Have A Day (Happy)

Early last summer when the virus reemerged even worse than before, people tried finding safe ways to connect with those most vulnerable. I ended up involved in one of those ways by virtue of an outdoor parade at a retirement community. Paris and I stood, mask on, among a crowd of volunteers on a street corner. Encouraging sign in hand, I found myself once again asking, How did I get here?

The community’s activities director had solicited volunteers from a post on Facebook. When we arrived that afternoon, the director met us outside, her face covered by a bright pink mask. She stood beside a speaker on wheels the size of a carry-on suitcase.

Her father was there, too. His car decked out in a handful of American flags, he asked if we “also” went to church with his daughter. This question explained the other volunteers standing around, two with handmade signs, and one with a bunch of balloons.

It also confirmed for me that my choice of sign wording: “Stay Safe! Stay Strong! God Bless!” was on-brand with the crowd we found ourselves in. Not that I would have otherwise written, “Hail Satan!” or anything. But it did take a few choices off the table including, “Life is Short, Hump Around!” or “YOLO!”

I explained, no, we were not from church, but Facebook friends. The director told the now sweaty crowd of sign bearers that we were waiting for “just a few more” volunteers to arrive. A few minutes later, two couples approached, waving, from down the block.  

Aside from the heat, it wasn’t a bad place to wait. This retirement community, I should mention, was not a dilapidated dumping ground for unwanted grandparents. This was basically a luxury resort with four stories of residences and countless amenities. As we were driving in, Paris and I marveled at the immaculate landscaping and surrounding fountains and statues.

“Even rich older people need visitors,” I said, rationalizing our mission.

“Agreed,” Paris said. “Age doesn’t care about money. It’s the one thing that gets us all.”

Of the two couples arriving, one was younger and looked like an alternate universe version of Paris and me. The other was older than us, likely in their early fifties. Throughout the rest of the afternoon, I would never once hear the man speak. His wife, on the other hand, would not stop talking. She had a close-cropped blonde bob and sunglasses with rhinestones. She wore a white linen shirt with cropped jeans and platform sandals. She was also, most notably, not wearing a mask.

“I hope I don’t COVID anybody,” she said with a laugh, using the highly contagious virus that is spread by breathing as a verb.

As the parade began, we marched forward with the music from the suitcase speaker blaring. I noticed the maskless blonde woman had two plastic packages in her hand. They were five-packs of gum, one Juicy Fruit and the other Big Red.

Walking past the residents on their patios and balconies, the woman began hurling the gum packets at them. Curious geriatrics would crack their doors only to be met with a blasting rendition of “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch” and pelted with purse gum.

“Didn’t quite make that one,” I said of a Big Red pack that came to a stop on the ground below a woman in a house dress peering down from a second-floor balcony. The blonde stuck her hand in her purse and pulled out more gum that she thrust into my hand.

“You throw some,” she said. She walked quickly ahead to bean a small fragile woman with some Juicy Fruit. We’d only just met, yet she expected me to participate in this absurd reverse Mardi Gras parade.

“God really provided for us with the weather today,” she called out gleefully. Yes, what fun would it be to aim candy at grandparents if you had to balance an umbrella in the other hand while doing it?

“Hey!” she called out to the director. “Hey! Hey! Change the song! Play some ‘Good Vibrations’ why don’t you?”

The director was being blasted in the ears by the speaker but managed to turn her head and catch Gum Lady’s wild arms waving. “CHANGE! THE! SONG! Play something more upbeat!” The director gave a thumbs up and pulled out her phone.

Suddenly the clink and chant of Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang” began.

“Not the song I would have chosen,” I said to Paris. “But ok.”

The woman with the gum was not enjoying this jam either. “Hey!” she called out again. “Change the song!” The song changed again, this time to the “YMCA” which seemed to get her engine revved. She started dance-walking.

I want to tell you now that this next part makes me sound like an asshole. This lady was really excited about the parade. She was overjoyed to be out in the world, screaming with no mask on, whipping chewing gum at people. In my defense, it was about 95 degrees out there. I had not seen more than a handful of any human beings in months. The sun was bright. The music was loud. Therefore it was inevitable that I would decide in that moment that I hated her.

