A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.
Dear Friend,
When was the last time you spent time with the contacts on your phone?
I got a new phone for my birthday (thank you, sister Alexis!), and, although phones now set themselves up through the mysterious sorcery of The Cloud, it felt like the right moment to clear out my contacts. My contact list has transferred over from phone to phone since I was in college. Somehow, some contacts had duplicated themselves, so I had like eight “Aaron Tinder”s glaring at me every time I opened my contact list — and I have no memory of going on a Tinder date with anyone named Aaron.
Phones are like little houses we carry around, and they’re therefore rife with organizing potential. I like to organize my apps by color, which is also how I like to organize the books on my actual bookshelf. I like to edit my photo library when I’m on an airplane without WiFi. But preening my contact list is something I’d never done. It felt like too much work. There is no easy way to do it directly from your phone; you have to individually open each contact and delete it. Who has time for that?
There’s a way to do it faster from a computer, which is what I learned by Googling. This felt doable, and I took it on. Immediately, I could tell that the task was going to feel strange.
I like organizing things. I like taking all the books down, holding them, considering them, and putting them back in an order that makes sense to me. I could spend hours “organizing” my old diaries, which is really just an excuse to re-read them and think about how critically important things once seemed — things that I now, invariably, can’t even remember. Odd, then, that it took me 20 years to address this digital undertaking of looking through a bunch of names. Well, mostly names.
In my looking and deleting, I also came upon the following numbers with labels in my phone:
“This is not the gynecologist I want"
“I think pizza"
“Steve’s nephew who has questions about Whitman"
“NOT SPAM!"
“Call this number to find out who put it in your phone"
I didn’t call that number, by the way. It has been so long since I have done anything where a stranger would flirtatiously put a mystery number in my phone that I knew exactly how the conversation would go:
ME: I called this number because you put it in my phone.
THEM: Who are you?
ME: Sophie.
THEM: Who?
ME: Sophie Goalson. Well, it used to be Sophie Lucido Johnson. Or just Sophie Johnson. I don’t know. This number was in my phone and it said to call it.
THEM: ….
ME: It was probably a long time ago.
THEM: I think you have the wrong number?
I deleted all five of those ones. I also deleted everyone whose last name was “Tinder” or “OK Cupid” — because the dates that stuck are in my phone with more permanent last names now, and I don’t have time for Tinder or OK Cupid anymore. But I remembered when I did, and I thought about my catalogue of bad-dates-gone-by. The guy whose lips were cold and wet — like a fish from a grocery store. The girl who wouldn’t stop talking about her ex and who told me she was feeling sick and couldn’t stay out, but would I be interested in buying her chapbook of poetry?
I deleted all the numbers in the vein of Someone’s Mom or Someone Else’s Grandma. Those are from my days teaching elementary school, when I got so good at calling parents that it sometimes felt like that was my job, and not teaching the children. I called them with good news, I called them with bad news, I went to their houses on Sundays to try to ingratiate myself to them, because there was this sense that that was what it would take to be a good teacher. As I deleted, I thought about all the Someones and Someone Elses. Last week, my former co-worker sent me a picture of a girl we'd taught when she was in first grade. The girl was wearing a graduation gown with gold tassels, and my coworker wrote, “Guess who is valedictorian?” My breath stitched. Wait, I thought. Weren’t we just the other day buying cupcakes and playing on park slides with this little girl? And now she has Instagram-worthy lashes and a high school diploma? But how?
Some of the students whose numbers I still had saved in my phone have died. I went to their funerals years ago. Some of them had funerals I couldn’t attend, or wasn’t invited to, because they died years after I was their teacher. There were a lot of phone numbers in my phone that belonged to people who’ve died. My grandfather. My friend Jamie from college. An old boyfriend’s old roommate. Those numbers felt hard to delete, although logically, they should have been the easiest. But the contacts symbolized a time that I could remember, when those people had whole lives ahead of them. There was a line of communication. There was a button I could push, and on the other end would have been a possibility that no longer exists.*
It took a while to delete those numbers; to accept that those stories have ended. A lot of my phone log editing felt like a kind of erasing of paths; acknowledgement of choices I have made, and doors that are closed. You put someone’s number in your phone in a moment when you think you might need it, and there’s a future that exists where you might use that number more than once; where it would be good to have it saved, so a relationship might grow bigger.
But there’s only so much time we have on earth, and I have spent a lot of my life not wanting to make choices. I have not wanted to believe in my own finiteness; that I actually can’t hold everything that I want to hold (or that I want to believe I can hold). But here’s the thing: making choices and then meeting sacrifice is what makes life meaningful. You can’t be everything for everyone; and this makes the people who you can be something for truly special. What would it be like to let go of all the things you aren’t? To rest for a while in the things that you are?
Of course, there were some people in my Contacts list to whom I hadn’t spoken in years and years, but whose numbers I didn’t want to delete. And so I had to confront what that meant: which is, some stories aren’t over, but have been left on “semicolon” for a while. I was liberal with the “Delete” button as I did my audit, because I made a rule: if I wanted to keep the number of someone who I hadn’t talked to in years, I had to text them today. I reached out to an old friend from New Orleans with whom I’d shared a lot of mezze platters at Mediterranean restaurants, an improv coach I'd admired, a boy from college who used to write poems for me. Others. Some people didn’t respond, which made me sad; but it also made me realize that maybe I was someone they needed to let go of, for their own hearts to be peaceful. Other people did respond, with long updates, photos, questions.
That felt good.
