This Was Not the Plan

& Anna Quindlen on power and control

I had no business standing on a street corner in Bushwick at 7 a.m. during a polar vortex, waiting for a dog named Bob.

I was keeping my eyes peeled for a large white transport truck called Lucky Tails Express—a cross-country rescue van arriving from Texas with forty shelter dogs packed inside. We weren’t adopting Bob—just fostering, something I do when time and life allow. It was eight degrees. Snowbanks rose to my waist. I was wearing pajamas, my house sweater, a scarf, and farm boots. In my excitement, I had forgotten something fairly crucial: a coat.

I had strong-armed my friend Holly into coming with me because she is an animal whisperer. She also lives on a farm in upstate New York and understands winter—and had dressed accordingly: insulated boots, three sweaters, a coat, hat, gloves. She looked at me as I stood there, grinning wildly and shivering slightly, and said with genuine disbelief, “How are you beaming right now?”

“Rescuing animals is how I access my inner child,” I told her, which felt both true and like something I should unpack with a therapist.

With each passing minute, more people arrived. They pulled up in salt-encrusted Subarus, stepped out of taxis, materialized from side streets—fellow fosters all—each holding a leash or a dog sweater and, sensibly, dressed for actual winter. The gathering took on the air of a motley flash mob assembling for a coordinated dance number.

When the truck finally pulled up, the air filled with barking. The rescue organizer—thick New York accent, no-nonsense—called out, “Not to be curt, but once you get your dog and check out, get the fuck out. It’s cold and we’ve got forty dogs in here.”

Bob was a senior. A big boy. “Nobody wants the big boys,” the rescue had told me, which immediately made me want him. When he stepped off the transport truck, my first thought was how shockingly emaciated he was. He’d been found as a stray. Looking closer, I saw the scars stippling his legs and the broken, missing teeth—the hieroglyphs of a hard life. And yet: sweet, soulful brown eyes in a grizzled black-and-tan face.

I have a soft spot for seniors in need of a warm, safe place to land. And at that moment, I had something rare: space. Emotional, mental, figurative, literal.

Or so I thought.

Within a few hours of bringing him home, what I’d assumed was just a cold declared itself as the flu. Exhausted and bleary-eyed, I loaded myself, my three dogs, and Bob into the car and drove to the farm—only to discover the heat wasn’t working and every pipe in the house had frozen. No running water. No shower. No bath for Bob, who desperately needed one. Friends were supposed to arrive. Family too, for a Grammy watch party. One pipe thawed, then froze again overnight. I packed the dogs back into the car and decamped to the city.

Nothing went according to plan.

And then, yesterday, Bob began to settle. He softened. When he first arrived, he was understandably disoriented, whimpering every time I left the room. As I write this, he’s curled up beside me, wrapped in the softest blanket I could find. He’s been asleep for hours, snoring deeply—like someone who’s been holding it together for years and has finally realized he doesn’t have to. As he waits to find a forever home, Jon has given him a name upgrade: Billy Bob Bo Bob Blanky Dank Batiste. Robert, for short.

There are moments when you can’t fix what’s wrong. You can’t control your body, the weather, the pipes, the thwarted plans. But you can offer a warm, soft place to land—to a person, to an animal, to yourself. That, at least, is within reach.

Which brings me to this week’s guest contributor and prompt. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen writes with piercing clarity about power and control—about the stories we tell ourselves regarding our bodies, our strength, our agency, and what happens when those illusions crack. Her essay met me exactly where I was: sick, humbled, reminded that control is often provisional at best. Her words invite us to look honestly at the moments when the wheel slips from our hands—and to ask what we do next.

P.S. If you’re interested in adopting a rescue dog, please check out True North Rescue Mission’s available pups. And keep an eye out for Bob, though he may or may not be available for adoption by the time you read this.

One more thing—

I’ve gotten several messages asking whether the 30-Day Journaling Project is still accessible. Some of you are just arriving. Some paused midway and are ready to pick it back up. And some finished and feel the pull to begin again. As community member Katie shared, she’s thinking of starting the days over—to see where she’s been, to notice where she’s headed now.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can find the full 30-Day Journaling Project archived here—along with musical pairings and video conversations with Jennifer Garner, Jon Batiste, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Michael Bierut for creative inspiration. It’s there whenever you want to return, revisit, or begin again.

Odilon Redon, Ophelia (c. 1900)

Prompt 370. Power & Control by Anna Quindlen

Samantha deftly threads the needle and then brings me a can of ginger ale. Above me are the two bags, one full of saline solution, the other the dark burgundy of iron. It turns out I have become anemic. “Listless and weak,” it says in the Webster’s on the stand atop my desk. This is contrary to how I think about myself in every possible way.

This is about my hemoglobin, my ferritin, my breathlessness, my fatigue. It can all be fixed with these infusions, drip, drip, drip. Somehow I have made it about much more than that, about power and control. After all, what’s not?

Hundreds of years ago, long before the invention of the x-ray machine, ordinary people lived with the tacit acknowledgement that the business of their bodies was a mystery, that life and death often jostled one another for position side by side, that illness was inevitable. It was all a matter of the fates and the gods.

But that is not where we live now. We have all absorbed the idea that we can manage our bodies by diet and exercise, oversee them with mammograms and colonoscopies, blood tests, and pressure cuffs. I have been, throughout my life, what I suppose you could call a compliant patient, although this is contrary to my character, too.

So there exist more iterations of my insides on film than there are versions of the Avengers movies. I know, because I’ve seen most of them. I’m the annoying person who convinced the radiologist to let me look at the mammogram on the computer, who has the wonderful GI guy who lets me stay awake to watch the colonoscopy, to the horror of my friends. “Remind me again what medical school you attended,” one of them once said.

Power and control. And then my body turned on me, in this small way. I had to halt my walking pace on the hills to breathe, pause in the middle of hoisting kettle bells. The healthiest patient I have, my GP said, and still my iron had gone south. There were only three times in the past when my body took the wheel, unequivocally, powerfully, inarguably. But at least at the end of each of those I got a baby out of the bargain.

I know anemia is small potatoes. I know because some of the people around me are not getting iron infusions, but chemo, which makes me feel like a fraud as Samantha offers me pretzels as I drip drip drip. And maybe, it occurs to me, this minor setback, easily dealt with, is the preparation for other, more serious losses to come, other times when I am essentially powerless against what aging, and mortality, bring. But for now, I want to look at blood test results that show the hemoglobin climbing, to realize on my morning walk that I have not had to stop, not once. I am back in control.

We all love our illusions, don’t we?

This is your prompt:

Write about a moment where you realized you weren’t all-powerful—that control was an illusion. Did you cling to it, or did you let it go? What happened then?

Today’s Contributor—

Anna Quindlen’s eleventh novel, More Than Enough, is being published this month. You can find information about her book tour here. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times column “Public and Private.” Her memoir of aging, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and her book A Short Guide to A Happy Life has sold more than a million copies. Her hemoglobin appears to be rising.

Join the Chat—