Month: July 2020

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For Today, For a Lifetime

“And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”

– Talking Heads

I’ve never been married for 22 years before.

It’s a little strange for both me and Heather, like we just came into possession of a DMC DeLorean with the Doc Brown option package. Last week, it was 1998 with my hair refusing to lie flat while we said “I do.” Yesterday, it was 2011, when we moved in with Missy for the first time and became parents in a way that neither of us had ever expected.

Now it’s 2020. And even against the backdrop of The Strangest Year of All™, this still makes us pause.

How DID we get here, anyway?

Silly question, of course. I mean, this is what we promised to do, right? To keep being there even when everything else changes. Like jobs. And homes. And new family members arriving while old ones (or not-so-old ones) leave. And all the rest of it.

But somehow, when you add it all up, it becomes stunning.

Think about it: Who thought we’d last long enough for the 1980s to become cool again?

 

“I did it one piece at a time.”

-Johnny Cash

It’s not unique to us, of course. It’s not even unique to marriage. As a species, we love to make promises that take moments to say and so  much longer to live.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

“…and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity …”

Personal commitments. National commitments. All of them so much more than we can see. Our words can leap years, decades, even centuries, but we still have to put them together day by day like everyone else.

And that’s hard.

It’s hard for a young couple who puts time and energy into a fantastic wedding and then discovers that a lasting marriage is a different animal, one that has to be reinvented every day.

It’s hard for a young nation that has to reach those blessings of posterity in fits and starts: sometimes surging forward in triumph, sometimes falling back in despair and most often moving one painful compromise at a time.

It’s hard now, when so much seems to have changed so quickly, to realize that our solutions may not be as quick. That they can’t be.

We can plan. We can prepare. And we should. But all we can reach, right here and now, is today. We’re getting through it as best as we can with what we’ve got.

But if we get through it enough times, it builds into something more.

If we keep going, we can make a difference. To ourselves. To each other. Maybe even to the world.

It all starts with one day.

 

“Look at where we are. Look at where we started.”

-Lin-Manuel Miranda

Heather and I have had a lot of “one days.” Twenty-two years’ worth.

On our very first anniversary, we struggled up the ridge of the Great Sand Dunes. It’s not something either of us would have thought to do on our own, maybe not even something we could have. But together, encouraging each other, we made it step by step.

In a way, we never stopped climbing that ridge. Through chronic illness. Through Missy’s dances and softball games. Through celebration and reflection and more books than any one family should reasonably own.

And love. Love most of all.

Maybe that’s why, when we look back, the surrounding landscape feels so staggering. There’s a lot of journey ahead. But we’ve come so far.

Here’s to all our journeys, wherever we may be on the path. May we all find what we need to take the next step.

We have a day ahead. Let’s make the most of it.

Heather and I certainly plan to.

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The Face of Choice

A few days before he died, Heather saw footage of John Lewis in “Eyes on the Prize” and couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

“He looks so young,” she said in amazement.

A simple thing. But powerfully true. There on the screen was the young Freedom Rider, protester, orator and organizer. A face so different from the Georgia congressman so many of us had gotten used to, the man who had represented his district for so long that no one would have been surprised to see him turn up in “Hamilton” – as one of the characters.

Now all the faces belong to the past.

What face will we see?

That’s not as simple a question as it sounds. Like many people in many places, America loves its heroes. But we love them best when they’re safely distant. A Founding Father who belongs to a different time. A martyr cut down at the height of his glory. Crusaders and agitators whose messages can be carefully shaped the way we want to hear them, rather than have them inconveniently speak for themselves.

Lewis received an honor that many fighters for justice never claimed. He got to grow old. And so, for years and years, he got to remain a person rather than an image. Someone who could inspire people or irritate them, make them proud or make them angry.

The living get to do that.

They get to challenge us.

They get to embarrass us.

They even get to shame us.

Most of all, they get to remind us that they’re people. Not saints and angels from another realm. Not heroes conveniently written into a Hollywood script. But people like you and me.

And that can be the most humbling lesson of all.

Because if someone like you and me can do so much and stand for so long, it suggests that we could do it, too.

And then we have to ask ourselves why not.

For some of us, true, it’s a matter of opportunity. If you’re sweating and straining just to find $5 for a cheap dinner, simple survival looms much larger than leaving any sort of mark or legacy on the world. But for many of us – most of us – the answer is more unsettling.

For most of us, it comes down to choices. Often ordinary choices, that collectively have an extraordinary impact in what we do or what we ignore.

Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a piece about a photograph I’d found in a World War II history. It showed German soldiers throwing snowballs at each other in a train yard. Replace the uniforms with civilian clothing and they could have been anyone’s sons and brothers, taking joy in a winter’s day.

Ordinary men. Capable of laughter. Capable of silliness. And fighting for one of the most evil regimes in history.

Not monsters, safely separated from the human race. But people. Like us.

We can be our monsters. We can be our heroes. These are roles of our making, born of our choices.

Who will we choose to be?

John Lewis has left now, his choices made. Only his example remains behind. Will we remember a man, in all his complexities and contradictions, who left a mark and a job to be carried on? Or will we just remember a face from a documentary, a name from another time, a message from an old battle that surely has nothing to do with us?

Will we remember that we share the same story and the same potential?

Will we remember that our choices matter? And make them?

John Lewis’s face belongs to the past now. It’s time again to look at our own.

What will we see?

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Sliding Through 2020

OK, who else remembers “Sliders?”

One … two … all right, you can put your hands down. And if you need to take 20 seconds to wash them, I’ll wait.

