Month: July 2019

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A Break in the Action

Gil leaps into discovery like only an 8-year-old boy can. All the fields lie open –  space, sports, cryptography, music – and he eagerly throws open the door to each new passion, exciting him and his parents alike.

Now my nephew is learning something new. Namely, the breaking point of a human wrist after falling from a moving scooter.

Yeah. Ow.

So, Gil’s left arm now sports a bright red cast. It’s a minor bump on the road of a grade-school summer. After all, it’s hard to play tennis or piano with one hand down. But there’s still robotics, camping, clubs, a steady flow of books … just about everything that doesn’t involve experimenting with how to pop a wheelie. (Ahem.)

This IS the injured kid, right?

Cast or no cast, Gil’s still moving. It’s what he does.

But then, whatever the shocks, life keeps moving. It’s what it does.

Sometimes whether we’re ready for it or not.

***

You know what I mean. We’ve all been there. The broken places. The moments where life throws up a big stop sign for a moment and says “THIS. THIS is what you will be paying attention to.”

Sometimes we’re lucky. We get the temporary hurts: the broken foot that heals, the smashed-up car that’s insured, the explosive argument that eventually slips into the past.

Sometimes … not so much.

Sometimes it’s a tragedy, whether personal or national, that leaves a hole in the heart that will not go away.

Sometimes it’s the painful calls of your own mind and body, the illnesses that don’t heal, the weights on the soul that just hang.

Sometimes it’s a break in the road. A realization that life is going to be different from this particular point forward, and there’s no way to turn around  and get the old journey back.

Time moves differently in the broken places, or it seems to. Outside, the world flashes past at high speed. But closer in, things just … stop. Time has been condensed into one event that must be lived, one tale that must be told. Sometimes repeatedly.

I’ve mentioned before how offensive it is to tell someone to “move on” after a loss of any kind, how you don’t just discard grief or pain or emptiness like a worn-out T-shirt. But there’s another side to it, too.

Namely, that you don’t have to feel guilty for being happy.

We’re good at that, you know. We find ourselves re-entering time and letting ourselves forget for a moment – to laugh, to enjoy, to marvel – and then feel bad because we know the cause of the hurt hasn’t gone away. As though we’re betraying a memory, or getting distracted from a crucial issue that needs our focus.

I’ll say it simply. It’s OK.

It’s OK to not think about hurting all the time.

It’s OK to enjoy things again.

It’s OK to  let other things into your life.

You’re not doing anything wrong.

Yes, we all need time apart. We all need time to heal. We all need to acknowledge the hurts, however that has to happen.

But it’s OK to look out from there if you feel like it. To see. To do. To live. To let light shine on the broken places.

As a friend observed, that’s how you make mosaics.

***

Gil’s cast will be off before we know it. Soon, he’ll be more unstoppable than ever, full-speed ahead, charging into all that life has to offer.

But then, his motion never really stopped. It just changed direction for a while. That’s a useful thing to remember.

Along with being really, really careful about those wheelies.

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A Hairy Moment

There are masters of illusion and concealment in this world. Artists who can make anything from a handkerchief to the Statue of Liberty seem to vanish without a trace.

Toupee Man is not one of those masters.

Who is Toupee Man? The Spanish police haven’t released his name, but his genius is surely one-of-a-kind. After all, there can’t be that many individuals who have hit upon the mind-bending idea of smuggling 17 ounces of cocaine into a country by … well … hiding it under a toupee.

Needless to say, said hairpiece and its cargo were more than a little obvious. Which is something like saying that Elton John was just a bit unrestrained in the 1970s.

“There is no limit to the inventiveness of drug traffickers trying to mock controls,” the police wrote in a statement reprinted by Reuters, one of the many news agencies to report this.

Inventiveness. Yeah. We’ll go with that.

It’s easy to laugh. Heaven knows I did. But like a lot of life’s humor, part of the laugh comes from familiarity.

We’ve seen this before.

Oh, I don’t mean we’ve all witnessed awkward items being smuggled under unlikely formations of hair, unless anyone has had the opportunity to live next door to Marge Simpson. (D’oh!) But we know the routine of trying to conceal the undeniable.

