Style & Serenity

Some mornings the news alone could make you give up on people. Gaza. The Epstein files. Wars nobody’s pretending will end. Whole days of evidence that we are not what we’d like to think we are.

Then my neighbor shows up at the door with something she made, because she remembered that I like it. My pharmacist says my name and smiles like she means it. A stranger holds a door two extra seconds so I don’t have to rush. A friend turns up with flowers for no reason at all, just because she thought I needed them. A child waves at me from a car window like we already know each other. A baby catches my eye in line at the store and grins, nothing to gain.

None of that fixes anything. It just keeps happening anyway.

There’s a poem for this, Danusha Laméris’s “Small Kindnesses.” She doesn’t argue that people are good. She just lists the things we do to keep from making each other’s day harder, the courtesies so small you’d never think to thank anyone for them properly, because they’re over before you register them.

Her line: “Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.”

That’s it. That’s the whole case. Not that people are good, exactly. Just that most of us, most of the time, given the choice, go out of our way not to hurt the person next to us. My neighbor. My pharmacist. The stranger at the door.

Laméris calls these moments “fleeting temples we make together.” I like that better than any argument I could make myself. It doesn’t ask you to believe the world is fine. It just says: look, here’s one more, and another, right where you weren’t looking.

Her point is that there’s so little of each other left now, that we’re a long way from tribe and fire, and these brief exchanges are most of what we get. Maybe that’s why the small stuff carries more than it should. A held door. A pharmacist who knows your name. A friend who shows up on the day she knows is hard.

It’s not enough. It was never going to be enough.

It just keeps happening anyway. You have to be looking.

Read the full poem here: https://poets.org/poem/small-kindnesses

On the third day I look down the length of the porch and all of us are in the rocking chairs. My sister, my brother, his wife, my husband, the kids. Nobody planned it. We got to the restaurant early and everyone drifted onto the porch, and now we’re rocking at slightly different speeds, watching traffic go by on Beach Avenue, not saying much. My niece has a book open and a snack in her lap and hasn’t turned a page in ten minutes.

Nobody’s working. Nobody’s leaving early. There’s no reason to be anywhere else and nothing waiting to be gotten back to, which is rarer than it should be. Four days with nothing to do but be together.

We go Thursday to Sunday. My brother’s birthday is what gets us there.

The kids set the schedule and the schedule never changes. Ocean in the morning, boogie boards, both of them coming out of the water with their hair flat to their heads. Then the pool. Then dinner outside at a long table, too many plastic carafes, everyone sunburnt and slow. Then ice cream. Then the same thing tomorrow. She’s nine and he’s twelve, which means this version of them has maybe one more summer in it.

My brother’s birthday falls in the first week of August. My father died on the first of August, nine years ago. My mother died that December.

My brother was closest to her. He takes that week harder than the rest of us and I don’t think he’d ever say it out loud. That’s most of why we go. A few years of nobody celebrating anything, then Cape May, and now it’s a thing we do, and he spends his birthday surrounded instead of alone with it.

There are four of us and four versions of every story from growing up. Who said what, who started it, what year it happened. We still argue, and we used to argue with real heat. I’ve relaxed about being right, which took me longer than it should have, and now I mostly enjoy listening to three people be wrong about something I was clearly present for.

All four of us thought of our mother as our best friend. Each one of us certain, each one with evidence.

She and my father taught us that family comes first and then made it literal. We were always with our cousins. Vacations, weekends, holidays, the whole calendar. Their friends were family too, and some of them still turn up in our lives. I grew up with cousins who were closer to me than siblings, and that wasn’t luck. It was two people arranging it on purpose for years. That’s the part I want handed down. Not the beach. The habit of being around each other.

Sophia wasn’t with us this year, the first time. She’s twenty, in Boston, working a co-op through Northeastern in a job that’s entirely spreadsheets. I called her from the beach. I sent her pictures all weekend, the ocean, the ice cream, her dad relaxing under the sun, whether she asked for them or not.

That’s what you do with the people who aren’t in the room. You keep aiming things at them.

I’d been thinking about my parents the whole drive down. I was listening to Tara Swart’s book about signs, which says you ask for something specific and then you pay attention. Somewhere on the drive I asked.

After my mother died I kept seeing 11:11 everywhere, so that’s what I asked her for first. Then a feather. Then an eagle.

I got 11:11 twice. Then a seagull feather at my feet as I walked off the beach.

The eagle took longer, and my niece knew about all of it. She kept asking me when we’d see it. Not humoring me. Asking the way you ask about something you’ve signed on for. Some version of that question every day.

On Sunday we left in two cars, them in theirs and us in ours. I saw an eagle on the back of a mail truck and texted my sister-in-law. A few seconds later she texted back. The kids had just spotted a blow-up bald eagle.

Two roads, same minute.

She’s nine and she’s already keeping watch. Nobody sat her down and taught her that. She was on the porch while the adults told stories about people she barely remembers, and she picked up the habit of looking.

That’s what we’re doing in Cape May. The beach is real and the ice cream is real, and underneath it something quieter is being handed over. I didn’t know it was moving until she started asking me when.