It felt good enough that I thought about you, and thought I’d offer it up to you, as a task that might give you a gift. If you don’t have it in you to go on a total contact purge, find two people in your phone you haven’t talked to in a while, and reach out and say hi, and say thank you.
And delete a few names, too. Let them go. It might give you a sense of peace. It did for me. After all, that wasn’t the gynecologist I’d wanted.
Love,
Sophie
*The school shooting yesterday hit me differently than Sandy Hook or Columbine, which both happened when I was still a child, and not a parent. As a child, you imagine what it might be like to die, because you’re figuring out what it means to be alive; as a parent, you try to force yourself not to imagine what it would be like to lose your child — although in every moment, that’s what’s lurking in the back of your mind, like a shadow you can’t shake.
I think modern humans have a long way to go in learning how to bow to grief. Elephants are good at it. They visit the bones. What would it be like to be able to visit grief, to inhabit it, to be still with it, and to leave it and carry on? It is easier for elephants, because elephants don’t kill each other very often. They do help each other climb out of mud and holes; they do toss dust on each other’s wounds to help their friends to heal. They cry. But it’s uncomplicated by elephant-made harm or violence or malice. When their friends die, they return to visit the bones. They hold the bones in their trunks. They move slowly.
Anyway. It’s hard to not be an elephant sometimes.
Add this to your to-do list.
Find two people in your phone you haven’t talked to in a while, and reach out and say hi, and say thank you.
Delete two names, too.
A drawing.
Here are a few drawings from a long-ago essay I wrote around this time of year when I used to make time for year-end reflection blog posts. I haven’t found the time in the past few years, but maybe they’ll re-emerge someday.
What’s on my mind this week.
(This will be about new parenthood. Skip it if you don’t want to read about new parenthood.)
T and her friend M (who lives upstairs from her, and is also a baby) share a nanny. This has worked out well for us, and for them, and we really loved our nanny. At the same time, I didn’t realize how important this relationship with our nanny (whom I will call Jane, because that is nothing like her name) was until she didn’t show up last Monday. She did send a text early in the morning, to M’s mom, saying that she was sick but would be in by 10 or 11; then she didn’t show up at 10 or 11 or any hours after that, either. She didn’t respond to texts or phone calls. (I sent her too many texts and called her too many times, by the way.) I felt worried that something was really wrong — although she did get back to us on Monday night, alluding that she was going through something and needed some time off. I haven’t been able to get through to her since then, and so we had to find a new nanny. I really do love the person we found, but I am shocked at how sad I am about how things ended with Jane. I hadn’t quite understood how much I loved her until I realized I might never see her again. It’s this weird, indescribable love you have for a person who loves and cares for your child, that goes into a brand new category my heart had yet to experience. There was this way that Jane would say, “Hello baby” every morning when I brought T to her that I have been noticing myself repeating in my own mind, making myself cry because I’m sad that T will not hear Jane say that again. It is likely that T cannot really tell what is happening; but on a different level, she absolutely can. T is fierce and loud and bossy; she doesn’t immediately like new people. The new nanny said she was pretty fussy today, and I thought, “Ugh, yes, T is not great with getting to know new people, no matter how amazing they are.” For a few more weeks, at least, T will remember Jane and will not be able to see her anymore. Again, I am surprised at how wrenching this is for me. It’s hard that you can’t talk to babies with words or try to explain things to them with language. I mean, you can, but babies understand feelings and touch and movement (at least, those are the things T understands). She understands that she has to be with a new person, and she doesn’t understand why. In some ways, this is not all that different from being an adult. There are a lot of things that happen and I can’t understand why. A whole life ahead of her filled with little losses like this one; but also little joys. None of this is predictable.
If you’re reading this and wondering if Jane is OK — so am I. I keep texting to see if I can arrange a goodbye date for her with the babies, but she isn’t looking at her phone right now. Our social circles don’t overlap; it’s hard to know if she’s OK. It’s hard to know what to do in general. I was not prepared for this kind of relationship to hit me so hard in the gut. They don’t put this in the books about baby-raising OR polyamory — the specific deep-felt love you have for your baby’s nanny, and how to navigate it. I’ll let you know if anything changes.
Extras.
My friend and old college roommate Sarah W. Jaffe wrote an amazing book that came out this week called “Wanting What’s Best: Parenting, Privilege, and Building A Just World.” It was exactly the book I most needed, and I think everyone who is interested in being a parent should read it, too. I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t mean it: this is a thoughtful and critical book for parents who find themselves wondering what they can do to sow justice in their larger communities while also parenting their children. A++++++.
Jessica Campbell’s “Rave” recently came out, too, and is INCREDIBLE. A documentary about queerness, faith, and more. Jessica is one of the funniest writers of our time, and one of my favorite artists, too.
The daily cartoon by Zoe Si following the shooting this week made me cry, and I think it’s a perfect work of art.
We went to LaBagh woods last weekend and saw two scarlet tanagers. May I please remind you that birds are FREE TO LOOK AT and AMAZING?!?!?! See my husband’s photographs of the tanager here.
I just found out MMMBop is a unit of time. (It does not mean “fruity duty.”)
I made this cake for Luke’s birthday and it was good.
Please enjoy this timeless and wonderful clip of Nichols and May, the first improv duo that made people go, “WAIT BUT HOW DID THEY DO THAT.”
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Wow! I now know I live in a different universe, but that's fine, because you are still in mine. No problems whatsoever with too many contacts. I have about 20, if that. And the paintings/are is wonderful in this post.