I pressed play on the audio file of my hypnotherapy session. Julie’s voice started midsentence. “—sending gratitude and love to your miraculous body.” Wait a minute. My miraculous body was still fidgeting for the sweet spot on the bed. I start over. Found sweet spot. Memorized it. Rolled onto my side, stretched to reach the computer on the nightstand, pressed pause and then play again. The headphones slipped off my ears when I lay back down. I made a mental note: buy a remote for the laptop. Do they make remote controls for laptops? Rolled over, hit pause, rewound, pressed play. One hand clapped to the headphones.

After two Zoom sessions with Julie and numerous replays of the audio files, I was ready to declare hypnotherapy a failed experiment, if not a scam. As hard as I tried ( and tried not to try) I could not remember Dr. Agnes Jackson. She was starkly absent from my dreams, oblivious to nightly invitations as I climbed into bed, oblivious to the playlist I’d created for the year she’d reportedly mentored me, and oblivious to her photo tucked under my pillow. I’d printed the photo from the internet. It came out an off shade of green with vertical white lines running through it—Dr. Jackson caged behind my subconscious.

I settled into the well-established routine of the therapy session. I knew Julie’s bits by heart. She would count me down: 5 “drifting deeper … ” 4. “Your brilliant intellectual mind …” (I appreciated that she saw my brilliance.) 3 “… will know exactly when to come back to the sound of my voice.” 2. “… down, down …” 1. bla bla bla. She would suggest I think about (or not think about, hmm, confusing) events that were kind of (subconsciously speaking) next door to the missing memory. She would end by reversing the count to bring me back to conscious awarenes, 0. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Eyes open bla bla bla.

I usually listened to the entire session, because, at the very least, I loved being the center of another person’s attention, even previously recorded attention.

However, my scepticism at ten out of ten, I took the passive aggressive route. I fell asleep. Sleep overtook me right in the middle of a math problem: How many books could I have published with the dolars I’d spent on hypnotherapy? It was a stellar nap. Deep and silent, quieter than four in the morning quiet. Of course, I didn’t know that until after the nap ended. Well, specifically, I couldn’t say the nap ended. Specifically, my eyes opened.

Opened, just at the second Julie’s recorded voice was saying, “Eyes open, wide awake, back in the here and now.”

While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

*****

"I've got no problem not seeing what I don't need to see."
———Hanif Abdurraquib
——--There’s Always This Year

A gravel drive led from our cabin to the main road, cutting through a pasture where a dozen cows grazed. As I hiked toward the bovines, I hesitated, leery of anything wearing four legs and a tail. A calf looked up at me, then ambled closer to its mother. (My apologies to the cows for being presumptuous about their relationship.) The little one was cute, until she was obscured by her bigger, meaner mom.

I stopped. My knees quivered.

Mama cow squared herself to the drive, ready to attack. Further ahead, cows were lying close enough to swat me with their tails.

My knees got very fluttery, in addition to the quivering.

Other mooing beasts had closed in from behind. They would definitely breathe on me.

My knees were buckling, in addition to the fluttering and quivering. I prepared to die from cow cooties.
The monsters got bored and wandered off. And when they left, all the activity in my joints wandered off as well.

I was grateful for such a close-up look at fear. How it rose and fell and passed away. How judgments piled on top of anxiety will spiral you into panic. Maybe I’ll take this as a starting point, to accept my whole self once and for all. Yes, from now on, a new mantra: compassion for anxiety.

As we were packing up at the end of our get-away, my friend said, “I saw a bobcat yesterday.”

What?

Note to my knees: Are you nuts? You wasted my scaries on cows? There were bobcats out there.

The August heat squeezed between my husband and me like the third person on a date. Holding hands and sipping Cokes, we plodded through our annual visit to the state fair. We trudged through the barns and the pens. Climbed on tractors, looked at cows and then sheep. Humidity glued tee shirts to midsections, defeating our efforts to conceal muffin top and paunch. Comfort trumped dignity on state fair days – it laid bare spidery veins, wrinkly knees, and wiggly arms.

Ben held his ice-filled cup against his forehead. “Ready for the goats? They’re next up.”

A bead of sweat traced a path down my nose.

“No. Let’s find some A.C.”

“Right behind you, Puddin’ Cake.” He patted my rear, and I was twenty again, that magical age before gravity got personal.

We slipped into the nearest building with glass double doors, not caring what might lurk inside. Cold air blasted us. We soaked it up for a moment and then drifted toward a nearby crowd.

Ben grabbed my arm. “Watch out.”

I sidestepped a tortoise the size of a footstool. It retreated into its shell, leaving only the point of its snout visible … and leaving me wondering what on earth it was doing there.

We edged closer to the front. A pre-teen boy held court behind a conference-sized table. A terrarium on the table was crawling with tree frogs the color of lime sherbet. The boy reached in and offered the frogs to the crowd, like hors d’oeuvres. He held one in my direction.

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe if I do this I won’t scream the next time a toad shows up while I’m weeding.”

“Yeah, he’ll just sit in your hand.” He placed the cute little critter in my palm. The frog, unaware of the rules, crept toward my elbow.

“Oh, no. Oh, no. It’s moving. I feel its claws.”

“Lady, hold your arm level, and he’ll sit still.”

