make me think I’m going after gold. But really I’m learning to persevere, whatever the outcome. I truly believe (can’t escape that word) that the stuff I’m doing is incidental to my story happening as it should. How I do things, why I do them, and what I see in the doing about my heart’s orientation are what matter.

I am now employed. The volunteer group that turned me down last week called Monday morning and asked if I was still interested in the job. I showered and went to their staff meeting. Tuesday and Wednesday I trained. Yesterday I tried to catch up at home. My hermit ways need modifying.

And yet, this is a very good way for me to be hired. Only now can I see it. I have really, really wanted writing to be my full time job with a part time paycheck. But I’m still waiting for a check for the last article I sold. It’s not a great time to get pay for words.

But for a writer it’s always a good time to live. For me, seeing real faces on the people I’m learning to work with is refreshing, especially when the job is one that’s been close to my heart for twenty-some years. It’s at a pregnancy support center, where the workers are anti-abortion (which, by history’s strange method, has become anti-establishment), but the mission is not political. I helped a woman who doesn’t speak English get diapers for her baby. A couple came in for infant clothing, their tiny one burbling in the dad’s arms.

I don’t know how well I’ll perform at this, or how many crashes will commence. It is very part time, though, and the people are treating me so nicely. They have been around this “game” a long time. I can catch back up, I hope, to where I was two decades ago when I volunteered for a similar group at the coast, where we used to live. Where I had screwed up my life a few years before. I promised God I would work with young women, if only I could quit my factory job, and things happened that let me quit the factory, be a stay-at-home mom, and serve people who were messing up their lives in a lot the same way I had.

Now my story arc has swung back around. Kind of the way an essay does, when the final paragraph ends up hinting at the beginning. Only this ending paragraph is a start at something new.