We’ve seen the prominent figure who “walks back” an outrageous statement, trying to explain why what he or she said wasn’t really what you heard.

Or the celebrity at the center of a scandal who tries to deny, to evade, and then to excuse.

Or anyone, great or small, who finds themselves in the midst of something unpleasant and tries, for just a moment, to “make it not have happened.”

There are a million terms for it. But it’s an urge as old as humanity. Hide the bad stuff. Make it appear normal. Even when it’s as obvious as trying to slip an Uzi under a baseball cap.

From the tale of Cain to modern playgrounds and politics, it’s always born of fear. And the answer is the same one that every kindergarten teacher knows, and that ever PR firm today teaches for crisis control.

Don’t hide.

Acknowledge the mistake. Admit the harm that was done.

Apologize. Sincerely.

And then make it clear how things will change going forward.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences. There almost certainly will be. After all, if it was harmless, there wouldn’t have been an urge to hide in the first place. Trust gets weakened. Customers leave. Policies can founder and elections be lost.

But invariably, owning your actions causes less damage than trying to bury them. Ask Mr. Nixon sometime.

The last step, of course, is the most important of all – how will things change? That’s where transformation can occur, if we let it. C.S. Lewis once noted that if you’re on the wrong road, the fastest way forward is to first turn back.

No wigs. No disguises. Just coming clean and taking the first step to do something different.

We know this. It’s why we get so angry when someone we know – famous or otherwise – refuses to learn, refuses to change, refuses to acknowledge that they have anything to change. And why we get so embarrassed when we catch ourselves, from time to time.

And it’s what makes it so wonderful when the change truly comes.

It starts with self-recognition. With empathy. With the recognition that other people matter, and that when we wrong them, we need to make it right.

Because if we don’t, there can be hell toupee.

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The Road Less Familiar

The pickup appeared without warning, moving past its stop sign and straight for the side of my car.

BOOM!

The doors took the shot. The air bags thumped into life. And everything came to a sudden, twisting stop.

“Are you all right?” a voice called from outside.

I was, mostly. My car, not so much. As I looked at the tears, scratches, and dents in the doors – including one chunk that was missing altogether – I realized two things:

1) I had been very lucky in my unluckiness.

2) I was going to be much later coming back from lunch than I thought.

***

Even when everyone walks away (thank heaven), something like that shapes your week. Phone calls, paperwork, Tylenol, and more become an unexpected part of the schedule, reminding you that what you planned and what you find can be two very different things.

Funny enough, what I had planned was to figure out a birthday present for my oldest niece, Ivy.

Ivy is turning 9 and has discovered epic fantasy. The bedtime reading for her and her younger brother Simon has lately included The Chronicles of Prydain, the Welsh-inspired adventures of an Assistant Pig-Keeper named Taran. One day, he chases after a panicking prophetic pig (say that five times fast) only to find himself in the middle of dread hunters, ancient magic, desperate rescues and – of course – the fate of the realm.

Did he expect any of it? Of course not. But a moment’s break in the routine transformed his entire life.

Fantasy is famous for that kind of thing. Bilbo Baggins finds 13 dwarves and a wizard on his doorstep, looking for a tea-break and for someone to rob a dragon. Lucy’s game of hide-and-seek finds a wardrobe that contains a lamppost, a Faun, and a kingdom bound in enchanted winter by the White Witch. In tale after tale, it only takes the slightest turn of a corner to turn a world upside down.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, gong out of your door, he used to say,” Frodo Baggins says in The Lord of the Rings, remembering his famous relative Bilbo. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Maybe that’s why those tales of magic and adventure still hold so much power now. They remind us how quickly the ordinary can become extraordinary, how the dull and everyday has no obligation to stay that way.

Sometimes they’re moments that echo the rest of your life. My own was forever shaped by a conversation in a nearly-empty bookstore – a chat that led to (so far) 21 years of marriage. And again by an unexpected death on a quiet Friday that rocked me, Heather, and all our family. The best and the worst, with the same power to ambush.

