September 21, 2020
We’ve been glued to the tube in the evenings watching news footage of the holocaust in California and Oregon, the Gulf Coast floods, the still-spreading pandemic, the scary clown show in Washington. But we quit our all-day house fix-up grind for a few hours to have lunch with a friend, a woman who came to the U.S. from Guatemala years ago. We kept in touch after she lost her job as administrator of the food pantry where I volunteer. We last saw her in February, just before the pandemic shut Virginia down. She and her husband now are doing well, both working, daughter in college, son nearby.
A day or so later I heard from an old colleague. We lost touch years ago. Recently I read that she had just published a novel. It’s an intense, passionate drama of a woman living through the American Revolution and the savage Cherokee wars in East Tennessee, a time of violence and hardship we now can barely comprehend. The title contains these words: “The Story of Hope.” She’s now planning her next book.
A friend in Florida contracted covid-19. She was sick for weeks but recovered. Back to work. Our youngest daughter, studying for nursing school in Colorado, learned she made the “President’s List” for the summer semester.
I got out of the house Saturday to volunteer at Athletic Equation’s “social-distanced” 12-hour run at Prince William Forest Park. Runners cover either a 6.5 or 11-mile course for a maximum of 12 hours. Few stay in that long. The winner is the guy/gal who racks up the most miles. I ran one loop. Good clean fun, but after a couple of loops you need spunk to keep going.
We all could use some spunk. Like the baby turtles pushing out of their shells in those PBS nature flicks, life keeps pushing us. For fun we drove past the three other for-sale houses nearby. We agreed that ours, next to all three, is a gem, a palace. Right?
Not exactly. Not by a mile. We patted ourselves on the back for getting the place painted, then looked closer and found more nicks and dings, chipped caulking, spilled paint, a broken wall outlet, cracks in the concrete walkway. All that is on us, we’ve blown the budget for contractors. We need new outlet facings, new stones on the stone walkway, mulch in the front yard, back yard, etc.
I didn’t know moving was a sentence to hard labor. But then, it’s housework, after all. We now know this is what everyone does. We’re not griping as much. This is no joke, but it’s become easier to laugh at ourselves.
You can’t go backward. My former co-worker from Guatemala, seeking work, persevered, said her Rosary, and eventually found a good job close to home. The Tennessee novelist spent countless hours in front of her computer screen bringing her thoughts to life. Our friend in Tampa fought the virus, took her medicine, and got better. Our daughter cracked the books day and night to earn those As. These stories repeat themselves everywhere, every day.
I know enough to appreciate and treasure those things; I got sick and had my dark, not-feeling-very-good moments in recent years. We remind ourselves that many Americans are living with stunning tragedy, unspeakable heartache.
We can’t comprehend the experience of the victims of the pandemic, the wildfires, the floods. Still, we all know others who have taken or are taking their turn in the mill, struggling with serious illness, struggling to find decent work. In an entirely different universe, others confront personal challenges to achieve something singular and unique, like writing good fiction.
Amid your own hardship, you may come to realize that you have no alternative but to go on. Struggle and pain in human experience can in some unknowable way teach fortitude, courage, strength, thereby offer a path to recovery. In this hellish year, as millions suffer, perseverance and faith can carry us. They emerge from love, the relentless, mysterious gift of God.
They carry us back to the richness we can find around us. We find it by welcoming new things, experiences, people into our lives. We find it also by facing down difficulties, unique or mundane: the job search in times of trouble; the serious illness; even the blank, unforgiving computer screen that tortures the writer with doubt.
The things we wrestle with aren’t always life-changing. I’m preoccupied with nuts and bolts, nails and hammers. I wonder if anyone else is trying to install an outdoor electrical outlet facing, spread concrete on a cracked driveway, build a stone path. Really, in our besieged country right now, this slog through amateur house touch-ups to make the place presentable for would-be future owners seems a petty, self-indulgent sideshow.
But it isn’t, not really. Someone has to do it. Seems that after all these years we’ve come up with something like a plan. We’re worried about what lies ahead, but we’ve unmoored ourselves from this place. Whether it’s Trump or Biden, we’ll be somewhere else, close to kids and grandkids, but still somewhere strange, somewhere alien to our up-to-now closely regulated lives. We’ll be planning our next adventure in a new place. This house, the toolshed, and this scruffy back yard will belong to someone else. All that work, all that living, behind us. It’s time.
On the Road 