What would you be doing if....

if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

That is what a friend sometimes asks me when I go to her with the latest fear or anxiety.

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

I consider this and think…

Go for a walk and find trees - lots and lots of trees on shady paths deep in the woods to cool you from the Alabama heat or discover the North Woods in Central Park when visiting the city.

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

Remember the names of trees that you love: sugar maple, loblolly pine, red maple, oak, cypress (remember the cypress kissing trees of Silver Lake that waved to you every day for fifteen years in a house on Elevado Street where you raised your children.)

What other trees? Willow, redbud, weeping willow.

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

Don’t you dare cry. You are not a weeping willow. Your tears are irritating. Your stupid tears invite people close to you to advise you to seek therapy, and you’ve had therapy and plenty of it, but you still cry too easily, and it’s annoying to them. You see it in their eyes that grow small with indifference. You’ve cried your quota of tears, so just knock it off. Just don’t, already.

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

Dogwood, ginkgo, sycamore, sequoia, spruce, crepe myrtle, tulip poplar, and magnolia.

In the years since your father died, you’ve managed to kill two trees that you planted for him. An apple and a dogwood. Dead and gone. Shriveled up bare branches, sad brown leaves, lonesome twigs and trunks.

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

So you finally go to a wise gardener named Jason, who knows such things, and you admit to murdering the two trees. Jason owns a place called “Petals from the Past,” south of Birmingham, and he nods at the retelling of the carnage of trees, and he says, “Sweet Magnolia Bay. That’s the tree for you. It’ll feel like it’s coming home in the hard Alabama red dirt.” And he is right.

The sweet magnolia bay that you and your husband plant together thrives. It sprouts hopeful buds, and when you walk by it, you say “Hi Dad,” though your dad was not a gardener, and your mother likes to tell the following story.

“Your father was no gardener, and one day, he and I were wandering around Home Depot looking for something to plant, and he said, ‘Do you even enjoy this?’ And I said, ‘I do not.’ And he said, “Me either. Let’s go.”

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

But what I recall is that one year, Dad planted roses for everyone in the family and named them after each of us, children and grandchildren. He even named one for himself and for Mom, too.

I’m sure his handyman, Brad, helped plant the roses, but I remember Dad wanted roses in his San Diego yard. It was the first yard where Dad had the leisure to plant things. As a football coach, we moved every three or four years, and if he did anything to our yards, it mostly involved wood chips, railroad ties, and shrubs. Fired by the San Diego Chargers (his last coaching job), he no longer had to uproot the family, so he looked around at his scrubby California patch of a yard for a few years and thought, “Ah, roses.”

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

Red, yellow, and pink roses soon crawled up the lattices in their San Diego House. He even got red nameplates with our names next to each rose. When I mention this memory of roses to Mom, she says, “I don’t remember that,” and she retells the story about Dad hating to garden and absconding from Home Depot. I remember my sister loved the roses but didn’t like the red nameplates next to them, saying they reminded her of funeral markers or tiny graves.

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

1. Go to the movies or watch a detective show.

2. Write a story.

3. Start a story.

4. Write the very first line of a story.

5. Return to your first love of playwriting.

6. Think about returning to your first love of playwriting.

7. Write one of your books as a play or at least the first chapter and see what happens.

8. Play with the bones of a story already started.

9. Make a pie, blueberry or cherry.

10. Pet a bossy dog. (Olive)

11. Pet an uncomplicated dog. (Wilbur)

12. Make a pot of soup and spice it with ginger, cumin, curry, onions, carrots, and garlic.

13. Organize the closet and drawers.

14. Call a friend.

15. Write a friend.

16. Make a cup of tea.

17. Stop reading headlines.

18. Stop doom scrolling.

19. Go for another walk - “a long meandering walk.” (Brenda Ueland - See below)

20. Paint, meditate, dig in the dirt.

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

Toward the end of Dad’s life, Mom sold Dad’s car to Brad’s girlfriend. It was a Lexus, and the girlfriend paid cash. Dad missed the car for a few days, but then forgot about it. Years earlier, we took his keys away when stoplights became an afterthought, and he operated strictly with an “I’m coming through, folks!” mindset, terrifying his passengers and others on the road. My sister wrote a beautiful play called “DRIVE” about that time.

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

Brad is still the handyman in San Diego. Brad has been their handyman for thirty years.

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

Now my brother tends the roses that Dad (and Brad) planted.

Mom says, “Your brother is so talented. Look at the roses! And we have a squirrel and a bunny. But the roses. They’re just gorgeous. Your father was no gardener. I remember one time at Home Depot….”

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

***

Note: After I first wrote this, a friend told me about Diana Beresford-Kroeger, and I discovered her books that I must read and watch her film “Call of the Forest: The Forgotten Wisdom of Trees.

It’s exactly what I need right now.

***

Dad’s tree - A Sweet Magnolia Bay.

“Sweet Magnolia Bay. That’s the tree for you. It’ll feel like it’s coming home…”

North Central Woods Central Park

What would you be doing if you weren’t worrying or obsessing over someone or something?

***

Brenda Ueland on walking…

I will tell you what I have learned myself. For me, a long five- or six-mile walk helps. And one must go alone and every day. I have done this for many years. It is at these times I seem to get recharged. If I do not walk one day, I seem to have the next day what Van Gogh calls “the meagerness.” “The meagerness,” he said, “or what is called depression.” After a day or two of not walking, when I try to write I feel a little dull and irresolute. For a long time I thought that the dullness was just due to the asphyxiation of an indoor, sedentary life (which all people who do not move around in the open air suffer from, though they do not know it.”