Three personal mysteries, one unsolved
I've had my detective hat on for weeks trying to figure out these random, mysterious events. Plus, recommendations!
I love the satisfaction of solving a mystery. The past few weeks, there have been a few big ones. I need your help with the last one. And I have a bunch of recommendations for watching/reading/listening at the end of the newsletter!
Mystery #1: The Spot
An oblong smudge of moisture in the driveway, right behind our car. It hadn’t rained (it never does). Was it oil? A bit too far from the back bumper, and the car wasn’t leaking any. Water, then. But where did it come from?
The next few days, I’d wake up and draw the blinds and see the spot. Still there. And growing, I swore. Lawson, ever-chill, said it was probably just leftover from someone pouring out a bucket of water. Why? Every night? Maybe someone was just showering in the middle of the night. But in plain view of a busy street, and in the same exact spot? There were no suds! Maybe it was the same guy who was watering our plants, he said, sending a chill down my spine (more on that later).
Over the course of several weeks, the spot continued to grow. It extended vertically across the driveway, forming a butterfly shape, and puddled near the sidewalk. It started stretching down the block. It was definitely water. And so, with each extension of the mystery puddle, the image of Floridian sinkholes big enough to swallow whole houses became clearer in my mind. I side-eyed the spot every time I made a trip to refill my water cup. I stood in the window and stared down at it, willing it to tell me its secrets. Every time we’d walk by, I’d inspect it, looking for the source.
And then, one day, I saw it: A man driving a work van emblazoned with SUBTERRANEAN LEAK. Knew it. A leaky water pipe was forcing water to bubble up through underground mud, between slabs of street crust, out into the road. And while it took several more days — and a few different pairs of dudes spray-painting multicolored symbols on the street — to fix the leak, the mystery was solved.
Mystery #2: The Plants
This is what we knew: Early morning, there were footsteps up the staircase, a few beats of silence, the thud-thud-thud of steps back down, and then water trickling down the stairs.
A week later, same thing: steps, silence, steps, water. The plant’s soil was wet. Someone had…watered our plant while we slept. What the hell? This freaked me out, for a few reasons: our staircase leads only to our front door, strangers in LA don’t water each other’s plants as some goodwill gesture, and the mystery gardener was doing it while we slept. Were they casing our apartment? Was this a serial killer’s bizarre, eco-friendly calling card? Who waters someone’s plants without knowing when they were last watered??? What kind of plant aficionado has never seen the horrors of root rot?
We made a plan: the next time one of us heard the steps, we’d look out the window and see who’s there. Trying to rein in a houseplant gnat infestation, we moved some more plants onto the stairs. And then we missed the culprit, yet again. I was still nervous about someone being outside our front door while we slept, but with the resolution of the mystery Spot, I felt a little better. The prospect of the Spot-bather and plant-waterer being the same person indicated some kind of morbid fascination with our apartment, which was scary. That not being the case, it told me there was probably a reasonable explanation behind the plant mystery — one we could figure out.
And then, while working at my desk one morning, I heard Lawson leap across the living room and swing open the front door. There was a muffled interaction, and then I watched a middle-aged man descend the stairs. The waterer — caught!
As it turns out, he was a landscaper hired by one of our neighbors to take care of her plants and yard. He’d been stopping by and watering our (admittedly dry-looking) plants as a courtesy.
Mystery #3: Circus Tales
This final one has yet to be solved, and it is driving me bananas. I feel less hopeful about this one, because there’s no observable pattern to interpret and no clues left to pursue. Recently, I’m faced with a mystery of memory.
I’m 27 and already feel my memory degrading. I regularly forget the names of people I’ve met, places I’ve been, things I’ve done. I’m trying not to worry about it. Maybe my grey matter is evolving and making new connections so rapidly that old memories must be pruned to make way for exciting, novel insights! Perhaps I’m a synaptic phoenix, rising from the dust of my past with a squeaky clean hard drive!
