I Know This Reporter

Celebrating 15 years

The things I forgot this week don’t matter much, cosmically.

• My kid’s D&D event.

• My kid’s circus class.

• A phone date with a friend.

• A zoom meeting with a client. (It was ok.)

• Getting my debit card back in my wallet.

• Whether I had lunch. (I didn’t.)

• How to share my screen in Teams.

The things I don’t know how to do weigh more, but still would barely fill an atom.

• How to homeschool a 13-year-old.

• How to homeschool a 13-year-old who’s part border collie, part philosopher, part ordinary Minecraft-loving kid, part frozen in self-consciousness, part hug monster.

• How to be 49.

• How to hang on through perimenopausal anxiety.

• How to be of good cheer after reading Careless People, the new book about Facebook (gift link to review).

• How to keep calling my senators and reps when I can’t remember lunch.

• How to be the kind of daughter who makes sure her mom ages as comfortably as possible while accepting that as a daughter she has less than 1% control over whether her mom ages as comfortably as possible.

• How to cook chicken.

It’s been a long year. You feel me?

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My husband is named Bob. Here are three pictures of him.

Bob’s a reporter for a local newspaper, 20 years strong.

You know how many stories he’s written in that time? More than 10,000. We figured it out the other day. Stories on town meetings and new skate parks, the regional nuclear power plant, so many high school graduations, deaths of beloved community members, drug murders, moms fighting for their sons’ mental health care, sex traffickers, new roadside diners, old automotive shops, new hospital presidents, old churches turning to arts spaces, old bridges coming down, new bridges going up.

The other day I got pissy with him because he did an interview at 8 a.m. That’s the hour I work on my novel, when our small house is usually quiet. Bob’s reporter voice is… resonant, and he turns the speakerphone up so his transcription software catches every word. I can never really hear the interviewee, but I sure hear Bob. Patient, curious, humble, focused, heartfelt Bob. I hear him. I hear him SO FLIPPING LOUD DURING MY 8 A.M. WRITING TIME.

We’ve been married for 15 years this June. We eat squabbles like shishito peppers, washing quick heat down with the milk of grace. After he was done (at 8:45), I barked at him and he thinned his lips, and we went back to our corners. He moved his work station to a more distant room. A while later, we met up in the kitchen. We hugged, and I pressed my temple against his big Santa beard.

“Who were you talking to?” I spoke into his shoulder. He’d also gone for a woods walk with our dog, Cowboy, and smelled like cold March air and pine needles.

“Another place whose federal funding disappeared last month,” he said. He breathed deeply in, and I did too. Our bellies smooshed and released with the long, slow breaths out. “I’m trying to get them all.”

He’s spoken with social services organizations, small business support organizations, people who distribute food to schools and food banks, librarians, post carriers, river conservation efforts. He’s trying to report on them all.

“It’s what I can do,” he said a day or so later. We were at the kitchen table now with our phones and newspapers casting shadows over the future. “I don’t have money. I don’t have energy to get to all the protests. I can’t fix anything.”

I sat on my impulse to interrupt and ate waxy Gala apple slices and crumbly sharp cheddar instead. We had this disagreement a lot early on, his heartbroken cynicism against my dogged faith in the fight, even when you know people have been, are, and will be terrible.

He pointed at his work computer, open next to him. “But I can do that. I can make sure we tell all these stories.”

The dog barked at the cat then, or our kid needed help with homeschool math and existential boredom, or I had to stir the onions. The sun fell, the clocks unwound, we slept, the dog barked at the cat again, and I woke to hear my husband booming hello! to another someone on the other side of the phone—a comedian, an advocate for domestic violence survivors, a town clerk, a lactation specialist, a real estate lawyer, a district attorney, a maple sugarmaker—giving Bob their loss and hope to tell.

Thanks for your patience, Bob says at the end of his interviews. He hangs up and takes furious notes. He stands. He sees me watching, moody or content, from the counter. He smiles, an imp and a bullhorn, a gentle powerful guy who meets his demons with tears and breath, thinking of what he’ll make us for breakfast and later for dinner. He’s happy I’m with him on the earth.

Me too. It’s something else to walk a while with a beautiful human, a learning man. I don’t forget. This is a thing I know.

What are you losing track of and remembering?

Love, B