I wait for the little things to happen. I look around, across, up and down. A crow is on a utility wire above me. He caws and bobs his head at me, making sure I am doing okay.

These are my slow days. They are the days between my jobs as a television journalist. I need days like these to bring me down from the speed of the fast-paced life of a news person.

When I am working the facts, I dart across the country.

I get in and out of airplanes more often than some people get in and out of bed.

The headlines beckon and I rush into the world with the urgency of a firefighter trying to save a burning house. Unfortunately, most of the time I don’t save the house, I usually get there too late. I arrive just when the victims return home to cry over their losses. I get there just in time to see them stumble over the ashes of things they once cherished. Just in time to get their reactions to what happened to them. I point a camera at their shocked expressions and ask them to express their pain as my camera person zooms in to get a closeup of their tears.

The hooting of the mourning dove and the soft rumble of the airliner high in the paint brushed white clouds above me, circling in for a landing at LAX keep me present in the smallness of me.

My warm cup of coffee at my side, loose sweat pants, flip-flops and my 14-year-old border collie mix at my feet are simple pleasures that fold their arms around me and speak “there, there.”

I watch as the blades of lawn grass silently stretch awake as the sun dries their dew covered backs.

The slow is where I place myself today. It is how I reacquaint myself to myself. I inhale and stop. I do nothing for a moment.

I get in and out of airplanes more often than some people get in and out of bed.

My life is a rush to move my body through space, squished up against the side of the flying tin cans, as my legs tuck under the backpack beneath the seat in front of me that holds my computer, notebooks, a kindle, and my travel masks.

I carry surgical masks, KN95s masks with ear straps, and KN95 masks with head straps for long flights, and I carry the professional mask I put on while flying to each news event.

I bundle myself into this small space, close my eyes, and hope to sleep a little before I have to jump into action as soon as the landing gear touches the tarmac.

I left this job once. It became too much about almost 20 years of nonstop action. I took a few years off, then slowly came back to it. My bills forced me back into the saddle. I can’t say I missed it too much, not with a cozy back yard, my dogs, and writing to entertain me.

When I left, I felt an overwhelm bundled with burnout. I thought I would die if I continued chasing the news. Not only was it hard on my body sitting in those planes, getting up at the crack of dawn and possibly pulling an all-nighter, it was also hard on my soul.

It got more and more difficult to go to the places where bad things happened.

The bad crawled inside me to feast on my humanity and ate my empathy for lunch.

It turned my face into a tableau of sorrow while I wasn’t being sad. The years of news plastered crevasses onto my face, each line of my furrowed brow slowly turning my expression into a permanent scowl.

I aged and shrunk. I lost myself inside the bad news and succumb to it like a slave to a master, powerless and shackled to my deadlines. Like all the people I interviewed, I became a victim.

It started early on, when I got my first assignment chasing the bad news.

I will never forget my first day of rushing into the fire. I got a call from the company that would eventually hire me full time as a television producer. They said there was a shooting in a school in Colorado, just outside of Denver, in a place called Columbine.

Go! They said.

So I boarded the next airplane out of LAX. The plane was full of journalists, television crews, print reporters, photographers, all of us heading into the storm.

I was nervous. I didn’t know how to react. I was in shock, like the rest of the world, at what we had heard had happened. 12 dead, bombs, automatic weapons, a library, school hallways, blood, many wounded, and dead. Teenagers killing teenagers.

I wanted to cry as I sat in the middle seat next to a reporter that had his laptop open and was pounding away at writing something; he powered out his words like a gushing wound and it spilled all over me. Though I couldn’t read what he was writing, I knew the words would shock just by stating the facts.
The air was so thick with anxiety mixed with the adrenaline that I couldn’t really breathe properly.

I didn’t want to go there. I didn’t want to see the place where the bad took over and killed innocence. I didn’t want to do anything but return to Los Angeles and cry.

I didn’t cry. I walked into the rumble and roar of the news and performed. I reported what happened. I found witnesses who told us about the horror of seeing their friends shot, about hiding in classrooms, under tables, about running out of the school with their hands in the air. I put on my cool hard mask of professionalism, which stayed on for the next 20 years, and listened to the crying victims.

And I didn’t cry.

The ruby breasted finches are gathering the remains of the weeds I pulled from my raised planter. The male nudges his partner. They bob their heads in unison, grab some dried grass, and fly up into the orange tree. Their nest is hiding deep under the green panoply, just next to a ripe orange. I see the fine twigs peaking out of the leaves, a perfect spiral home for their offspring.

