Month: September 2020

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Walking Inward

“It’s not working,” Heather ground out, her face scrunched in pain. “What do I do?”

It had been a heck of a week. Heather had started out with one of her regularly-scheduled infusions for multiple sclerosis … followed by an allergic response that generated two trips to the emergency room over the next two days. The next day, an off-course driver swerved off the road and took out part of our backyard fence before ending his journey against the neighbor’s tree.

And now? Now Heather finally had the medicines she’d been waiting for to calm an MS flare. But after a few hours, they’d had as much effect as a peashooter on a boulder. Maybe less.

“Scotty?” she asked after the latest wave of pain and spasms, as we sat together on the couch. “Tell me what Middle-earth looks like.”

I knew what she was doing. We’d done this before. Call up a landscape. Talk through a memory. Mentally walk through somewhere, anywhere, that isn’t here.

And so we began. We talked out the Shire and the Old Forest. And then the tales of the cabin that her grandma’s family owned. And then the colors of fire, and how hard it could be to tell what had actually happened to start one. And then …

And then, an hour had passed.

The pain wasn’t gone. But it had had time to subside, a little. To lose the spotlight, leave the focus.

Somehow, with a shared weary smile, we’d made it again.

A familiar fight. Especially this year.

You know what I mean. 2020 has been a heck of a week, every week, with no immediate end in sight. It’s been tiring, exhausting, exasperating, and so many other synonyms that I’m surprised the thesaurus makers aren’t rolling in profits.

Each day, the path is a little different but the feeling is the same: fifty miles to walk with 400 pounds to carry on the hottest day of the year through a landscape dotted with thorn bushes and goatheads. And by the way, everything is on fire.

And each day, we have to find a way to make it. Not just through the health risks and the economic pain, though heaven knows those are challenging enough. But through the voice inside that says “I’m not sure I can make it this time.”

And if we stay where we are, as we are, maybe we can’t.

But we don’t have to.

Because even when walking outside is choked with smoke and danger, there’s still a walk inside to take.

We know it. We often reach for it without thinking. Stories, memories, experiences, thoughts. Real or created, beautiful or ridiculous. Streamed for millions or reflected on by one.

It’s one reason we look to each other in a time of crisis. Not just for assistance, but to share and talk. To be somewhere else for a while and heal in the words of a friend.

It’s not ignoring reality. It’s recovering from it. It’s remembering (as Samwise once did in The Lord of the Rings) that there are stars above the smoke that the Darkness can’t touch. It’s thinking beyond the moment to what makes us human and drawing strength from it.

It’d finding hope that what has changed can change again. That having lasted, we can last again.

Sure, some might call it escapist. JRR Tolkien himself had words for that. “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?” the writer asked. “Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”

Why indeed?

I wish you well in your own escapes. From the moment. From despair. From helplessness and exhaustion.

May we all walk through the landscapes of the heart and mind to a place of greater strength. Until someday this too is a story.

Together we will outlast the pain. And once again, we will see the dawn.

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Carry That Wait

In “The Princess Bride,” there’s a moment where the beyond-master fencer Inigo Montoya stands at the top of a cliff, watching his opponent-to-be slowly climb the rock toward him. The cliff is steep. The climb is slow. And Inigo just wants the fight to begin.

“I hate waiting,” he mutters.

Lately, Heather and I have felt a certain kinship with Señor Montoya. Because waiting, it seems, is the most difficult battle of all.

Sometimes it’s the Parent/Guardian Standby, waiting for a Missy tantrum to blow out so that we can get back to what we’re supposed to be doing.

Sometimes it’s the Chronic Illness Blitz, where Heather is trying to outlast the pain of a sudden surge in her chronic conditions (lately the MS) and both of us have nothing to do but wait in anguish.

And of course, sometimes it’s waiting on a larger reality. Like the pandemic. Or the wildfires. Or the other thousand unnatural shocks that 2020 is heir to.

Which means, right now, we’re all Inigo. We want something visible to fight, something to do. But any progress made is almost invisible. And waiting – whether in pain, in endurance, in impatience or desperation – is exhausting business.

Sometimes it’s necessary. Sometimes there’s literally nothing you can do but bide your time and wait for a better change of season. All of us hate acknowledging that – we want to be not just the protagonist of our story, but the author – but it is a lesson that needs to be learned, over and over.

