Days of the Locust

Empathy—everyone thinks it’s so wonderful! I’m often told I’m an empathetic person, as if it’s a compliment. But truthfully, no one realizes how deeply empathetic I am, and what a blight it is. I would trade in my empathy for a good salty vice—gluttony, selfishness, sloth, whatever. According to Merriam-Webster, empathy is “the ability to relate to another person’s pain vicariously, as if one has experienced that pain themselves.” (I’m going to ignore the noun/pronoun--“one”/”themselves”--number disagreement.) The thing is, I experience another’s pain exactly as if it were my own. And therein lies the problem. There is a lot of pain in this world, and some days I think I feel it all: I am stressed out by the predicament of my friend who has an instant to pack a lifetime and a loftful of accumulation into a modest-sized new apartment. I feel her anxiety about whether she can afford the new place. I feel the distraction of my friend whose beloved nonagenarian aunt died leaving her to dis

Sorting through clothes in a closet at my mother’s apartment, I noticed that my mother’s garments all had a very identifiable fragrance—not quite perfume, but not B.O. either. I’m not sure what it is. Out of curiosity, I sniffed my mother in person, and she didn’t smell at all like her clothes. And another thing: My father was quite bald from middle age on. Yet when I was emptying his pockets so I could donate his old suits, every jacket held a comb. What did he use them for?

Half a dozen times a year I fly from New York to San Francisco to visit my mother. I pay for the flights with “reward miles” accrued on my mother’s credit-card. Because the agency responsible for my mother’s 24-hour home care accepts payment by credit card, and her home care costs nearly $200,000 a year, I rarely have to pay actual cash to fly. All good. But there’s a big but: I have to fly on the widely and rightly reviled United. Mostly my economy-class flights are like much of life in the lowest caste—cramped and smelly and occasionally humiliating. But sometimes there’s magic! *Like the time I was asked to change flights—to an earlier flight in a section with more leg room AND I got a $300 credit. *Like the time I was the only passenger in my row and I thought I’d lie down for a moment till the drinks cart came—and I woke up five hours later when the plane clunked down its landing gear! *Like the time a steward gave me a cookie—for free!—and he didn’t offer one to anyone else! Why

Today at lunch I was trying to make conversation with my frail, stroke-stricken, demented mother, whose speech is often at odds with what she means. I asked her what was the happiest moment of her life? What was the proudest? The one thing she’d change if she could? The saddest moment of her life? She struggled with all but the last: “I am sad because I have no future,” she said, with crystal-clear enunciation.

OK, this is not a photo of the raccoon I saw peering at me over the parapet across the street from my building, but it looks exactly the same.

Maybe it’s just me, but an object with a single function seems like a waste. So I’ve got reversible sunhats; a raincoat that is not only reversible but that also tucks inside itself to become its own container ; handbags that can be origami’d into napsacks; combination tools; scarves that can be tied into a dozen different garments; ditto sarongs; skorts ; sporks; a pen that doubles as a stylus; three-color pens; bifocals that turn into sunglasses when you step into the light; and an iPhone so large that it serves as a perfectly satisfactory ereader. And the iPhone case has a kickstand so I can read hands-free. Oh, and I’m typing on that same iPhone with the help of a tiny tri-fold keyboard that slips into my handbag ( which converts into a napsack). It’s a form of multitasking, I guess. I also do kegels instead of focusing on my breath when I try to meditate (which isn’t often, since I find it boring and so unproductive). But here’s the thing: None of these cleverly desig