Anybody, Everybody

Alone in a pew, all in black, she could have been anybody.

Granted, in all her long life, Queen Elizabeth II has never gotten to be just “anybody.” That’s part of the package of being British royalty: people may adore you, detest you, gossip about you, or even accuse you of being shape-shifting aliens from another planet … but they will never, ever completely ignore you.

But for that one moment at Prince Philip’s funeral, in that one image circulated around the world, none of it seemed to matter. For that brief moment, the pomp and circumstance subsided into a figure anyone could know. A small woman, long married, newly widowed, the social distancing around her echoing the empty place in her heart and her life.

It could have been any of us. It has been some of us. Painfully familiar, in a world where so much has changed.

I’m not a close royal-watcher. (That was my English grandma Elsie.) I didn’t sit to watch every moment. But I did notice how even online, where the brash and the inappropriate can so easily intrude, the feel at that moment was overwhelmingly … well, kind.

I was relieved to see it.

Every once in a while, I wonder if we’ve forgotten how.

I’m not the only one. A friend sent me a message this week, dismayed at what her adult daughter had been seeing in the not-quite-post-pandemic world. As most of you know, it’s been a little like Rip Van Winkle as more and more people come out of their isolated state and back into a more engaged world. But like sleepy ol’ Rip, some of them didn’t seem to recognize immediately that the world had changed from what they knew, or were too impatient to care.

Maybe you’ve seen what she saw. The folks that expect restaurant service to be just as seamless as before, despite the crowds and precautions. Or perhaps the ones that cut in the self-service grocery lines, outflanking the ones waiting on their “distance dots.” Or other bits where the social gears are sticking instead of clicking.

I know. It’s not easy. Especially in the transition period we’re in, where the light keeps getting closer but at the speed of an inchworm. Many of us have had our shots, many more are on the verge, and we want to be D-O-N-E with this whole business. Back to business as usual.

And as we emerge, it feels more like a report from Mr. Spock instead: “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.” Each day, we get small reminders that it’s not going to be completely as it was. Maybe it never truly is … “normal,” after all, is a thing of today, always in motion, redefined by each generation.

But as so much changes, it’s vital that kindness remains.

if any lesson comes out of the pandemic, it has to be that. We’ve seen pain and disruption, adjustment and transformation. We’ve experienced brutal ugliness, heart-stirring courage, and even beauty finding its way out of isolation and into the light. And where we’ve made our best moments, we’ve made them for each other.  

Friends. Neighbors. Strangers united by nothing but a desire to help. That hasn’t been all of us, but it hasn’t been none of us, either. At the darkest, there have been hearts finding ways to help, even  when the hands had to stay six feet apart.

That’s the old truth that our new world has to remember. That it starts with kindness. With caring. With seeing other people as humans that matter, that we need and are needed by.

Like that little old lady in the pew, no one is just “anybody.”

 And that has a certain majesty all its own.

Taking Her Best Shot

In the life of my beloved Heather Rochat, nothing medical is ever simple.

She’s the one juggling such wonderful conditions as multiple sclerosis, ankylosing spondylitis, Crohn’s disease and a couple of others that would drive spell check absolutely insane.

She’s the one with the list of allergies and sensitivities that looks more like the Terms and Conditions for a software purchase.

If this were a comic book, she’d be all set for her superhero origin story. In this world, she’s mostly set for a lot of doctor’s appointments and unexpected Urgent Care trips.

So I don’t know why I was surprised when even her vaccination turned into high drama.

Like most Americans, we’ve been mentally singing “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” since an early stage in the pandemic. Heather has been especially eager –  her immune system has more compromises than a last-minute budget deal, so the sooner that all of Chez Rochat got inoculated, the better.

Finally, the calls and emails started to arrive. One by one, each of us got the first poke. Heather’s appointment came last, on a fine Saturday morning that seemed to project blue skies ahead.

Jab. Wait. Return. Simple, right?

One more time. When we’re talking about Heather, nothing medical is ever simple.

“I don’t feel too good,” she said after pulling up in the driveway.

Alarm bell. Yup. Heather had a lovely rash across her shoulders and along her neck. And a little confusion into the bargain.

Allergic reaction. Again.

Aargh.

