Tag: life

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The Road Less Familiar

The pickup appeared without warning, moving past its stop sign and straight for the side of my car.

BOOM!

The doors took the shot. The air bags thumped into life. And everything came to a sudden, twisting stop.

“Are you all right?” a voice called from outside.

I was, mostly. My car, not so much. As I looked at the tears, scratches, and dents in the doors – including one chunk that was missing altogether – I realized two things:

1) I had been very lucky in my unluckiness.

2) I was going to be much later coming back from lunch than I thought.

***

Even when everyone walks away (thank heaven), something like that shapes your week. Phone calls, paperwork, Tylenol, and more become an unexpected part of the schedule, reminding you that what you planned and what you find can be two very different things.

Funny enough, what I had planned was to figure out a birthday present for my oldest niece, Ivy.

Ivy is turning 9 and has discovered epic fantasy. The bedtime reading for her and her younger brother Simon has lately included The Chronicles of Prydain, the Welsh-inspired adventures of an Assistant Pig-Keeper named Taran. One day, he chases after a panicking prophetic pig (say that five times fast) only to find himself in the middle of dread hunters, ancient magic, desperate rescues and – of course – the fate of the realm.

Did he expect any of it? Of course not. But a moment’s break in the routine transformed his entire life.

Fantasy is famous for that kind of thing. Bilbo Baggins finds 13 dwarves and a wizard on his doorstep, looking for a tea-break and for someone to rob a dragon. Lucy’s game of hide-and-seek finds a wardrobe that contains a lamppost, a Faun, and a kingdom bound in enchanted winter by the White Witch. In tale after tale, it only takes the slightest turn of a corner to turn a world upside down.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, gong out of your door, he used to say,” Frodo Baggins says in The Lord of the Rings, remembering his famous relative Bilbo. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Maybe that’s why those tales of magic and adventure still hold so much power now. They remind us how quickly the ordinary can become extraordinary, how the dull and everyday has no obligation to stay that way.

Sometimes they’re moments that echo the rest of your life. My own was forever shaped by a conversation in a nearly-empty bookstore – a chat that led to (so far) 21 years of marriage. And again by an unexpected death on a quiet Friday that rocked me, Heather, and all our family. The best and the worst, with the same power to ambush.

They’re not the moments you choose. They’re  not the moments you expect. But they are the moments that re-set your choices and your expectations, that reframe your thinking and remake your life. The moments that can break your heart or make it powerful beyond imagining. Maybe both.

Those moments can be personal. They can be national. What they can’t be is easily dictated.

That’s not comfortable.

We want to write our own stories, to have full control of the plots. And when the twists come, it’s unsettling at best. You can’t see where the tale’s going. You can’t skip ahead. You just have to travel the road as best you can, with all its unexpected burdens and blessings.

And when each turn arrives, it forces us to think. To break out of the usual and look. To actually see the world around us, and not just a far-off destination. To learn what we value and what we’ve taken for granted.

That’s something I’ll try to remember on the road ahead.

Hopefully with a working set of wheels.

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A Thirty-Year Gift

Star Wars grabbed hold of me at an early age.

I had the action figures in the Darth Vader carrying case, including a Han Solo whose hand went into the pencil sharpener, courtesy of my sister. I knew the movie dialogue, read the comic books, and reinvented the world around me in terms of a galaxy far, far away. Swings became X-wing fighters, blizzards turned the backyard into the ice world of Hoth, and even “A Christmas Carol” was seemingly improved when my best friend and I put Han in the role of Scrooge.

Obsessed? Maybe a little. But we had a lot of company. The story was thrilling and the characters were so much fun to be with. The wide-eyed Luke. The wise-cracking Han. And of course, the gutsy and determined Princess Leia.

And now the Princess has left the stage.

There’s been a lot written about Carrie Fisher since she died at 60 from a heart attack. She had that kind of life. People have talked about how they drew inspiration from her far-from-helpless Leia, or hope from her open acknowledgement of mental illness. They’ve talked about her rough-edged humor, her career as a Hollywood script doctor, even her dog.

The one thing I haven’t seen so much on is how close we came to losing so much of it.

It happened in 1985. After filming a role in Hannah and her Sisters, Fisher almost died from a drug overdose. She was rushed to a hospital in time and it afterward became a turning point for her life and career, beginning with “Postcards From the Edge” and going on to so much more.

A slightly slower ambulance might have meant a headline of “Carrie Fisher Dead at 29.”

That makes one pause.

Yes, age 60 is too soon to leave the world these days. But given what could have happened, we should count ourselves lucky. Time is a precious gift, and the world got 30 more years with her that it might not have had – years in which so many of us really got to know her, and in which she really got to know herself.

It doesn’t take celebrity to appreciate that.

None of us are promised one more day. When we leave a friend, it might be the last time. When we put off a dream, there might not be a later chance. Life can be an amazing story, but there’s no theme music to warn you when the credits are about to roll.

We avoid thinking about it most of the time. Life is busy and the implications are uncomfortable. A cartoon I saw once on a college door read something like “Bob lived every day as though it were his last” – and naturally, what it showed was Bob running around, screaming “I’m gonna die! Im gonna die!”

But turning away doesn’t make it less real.

It shouldn’t make us live in dread. But it should make us live.

Be aware of the world instead of sleepwalking through it. Make the choices, take the action, do the things that will make you and it better. Reach for people and lift each other up.

When I leave the house, my last words to Heather and Missy are almost always “love you” – just in case. It’s a small thing, but a big meaning.

None of us get guarantees. Not even gutsy space princesses. But what we do with what we get can mean the galaxy to someone.

And that kind of bond is a powerful Force indeed.

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Turning the Page

Gee, I might just live forever.

