Why yes, I am a writer

I was interviewing for a job I didn’t want—some position at a grocery store that I didn’t actually apply for. I don’t even really know what the position was and I never did hear anything back about it even though they said they would call in a few days one way or another. I wanted out of the grocery industry for sure, but at the time I desperately needed a job, so I couldn’t really say no to the interview. It was conducted in a very small, very cold office where I sat in an old, rusty metal fold-out chair shivering despite wearing a long-sleeve dress shirt and tie in the middle of August.

Whether it’s 100% relevant to the job or not, I always include somewhere on my resume that I edit and self-publish a literary magazine and that I am a writer. I often get questions about it during the interview—generally in regards to what kind of time commitment it is. You know, in case it would take attention away from my “real” job if hired. At this particular interview, the question was asked, “So, you want to be a writer?”

“So you want to be a writer?”

Like, what kind of question is that? I wondered to myself. Don’t you see on this resume right in front of you that I am in fact a writer? Does it not say that I am a published writer? Does it not say that I write poems and stories and novels and blogs? Why are you asking if I want to be a writer?

I didn’t know how to answer her question without sounding like a dick so I just said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

I wondered if she had ever read a book. Then I wondered if that was a little judgmental to think. But I didn’t care much. I figured she had probably read 50 Shades of Grade or Twilight. Maybe a Nora Roberts book or two.

I don’t want to be a writer; I am a writer. Like, goddamn woman. If you want to be a writer, you pick up a pen and paper and you write. Or you grab a laptop. I’ve done that. I’ve written. I’ve written a lot. I am a writer. I wrote this right here that you’re reading. I sometimes even introduce myself to people as a writer.

Here’s the thing. I’m a writer right now, but what I want to be is a successful writer. I want to write and get paid to do it. I want to publish a bestseller and not have to work a real job ever again. There are no applications or job fairs for that. That requires real work and effort. It is email after email after email to agents and publishers. It is countless rejection letters. It is not taking it to heart. It is perseverance. It is writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and never stopping. I know what I want and I will achieve it.

On an island in the sun

If I have ever learned anything from Hugh Grant it is that I am not an island. In the 2002 adaptation of Nick Hornby’s About A Boy, Grant, portraying boytoy Will Freeman, famously uttered, “All men are islands,” and then proceeded to explain how this is the foundation of his life—of his bachelorhood. He believed that with all of the conveniences of today’s society that you don’t need anyone or anything else beyond what you could obtain for yourself—and his character was filthy rich without needing to work so he had everything. Like an island, Will was isolated. He had no desire to settle down—didn’t care if he had a family and only had a small handful of friends. If it wasn’t on his island, then he didn’t need it.

I am not an island and deep down, no one is.

I don’t like to do things by myself. No matter how badly I want to see a film, I won’t go by myself. I hate even just eating by myself. And aside from when I lived in a shoebox dorm room, I don’t like being home by myself for extended periods of time. I need people in order to function. That is why I struggled a lot in college—I had friends, but mostly kept to myself in my dorm room writing yet another history or English paper or reading yet another dull academic writing. When I wasn’t doing that, I was writing for myself or working (side note: I somehow managed to finish writing a novel I had started a couple years earlier while simultaneously working on a massive semester-long research paper). There is a very small handful of people I met during my time at college who I still keep in touch with and as much I would often times like to blame someone else, there is no one to blame but myself.

When I graduated high school, none of my friends really left. The only one who really moved on had spent the last two years living in Japan where her dad was working, so it wasn’t much of an adjustment to not having her around or being able to talk to her often. This was when cell phones were just starting to become commonplace too and when unlimited text messaging was a status symbol, so it really wasn’t unusual to us to not see one another for a few weeks or even talk to each other for that matter. Without cell phones, the cost of long-distance phone calls was still a concern—something today’s generation will never understand no matter how many times you try to explain it.

My two best friends are both younger than me. One just graduated high school this year and the other will be graduating next spring. The first one went to school over an hour away and when he left, it was very strange for me because that was the first time I really had to deal with that. I wasn’t sure how to handle it. I know I did better than his little sister though who was already crying even a week before he left. I imagine she wrapped herself around his leg when it came time to leave.

The other, who was once introduced by a mutual friend of ours as my “bestest friend ever”, is 7 years, 3 months, and 4 days my junior. I’ve known him for several years now and have watched him grow up. We’re not just best friends, but also brothers. Last week he enlisted in the Marines.

