An incubus of anxiety squats on my stomach all night long, sticking me everywhere with its razor-sharp talons. I wake up still ringed by worries both great and small.

Two cups of coffee and a layer of mascara later, and I am in the car.

My house is 25 miles away from the campus where I have worked for 25 years. Before I reverse out of my driveway, I whisper, “Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim.” I tap my forehead three times, adding: “Keep your head in the game” because it’s all too easy for a preoccupied mind to zone out, float through a red light or forget to check a blind spot since there’s never a car there at this time of the morning.

If I’m lucky, the high speed burn down the expressway will incinerate the incubus. By the time I arrive on campus I will feel both more grounded and lighter.

But when my luck feels thin, and the obstinate demon continues to clutch at me, I try something else. I take the backroads instead, hoping the slow meditative curves will do me good. The tires of my Japanese car spin along roads well worn by seventeenth-century English settlers along footpaths hewn by Matinecocks for eleven centuries before that.

Loathe to be alone, I often listen to Spanish language radio for company. With focus, I can tell when the DJ is bemoaning the weather, celebrating what the Yankees did last night, or reciting an ad for car insurance. Innocent pebbles that together form the bedrock of life.

But unfortunately, this morning, the DJ was telling about Los Estados Unidos and las bombas.

Fluent in all languages of despair, the incubus smirks and jabs a nail into my right temple, making me feel like each and every global crisis is a problem I personally have to solve. I clutch the steering wheel and careen around that icy pond a bit too fast.

I tap my forehead and recite the mantra again, “Mantén la cabeza en el juego.” I breathe deeply and slow down for the narrow bridge over the Nissequogue River.

I’m about to switch the radio off, when I hear the DJ say, “La Señora Eva” two or three times. 

As if I were sitting across from him in a café, I lean forward a bit to hear him better. He keeps saying “Llame a La Señora Eva” and he rattles off her phone number, and he says she is in Ronkonkoma, and all you have to do is call the number because “alegría está cerca.” But no matter how I try to zero in, I can’t understand what Señora Eva’s special services are and since I am driving the car, I cannot write down the number.

Could it be? Could joy be near?

“Not likely,” the incubus snarls. It flicks a pointy talon at the pile and the anxiety avalanche begins:

Las bombas are exploding just five hundred miles away from the homes of my Turkish relatives.

A loved one’s recent blood test has shown a pathologically low platelet count.

A man knocked on our front door a month ago saying the dreaded words: “You have been served.”

If I kicked all the pretty pebbles in the world, I could not avert this avalanche.

“That’s right,” the fiend smirks.

Then, with exquisite cruelty, it inserts its sharpest pincer into my heart. My mother’s dementia is eating away at her, another nibble every day: her smile transformed to an odd grimace, a word gone missing from her vocabulary. Now, every day feels like a slot machine spinning, and I fear that one sunrise soon it’s going to land on three lemons. A few weeks ago I lamented to a friend at a New Year’s gathering that the place near my house is nine thousand dollars a month. She guffawed. The place in Manhattan where her aunt now lives in Memory Care is twenty-five thousand a month.  We just stood there holding our Moscow Mules because there is no such thing as recovery and things will definitely get worse and I can only pray that when death comes (alas, for us all) it will be on caterpillar feet, quietly and gently.

This old road seems to groan under the weight of my worries. It sighs back the universal truth: we all have our burdens and the world is a vale of tears.

But I also detect a softer whisper. The other truth: Spring winds soon will blow, distributing seeds along many routes and roads.

Alegría.

Alegría está cerca.

Está cerca.

Cerca.

Alegría.

Could it be?

I picture Señora Eva with a quiver-full of hope slung on her back. She takes aim at the incubus and lets her dart fly…straight for its ugly face.