They’re not the moments you choose. They’re  not the moments you expect. But they are the moments that re-set your choices and your expectations, that reframe your thinking and remake your life. The moments that can break your heart or make it powerful beyond imagining. Maybe both.

Those moments can be personal. They can be national. What they can’t be is easily dictated.

That’s not comfortable.

We want to write our own stories, to have full control of the plots. And when the twists come, it’s unsettling at best. You can’t see where the tale’s going. You can’t skip ahead. You just have to travel the road as best you can, with all its unexpected burdens and blessings.

And when each turn arrives, it forces us to think. To break out of the usual and look. To actually see the world around us, and not just a far-off destination. To learn what we value and what we’ve taken for granted.

That’s something I’ll try to remember on the road ahead.

Hopefully with a working set of wheels.

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Colors of the Heart

When Heather sent me the Fourth of July picture, it shone brighter than any firework.

Heather had gone to her sister’s to enjoy a holiday get-together, while I stayed home with a headache. That meant that our Unwritten Family Protocol #23 was in effect: when one half of the couple is absent from a family event, the other shall send photos whenever possible. It keeps us both there in spirit. And it gives us endless opportunities to crack each other up.

Like now.

I looked at my phone – and burst helplessly into admiring laughter. Heather looked like she had been mugged by a Hawaiian edition of the Lucky Charms leprechaun. Around her neck were a solid curtain of rainbow-colored leis, setting off the dazzle of her tie-dye shirt perfectly. Another array of multicolored hair decorations completed the ensemble, along with an over-the-top “Don’t you wish you had all this?” expression on her face.

She looked absolutely beautiful.

Heather’s colors were back. And nothing on earth could have been better medicine.

***

We’re an interesting pair. We have been for almost 21 years. (The big day comes later this month.) Of the two of us, I’m the “social introvert” – the one who makes phone calls, acts in plays, and generally knows how to break the ice without falling in. But I’m also the somewhat conventional one, the guy in slacks and a button-down who reminds our ward Missy not to keep the radio cranked too high.

Heather … well, she may be the quieter of the two of us when it comes to setting up a vet appointment or having to order pizza. But she’s also the more fearless – curious, challenging expectations, and completely unafraid of looking silly. (Does it surprise anyone that she was originally going to be a teacher someday?)

And when she’s on, she wants color. It might be a brilliantly patterned skirt, a tie-dye with Bob Ross on it … she even once carried a book bag that had butterfly patches from corner to corner. She can be more restrained when the event calls for it, and every bit as lovely, but she’s at her best when she can truly enjoy herself.

Which makes it really unfair that those moments can be so rare.

** *

Heather has MS. And Crohn’s disease. And ankylosing spondylitis (which sends my spellcheck into a coma). And a host of allergies to a long list of foods and medicines. And … well, you get the idea.

We’re not sure whether to blame aliens, Rocky Flats, or a script writer who got addicted to movies-of-the-week. But the net result is that Heather’s batteries only allow so much, while her pain sensors allow much too much.

There are good days. Or hours. Or minutes. But she has to measure herself, conserve energy, rest often, pick her times.

In short, she often has to mute her colors.

And I know it drives her crazy.

It’s been an ongoing lesson for both of us – the kind that makes you grit your teeth and wish for the end of the school year, but a lesson all the same. One about endurance and patience and going through a lot of gray to get back to the colors again.

And especially, that it’s OK not to be OK with it.

Most of us are going through something we don’t want. You don’t need the list. You know the list, and which item belongs to you. And most of the time we find a way to deal as best we can.

But it’s OK to not like it. It’s OK to know it’s not fair. It’s OK to let yourself go sometimes and get upset about it, to refuse to be a passive piece on the board.

It’s OK to feel and not just be a shade of forgotten gray.

And when the better times come, it’s OK to enjoy it. To be a little wacky. To let your colors shine at last.

Rare things are precious. So treasure a rare joy when you can seize it. Maybe even take a silly picture or two.

The smile it creates just might be your own.