I was heartbroken.

After 4 long, stressful months of unemployment and somehow not once having shed a tear, this was what finally did me in.

He made the decision without talking to me and told me in a less-than-tactful way. He said he was afraid to tell me, that he didn’t want me to try to talk him out of it. And I understood why. It wasn’t the first time he had said he was afraid to tell me something. But it still hurt.

For a long time he had always said that he was going to eventually leave Ohio, that he did not want to spend the rest of his life in the rural area he had called home for most of his life. I always hoped that day wouldn’t come, not wanting to lose my best friend. That maybe he would just end up at OSU or Wright State and maybe do a semester abroad. I definitely didn’t want him to move to Florida where he spent his childhood like he had said many times he wanted to. My real brother lives all the way in Seattle, so I was counting on my best friend being around to be the cool uncle to my kids when I eventually have some and to give me nieces and nephews that I didn’t have to get on a plane to see. I remember once we joked that we would force our kids to get married so we could finally be real family.

Now there is a date. There is a finite amount of time left until the day he is officially a Marine and is no longer up the street and around the corner. August 11, 2015—just 15 days before his 19^th birthday. I have a countdown on my phone for his 21^st birthday, but I’m not sure I can bring myself to set one up for that day. I’m not sure I want to know how many days are left.

My best friend has always lived within walking distance—even just across the driveway at one point. It’s not uncommon for him to just randomly show up at my back door, even at 11:30 at night when he has school the next morning. We have always done everything together—movies, bowling, concerts, baseball games, poetry readings, fundraisers, urban exploration through parts of Columbus where you had better have your car doors locked. I’ve taught him how to bowl, how to write, how to save money, introduced him to music he otherwise would have never heard. He taught me how to love baseball, how to dress nice and properly match my shoes to my outfit, and gave me the encouragement and confidence I hadn’t really felt from anyone else before to actually take my writing seriously and share it with a wider audience. We have made each other a better person.

The idea that all of that might be gone terrifies me.

He has said for a long time that wasn’t going to stay in Ohio, that he wanted to get out of this small town. I let myself believe that wasn’t ever going to happen, especially when he started talking about going to college in Ohio—OSU, Wright State, Kent State. I can’t let myself believe that anymore now because there is a contract on file with the United States Marine Corps that says otherwise. I have to allow myself to let go and to him grow into adulthood and become his own person. For a minimum of four years he will be in another state or even in another country; I think we’re both hoping for South Carolina. And for the first twelve weeks of that, we will have next-to-no communication beyond a pen and paper. 

I’m a very sociable person. I like to talk to my best friends daily, even if it’s just a single text. I know that many times I rely on my friends too much—something I’ve grown to learn over the years. A lot of it stems from some mild neurosis from having been betrayed friends in the past, but I’m learning how to trust again and that the friends I have do genuinely care about me and will be there when I need them. I’ve been around for a quarter of a century now, which doesn’t make me old by any means, but in that times I’ve seen a lot of friends come and go. I’m still friends with a lot of people I met in elementary school, kindergarten even. And I actually talk to them regularly and hang out with them, so it’s not like it’s just a friendship by name. But I’ve had people who have called me their best friend and I’ve called them my best friend who are no longer a part of my life or are barely a part of my life anymore—some for good reasons, some for simply just a matter of growing apart. I guess that is what scares me. 

There is nothing scarier than to feel like you’re not in control of a situation, but it is during that time when we will learn the most about ourselves.

About A Boy is one of my favorite books and movies. It follows a bachelor who thinks he has his entire life figured out until a young boy forces himself and his mother into it. By the end, Will Freeman discovers that he was missing a family the entire time, that he wasn’t as happy as he thought he was all on his own. In the beginning he was an island, but he learns that no one is an island, but rather part of a chain of islands. The thing is, though, the Earth’s surface is always shifting—some islands move closer together while others drift further apart. As the neighboring islands drift, it’s all about what you do to keep in each other’s sights.

The time I sold furniture for a week

I worked in furniture sales for one week. It was a locally owned and operated furniture store that had bought into a large corporate franchise scheme. The fact that they had more or less sold out should have been my first sign of what was to come.

