Month: November 2020

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A “Muddled” Message

As we rolled past the Christmas light pioneers of 2020, Heather began to raise the Garland.

No, not tinsel. Judy.

I promise, this year of all years it makes sense.

Ever since we began dating, Heather and I have hit the roads each winter to see what the Holiday Light World™ has to offer. We’ve witnessed the simple rooftop “landing pad,” the warmly glowing homes that belong on a Christmas card, the flashing blinkers and chasers that could launch America’s newest game show, and of course the gloriously overloaded theme parks that look ready to spontaneously combust with holiday cheer.  You know the kind: “Joy to the world, my retina’s gone!”

But when we began taking care of Missy, things moved up to the next level. For Missy, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas” isn’t a song, it’s a way of life. When lights begin to appear, she’s ready to hit the road – every night, if possible. By Dec. 26, we may have made a dozen or more forays into the electric wonderland, visiting a different neighborhood every night. Sometimes we even discover brand-new neighborhoods thanks to her eager curiosity and my poor sense of direction.

Hey – if you don’t get lost in your own town at least once, is it really Christmas?

So when we rolled out on Thanksgiving night to see the early bird displays, we were ready. Heater cranked. Eyes alert. Christmas music on the radio.

Which brings me to Judy.

Somewhere around Sunset Street, Frank Sinatra began crooning the wistful strains of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.” And as the tune played on, Heather sang over it with the original, darker Judy Garland version:

Someday soon, we all will be together,

If the fates allow,

Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow …

“I like it better,” Heather said as the last notes played. “Especially this year. It fits.”

I knew exactly what she meant.

When Garland originally sang it in Meet Me in St. Louis, it marked an uncertain future for the characters in the story, faced with the likelihood of an unwanted move to New York City. Outside the world of the movie theater, the reality of late 1944 faced just as much uncertainty. World War II had shown unmistakable signs of being winnable at last – the Normandy invasion, the liberation of Paris, the steady advance across the Pacific – but with months of fighting still ahead, families had to keep wondering.

When would everyone be together again?

When would things return to “normal?”

Could they?

They’re the same questions we face now. And they don’t have easy answers.

Right now, hope and fear are entwined in an anxious waltz. Vaccines have begun to appear on the horizon – three of them! – side-by-side with yet another hideous surge in the COVID-19 pandemic. Even when they’re ready, it won’t be as simple as turning on a light switch. It takes time to distribute the shots, time for the antibodies to build, time for immunity to build up high enough to finally damp down community spread.

And with every hour of that time, the uncertainty continues. For the lives of loved ones. For jobs and livelihoods. For the hope that “someday soon,” we CAN all be together.

Until that time, we have to muddle through as best as possible – not despairing, but not ignoring the reality, either. Doing what we can, where we can, how we can as we watch out for each other and endure.

For now, we hope with the song that “Next year, all our troubles will be out of sight.” We keep the light alive and prepare for the day when it will grow.

And for those who keep it alive on rooftops and front yards across Longmont – more power to you, my friends.

You’re definitely going to need the wattage.    

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Talk to the Hand Turkey

OK, who else remembers hand turkeys?

I suppose there are sillier questions to start a morning with, like “Which is louder, red or 13?” or “Can the Broncos build a real offensive line?” But then, hand turkeys were kind of a silly thing. If you have a kindergartner, you almost certainly know the drill : trace your hand with a pencil or marker, add a face on one end and boom! Instant turkey.

It still makes me laugh because it’s so easy. You see, in a world filled with brilliant holiday crafters, my skills more or less peaked in grade school. Wrapping paper and I have a notoriously uneasy relationship. My attempts to depict hearts or shamrocks usually look like someone let the air out of them. And the less said about my cooking abilities for any holiday (or at any other time), the better.

But when it comes to hand turkeys, we’re all on a level. If you can draw a steady line, you’re good. Maybe even if you can’t.

It’s a simple, weird ability for a simple, weird holiday.

Yeah, I said it – Thanksgiving’s kind of weird. Nice, but weird. Think about it for a second.

It’s a time for stepping aside in quiet contemplation – whose celebrants then complain because it doesn’t draw the attention that more public holidays like Christmas or Halloween do.

It’s a moment for being grateful for what we have, right before four weeks of being told that we don’t have enough.

It’s a time when really odd traditions have the power to stick. Like being passionately devoted to cranberry sauce shaped like a can. Or listening to (and loving) 18 minutes of Arlo Guthrie. Or paying attention to the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions in any shape or form.

Most of all, it’s a time to reach out and reach in. Reaching out to a community, especially those often forgotten. Reaching in to those we care about most.

Which means that once again our kindergarten teachers were right. A hand really is the symbol of the season.

And it’s why this Thanksgiving may be especially hard.

This year, we’ve added one more oddity to the list – to reach out by staying back. To show how much we care by keeping our distance.

That’s not easy.

For a lot of us, Thanksgiving is about drawing people close together (even if some of them are then banished to the kids’ table). Even in a normal year, when someone can’t be there – whether for one feast or for a lifetime – it leaves a hole. This year, the holes may well feel like a Swiss cheese. It’s hard to be thankful for what you have when everything inside you is saying there should be more.

But then, gratitude is easy when everything is in abundance. It’s the harder times that test us. Are we truly thankful – or just comfortable?

Is that hand there to provide others with what they need – or just to take what we think we deserve?

Can we show love, and caring, and thought for others even when it’s difficult? Even if it means making a quiet holiday a little quieter?

I think we can. And I think we do it just like the kindergarten teacher showed us.

Make things simple, not complicated.

Hold your hand still.

Draw the line carefully and firmly.

And then put the best face on it that you can.

