Moving is a big to-do

On asking friends for help. Plus recs for Andrea Gibson's poems, the tooth fairy, and Tracy Kidder on the social safety net.

I am currently writing this email while sitting on the bathroom floor of a Holiday Inn Express at 11 p.m. on Friday night. I will schedule it to go out to your inboxes tomorrow morning.

I am writing from a hotel bathroom floor because my very pregnant wife and toddler son are sleeping in the other room and I don’t want to wake them up. It’s late because we spent the entire day moving to a new house in a new neighborhood in LA (Eagle Rock) so we can have enough space for kids and for our parents to stay with us when they visit.

It’s all very good and it’s also all very overwhelming. There is so much to do.

In general, I am not great at asking for help. I love when friends ask me to help them, but I’m not as comfortable with the other way around. But this week, I just could not possibly do it on my own so I sent out an SOS email to my closest pals in LA.

I was inspired by an essay my friend Olivia wrote in her excellent newsletter about the idea of hosting "A Big To-Do." It’s a party where friends come over and help with the overwhelming amount of tasks on your plate.

I dreaded pressing send on my Big To-Do email but then I did and the responses were so overwhelming and kind. So on Friday night, a bunch of friends came over to our new house, ate pizza, and spent a couple hours unpacking and setting up the place. I feel like in my twenties, a big thing was helping friends move heavy couches or mattresses. Now, our backs can’t handle that so I hired movers, but people were very excited to help sort books and decide where the correct cabinet for spices and cereal was. Not the same cabinet!

The move went from totally overwhelming to actually quite fun. I don’t cry a lot, but I have been brought to tears several times in the past few years by the kindness of friends when we are really in over our heads. When friends dropped off dinner after our first kid was born? Instant tears. Tonight, after the friends broke down cardboard boxes and took them away in their cars? Tears again.

I’m getting sappy in my middle age. But I am also more and more realizing how much I need community and how impossible it is to do any of this alone. The big political and societal stuff but also the individual day to day stuff. It all relies on other people.

As for the move, did we get everything done? Nope. Hence the Holiday Inn. Does that matter? No. We are so much closer than I would have been in a week if I had been doing this solo. And it was genuinely fascinating to see how people thought we should set up our bathroom and kitchen and to get an instant consensus on where the best wall for a bed to go is.

I don’t know if any of this makes sense but it’s very late for me and I have lots more to do tomorrow so I’m going to end this intro there.

This week’s list

GREAT:

The poet Andrea Gibson died this week. Andrea Gibson was one of the first poets that got me into poetry. Listening to mp3s of them reading, sometimes combining their poetry with musical backing, linked lyrics and writing in my mind in a new way. For the past few years, Andrea had known that there was not much time left and turned the act of dying into an extended poem and artform of its own. There are so many Andrea Gibson poems that I could share that it’s hard to choose. But here are two:

In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down

and

How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best

FUNNY:

The story itself is cute but the letters that kids sent, especially the angry and threatening ones, are hilarious. The Tooth Fairy Is Real. She’s a Dentist in Seattle. “For 20 years, Dr. Purva Merchant has been answering letters from gaptoothed children and their parents — roughly 6,000 in all.”

INTERESTING:

Tracy Kidder is one of the greatest living nonfiction writers. If you’ve never read his books, you are missing out. Mountains Beyond Mountains about Paul Farmer’s work in public health is a life changing read. And I don’t think anyone has written a better book about what it feels like to work in an elementary school than Among Schoolchildren. This week, the Pulitzer Prize winner turned his pen towards the state of food pantries and the fraying social safety net in the United States. It’s a topic that is very near and dear to my heart and I think he captures it far more eloquently than I ever could. A New Era of Hunger Has Begun

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That's it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

Thank you for reading and please apologize any late night typos or dead links,

Chris Duffy

This has been Bright Spots, a newsletter.

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…wait, who are you?

I'm Chris Duffy, a comedian, TV writer, podcast host, and both a former fifth grade teacher and a former fifth grade student. I’m currently writing a nonfiction book about humor for Doubleday.