I have no interest in couches other than sitting on them. I definitely have no interest in selling them.  But it was a job with benefits and good pay and it had been three months since I was last employed and I had bills to pay. So I took it. I didn’t want to take it, but I knew I needed to. I knew someone who had been working there for many years too, so I figured it couldn’t be that bad of a job (read: by knew, I mean someone I casually knew in high school).

My schedule for training was Thursday through Monday. Certainly not ideal, but I understood and respected that that was when I had to work because that was when the sales manager was scheduled and she was the one training me. I was told in the interview that training would be about three weeks. On day one, I was told five to six weeks. By the end of day three, I had figured out that the sales associates worked open to close with one one-hour lunch break, which meant my schedule totaled around 44 hours a week and was, in fact, the shortest possible schedule you could have. The store opens at 10am and closes at 8pm during the week, though employees are expected to be there by 8:45am. Hardly the “some evenings and weekends” that was promised by the classifieds ad, the phone interview, and the in-person interview and definitely not the implied rotating morning/evening shifts. And since this was a salaried/commissioned position, there was no overtime. Once I realized how many hours I would be working and did some quick math, the training salary I was given no longer looked as exciting (think fast food pay). I wasn’t sure how to feel, though my heart was saying deceit. It felt like they purposely overlooked an important detail so they could fill a gap with a warm body because they knew it was far from being an ideal job. How exactly are you supposed to have a life when you have no weekends and literally your entire day is consumed with peddling bedroom sets and dinettes? There are far too many people in my life who I know need me to be available for them for more than a couple hours a day for me to be locked up on a retail floor for over eleven hours a day. That alone was enough to make me want to get out as soon as possible.

As my training continued, I wasn’t sure if I could continue no matter how much I needed a job.

The entire training program is based on a book published in 1986 that has accrued a whopping eighteen reviews on Amazon, the first dating back to 1997. The book is accompanied by twelve training videos that had been converted from VHS to DVD (they actually ended with the narrator reminding you to rewind the tape). Knowing these videos were as old as I am and featured a host who probably saw the Great Depression, I knew to expect some subtle sexism given the subject at hand—you know, the recliner is the man’s domain and his wife makes him a sandwich while he watches TV. That’s exactly what I saw. And the sexist sentiment was echoed by the female sales manager who oversaw an all-female sales staff, though in a slightly different light. I was told that since I was a man, I would probably run into issues with connecting with clients because it would be weird for me to compliment a woman on her purse, earrings, or hair (because apparently only women shop for furniture and the only way to connect with a customer is compliment them because we’re all vain, superficial beings or something—but maybe I’m reading too much into it) and also with describing furniture because men do not understand the aesthetics of furniture and care more about its construction and reliability—though, my skills as a writer, of which she knew little, would supposedly offset this biological setback. Not one bit of that rubbed me the right way.

And then the videos took a racist turn and I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.

I can’t for the life of me remember what comparison he was making, but the man in the videos went on this awful tangent about how if you give an American a pair of chopsticks, they won’t know how to use them. Okay, yeah, chopsticks are kinda difficult to use. And then for whatever he felt he needed to continue his example by referring to “Oriental people” not being to use a fork. And kept saying it. That was offensive when those videos were filmed let alone today. I wanted to take my shoe off and throw it at the TV. I needed this job though. And so started the conflict.

I felt like I had been deceived about the job and then you add in the sexism and then the racism and then consider the fact that this business is killing way too many trees because of a WAY outdated infrastructure. And I just didn’t know if I could continue no matter how much I needed a job.

The last straw came when I was told to lie and make stuff up.

The sales manager said to me, “I know you don’t have a girlfriend but go ahead and say to a customer, ‘My girlfriend has that purse and she loves!’” Another sales associate piped in saying she couldn’t lie because she knew that customer would come back and she would get caught in her. She did, however, offer up that she would often tell customers that she knew someone who had a particular piece of furniture because odds are she had previously sold it to someone. The sales manager agreed and upped the ante by saying she would tell customers she even owned something when she didn’t own it at all. My stomach was turning. And that wasn’t the first time that had happened. Even just the morning meetings would do it. On what would end up being my last day there, I got to see them use their tactics first hand on my friend’s mom and I couldn’t have been more disgusted when the sales manager said to the sales associate after she had left, “See, you still got it!”