Anyway. Last weekend my brain decided to remind me of an interaction I had — somewhere, at some point in the last two years. This person (gender? age?) told me that they came from a family of circus people in Latin America. I vaguely remember them saying they were also a performer, or maybe they were quitting their job to join the circus?? Or am I mixing up my memories with a tweet I saw about someone going to circus school? Did this interaction even happen? As I pull on each thread of information, the whole thing seems to come apart like an ill-knitted scarf.
At this point, I’m not certain this was anything but a hallucination or daydream. I ran through the list of every Latin American person I’d met in the last couple of years. I messaged a friend, a Venezuelan teacher who’s a talented flag dancer and singer, asking if he was the person I was thinking of. In a reply full of laughing emoji, he said no. No! I was crushed, my brain sizzling at the edges, neurons helplessly firing into an abyss. What if that detail was wrong? What if the family circus only toured in Latin America, or if that wasn’t accurate at all? I ran through the list of every person I’d met who had “circus-family-energy,” as I called it. That took a while; it’s LA.
And still nothing. At the start, I was sure this person was a young man I’d met just once, maybe at church, and that he’d told me this backstory in passing while we chatted in a group. That unraveled the more I poked and prodded my memory.
Now I’m just in limbo, forever unsure if I met a descendant of Latin American circus people or not.
Recommendations
Watching: Season 2 of “The Bear” – While there were fewer action shots of mouth-watering dishes this season, the second round of this Hulu show was a masterclass in tension. Entertaining, cringeworthy, stressful, playful, infuriating — so many of the flavors that define hospitality work. The cast was unreal (there’s an Emmy with Jamie Lee Curtis’ name on it for her staggering performance as a deeply troubled, manipulative matriarch). And this season felt like a self-aware, loving, and convicted eulogy for all of the restaurants that shut down or never opened during the pandemic. Most of all, it was a potent reminder that restaurants don’t exist without flesh-and-blood people.
Reading: This dispatch about “awe walks,” from NYT Well’s monthlong exploration of walking. This story gave a name to something I’ve discovered organically and offered tips on how to get the most out of a walk. The rest of the installments are here.
This piece by Chabeli Carrazana in The 19th* about lesbian bars in the U.S., and how the couple dozen that remain are hard-won beacons of community. This detail struck me: The day the first lesbian bar opened in Worcester, Mass., “a lot of women were coming in there and walking in the front door and crying,” the owner said.
While on a little vacation in central California last weekend, I finished Bonnie Garmus’ “Lessons in Chemistry.” It was a blast to read (all 350+ pages breezed by), and gave me the kind of satisfying and slightly sappy ending I want in a summer book. Both the new season of “The Bear,” and Lessons center the invisible, thankless, and legitimate work of cooking. They’ll have you thinking differently about food.
And, in a bit of amusing-slash-chilling news, all those orca destroying boats might just be traumatized, or following a seasonal fad, kind of like that time a bunch of them wore dead salmon as hats (thank you, Lawson, for this).
I’m considering returning to “Klara and the Sun” next. Send me your summer book recommendations! And you can check out the rummaging library here.
Listening: The “Ologies” episode on indigenous bees. I simply had no clue honey bees are invasive in the U.S., or that California has over 1,600 species of indigenous bees at last count. Or that the largest bee in the world is 2.5 inches long. What! So many cool facts in here.
And a gutting, predictably insightful interview with Jia Tolentino on Glennon Doyle’s podcast. They talk about paradoxical living, their relationship to the internet, dropping acid, the inexplicability of motherhood, and much more. Jia’s incredible book of essays, “Trick Mirror,” is also in the rummaging library.
Still: Drumming, and tiptoe-ing into maybe playing with musicians. Terrifying, mortifying, unfathomable, and a little exciting.
Thanks for reading rummaging, and please write in to let me know if you, dear reader, come from a family of Latin American circus performers, or just to tell me how you handle the unsolved mysteries in your life.
Isa
Rummaging is written by Isa Cueto and edited by Annie Cappetta.
Your thoughts on the spot reminded me of The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka! Despite the heavy subject, it’s a light read. Great for summer ✨
We saw Cirque du Soleil this month, only knowledge I can supply is peanuts. My memory lately has been the same. If you don’t get out of your shell, you are just a nut. XOXOOX