Because I Cannot Fix the World...
Trying to put my stubbornness to good use
Because I cannot fix the world, I thought I’d try to fix the broken towel-bar instead. It’s a delicate contraption—two slender rods with four brackets to hold them, and all of it pinned together by a single headless screw the size of a grain of barley. The pieces have been sitting in a pile to the right of my sink, with a promise to make the repair— and, meanwhile, I have nowhere to hang my towels. The tools that are needed are there: the tiny blind screw and a hex wrench. Surely, I tell myself, if this is something a handyman can do, I can get it done. I think about the threat of fascism while I hold the parts in place with one hand and try to use the tiny wrench with the other. When it all falls apart the first time, I remind myself that some things, once broken, are simply very hard to make right again. The grub-screw keeps falling onto the floor, rolling away to places unknown, or burrowing into the nap of the bathroom rug that pads my knees where I kneel like a penitent, close to the wall. Again and again, I try to get the threads to catch. Each time, it all comes crashing down with the sound of wind chimes. The elegant marble floor also needs some loving care. In places the grout has come out, leaving holes large enough to devour a tiny screw. Using the flashlight on my phone and a prayer, I manage each time to retrieve it. Over the course of several days, I keep at it, telling myself that both patience and optimism are required— and that there’s also a learning curve involved— when one applies persistence to things that can feel overwhelming, whether home repairs or political resistance. Copyright ©️ 2025 by Barbara Quick
Scientific fact: The birds outside my window are descended from dinosaurs.
Only some of the dinosaurs could fly. I wonder, could all of them sing?
Do the birds outside my window sing the songs imprinted on their DNA by their ancestors 180 million years ago?
What’s a hundred million years or so to an ancestor with a story to tell?
Nana told me how the priest in Kishinev let her family shelter in the attic of his church because her mother, a seamstress, won the commission to make the coats and hats for the parochial school. And when the mobs came, in 1903, calling for death to the Jews—when scores of her neighbors were murdered and hundreds were injured—my great-grandmother was able to keep her children safe.
The story is part of my DNA as a writer. It’s a story I finally told in my fourth novel, What Disappears: a song I’ve carried in my blood all these years. A song of surviving, of guilt, and shame at being hated and hunted down. Of surviving by virtue of talent or even a rare type of beauty—because who knows, really, what caused the priest to take pity on my great-grandmother?
Sewing and storytelling are not dissimilar, each art requiring patience and a certain urgency to get the job done: to sing the song imprinted on one’s heart, that demands to be sung.
I listen to the songs of the birds outside my window, those messengers from the prehistoric past—and I wonder how evolution will transform us in the course of the next few million years.
Will we, like the dinosaurs, evolve into much tinier creatures than we are now? Will we forage in fields and shelter under trees? Will our voices become so high-pitched, by virtue of our diminutive size, that no other creature will be able to understand what we say, no matter how virtuosically we sing?
I hear longing in the songs of the birds outside my window this morning—longing, love, and gratitude for the courage and skills of their ancestors who died for them and lived for them so they might survive.
An Excerpt from What Disappears
Who were these people—these neighbors and merchants, these men she’d wished good-day, who’d tipped their cap to her and tousled Olga’s curls? Who were these monsters who had murdered her husband and left her children without a father, destroyed their shop, leaving Sonya and her children without a home?
The glass in the frames that held their family photographs was shattered. The photographs had been ripped into pieces, along with all the leather-bound books that had filled their shelves. Asher’s books!
What could cause people—the normal, everyday people of Kishinev—to suddenly turn so hateful? What had she and Asher ever done to offend them? Hadn’t she always been a good neighbor and friend? Wasn’t her shop always a lovely, welcoming place, where Jews and Christians alike drank glasses of tea while Sonya confected beautiful clothing and hats for them? Hadn’t the mayor’s wife, delighted with her new cloak, kissed Sonya’s cheeks and told her that she was one of Kishinev’s treasures?
She bent down and picked up a pair of Asher’s glasses, crushed by someone’s boot. Close to her ear, she heard Olga murmur, “Papa!”
Ask for What Disappears at your favorite bookstore or in your local library.
This edition of Life-boat Made of Words is dedicated to my friends Dana Barak and Barbara Price, who both have birthdays today. ❤️
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