My two days off came and I had some hard thinking to do. Could I continue working there? I honestly didn’t know. I needed the money and I knew that already having a job would more easily help me find new employment, but my stomach was already turning and I didn’t want to deal with ulcers anytime soon. I was afraid I would have more trouble sleeping at night than I already had.

I spent a lot of time weighing things out and asking people for advice. If I quit, would it truly be because I couldn’t tolerate the environment or would it be because I just didn’t want to do the work and didn’t like what I was doing? I went to a prestigious institution and received a real degree in a real subject so I shouldn’t be selling furniture, right? If I quit, I didn’t want that to be the reason. I had to know that I was quitting for moral reasons. By Thursday morning, I had figured that out and I’m still surprised I was paid the right amount and on time.

The sales manager tried to pass it off as joking when I said I didn’t like being told to lie to customers, but there was nothing humorous about it. She apologized for me interpreting it that way. I didn’t really accept her apology. I then told her their training videos were racist and her attitude changed. As she walked away from me, she told me not to take anything on me way out. I don’t think I had ever been disrespected that much before in my life. I should have dragged a couch out behind me just to spite her.

This was a little more than two weeks ago. I still haven’t found anything else. But I know that my head will rest easier on my pillow at night now. There’s an elderly lady I help with groceries and I get her mail for her on occasion and she kept telling me how proud she was for sticking with my morals and that pushed all doubt from my mind. Although my bank account is still dwindling, albeit with a small amount of padding from my five days in furniture sales, I know that I did the right thing and that I am a better person for it no matter how well I would have done the job.

I don't read books and I know that's controversial

"When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs."  

Garrison Keillor

If you ask a writer for advice on writing, most likely they will tell you to read. And as someone who has always learned better by doing, I’ve never quite understood that. If you want to be a better writer, isn’t the first thing you should do is write?

There’s the age-old adage that practice makes perfect.

A few weeks back someone I hadn’t spoken to in quite some time got in touch with me to ask me how he should go about starting a literary project he had been thinking about for some time. I was surprised and humbled. Specifically, he was unsure of what perspective to use to tell his story. Since it was non-fiction, I suggested first person, though was not opposed to his idea of third and cited instances where non-fiction had been written as fiction. Although it is in first person, I referenced Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a novel that is a fictionalized account of real-life happenings as documented in Thompson’s many letters. Before I could finish my thought, though, he interrupted me and said he had never read a book before in his life. I didn’t doubt it, knowing his background. I told him his first step was that he needed to read a book. He said that wouldn’t happen. I told him I couldn’t believe I said that.

I don’t read books. I own many. But a lot of them have never been opened or have only had the first 50 or so pages read. When I was younger I read a lot—including almost every book K.A. Applegate wrote (the best one was the Everworld with the human sacrifice). I honestly couldn’t tell you the last book I read in full that wasn’t a poetry chapbook or a requirement for a college class, but if I had to guess it was either The Kite Runner or Nick Hornby’s young adult novel, Slam. As a writer, I have been criticized by more than one person more than one time for this. And while I get that reading is, in a sense, studying your craft, I have never quite understood why some writers seem to think that reading is more important than writing, even going so far as questioning your skill as a writer, with or without having read your work, simply because you aren’t constantly reading or if are reading, aren’t talking about what you are reading. And that boggles me.

The best thing a writer can to do to become a better writer is write.

My freshman year of college I went to a Garrison Keillor book signing. At the time, I hadn’t read any of his books, but I had fallen in love with the film A Prairie Home Companion and started listening to the radio show when I could. I didn’t know if he would speak at the event or just sign books (I bought one when I got there—Lake Wobegon 1956), but I knew that if he did speak, he would undoubtedly have something good to say.

I can’t remember the main premise of the speech that he did give. I can only remember three things. He had the entire group situated on the second floor of Books and Co. in Beavercreek, OH sing “Amazing Grace”, the lyrics rolling off the high ceilings of bookstore. As I stood in line waiting my turn for an autograph (on both my newly acquired book and the DVD jacket for my copy of A Prairie Home Companion), my phone rang and it was this 1920s-swing-big band type of ring tone. I was embarrassed and quickly tried to ignore the call from my dad. As I approach Mr. Keillor, he asked me what that sound was and I thought for sure he was going to yell at me for not having my phone turned off. Instead, he said he liked my ringtone.