As we rounded the corner, we came upon a large puddle and all navigated our way around it.

“Look, you guys,” Gum Lady yelled while walking near the puddle. She had taken a break from her aggressive candy distribution and was now waving her homemade sign she had taken from her husband’s hands. “Look! They’ve got a pool!” she joked.

Would someone shut her up? I thought. The Lord had delivered on the weather. Was it too much to ask for another miracle?

I turned my head toward Paris, probably about to say something snarky, when behind us, I heard a splash.

The woman was fully on her back in the “pool” she had discovered, jeans and white linen shirt drenched. The sign she had been holding was floating face down in the water. Pockets full of now-soggy gum, ruined. I felt a gut punch of secondhand embarrassment for her with a side of shame for my own shitty thoughts.

Paris sprinted over to help, but she refused his outstretched hand. Instead, she plunged her hand in the water and pulled out her sign.

“I’m fine. I’m totally fine,” she said, laughing and steadying herself. “Here, you carry this now.” She thrust the sign into Paris’s hands before standing up and dusting herself off. She was perhaps a little embarrassed but not injured. My heart softened to her as I watched her shake the water from her foam platform flip flops.

Paris held the dripping poster board away from his body and tried showing it to the residents watching from their balconies. They leaned forward and squinted at its running ink.

The left side of the woman’s sign read, “Have a Day!” Next to that, she had drawn a traditional smiley face. Beneath it all, she had written “HAPPY!”

Paris smiled at me under his mask and held the sign for me to read. Have a day we did, and we were happy.

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This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.

Won’t You Be My Helper?

This week, amidst the Texas freeze, I found myself crouched in front of my house in the snow with my brother-in-law, Aaron, absolutely vexed by my water meter cover. It’s a circle of metal, about the size of a personal pan pizza, and can be removed with an aptly named “water meter box key” which I do not own. Aaron, unsurprisingly, does own one of these. This is because he can make/fix/build/do anything and already has all the tools to do it with.

We ended up out in the cold yard that day because of Pete Delkus, the local weatherman who my Uncle Jerry says “stands too close to the TV camera which makes his head look enormous.” I’ve never met Pete Delkus in real life, but I’m sure he has an average size head and that’s just an optical illusion. Pete fancies himself as THE weatherman of DFW. He tweets “I told you so” when his predictions come true, like some vindictive meteorological Nostradamus. Weary of disregarding his advice and finding myself on the business end of one of his tweets, I panicked, and for good reason. Pete called the upcoming winter storm “PIPE BUSTINGLY COLD.” That’s pretty specific.

Once I heard that, I realized if I did have a pipe bust, I would not know how to turn off the main water supply to my house. I imagined water flowing from my walls like blood from the elevators in “The Shining.”

So I FaceTimed Aaron earlier in the day, scheming in the living room, as my boyfriend, Paris, worked, unaware, on the other side of the house. I asked Aaron how to open the box. He told me I needed a key. Having no such key, I checked online at Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Ace Hardware for any available. The nearest one was at a store in East Texas, over 50 miles away.

I’m an excessive prepper, but not drive-50-miles-for-a-tool excessive. More like a buy-a-weather-radio-for-COVID-quarantine excessive. To quell my fears, Aaron offered to drive over and use his key to open the lid. Once he got here, we ran into one tiny problem: his key didn’t fit. Well, it fit, it just wouldn’t turn.

“You should ask your neighbors for help,” he said, as if this were some easy task.

I surveyed the surrounding houses, looking for candidates I could approach.

“Well that one called the cops on Paris because they thought he was stealing a package from our porch,” I said pointing to one house. “Those people got mad because Buffy ate their kid’s football when it flew into our back yard,” I continued, pointing to another. “Found out online that guy is a registered sex offender for trading in child pornography, but we’ve never spoken. The woman in that house over there sits on her porch when the weather is nice and screams at her bird.”

“Damn, well, ok,” he said. Then we spotted him. Down the street, a neighbor who I have waved at on prior occasions, was de-icing his car.