For those of you in the great majority, “Sliders” was a 1990s TV show about alternate histories where every week, the heroes would step out of a wormhole into an unfamiliar reality. Maybe it would be a world where Egyptian pharaohs still ruled … or where the American Revolution never happened … or where humanity had been replaced by androids. (You know, as opposed to being replaced by voice-mail trees and self-check-out stands.)

Each week would have its own weirdness. And no matter how hard the heroes tried to find their way home, the world would keep becoming unrecognizable, frequently and without warning.

Doesn’t sound familiar at all, does it?

Yeah, you can stop laughing now.

If anything, “Sliders” looks a little conservative now. Reality turning upside down once a week? I think most of us would  kill for something that dull and predictable. Lately, we seem to have been bouncing around like a ping-pong ball in a clothes dryer, always in motion but not really getting anywhere. I mean, who would have thought we’d be in the timeline where Australia burning down was just the opening act?

Maybe we should have been warned when the Chicago Cubs won the World Series four years ago. But I digress.

We keep trying to find “normal.” And like our heroes, we’re not having much luck. Even when a vaccine or a cure finally arrives for the pandemic, some pieces of the new normal will likely stay. Maybe we’ll keep seeing fewer people drive 40 minutes to work and more of them walk 10 seconds to the living room. Maybe masks will become the new cutting edge of high fashion, with the new styles announced each spring.

And maybe, just maybe, we’ll realize that normal isn’t what we think it is.

Oh, we like to believe we know it when we see it. After all, normal is what you grew up with, right? And then the next generation comes along and laughs, gapes, or shakes their head.  “You did THAT? You didn’t know THIS? And Mom, who let you out of the house with that hairstyle?”

The simple truth: every age is a chaotic one. Granted, some are more obvious than others, whether it’s the Depression years of the 1930s or the 2020 That Refused to Die. But even in the best of years, nothing stands still. It’s only memory that turns a time into a perfect photograph, with all the stress and injustice conveniently filtered out.

Things will change. We will not always like it. But we’ll always have to be ready for it, so that we can do the best we can with what we’ve got.

Together. Eyes open. Not just hunkering down and hoping to ride it out, but staying aware and putting in the work that hope demands.

It won’t be easy. It may be painful. But if we watch out for each other, if we adapt, if we learn – then just maybe some of those changes can be for the better.

And what we survive, we’ll survive as a community. Even in 2020.

But if I see a pharaoh marching in next week, I’m talking to the screenwriter.

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The Story of Us

It finally happened. I got to see it.

In a word? WOW.

If you’re new to this space, you should probably know that I’m a “Hamilton” fan. And unless you’re new to planet Earth, you’re probably aware that I’ve got a lot of company, including many of us who have yet to beg, borrow or steal our way into “The Room Where It Happens,” also known as a live performance of the Broadway smash.

That changed on Independence Day weekend. In a world where everything’s gone remote, the hip-hop history of the early republic followed suit, jumping feet first into streaming television. For two and a half hours we could see the show as it was on one night in 2016 … you know, back about a million years ago, when masks were something from a Jim Carrey movie?

I jumped in with it. And got hit with several tides at once.

First, of course, was a bit of heartbreak for a personal passion. Thanks to the coronavirus, it’s been so long since we’ve been able to touch live theatre – to see faces play off faces, actors play off audience, the perpetual cycle that creates something unique to the moment yet timeless in the memory. For an amateur actor like myself, to have even the shadow of that was powerful, even while it evoked the yearning for something more.

And then it touched something more subtle.

Watching the faces, you see, means watching reactions. Seeing thoughts and decisions. Having the impact of choices made physical and real.

In a story like this, that’s vital. Because this is a story about stories.

And it’s one that’s achingly relevant to now.

A bit of background: the musical sets up Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton as foils to each other. Burr waits for the right moment; Hamilton tries to create it. Burr is cautious about what he says; Hamilton produces a flood of words at every moment. Burr weighs what his audience wants to hear; Hamilton speaks and writes with brutal honesty.

And yet, at the start, they’re more alike than different. Both are focused principally on themselves. True, Burr is considering how he’ll be perceived now while Hamilton instead looks forward to how he’ll be remembered. But it’s still “all about me.”

Burr rarely gets beyond that. When he finally puts his cards on the table, his aim is simply power for its own sake. To be at the center of the decision-making, regardless of what the decisions wind up being.

Hamilton, in the play, finds the seeds of something more.  Not just because he has something he wants to build. But because he’s reminded – often in painful ways – that his story isn’t just HIS story, that the choices he makes have an impact on others.

That’s a valuable reminder at any time. And especially now.

In a crisis, it’s easy to get caught up in the personal. After all, there’s so much of it. It’s human to feel the blows, to mourn the changes, to chafe at restrictions and scream “When do I get the life that I want back?”

We all feel it. And we know it’s not that easy.

In blizzards, in wildfires, in pandemics, the choices we make for ourselves can make life-or-death differences for others. That’s always the case, really, but a disaster underscores it. A moment’s carelessness can mean a pileup on icy roads, an out-of-control canyon blaze, or, yes, an outbreak that snuffs out lives and livelihoods on an epic scale.

And when we consciously look out for others – that’s when we’re at our best. That’s when we become neighbors and communities. It’s how we recover and build. Not by pushing ahead to what we want or deserve, but by watching for the needs and concerns of others and meeting them, even when it’s inconvenient.

That’s a story worth joining.

I wonder if we can get Lin-Manuel Miranda to write the music?