RULE OF THREE

I used to play a game with my sister where we’d come up with the three things in the store which, in combination, would most likely cause the cashier to do a double-take: tarp, shovel, lime dust; National Enquirer, lube, Doritos.

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There are many reasons, besides punchlines, to use threes. Threes are inherently more textured, and more stable, than twos, just as anyone in a long (long) -term relationship knows that they’re going to be more capable of spousal kindness after a laundry shrinkage event if there’s a third person in the room.

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When I’m having the kind of day where I’ve gone so off-grid emotionally that my neighbor popping by with coffee for us is enough to make me forget the English language (“hi, food sure dinner fun again together can soonish hi?”), my friend reminds me it is helpful to look around me and name three things I can see: birch tree, airplane glint, Husqvarna lawn tractor (which my son used to call “dacdoh” and now knows how to check the oil level on).

By the time I get to listing the third thing I can see, my nervous system has begun to act less like an electrocuted barn cat, and the neighbor and I are not only able to agree in comprehensible English that another dinner party would be fun, but we’ve also managed to ride our poor little egos to the writer rodeo and set up a plan to exchange works-in-progress.

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Many writers are third-thing makers: they put two perceivable elements together (like two characters, or two tones, or two themes) to make a third, unseen, more esoteric but more complete experience.

They are offering the non-literal and infinite fullness of what is.

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When I say I have been a mother three times, including a baby I carried for only fifteen weeks, I find the number three calming, rather than jarring or macabre.

The part of my brain that stopped evolving somewhere around Domestic Chicken is enormously confused by the fact that only two children, not three, are yelling “JACKPOT!” while they dump out the recycling bins in the shed; that there is no third to help them more quickly to the conclusion that adding sand, water, and pine needles to the refuse pile would be super.

I mean, my living children get there just fine— to the sand-pie throwing— and perceive no lack, nor should they—but to my chicken-brain as it observes their two-ness, somewhere, a hinge, a point of ease or movement, a continuation, is missing—

bok bok bok

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For F. Scott Fitzgerald, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

I’m working on the functioning.

(Ask my kids’ jellybeans. I DON’T EVEN LIKE JELLYBEANS.)

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Places I’ve been since 2019: Wegmans, Target, Agway.

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In a subway station, the third rail is the one you don’t want to touch.

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In the Christian tradition, the third thing is the “holy ghost.”

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Now that I’ve rubbed a couple tones together, we’re all kind of vibrating weirdly, stepping into the third-thing space.

Don’t worry, love: it’s just that:

space.

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Necessary ingredients for a dance party, according to my four-year-old daughter: everyone is wearing last summer’s sandals, everyone has been offered a hat, Ingrid Michaelson’s “Freak Show” is playing.

Michaelson comes to the end of the first verse and sings, “you’re not the only weirdo here / let me show you where I’m from.”

My kid starts flapping her elbows.

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A friend and I have been experimenting with the idea of banishing “longing” from our vocabularies, in favor of the more agency-infused “desire.”

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“I want,” we practice saying. It’s not easy.

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I want

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I want

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I want

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I say

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the non-literal and infinite fullness

of what is