The thing that really stuck out to me, though, was his response to a young man, maybe 16 or 17, during a brief Q&A session. It was a question standard to these kinds of things, one I am sure you have heard or read many times in interviews: “What advice do you have for a young writer?” Mr. Keillor’s response was simple. Write about the people around you. He said that all of the inspiration you needed was around you—something Garrison Keillor clearly believes if you have ever read any of his books. I can still remember this line word-for-word: “For without you, their lives will go unrecorded.”

Life is full of characters and dialogue and plotlines. Every story you will ever tell, whether it’s fiction, poetry, non-fiction, has already been lived out for you. You just have to write it down.

The key to writing a good story isn’t reading a book—it’s writing a good story. Write something that feels real and people will believe it is real. You will never find that with your nose buried in a book, but rather by living life. We communicate every day in one form or another: text messages, phone calls, small talk with strangers, Facebook posts, Tweets, dinner table conversation with the family, philosophical talks around a summer bonfire. Writing is communication. It is taking an event—real or fake—and putting it down on paper in a way that will elicit emotions in the reader and enable them to develop a relationship with not just the characters but the story as a whole. 

People want to read things which they can believe to be real, which they can identify with.

The summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school I attended a week-long creative writing camp hosted by a nearby university. The instructor echoed Mr. Keillor’s thoughts, stating that the best dialogue is real dialogue. His suggestion was to go to the mall or a coffee shop or somewhere else public with a notebook and write down the conversations you hear. Get the slang, the colloquialisms, the dialect. This is where almost every ounce of inspiration you will ever need for your creativity lies.

I buy heavily into Mr. Keillor’s advice, as well as that of the instructor at the creative writing camp. And I firmly believe that the best advice for a writer is to write. I’m not saying don’t read. Reading is important. But I don’t think reading makes you a good writer. Writing makes you a good writer. I don’t think it is okay for anyone to ever discredit or judge someone as a writer simply because they’re not reading three books at a time.

As for the friend, whether he reads a book or not, I have no doubt in my mind that he has the talent to create something that millions of people will read and they will find inspiration in it. I think he has a better chance than I do. I just hope he does it.

How my driver's license got a little heart

Back in May I turned 25, which in Ohio meant I had to renew my driver’s license. I actually almost forgot, but remembered the afternoon before my birthday and hurried to the BMV where I got a new picture that gets double-takes because I was randomly wearing my contacts and dropped a bunch of money I wasn’t planning on spending—fresh into unemployment. It was the usual schpeel, though thankfully without a line; I was actually in an out within twenty minutes, perhaps a new record. There were all the normal questions: do you have insurance, are you a citizen, height, weight, etc etc.

“Would you like to be an organ donor?” she asked across the counter, showing such little emotion.

I replied to her with no hesitation, “Yes.”

Prior to that, I had not been an organ donor. There was not a little heart on my driver’s license, just a letter than meant I had to wear corrective lenses while driving. I hadn’t even considered it, despite having heard testimonies in school and in driver’s ed. It’s strange how they show you videos of dismembered bodies to promote safe driving, but then encourage you donate your organs in case their instruction doesn’t work. I even met a double lung transplant once by chance; she works at the bookstore I occasionally visit.

For some reason I felt that my body should remain whole upon death—a selfish thought carried over from my youth. I had no explanation for that reasoning other than that.

A while back I met a young man who knew he would eventually be placed on the transplant list for a double lung transplant after a lifetime of lung infections related to cystic fibrosis had ravaged the set he was born with.

His lungs weren’t destroyed by something he did—not by smoking or exposure to chemicals in the workplace. This happened because of a rare genetic mutation. Rare as in only 30,000 people in the United States have the disease—that’s significantly less than how many people die each month from heart disease and just about equal to how many die each year because of car accidents. Diabetes affects almost 1000 times as many people in the United States. Over five million people in the United States are believed to be suffering from Alzheimer’s. Cystic fibrosis affects just 30,000 people nationwide, 70,000 people worldwide. Columbus, Ohio—the nearest major metropolitan area to where I live—is home to around 800,000 people. Even if we looked at the Columbus suburb of Delaware where I went to college, there is a population of about 35,000.

I think that should give you some perspective. Because I just looked up those numbers to write this and even though I already knew some of those statistics, it still did for me.

My cousin will eventually need a double lung transplant too, as will the young boy who lives up the street from me. They too suffer from cystic fibrosis.