At moments like this, it’s easy to feel stuck. We’ve all had a taste of that, right? The light at the end of the tunnel that turns out to be an oncoming semi. The “few more weeks” that keeps stretching on and on. The crisis that keeps popping up its head like a Whac-a-Mole game.

When it’s all dragged on so long, it’s oh-so-tempting to give up. Sometimes it doesn’t even seem to matter if the news is good or bad. Some folks throw off precautions too soon, believing the worst is clearly over. Some simply quit out of fatigue and despair.

But it’s still about all of us. And we’re still in the fight.

And when you stay the course, hope has a chance to pay off.

In Heather’s case, she won on the long odds.

We talked to an allergist a couple of days later. Yes, he said, it had been an allergic response. But based on 4,000 similar cases he’d seen, it wasn’t severe enough to prevent dose no. 2 from going ahead. Just keep the appointment and stay a full hour afterward in case of trouble.

But that was it. No having to seek out Johnson & Johnson single-shot clinics. No need to encase Heather in a protective bubble for the rest of her days. Just a brief setback that didn’t have to be permanent or severe.

For now, we could exhale.

For today, we’d won after all.

Sure, we’re still crossing our fingers a little bit. The unexpected could still happen on the second poke. But that’s the way of it for all of us, right? The unexpected can always arrive. All you can do is do the right thing, give yourself the best odds possible, and then pray that you’re ready for whatever happens next.

I think we are. As a family. As a nation. So long as we hold together.

We know what we need to do. We just need to keep doing it until we’re in the clear.

And in a complicated world, maybe that’s pretty simple after all.

Learning Normal

“Scott … he’s not letting Potatoes near the seeds again.”

I sighed. This had been a running theme of our first day or two in the Finch Family Revival. We’d finally managed to get a pair of birds, Potatoes and Molasses, named for a silly song on a favorite cartoon. On arrival, they were everything two finches should be: cute, energetic, curious.

But they were also not the matched pair we’d been seeking. Potatoes is a society finch. Molasses is a zebra finch. For those of you not steeped in the intricacies of Birdie Lore, that’s the Odd Couple: the quiet-living, polite individual suddenly asked to be roommates with Mr. Pushy.

Most of the time it didn’t seem to matter. They’d quarantined together for a week at the pet store and seemed appropriately friendly and affectionate when it came time to discover the strange new setting of Chez Rochat (or at least a comfy cage within it). But when Potatoes would land on the seed tray, Molasses would get uncomfortably close. “Ahem. Excuse me. You know that’s MY spot … right?”

And off Potatoes would go, putting off her meal until later that night.

We tried a separate dish. Results were … ambiguous at best. We weren’t taking them back – we’d never returned a pet in our marriage and we weren’t about to start now. Reluctantly, knowing how social finches were, we bought a second cage and began putting it together. And then we gave it one more day, partly from hope and partly from the knowledge that moving just ONE finch out of a cage is like trying to catch a single specific fly out of a swarm: a matter of grace, delicacy and no small amount of luck.

Something happened.

Potatoes grew a backbone.

Molasses hadn’t stopped coming over with his “Watcha doin’, why’re ya here, lemme see, lemme see.” But Potatoes stopped retreating. And faced with that, Molasses didn’t push it. Before long, the two were eating together at the seed tray like old buddies on lunch break.

They’d had to relearn what normal meant. And they pulled it off.

That gives me hope for the rest of us.

About 100 million of us are now at least partly vaccinated from COVID-19 (including the Rochat household). With that, the rules of “normal” are starting to get rewritten again: how to travel, who to visit, when the masks can come off and when they still need to stay on. We’re finding out once again how to live with each other, especially during this transition period when some are protected and some aren’t.

When the dust settles, it’s highly likely that some pieces of how we live and work won’t look anything like they did before. (And sadly, as we saw recently in Boulder, some pieces of it may be all too familiar.)  But one thing will be just as true as it was in 2019 – or, for that matter, as it was during that oh-so-chaotic 2020.

We still have to do this together.

That doesn’t mean rolling over for the demands of the callous and the cruel, any more than sharing a cage meant Potatoes had to starve herself. But it does mean remembering what we learned during the Great Pandemic, or should have: that we all depend on each other, that small acts of compassion can make big differences, that it’s worth giving a little to get a better world.

That when the world changes, we can change with it. And remain neighbors through it.

A finch can learn it. Maybe we can, too.

Meanwhile, anyone need an unused bird cage?