Anything Helps

The first night of the year, I dreamed about climate change. In the dream, a man told me that the temperature would rise so quickly over the next two years that humans would die out.

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to be funnier, so I tried to make myself laugh about it when I woke up. What do you suppose it means? I asked myself. Dreams about teeth represent a loss of control, but if you dream climate collapse will kill you and everyone you love, maybe it means that a financial windfall is coming.

It wasn’t my best joke, but it was the beginning of the year. There was time to improve.

A few days ago I finally went to get my flu shot, since it’s supposed to be another terrible flu season. I had an appointment for 4 p.m., but the Safeway Pharmacy is always busy, so I waited. I sat in the pharmacy with a mom and her two adult children. We bonded over the long wait, taking turns going to the desk and trying to make eye contact with the pharmacists, in case they forgot us.

In between, I read about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good. I watched the videos on mute, the one that shows the officer filming and the one that he filmed, the thirty-seven seconds that include her last words and her death.

While I was waiting, I got a text from the Safeway Pharmacy congratulating me on my vaccination, even though it hadn’t happened yet. Finally, the pharmacist came and gave me the shot. It took no more than twenty seconds. I left immediately. I had to get to an eye exam.

I’d been putting off this eye exam for months because I’d been thinking about getting Lasik. I thought so hard about it, in fact, that I made it all the way to a Lasik operating table this fall. There, I panicked, changed my mind, and left the clinic. Later, my husband used the money we’d deposited to get Lasik himself. I see him now, with his perfect vision, and feel jealous but also relieved. I keep hoping I’ll work up the nerve to try again, but I haven’t. In the meantime, my glasses have become so scratched that I can barely see out of them.

On the third day of the new year, I thought of another joke: Easy to talk about moonlight, harder to be in moonlight and not wish for additional lighting. The best jokes read like lines of bad poetry, I tell myself.

When I finally realized how scratched my glasses were, I booked a same-day eye appointment at a place across town. My arm stiffened as I drove because of the flu shot. Traffic was terrible. It was raining even though it was January.

When I arrived, I quickly realized that the clinic was one of those scam-adjacent businesses that seem increasingly common. The young woman at the front desk explained that there was no doctor on site, but that I would see one over video, a telemedicine eye exam. She led me to a back room and had me look into a machine that showed a green dot coming in and out of focus.

She put my glasses into a machine that analyzed their prescription. Then she told me I wouldn’t qualify for the promotion they were running because I wear trifocals.

No, I don’t, I told her. I’ve worn glasses for almost all of my life, and I’ve never had bifocals or trifocals.

She shook her head. The machine told her my glasses were trifocals. It was my word against the machine’s.

How would I see out of trifocals? I don’t need them, I said.

Okay, she responded, with a tone that suggested I was being extremely irrational.

I left and went to the place I’ve been turning to lately, which is Dollar Tree.

In December, extreme couponing influencers began posting about Dollar Tree’s hidden twenty-five-cent clearance. My older daughter and I became obsessed. Together we went to multiple Dollar Trees and scanned the barcodes of hundreds—maybe thousands—of items. We focused on practical things we could donate to her school: packs of girls’ underwear, mittens, gloves, scarves. Finding these things and giving them away felt so good that I started going to Dollar Tree even when my daughter was in school, just to take the edge off. I discovered certain chapsticks were on hidden clearance and decided I could buy enough to give out with her Valentine’s cards: Chappy Valentine’s Day.

Soon I was driving to the Dollar Tree at the edge of town and then across the state line into Idaho. My husband jokingly asked if I was having an affair and trying to cover it up with Dollar Tree clearance.

By January, the twenty-five-cent items were ringing up for a penny. I filled my Dollar Tree cart with hundreds of items and paid just $3.26. I felt like I was flying. I drove to the next Dollar Tree and then the next. My husband fed the kids dinner and gave them a bath. I returned home with bags full of battery-powered scent diffusers, stacks of board books, stickers. The objects didn’t matter, really, only the price: pennies.

On the fourth day of the year, a homeless man stood outside Dollar Tree holding a sign: Anything helps. I didn’t have cash, but I did have a pair of socks from Dollar Tree and a small jar of mixed nuts. I gave them to him. He was so grateful it was upsetting. It was the least I could do, I said. It was hardly anything.

On the sixth day of the year, at Dollar Tree, a woman asked if I worked there. I said no, but I should have asked how she defines work. Because in a way, I do.

My interest in Dollar Tree is less about charity than it is about organization. It seems wrong for items that might be useful to be trapped inside of Dollar Tree when they could be out in the world, not making it better, exactly, but at least filling some kind of need. Like, If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain, except it’s: If I can give one homeless man the Pixar Studios–branded socks that I bought for a penny, I shall not live in vain.

Five years ago, back when I lived in Missouri, my aunt and I found a squatter sleeping in my grandparents’ guest house. We called the police. They took him away in handcuffs, then threw away the groceries he’d brought with him: an almost full jar of peanut butter, some bread, some packets of tuna. They said he’d probably stolen them, and I bet he had, but they were perfectly good. After the police left, I fished the groceries out of the trash and gave them to the homeless people down the road.

The same year, the police chief announced what he called a pedestrian safety ordinance. Under the ordinance, people who gave panhandlers food or money could be jailed for the offense. After the ordinance passed, I gave things to homeless people at every opportunity. Arrest me, I thought each time. Arrest me. But the police never did.

Last night I dreamed a woman in a position of authority denied me access to something because my identification was wrong in some arbitrary way. I can’t remember what I wanted access to, although I think it might have been ice cream, like at the counter of my first job, with all the flavors laid out behind glass. In the dream, I felt a terrible rush of anger—the sense that I was about to scream at her. Instead, I laughed, loudly, manically, in her face.

When I woke up, nothing felt funny. I thought I might never think anything was funny again. It felt practical, like adjusting expectations. All of my humor had dried up and blown away, and it was only the twelfth day of the year.

I keep thinking about time, about what I would do if I really knew I only had two years left, or thirty-seven seconds. How I might spend that time scanning barcodes at Dollar Tree, waiting at the Safeway pharmacy, watching a dot come in and out of focus, almost getting Lasik but then deciding not to at the last possible second, as if it were all a joke the whole time, and I can’t believe anyone ever took me seriously.