The airplane high above me switches speeds, slows down for landing. I lift my cup of coffee and sit back on my plastic Adirondack chair. I watch my puppy roll on her back on the freshly cut grass, kicking her hind legs in the air in ecstasy.

I wait for nothing in particular to happen.

I try hard not go back to that day exactly 23 years ago in Colorado or all the other days when I had to ask the hard questions and not cry.

Maybe today I just may cry a little.

My attention lifts off my morning newspaper like the steam rising from my coffee cup. It floats out of my living room window and onto my quiet neighborhood.

She stands about 4 1/2 feet tall. He towers over her, his thin, lanky frame covered in loose-fitting green coveralls. He must be at least 6 feet tall. A steady beat of a smooth R&B melody drifting out of the large green garbage truck’s open door like a cool breeze on a hot summer day. The beat is subtle and steady, like a metronome for the moment.

The scene was familiar. Every week he comes. Every week she waits. Every week she hands him a plastic bag filled with things growing in her backyard, from her trees, some persimmons, or oranges, or maybe lemons, and pomegranates. During the height of the Covid pandemic they would wear masks when they met in the middle of her driveway. Today they bump elbows, but the masks are now somewhere at the end of the line, piled high on a landfill, no longer part of the ritual of their weekly meeting.

Today they bump elbows…She understands him. He understands her.

My neighbor is a Japanese woman at least 80, maybe even 90, years old. He, is a garbage man, a working man, who takes a moment out of his busy schedule hauling our weekly refuse to connect with his friend, the elderly Asian lady. When she speaks to me, I can hardly understand her through the thick accented English that lingers even after a lifetime of being an American. But he understands her; his smile is bright as the day is sunny. She nods and bows while gesturing with her hands. He nods and bows back. He speaks her language. She understands him. He understands her.
I don’t hear the words. I don’t need to hear the words. I see their bond through the canopy of my wisteria as I watch the scene outside my front window. I begin to cry tears of joy. I am suddenly filled with an incredible sense of awe at being an invisible witness to such a perfect yet, improbable connection between these two people.

I look back down at the newspaper sitting on the table in front of me. Drought, war, Covid -19 still ravaging communities, and billionaires getting their kicks flying into outer space. The headlines disturb me. The bathtub rings around the reservoirs, like rings around a fallen tree. How can this planet survive? Fish are drowning in the puddles of toxic waste. When will our civilization cease to exist in this overheated place? Water is life. Water is evaporating. Water is gone.

The next page has a large picture of people wading in a pool to cool off in a place called “Drytown” somewhere in California, where the temperatures hit 107 in the shade. They look like human water lilies bobbing up and down in plastic inflatable lifesaving rings in chlorinated man-made ponds with concrete walls to keep in the little water we have left.

…no spectators for the Olympic Games in Tokyo because the pandemic can’t be stopped, but the games must go on.

I turn the page. I read no spectators for the Olympic Games in Tokyo because the pandemic can’t be stopped, but the games must go on. I flash back to memories of attending five Olympic Games as a volunteer, a journalist, and a spectator. The roar of the crowds still resonates deep inside me as if it were yesterday. The collective energy of a universal love connected the watching and the competitors and the collective breath-holding as the athletes put their entire blood, sweat, and sometimes tears into pushing their bodies to the limit.
I close the paper, but the front page screams out at me. Images of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spacecraft successfully flying 53 miles above the earth’s surface. NASA says that qualifies for outer space. Why do this? Because they can. Branson said it was 99.9% beyond his wildest dreams. What are those dreams? A life-changing experience? Is it the price tag or actually the experience that is life-changing? People will pay $250,000 to take a flight above it all in order to look back down at us. Just imagine how $250,000 could give decades and decades of food and shelter to millions of people down here on earth.

The small perfect moments that I witness daily down here on earth have a big impact on my well-being…

The small perfect moments that I witness daily, down here on earth, have a big impact on my well-being, and many of them are free. Do I really have to fly into space when I can see a flower growing through the crack on the concrete sidewalk? Or I see my two dogs licking each other’s muzzle and smiling? Or the joy when I see a hummingbird feeding from the sweat nectar inside the orange bird of paradise blooming outside my bedroom window? Or when I witness the smile on the face of a neighbor’s 4 year old riding her bike without training wheels for the first time. Or when my octogenarian Japanese American neighbor bumps elbows with a tall, smiling black man.

The man in the green coveralls rolls her two garbage bins back behind her large gate so she can fill them up again. She closes the gate behind him. He walks to his truck and jumps back inside the cab and onto the driver’s seat with a smile and his bag filled with small things. He drives away with his humanity, and I close my newspaper.