“How about him?” Aaron asked. I had no clue of his name, but at least I had not overtly offended him (that I know of). We walked down and asked, but the man said sorry, he had no key.

“You really need to make friends with your neighbors,” Aaron said.

This is true. I moved into the house in December 2018 when I was working full time at a big law firm, performing comedy multiple times a week, and doing the podcast. I was barely ever home, much less free to mix and mingle with the people who live around me.

Then the pandemic started and, though I am now home all the time, I have no clue who anyone is. It’s not like I “just moved in,” so I no longer have any excuse to introduce myself. Now any effort to make connections makes me look like I am hunting for a handout.

With no help from my residential proximity associates (“neighbor” just seems too familiar at this point), Aaron tried determining how the locking mechanism functioned. I, on the other hand, kept jamming things down into the key hole. I tried his key, a piece of rebar, pliers, a wrench, fingers, kitchen spoon, old bowling trophies, etc. Nothing worked. The metal personal pan pizza just spun, stubborn in its place.

Suddenly, a man appeared on the street before us, crunching in the snow as he dragged his young son on a makeshift sled down the street.

“How’s it going?” Aaron said easily. The man smiled and waved. Aaron went for it.

“You ever opened one of these?” he asked.

The man walked over to take a look, hands on his hips, in a familiar “figuring it out” stance.

“Oh sure,” he said. “But you need a key.” We showed him what we had, and he tried it himself, to no avail. “The edge here is too big,” he said. “I’ve got one at home, though, let me grab it. One sec.”

He walked off, dragging his son behind him. The boy let out a “weee” as they got smaller in the distance.

Holy shit. Neighbors are bad ass.

The man returned key-in-hand and, with one strong twist, removed the meter cover. I thanked him and introduced myself.

“When did you move in here?” he asked. I told him 2018. “Whoa,” he said. “It’s been that long?” He told me his name was Brian, and I vowed to remember it.

“I live in the red house down the road,” he said. “Feel free to knock any time.”

“Thank you, ….?” I said, pausing for his name.

“Brian,” he repeated. Brian Brian Brian Brian Brian, I thought. I made a mental note: Send Brian a gift card. Bake Brian some cookies. At the very least, REMEMBER BRIAN’S NAME.

Getting the cover off was only half the problem. After that was accomplished, we (Aaron) had to dig out about six inches of dirt and locate the shut off valve. Once we did that, covered in mud, Aaron left to make it home before the melted snow refroze and turned to ice.

When we get a little chilly weather down here, we always hear things from smug folks who live in areas with a more consistent winter climate, like “LOL A LITTLE BIT OF SNOW? YOU IDIOTS!” It never fails.

If someone in a cold climate got 100 straight days of over 100-degree heat, I wouldn’t laugh at them for not having central air conditioning. Maybe they only have a window unit, not because they’re idiots, but because it makes sense for their climate. Similarly, here, we have nothing to prepare us for this kind of snowy madness because it rarely-to-never happens.

The storms this week were bad. People, including young children, lost their lives. It has been called “Katrina-like” in its devastation.

In the wake of this destruction, my biggest take away has been the helpers. There’s that Mr. Rogers quote about seeing scary things on the news. His mother told him, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

Texans are helpers. Cars stuck in ditches were yanked out by strangers in trucks with tow ropes. Local Jeep club members mobilized to give rides to stranded first responders and healthcare workers. Folks with no power or water were taken in gladly by those who had warm, lit homes and flushing toilets. Texans have mobilized to provide mutual aid and resources to one another via crowd-sourced lists.

We lent a hand when we saw where one was needed, and we accepted help when we couldn’t tough it out on our own.

Seeing all these helpers makes me grateful. Grateful for friends, grateful for family, and especially grateful for neighbors. We can’t control when disasters like this happen, but we can control how we act in their wake. We could all do to be a little more kind like my neighbor, Brad.

Wait, no, it’s not Brad.

Brett? Bartholomew? Barnacle?

Shit, what was his name?

Kidding – it was Brian. Thanks again, buddy!

If you have the means and would like to help Texans hit hard by the winter storms, you can find a list of places to donate here or here

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This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.