This isn’t forever. It can be better and it will. But we need patience for now to bring the joy that will come.

This year, it’s all in our hands.

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Well, Chute

Long ago and far away, I could hear gears softly grinding as I peered through the plastic scope.

Now? Not quite.

Now? Ooh, close.

NOW!

With the pull of a lever and an abrupt click, a plastic figure of a parachutist dropped into a hole on the slowly spinning board.

“Nice job!”

The game was called Chutes Away, a proud product of the 1970s (complete with commercials starring Dick Van Dyke). The object was to drop a team of air-rescue skydivers into their moving targets below. And for me, it was as much a part of the school day as reading or math.

A wonky nervous system will do that.

You see, I was diagnosed with epilepsy when I was 3. One side effect for me – OK, several side effects for me – was that I had to work hard on skills involving coordination, balance, concentration and spatial perception. All of it required practice, sometimes with a wonderfully patient occupational therapist outside of school, sometimes with an equally patient counselor in Northridge Elementary’s “Resource Room.”

My resource room training had a lot of games, which I only realized the purpose of much later in life. Chess for planning and memory. Or Concentration for pattern recognition. And that silly game of Chutes Away for reflexes, timing, and anticipation.

If you kept yanking at the lever rapid-fire, scattering parachutists like so much dandelion fluff, you’d never win. But releasing when the crosshairs were right on the target was no good, either, because the board was in motion.  You had to lead the target, be patient, and move only when it was time to move.

Do that and you’d hit the target every time.

I think about that a lot in 2020.

Patience is hard this year. Believe me, I know it. My wife Heather, who collects autoimmune conditions the way some people collect action figures, has barely left the house except for medical appointments since March. Our ward Missy, for whom Zoom was once a curious novelty, has pretty much had it with faces on screens and virtual lives. And as much of a homebody as I am, I’m still occasionally growling at frustration at having to delay a trip out because I forgot to launder a face mask.

Simple things require thought. And that can get frustrating.

We’re certainly not the only ones. Pressure builds up. People want out. Folks grab at even the shadow of normal. We’ve seen it more than once: at holidays, at the resumption of classes, at any time where it seemed like a little release couldn’t possibly hurt.

The thing is – we know that story, don’t we?

And more often than not, we’re pulling the lever too soon.

I think most of us by now know someone who has COVID-19. Some of us (myself included) even know someone who’s died from it. We know what it takes to pull the curve down until a vaccine or cure arrives because we’ve done it before: patience, simple habits, basic practices. Any of us could list them in our sleep by now.

But knowing it is often easier than doing it, especially when there are so many pressures on all of us. We want a less-restricted life. We NEED it.

But if we don’t keep our eye on the target and wait for the right moments to act, we’re just going to keep hitting the landscape.

And every crash just makes the game harder.

It is hard. But we can make it. We can lead this target. We can hit it.

Together, we can show the world that we’re a bunch of straight chuters.

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What’s Called For

When you have to write a column a couple of days in advance, there’s always a danger of being overtaken by events.

This one didn’t even make it to 400 words.

“THEY CALLED PENNSYLVANIA!!” Heather shouted from the bedroom as I wrote on Saturday morning.

My brain abruptly turned into a train derailment as my fingers skidded to a stop.

“You’re kidding!” I called back.

“No! NBC, CNN, now ABC …”

I looked at my incomplete draft. And then reached for the backspace key.

Maybe I ought to buy that lottery ticket after all.

Like most of us, I had gotten used to the thought that “Call Me” might be a nice Blondie song, but it was unlikely to be seen in real life for quite some time. After all, this is how it works, right? Trickle of votes, adjust the lead, back to the count. Trickle of votes, adjust the lead, back to the count. Over and over in an endless news cycle, sort of like Peter Jennings meets Bill Murray.

To be honest, the catch-and-release pattern gave me a rueful chuckle. This used to be my former life as a newspaper reporter. In the Super Bowl-like enthusiasm of Election Day – marked by newsrooms with high adrenaline and higher pizza bills – there would always be at least one race that would defy deadlines. In a ballot full of easy calls and quick turnarounds, you would somehow draw the one that looked you in the eye and screamed “Meaningful results? TONIGHT? HAHAHAHAHA! See you in the morning, sucker!”

So yes, this is familiar. It’s just on a larger scale.

It’s also more challenging.

As a reporter, I had a job to do, a story to write at the end of it all. As a voter, it’s less obvious. After all, we’ve done our job, right? We made our call, said our say, and now we can finally be thrilled, or disappointed, or eager to see if armies of lawyers can manage to beat each other to death with briefcases.

But it’s not that simple.

When the election ends, our job is just getting started.

There’s been a lot written lately about peaceful transitions of power. That’s not just a courtesy – it’s a recognition that elective offices are under a permanent job review. Fortunes can change as easily as the tides, yesterday’s “outs” can be tomorrow’s “ins,” and when it’s your turn, you had better show the same grace on the way out that you hope to receive on the way back in.

And that job review? That’s us. Regardless of party. Regardless of faction.

And that goes on long beyond a cast-and-counted ballot.

It means watching the people we choose, and not just as a fan club. It means separating truth from fiction, learning what’s going on, learning what it means for people beyond our own sliver of the world. Not silencing our voice, but learning to hear the voices of others as well. As any choir will tell you, that’s the only way to create harmony.

It means holding people accountable for their actions, even the ones on our “team.” I use the quotes, because our real team is ultimately the country itself. No one deserves our blind support. Praise what makes us better, challenge what makes us worse, and always look for a way to bring more light and less pain to the world.

I’ve said it before – this country is never finished. We need to make sure the next chapter is one we can all be proud of. Even if we have to rewrite it in midstream.

Now and always, that is our calling.