I did. The frog did not. It headed toward my face, onto which, if I didn’t take evasive action, it would spew chartreuse slime that would have to be removed with Ben’s power sander.

My voice climbed an octave – “It’s still going” – for every centimeter the demon scaled. “Get it off!”

Somebody screamed. I couldn’t tell if it was the frog or me. But boy rescued beast just in time to save it from a lethal dousing of Coke.

Onlookers smirked. Ben nudged me toward a neighboring table. Five-gallon jars sat on top of it, with signs attached. Mexican Redkneed Tarantulas. Hissing Cockroaches from—.

“Good Lord!”

At the far end of the table, a man chatted with spectators, while a massive snake—an eight-foot albino boa constrictor, according to a nearby sign—twisted itself around his outstretched arms.

A woman standing next to me pointed to the boa. “Is it poisonous?”

“No, no. Do you want to hold her?”

Do you want her to hold you would have been more accurate.

The woman shook her head and jumped back, stepping on my foot and crashing into three teenaged girls. Laughter rippled through the audience.

I sympathized with that poor lady. One childhood summer, a fifth-grade bully named Frankie had terrorized me with the garter snakes that slithered around our neighborhood. Leaping from behind a lilac bush, Frankie would throw a writhing serpent at me, then laugh and run away. Because snakes were plentiful—and Frankie persistent—I hated that summer.

Since then, fear of snakes launched by fifth-grade boys had matured into mid-life anxieties. I was afraid of turning the wrong way onto a one-way street. I was afraid of absentmindedly walking into the men’s restroom. I was afraid of standing in the express line with too many items in my cart. I longed to be brave, to sweep in on a white stallion and rescue myself. But I was afraid of horses.

The man inside the boa surveyed his audience, and I tried to disappear by studying my shoes. The strategy failed, as it had in eleventh-grade geometry whenever I hadn’t known the answer.

The teacher looked right at me. “How about you? Do you want to hold her?”

“Me?”

Without permission, my head nodded yes. My stomach countered, Are you crazy?

The snake charmer moved in my direction. “Come on around to this side of the table.”

“You gonna do it?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know.”

What? I could not have said that, because I most certainly did know that I would not do it.

But … on the other hand. A coward dies a thousand deaths. I had nothing to fear but fear itself. Today was the first day of the rest of my life, dammit.

My mutinous left foot took a step. Me? Hold a snake, on purpose?

“Maybe,” I said to Ben. The right foot joined the mutineer. “Yeah.”

He pried the Coke from my hand. “Terrific. I’ll hold your cup.”

I walked around the table (giving a wide berth to the hissing roaches) until I was face-to-face with the man and eyeball-to-eyeball with the snake.

“Hold your arms straight out at your sides.”

I stood like a scarecrow.

The man unwound the boa from his chest and arms. With one hand under its head and the other supporting its midsection, he draped the sinewy reptile across my shoulders.

“Be still,” he said.

No problem. The snake felt smooth and cool. Of the two of us, I was the clammy one. It lay across my shoulders, no doubt bored by just another day at work. I was sorry I’d ever gotten out of bed and certainly regretted passing up the goats.

The boa weaved and wound its way along my shaking limbs, reptilian muscles rippling as it explored the wobbly terrain. The coils gripped like steel cables, and my outstretched arms ached with the effort of keeping the weight aloft. I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists, and contemplated the void, while the serpentine body wrapped around me. A casual squeeze would have snuffed my tiny flame.

I can’t believe Ben let me do this.

The outside of me froze, while the inside quivered. Heart raced and temples pulsed. My palms were sweating like a cold bottle of beer, and my mouth was as dry as granola without any milk, and the butterflies in my stomach were quaking as they flew.

Then the boa flicked her tongue.

With that flash of movement, the sense of weight on my shoulders receded. Motion took the foreground. Threatening mass morphed into shape-shifting mercury.

An imprisoned breath escaped my lips. I saw Ben giving me a thumbs-up, and then I turned my head slightly to get a better look at the creature I was wearing.

The boa slipped and glided. She undulated around my arms in a liquid dance, controlling me with the grace of a tango partner. A ginger widow’s peak branched into delicate honeycombs that wrapped her creamy skin in a mantle of lace. As she loosened and tightened her embrace, flecks of gold from nose to tail flirted with the dappled sunlight in the room.

Yet, at the same time, her smoldering power emboldened me. It incinerated all pretense of reticence. It destroyed any notion of decorum. Blazed away the remains of afraid. I was Wonder Woman, vanquishing my foes after bouncing their impotent bullets off my bracelets.

Muscle fatigue finally overtook my craving to prolong the moment. Mouthing a silent thank you, I nodded my readiness to be released. With her keeper’s assistance, the boa unwound herself from my shoulders and returned to his. She flicked her tongue three times, and then she settled.

I strutted back around the table, hands on my hips.

Ben punched the air with his fist. “Yes!”

“Wow … that was … well … ” I pursed my lips, searching for the words until the desire to speak slipped away on a sigh. I grinned, danced a little jig, and kissed my sweetheart.

“Honey,” he said, “you just earned yourself a corndog.” He draped his arm around my shoulders, handing me the Coke.

After we stepped outside, I cast a longer shadow in the afternoon sun. My stride lengthened. Under the steamy summer sky, my cool was impermeable.

Frankie never would have touched that boa.