Count Von Count Under Moonlight

a winter story

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It’s been awhile since I put anything except a book review behind my paywall. I was starting to feel like I was neglecting my paid subscribers, so I got out my personal diary and edited a recent entry as minimally as I could bear. There are some related pictures (including of the LEGO Enterprise) at the end.

Enjoy! Or don’t. Either way, nothing this personal is likely to get published again anytime soon, ha ha.

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About an hour ago, trudging up the snowy hill at Josh’s house, I had one of those big-picture-view moments — the kind that normally send me scrambling for a keyboard so I don’t spiral into depression. This time, the opposite happened. I laughed all the way home.

I’m sleepy, but there’s something here I want to pin down. So I’m writing until I either figure it out or fall asleep mid-sentence.

Josh came over earlier to see my LEGO model of the Enterprise. It’s the coolest build I’ve ever done, by at least two orders of magnitude. Saucer separation. Riker’s trombone. Spot at Data’s feet. Troi’s thick, luminous hair. The best Christmas present I’ve ever bought myself, bar none.

He loved it — and not in that “I’m your friend so I’ll pretend to care about the tiny brick trombone” way. I could tell he didn’t have to fake enthusiasm, and that’s always a strangely intimate relief. Good friends can perform excitement when necessary, but it’s nice to know it’s unnecessary.

Then we went to Walmart.

Something in my lizard brain is soothed by walking into Walmart. I had my work phone in my left pocket and my personal phone in my right — a brief, mortifying “Good grief, is this who I am now?” moment — but work has been intense this week, and my personal phone controls my hearing, so yes. This is who I am now.

Josh ducked into the men’s room, leaving me a moment to get myself situated. I grinned like an idiot when I saw that both phones picked up the Walmart wifi automatically. The irony of my bougie tech — one device literally granting me the miracle of five senses — feeling perfectly at home in Walmart made me laugh.

It felt like every childhood argument about my “uppity” habit of walking around with my nose in a book was being simultaneously contradicted and validated.

Contradicted, because: uppity? Me? I’m ten years, a college degree, and a few thousand miles away from that version of myself, and still shopping at Walmart.

And validated, because between my Kindle and Audible apps, I had — let me check — just shy of 1,400 books in my pocket. (“A book,” my mother would spit when she caught me reading in public. Ma’am, I am now carrying a small-town library.)

I caught myself smoothing the relaxed half-smirk off my face before texting Josh that I was heading to the Coke Zero.

I don’t know why I did that. If anyone would understand, Josh would.

I am poor white trash who grew up being resented for liking books, an abused child by any definition, and that cultural inheritance — America’s Walmart-shopping working class — is mine whether I claim it or not. My lizard brain relaxes when I walk in the door. That’s simply how I’m wired.

And this remains true even though I made myself into a data scientist who gets paid to build mathematical models, is relied on by important people, tutors advanced calculus for fun, and sells original drawings built off self-taught fine art skills. None of that rewired whatever part of me thinks “Walmart = safety.”

Meanwhile, Josh is also an abused child all grown up, poor white trash but now with a Sarah Lawrence education, an encyclopedic knowledge of Tudor history and American manufacturing, and a midlife career that is basically the ongoing eloquent expression of his thoughts.

So why hide that my lizard brain had shifted out of PTSD mode for once — simply because I was in Walmart?

Is that what I needed to clarify? Is that the reason for this writing urge?

We shopped at a leisurely pace, pausing to debate frozen pizza brands, and suddenly I was eight years old again, pushed around the fluorescent aisles of fourth-grade Walmart. My mother would hiss at me for being nose-deep in a book, and I would respond, “Then can I please go wait in the car?”

I was unworthy of being trusted to do that, of course — but apparently worthy of being sent to fetch items from opposite ends of the store, something I remembered when I reminded Josh that he wanted slippers and a robe.

He pushed the cart that way, and I went for eggs, the choreography of old patterns echoing faintly between us.

Josh was already narrating his robe ambitions when I caught up to him in the men’s aisle. Not just any robe — a floor-length one, ideally with a little sweep to it, so he could… not sashay, exactly. Swish? Glide.

