The Phobic Do-Gooder

 A Pause in the Workday 

An office building where I used to work is wrapped in tall, wide windows. One winter day, something hit the glass not 20 feet from where I stood. There was a loud thump, and when I looked, a dark shape fell.

Image, Teece Aronin

I hurried to the window and peered down. On the ground, a sparrow lay on its back, its head submerged in snow. Its little breast rose and fell, rose and fell, and if it hadn't been for that, I would have sworn it was dead. 

I worried that if the bird didn't right itself soon, it would suffocate, but I hesitated to help. I love birds, but I love them from a distance because I'm a little bit phobic about them - fish, too. I think my fear is that they'll flap or flutter in my eyes.  

One of my coworkers came over to see what I was looking at, and because she was famously tenderhearted, I asked, "So, Jean, what are you going to do?"

An Origami Bird

While Jean was off looking for a box and I kept useless watch over the sparrow, one tiny leg sprang up and then the other, as if an origami bird were unfurling in the snow. 

Next, the sparrow flipped right-side-up, blinked, and looked around. It wore a party hat of snow on its head and another, smaller one, atop its beak. 

Suddenly, there was Jean, gingerly traipsing up to the bird, cardboard box in hand. When she got close, the bird took off but fell again. Jean came closer, and this time, when the sparrow took off, it kept going, faster and higher until it was clear that it needed neither Jean nor the box, and certainly not me. It disappeared into the wild, gray yonder.  

I need to get over my phobias before they stop me from helping when there is no Jean around. The fact that something is different from us doesn't mean we don't share the world with it, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't help. 

Besides, maybe some of the things that flap or flutter have a phobia about me. 

I Was Just Resting My Eyes . . . for Four Years

COVID Sucked Steam - Bigtime

COVID-19 sucked the steam right out of my little demitasse, leaving its contents to cool for four years. I started the blog in early 2014 to capture "anything that crossed my mind and stalled there long enough." 

Before COVID, Chipped Demitasse was a combination playground, underwater cave, and space camp where I explored ideas that struck me for any or practically no reason, probing the recesses for treasures of humor and ethos.   

When I wrote "Playing Games with Underwater Welders," the post before this one, it was March 2020, and COVID was dropping a big rock smack on top of the world's head. And the world wasn't wearing its helmet. 

Clicking "publish" on that post, I had no idea that would be it for years. 

This Little Light of Mine . . . Blinked Right the Hell Out

For six years Chipped Demitasse was a light I used to keep from falling in the dark, especially the pitch-black of divorce, sudden onset single parenthood, and my mother's death. It was a passionate pipedream whispering in my ear that I might write something astounding someday, something that helped people or righted a wrong. Even if it were a microscopically small wrong that no one knew about but me, I would be thrilled. Besides, COVID was microscopically small, and it was a very big thing. 

As the pandemic leaned in to savage the planet in earnest, I thought I was doing well - overall. I mean I was saddened by COVID, terrified of COVID, worried about my family and friends because of COVID, and grateful my parents had died before COVID. But I wasn't hit so hard that I couldn't keep writing the blog that was a coping mechanism and a joy - I thought. 

Still, my focus went elsewhere, toward building multiple income streams from freelance writing, marketing, and communications consulting. I love those things too - and in times that had never seemed less certain in my lifetime, they helped pay the bills. 

In the meantime, COVID ramped up its invasions of homes, schools, offices, work cubicles, and places of worship. It was a wheezing, hacking, spit-spewing blob that seemed to penetrate walls and ooze beneath doors. 

Fever Dreams Without the Fever 

And then there were the COVID dreams; you probably had them, too. In one of mine, my parents were alive. I was standing with them and my siblings on the beach at a blighted, deserted resort. The weather was blustery, and canvas beach umbrellas and cabanas flapped loudly in the wind. 

We were all wearing raincoats, and my brother's was long, gray, and drab as a tarp. My mother pulled two frilly black bras from a beach bag, passed them to me as though they were sandwiches, and explained that I should use them as masks. One of the cups consumed my entire face, and I remarked that they'd be great for glamour mask shots, proving that even in COVID dreams, I have a sense of humor.  

When my brother announced that he was off to find a restroom, I yelled, "Remember! Six feet!" at the wind-ripple-y back of his departing coat-tarp. 

Sometimes I Wasn't Dreaming

At the height of the pandemic, things you once thought only happen in dreams, happened in real life. When my daughter, Sydney asked if we could go garage sale-ing one day, my knee-jerk response was, "Sure!" I didn't think before I spoke, and when I saw how happy Syd looked, I didn't want to disappoint her. We masked up and ventured out. 

As I browsed dogeared paperbacks, grimy action figures, and laceless roller skates in some stranger's back yard, two people without masks stopped within a foot of Syd. I transformed into Donald Sutherland in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," pointed and yelled, "Syd, get back! Those people aren't wearing masks!" 

That happened during a particularly ugly early days COVID surge. Still, it might've been an overreaction on my part. I who had performed crisis communications during two public health emergencies - an oil spill and a heat wave - went apoplectic as two passersby at a garage sale strolled into my baby's personal space. 

Then there were the almost apocalyptic experiences, like when I drove past a house with a child's birthday party underway in the front yard. The yard was decorated with a banner and balloons, and revelers in party hats laughed and clapped - but the child was in one yard with her parents, and the guests were another family in another yard - across the street.  

Things that Are Frivolous but Deep and Neurodivergent and Loving It 

Chipped Demitasse never focused on one topic. It's not a travel blog or a parenting blog, or a history, finance, or health and wellness blog, although I've written about all of those things here. 

It does have a theme, though, which I touched on earlier: teasing out exquisite, moving, painful, meaningful, awful, zany, or frivolous things to see them in a different light. 

Last October, I was diagnosed with ADHD, meaning that I'd been cluelessly neurodivergent all my life. Most people I've told said, "I don't see it; you seem pretty low-key." But ideas for things to write, comics to draw, and paintings to paint ricochet around in my head all the time, and I have to keep my phone handy to jot them all down.  

Before my diagnosis, there were times when tedious things were harder than they needed to be. A boss once glanced at notes I'd taken and complained that they gave her a headache. I was the only one who would be using the notes, and they made perfect sense to me, but I know now that my loathing of tedium and my meandering notetaking can be traits of ADHD and neurodivergence. I've also learned that those challenges could be addressed and that my turbo-charged creativity and alternative thinking skills give me an advantage much of the time.  

My plan for this blog is to keep nudging it up the same path but to zhuzh it up a little (note the snazzy new subheadings). But most important: I want to share my new and improved world with others.

Different Flavors of "Expresso" All in One Tiny Cup

The forms of expression available to me through this blog are more reasons to bring it back. Writing ghost stories for Halloween and noir spoofs starring Sam Spayed, Dog Detective, and then swinging to the opposite end of the spectrum to write about grief and loss, feels freeing, although it might give others vertigo. And if any COVID-related flotsam washes ashore, I will place it gently on the sand and look for treasure.