Sometimes … well, sometimes there is something to do. It may not be much. It may be completely ineffective. But if it doesn’t hurt someone else – or better yet HELPS someone else – then it may also be worth trying.

The small bit of comfort offered in a time of pain.

The attempt to redirect a tantrum-generator onto something else.

The basic courtesies and protections that make it possible to live life at all when viruses fly and the skies turn orange.

Here, too, we’ve got a role model. Inigo hates waiting … so he offers to throw his opponent a rope and swears on the soul of his father he will reach the top alive. In the short term, that leads to his defeat. (To be fair, he was the only one not wearing a mask). But in the long run – and after a VERY long period of waiting – he finds a new partnership and a greater goal, one that allows him to rise above being a petty clock-punching henchman and become the hero he was meant to be.

Consideration for others. Keeping commitments. Becoming aware of the bigger picture. No, those aren’t bad lessons to learn at all.

I still hate waiting. I still want something to draw my sword on, even if I know I’ll lose. But with an eye for kindness and a drive for compassion, it doesn’t have to be empty waiting. `We can be there for each other. And in being there, we make ourselves better.

Maybe that’s enough. I suppose it has to be.

If nothing else, it makes the wait of the world a little lighter.

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The Next Chapter

These days, Labor Day weekend feels a little novel. If the novel were written by George R.R. Martin, anyway.

Maybe I should explain.

This is the time of year when I usually spend a lot of time looking forward and looking back. The looking forward is one that I share with millions of Americans as I try to stare into a crystal ball and put together two viable fantasy football teams. It’s an exercise in trying to predict greatness, injury, and whether you can scramble to the fridge for another Dr Pepper before the next Draft Day round pops up on your computer screen.

The looking back? That involves Missy. As I’ve sometimes mentioned here, September is when my wife Heather and I have to put together our annual guardian’s report on Missy, combing through receipts, bank statements and memories by the score. It’s time-consuming but oddly rewarding as well as we reaffirm another wonderful year together.

It’s a well-worn routine. In any other year, it’d be utter reflex.

Any other year isn’t 2020.

This is the year when football prognostication means guessing whether there’ll be a full season at all – not exactly a guarantee when the team stats may include points against, yards allowed and positivity rate.

It’s the year when most of Missy’s usual activities and expectations were turned upside down. No bowling. No softball. No hugs with her favorite band (Face) after a great show – kind of hard when you’re crowding the monitor for a livestream performance.

In many ways, life has become month-to-month, if not week-to-week. Grand plans for the future? These days, if we can figure out what’s available at the grocery store, we’re probably doing well.

It’s a little like living in a Paul Simon song: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.”

Even more, it’s like living in a novel.

Not reading one. Writing one.

Readers, after all, have the benefit of knowing how much of the book is left before major plot points have to be resolved. (Assuming the absence of a sequel, anyway.) They can cheat, skip ahead, look up a review on Amazon.

Writers don’t necessarily have that luxury. Oh, some laboriously outline everything – and still get surprised. Others go in with a starting point, a destination, and a loose idea of how to get there, discovering the path as they go. The reader is almost guaranteed to be surprised by the next chapter because … well, so was the writer.

As E.L. Doctorow put it (and many others have quoted), it’s like driving at night. All you can see is what’s in front of your headlights. But you can make the entire trip that way.

That’s our life at the best of times. 2020 just made it obvious.

The good news is, some truly epic journeys have been made that way.

It’s how J.R.R. Tolkien picked his way across the landscape of the Lord of the Rings, discovering each new bend as he came to it.

It’s how Stephen King walked every step of “The Green Mile,” staying just barely ahead of his readers as he wrote each new installment.

And it’s how we’ve survived crisis after crisis, both as individuals and as a nation.

That’s not saying foresight and planning are useless. When you hit a crisis, your preparation shows, as anyone knows who’s ever plunged the depths of a blizzard-bound grocery store in search of milk and bread. But however well we’ve trained our reflexes, we’re still living life at one second per second. We can only see so far ahead. And we may be wrong about that.

But as long as we’re staying aware – of ourselves, of the moment, of each other – we have a chance of building a story worth remembering.

Maybe we’ll even get a decent quarterback out of it.