Glide is the word.

So he could glide, making a dignified domestic entrance, like Liberace stepping onto the stage of his own bathroom. The more he described it, the more he seemed to grow into the role, shoulders lifting, chin tilting, as if the robe already existed and he was merely trying it on with his soul.

This is one of the great pleasures of shopping with Josh: he entertains me whether or not he intends to. Walmart had only perfectly ordinary navy fleece robes — thigh-length, utilitarian, aggressively sensible — but he was talking about his Platonic ideal of robes with the aspirational energy of someone describing a vintage velvet opera cloak.

Meanwhile, a few feet away, I spotted an adult onesie — red flannel, ridiculous, cozy, shaped like a human stocking — and without breaking stride or conversation, I added it to the top of my grocery pile. I didn’t check the price tag. At Walmart, you don’t check the price tag. That’s the whole point.

And even if I had wanted to, I didn’t particularly need to. I had a crisp $100 bill in my pocket from selling some LEGO earlier that afternoon. Until I get my student loans paid off, I insist that my LEGO habit mostly pay for itself. Fortunately, LEGO holds about 85–90% of its value on Craigslist, which means I can build the Home Alone house, admire it, bond with it emotionally, and then basically rent it out to the next nerd for a modest handling fee. The Enterprise will not be sold, but that’s rare; most of the time they cycle through my house.

So yes: a red flannel adult onesie went into the cart without ceremony. If there is a more universal symbol of “life is hard, let me have this,” I’m not aware of it.

We gathered the last few items — eggs, slippers, a robe that, tragically, did not meet Josh’s Liberace standards — and headed for the registers. More than half of the lanes were closed, lights dark, conveyor belts still, despite the crowd. That’s Walmart these days. We joined a checkout lane near the service desk, the clerk leaning on her elbows like someone who had survived a minor war.

As we approached, she straightened, flipped off the lane light, and said to Josh, with a certain solemn authority, “Sir, you’re my last customer.”

I blinked. Why tell him? Was he meant to enforce the boundary? Intercept would-be line-jumpers? Did she take one look at him — his dignified posture, obvious goodness, and general air of rule-abiding decency — and think, This man will keep order?

Josh accepted the responsibility with the calm seriousness of someone knighted on the spot. And I stood there beside him, trying not to laugh, wondering at the odd little grace of it all — two recovering poor kids, one aspiring Liberace, one red-flannel onesie, about to take our poor-white-trash dinner of Walmart brand cheesesteak and onion rings to Josh’s house for dinner.

Back at his house, I managed to immediately overwhelm his washer by cramming two loads’ worth of laundry — including what I had been wearing, since I had the onesie to change into — into one. This was not a mistake so much as a structural inevitability: my brain said efficiency, the machine said ma’am, I am begging you, and the result was a low mechanical groan that sounded like a protest filed with HR — but it worked just fine. It’s an old, pre-app washer. It has seen things.

While Josh did a little work at his desk — some editing, I think, or maybe answering email — I parked myself in front of his fireplace. Shredder, his large floofy white tomcat, took approximately three seconds to climb into position beside me, like a marshmallow with opinions. The heat of the fire and the weight of Shredder’s very earnest purring combined into something close to a sedative.

Josh made dinner while my clothing dried — a simple, poor-kid feast that tasted like comfort: Walmart cheesesteak and onion rings, fried up hot, served unpretentiously, the way food is meant to be when you’re tired and happy and in good company.

We watched Little House on the Prairie while we ate, a season-three episode called “Bully Boys,” where Rev. Alden learns the folly of turning the other cheek one too many times. It’s one of those episodes where the moral clarity is so blunt you can practically hear the writers sharpening a lesson on a whetstone.

We cracked each other up when I suggested we do an audio podcast based on it — but not a real podcast. A meta-podcast.

One of us would write a post summarizing the episode, leave the comments open, and then the podcast would just be us predicting the comments in advance.

I immediately launched into my narration voice:

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extra space to allow for the Substack app screwing with paywalls

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