It is surreal to me that right now a friend of mine is in need of new organs. And even though I have known this disease since my cousin was diagnosed just a handful of months before her second birthday—a late diagnosis, actually—almost nine years ago, it has only been within the last few months that it has become real to me. Before meeting that young man, who has since become a very good friend, earlier this year, the idea of a double lung transplant hadn’t even crossed my mind. I knew it was a possibility, but I didn’t know it would happen eventually. Now I can’t help but recall all of those dramatic episodes of ER and Scrubs. Do you remember “My Lunch”? Or the movie John Q?

Generally the word ‘surreal’ is used to describe good things: things reminiscent of fairy tales or our favorite dreams. But I can’t find a better word to describe how am I feeling. It’s bizarre knowing that someone else must first die in order for someone else to live.

How do you pray for that?

I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. I don’t think I ever will and to be honest, I’m not sure I want to. I’m not sure that is something I want to think about. But whoever it is who ends up giving this gift, I want to thank them while I still can.

But I liked foxes before that band from Norway

The first time I can remember seeing a fox was when I was spending a summer in London staying with a friend. He lived in a small suburb in the southeastern part of the city. There were three of us—my friend, another friend of ours, and myself—staying in the guest room on the second floor of his house, overlooking the street. We were awoken sometime around 1am or so by a rustling outside. It was my other friend who heard it first and he acted as excited as a small child on Christmas morning. There were three foxes outside running through the streets and going through the neighborhood’s trash and recycling. I was very confused when my friends told me to look at the foxes outside. I couldn’t figure out why there would be foxes in the middle of a city. I thought foxes lived in forests or in the arctic—not cities. But in England, foxes live wherever they please.

The foxes in London aren’t the red foxes you generally think of—they’re a little smaller and grey. They’re England’s equivalent to the raccoons of Ohio, scavenging through the most easily-accessible of trashcans for whatever left-behind scraps for dinner. And like with raccoons and some birds of prey, they roam the city because it was their home long before the likes of Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf. Although London is one of the oldest cities in the world, the modern city we know used to be much smaller with a lot more forests—though even now it is one of the greenest cities in the world. As civilization expanded, the foxes stayed put, adapting to their new urban environment, not giving up or into mankind’s supreme domination. Instead, creating a new way of life.

Foxes are an inspiration.

I remember when I lived in London for three months in 2008, I was out walking one day in, I think, a business district near Euston Station and in the middle of the sidewalk right at the very edge of a walkway to an office building was a fox. A dead fox. It was bloated and probably had a few flies around, though I don’t recall it smelling. Clearly, it had been there for a while. I remember stopping and staring at it briefly before continuing on my walk, wondering why it was still there. Although it wasn’t squished or even at all bloody, I assumed it had been hit by a car and the 20’ from the road to its final resting place was all the further the fox could make it. I couldn’t figure out why it was still there though—why no one either from the city or from the building, the walkway of which was being intruded upon by the fox, had removed it yet. It was as if I was the only one who could see it. Maybe that’s how the fox wanted to go out.

A few weeks ago I saw a fox dead in the middle of the road. For the longest time I never even knew that foxes were native to Ohio until a couple years ago when I had one run out in front of me one evening as my friend and I were driving to a restaurant in a nearby city for dinner. That fox managed to not get hit by either my car or the one coming from the opposite direction. This fox I saw a couple weeks ago, however, was not as lucky.

I really like foxes. I think they’re beautiful creatures—majestic even. They hold great significance to me. When the fox ran into the road and dodged both oncoming cars, that, to me, was a sign that even though absolutely nothing in my world seemed to be right, it would all be okay eventually. So when I saw the dead fox in the middle of the fox a few backs, I wondered if that too were a sign. And if it was, what did it mean? With unemployment and the job hunt still looming, I didn’t like the implications of that sign. However, my mind was put at ease not long after.

As I drove home from my favorite pizza local pizza place, Firehouse Pizza, the other night right at dusk, I noticed two animals playing in someone’s driveway. I saw pointy ears and tails, so I assumed they were cats. But as I drove by, they stopped playing and looked at me—they were foxes. Younger foxes, I assumed, who were enjoying each other’s company by wrestling around as the sun started to fade away. And I smiled, happy to see these creatures enjoying themselves.