I was picking up a friend from an early morning doctor’s appointment when the air conditioning began to blow hot.
It had been getting less cool as the summer progressed. The Neighborhood Trolley has a black interior; it gets warm easily. But this wasn’t just a hot car– the air from the vents was far hotter than the air outside.
A sensor that looked like a thermometer lit up red on the dashboard. I turned off the whole car and opened the doors, just in case the Neighborhood Trolley needed some air. I didn’t know what else to do for a car that was running a fever. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was thirty-six, and I’m not yet thirty-eight now. Cars are mysterious to me.
When my friend got out and I turned the car back on, the thermometer was gone. After I dropped her off, I went to the mechanic, who took the Neighborhood Trolley into custody. He said it would take a few hours, and I didn’t have anyone to pick me up, so I walked to the bus stop.
The bus trip home took forty-five minutes.
I have made no secret about the fact that I have anxiety, and that being poor without a car in Steubenville was traumatic for me, so it’s no surprise that I was anxious on the ride home. I felt as though I was going to have a panic attack the whole way. When I got home, I got a call from the mechanic saying that the bill would be just over five hundred dollars– astronomical by our income standards, and coming right on the heels of an unlucky month.
Right on queue I got another phone call, when I was pacing around the opposite side of the house tearing my hair out about the mechanic’s bill. The caller ID said it was the Department of Job and Family Services, to whom I’d just submitted some paperwork downtown for our Medicaid insurance. Of course, by the time I got on the phone, they’d hung up. They never let it ring very long and they don’t leave messages. When I called them, the receptionist told me she didn’t know who had called me, and that I had to call the Ohio Benefits Hotline instead of the local branch. So I did. And the benefits hotline kept me on hold for an hour.
When I finally, finally got to a human being, she was kind. Most of the people who work for Job and Family Services are kind. She assured me that the paperwork I’d submitted had been accepted and my Medicaid was active. She didn’t know what I’d been called about, but there was nothing wrong with what I’d submitted and nobody is being taken off Medicaid at the moment anyway. I explained that I have anxiety and I always feel like I’m going to be arrested if I make a mistake on my paperwork, so the missed call had made me sick, and she was kind about the whole thing.
I hung up, staving off a panic attack for the second time that day. Even though the news had been good, waiting that long on hold was nerve-wracking.
After I hung up, I saw the message from the troll.
I get a lot of messages from trolls; this one was especially bizarre. Here it is in its entirety:
“I am OVERJOYED that this stings you. So incredibly happy. Now you have a taste of what others feel when you attack them mercilessly and you do that nasty double down to them. I’m literally at OLM 15 miles away dancing a jig to your discomfort. THRILLED, you nasty hypocrite. And praying there’s so much more where that came from. Get over yourself. You’re a witch, and you deserve whatever criticism you receive from the priesthood. Glad to see it burn.”
I couldn’t respond to this person because they’d blocked me after this missive. I don’t know what I would have said anyway.
I was puzzled at the claim they were “literally at OLM 15 miles away dancing a jig.” There’s nothing called OLM within fifteen miles of my house. At first I thought “OLM” was some kind of name for the Latin Mass, but I eventually realized that the troll was talking about Our Lady of Mercy parish, FIFTY miles from my house– as a friend on social media pointed out, if they were using voice to text the words might have been confused.
I looked up the church in question and found some interesting reviews.
I realized that the church office wasn’t even open, nor was there a liturgy going on in the church, at the time when the troll had contacted me. Either he was lying about the location of his jig, or he was a squatter, or he was a member of the parish staff in the church after hours. I began to speculate ridiculously about who.
And then I started to laugh at myself, because I was wasting the afternoon of an already stressful day trying to hunt down a miserable clericalist troll.
Nothing has hurt me like the Catholic Church has hurt me, and that can be hard to get over. I have resolved to not let such people get under my skin, but it’s a hard lesson to learn. Here I was speculating about the identity of a sibling in Christ too cowardly to even use their own name.
I closed the laptop, and I went out to the community garden.
It’s so pretty there right now. The fallow half of the garden is a jungle of pokeweed as tall as I am. In the cultivated half, the raised garden beds are overflowing with plants. Four of those beds are mine. My Four Sisters patch has cornstalks and a sunflower almost ready to bloom; the peas are not quite spent for the year; the summer squash is growing by leaps and bounds. The tomatoes are weighing down their vines, if only it would stay hot out long enough for them to ripen. The potato plants are nearly bursting out of their deep barrels. Everything looks so beautiful, it’s hard to believe there’s anything wrong with the world.
When I was a little girl, I watched a five-day story arc on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood that stuck with me all the rest of my life. I shared the episodes with my daughter when she was a preschooler, and fell in love with them all over again. The episodes concern a scraggly old goat who is caught pilfering vegetables from the Neighborhood of Make-Believe puppets’ gardens. When the other puppets catch him, they find out that he’s taking home food to his neighbors in the land of Southwood, which is experiencing a famine due to a drought. So all the neighbors in Make-Believe drop everything and turn the whole neighborhood into a garden. They grow food on the Platypus Mound and on vines over Ex and Henrietta’s tree. They grow food at the castle and at the Museum-go-round. They transport it all on a boat to Southwood to help their neighbors, because this is what you’re supposed to do when there’s a crisis.
I’ve taken this lesson with me ever since: if there’s a crisis, you should grow a garden. If there’s a pile of crises all in a day, you should grow a bigger garden. And if someone is doing something bad that hurts, you should feed hungry people.
I fussed over the plants and admired them for a long, long time.
I picked a handful of peas and put it in a bag to hang on the garden fence, where I’ve been giving away my extra vegetables. There are a lot of hungry neighbors in LaBelle.
I brought home some squash for my dinner.
I got a text from my friend saying that she’d take me to pick up the car tomorrow when it was finished, and I got some help to pay the bill from a few other friends.
Everything had felt so wrong, and now it felt wonderfully right.
There’s a life lesson in there somewhere.
Image via pixabay
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
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