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.

Letter Be

By the time this appears in print, Gil’s letter should be almost ready to arrive.

Gil is my stunningly brilliant 6-year-old nephew. (No, it’s not short for Gilbert, and yes, my sister is an Anne of Green Gables fan.) He’s a budding student of the sciences, who once casually pointed out landmarks on the moon and Mars to me during an imaginary space odyssey. His busy hands have built long, elaborate marble runs, followed by long painstaking videos depicting the “races” between the marbles as they swerve and roll.

And now Mister Gil has discovered the epistolary art.

“Dear Anut Heathr/Uncle Scott/Missy,” he opened in carefully handwritten crayon, with animal and robot stickers decorating each line. “Wut things are you doing? And wut book are you reading? How is the weather? Please wriet back.”

My own response is finally ready for him. I say “finally” because … well, this is an admission that doesn’t come easily to a professional writer. This is between you, me, and a few thousand other readers, OK?

The fact is, I’m terrible at personal letters.

I know, it doesn’t make much sense. I’ve been a columnist for years. I can write news stories and PR pieces easily. And I’m quick to jump on emails, social media, and all the other communications tools of the 21st century. Easy.

But good old-fashioned mail? Too often, my brain resembles a kindergarten playground, trying to get everyone to line up properly and get back to class. “Oh, yeah, I need to send that reply out … oh, wait, we’re out of envelopes, I’ll pick some up at the store tomorrow … huh, the old envelope got recycled, I’d better email Carey for the address … OK, I know I have stamps around here somewhere …. “

If this all took place in one sitting, it might not be so bad. But each gets punctuated with occasions of Life Happening and soon “Scott’s Correspondence” has become the next long-running miniseries, complete with episodic cliffhangers. (“Will Scott and his envelope make it to the post office in the same trip?”)

Nonetheless … we’re doing this. Because it’s important to Gil. And therefore it’s important to us.

He’s learning. And all of us in the family want to encourage that. So we write. We click on his YouTube videos. We keep an eye out for books and toys that’ll fuel his interests even further. And we smile as he constantly finds more for us to encourage.

After all, when you reward behavior, you tend to see more of it.

That’s true for most people, whether we’re talking 6-year-olds or congressmen. Oh, granted, the 6-year-olds usually aren’t as stubborn and willful as the politicians (I blame a lack of regular naps and the occasional time-out), but the principles are the same. Communicate. Show up. Be clear. Encourage. Don’t stop. Packing a town hall or filling up a voice mail box may not be as cute as attending a school program, but it’s part of the same idea.

Smart politicians know this. The ones that forget sometimes become unemployed politicians.

And the best part is, it shapes you too. It makes you a better voter. A better relative. Maybe even a better letter-writer.

What you touch, touches you. And both can be better for the experience.

If you’re lucky, you’ll even get some cool robot stickers out of the deal.