No, I haven’t been listening to the theme from “Fame” again. (“I’m going to learn how to fly – high!”) But I have been getting some encouragement from Smithsonian lately. According to an article there by Erin Blakemore, reading books lengthens your life – and the more you read, the better it gets.

This is an exceptionally good thing for us for two reasons. Number one, our home is practically overflowing with evidence of immortality … which is a nice way of saying that there are books shelved, stacked and scattered in every single room, including the garage. And number two, both Heather and I possess a mighty tsundoku —  a useful Japanese word referring to the “reading pile” that has yet to be whittled down. At the rate we accumulate volumes, we might just need the extra lifespan to imbibe them all.

The details? The article cites a study from Social Science and Medicine that looked at 3,635 adults who were 50 or older. After controlling for other factors, those who read books lived almost two years longer on average than those who didn’t. Those who read more than 3.5 hours a week saw the best effects. And books produced better results than either newspapers (apologies to my former co-workers) or magazines.

It’s not solid proof. But it’s a good suggestion that, like so many other aspects of life, what we emphasize becomes powerful. Push your body and you strengthen your body, as we’ve seen in so many Olympic athletes this week. So why shouldn’t pushing your brain make it stronger, too?

Of course, there’s a corollary to all that, too. If a person builds what they focus on, then we need to be careful what we focus on.

We haven’t done such a great job of that lately.

We live in a social environment that has become increasingly toxic. One where people listen less and argue more – if “argue” is even the right word, as opposed to “overlapping shouting.” One that encourages people to look at differences instead of commonalities, to close out instead of bring in, to form up factions rather than attempt the hard work of compromise.

In a world that reasons by volume, the biggest bullies and shouters look like leaders. Not because they’re right, but because they refuse to let anyone else occupy the stage. And the more that people buy into it, focus on it, imitate it, the stronger they become.

And it doesn’t have to be that way.

Change the focus and you can change the reality.

Kindness and empathy haven’t died. Hope and consideration aren’t extinct. Courage hasn’t gone the way of the VCR and the floppy disc. They may not get the 6 o’clock news, but they’re still there. And if those “muscles” get exercised — if we refuse to be bound by fear, if we push back against hate, if we actively reach out to each other at every opportunity – then they, too, become strong.

Curiously enough, reading can be powerful there, too. After all, books are captured memory. They remind us that this is not the first time hate and fear have run rampant. And they remind us that those forces have been overcome before, and can be again. That the fight may be never-ending, but it’s far from hopeless.

And if we’ve been willing to touch a multitude of minds on the page, live a hundred lives that were never ours – then just maybe, it might train us to be aware of the minds and lives of others in the “real world,” too.

It’s all in where you put your time and attention.

The choice may well speak volumes.

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Snownose

In the shady recesses of the Rochat back yard, the last holdouts of snow still linger.

For a little while each day, so does Duchess the Wonder Dog.

For those who haven’t met her yet, Duchess is our eldest dog, an 11-year-old mix of border collie and black lab who’s both too smart for her own good and too shy to be believed. A rescue dog, she latched onto my wife Heather like a furry guardian angel and still gets anxious on the rare occasions that the two of them are apart.

She’s getting a little slower these days, as older dogs do. She rests a little more, takes a little longer to hear her name, trots downstairs a little more slowly when it’s time for a run or a meal. She’s hardly on her last legs yet, but those legs have less hurry and more care than they used to.

Until the winter comes. And then something magical happens.

A sparkling fountain of youth arrives.

When the nights are cold and the ground is white, Duchess is in her glory. She crouches. Buries her nose in the snow. Takes off at top speed for the next drift. Buries her nose again. Then repeats and repeats and repeats, running an Indy 500 course through the yard, looking more like a puppy than a Grand Old Lady with every snowflake.

Like Clark Kent becoming Superman, Duchess has become Snownose the Unstoppable. No fear. Just pure unadulterated joy.

It’s worth watching. Even if it does mean opening the door … and opening the door … and opening the door again in hard-freezing temperatures just to see if she’s finished up her business yet. Not only is it fun to see the young dog I remember, but I even get a little jealous of how thoroughly she can lose herself in her wonder and exuberance.

That is, until I recognize in her joy an echo of my own.

No, I don’t spend Friday nights sticking my nose in random snowdrifts. (Well, not unless the walk is really icy.) But I have noticed that when I start to write, the rest of the world falls away for a while. Even headaches of near-migraine level will get pushed to the back as the cranial supervisor declares “Sorry, no time for that now. We’ve got a fresh shipment of words coming in and we need the space.”

Maybe it’s an extreme focus on the moment. Or the power of routine for someone who’s been putting fingers to keyboards for far too long. But at its core, I think it’s a passion, a liberation, even an embrace.

It’s knowing what you were meant to do. And then doing it.

And it’s a joy I think too many of us never discover.

That’s not a condemnation. Especially these days, many of us just try to make it from moment to moment, doing what we need to do just to keep life going. For someone burdened by the “now,” asking to reach for something more may seem frivolous, even cruel.

It’s not an easy escape. But when it happens, it can give the moments meaning.

And once reached, it’s hard to resist going back.

I know an author, Christopher Paul Curtis, who wrote his first novel on an assembly line. Literally. He’d double up on hanging car doors to give a friend a break, then take a few minutes to write here and there when his buddy did the same for him.

He reached for his joy. Even in the middle of a car factory.

And it changed his world.

Maybe it’s a battle to find even five minutes. Maybe those five minutes won’t produce the next hit song, or the recipe of the year, or the business that lets you lean back and retire.

But if the effort takes you out of yourself – no, takes you more thoroughly into yourself – that’s the real prize. And the more it happens, the more you want it to happen. Even if it means fighting for that five minutes again.

When you get there, it won’t matter.

All that will matter is the chill of the night. And the waiting dance of the snow.