Tag: perception

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Blitzed

Only a game.

We invoke the words easily. In resignation after a hard loss. In disbelief when a player signs for millions. Even in frustration when uprooting a partner from the couch, AKA Fantasy Football Central. “Good grief, it’s only a game!”

But we’re not used to whispering them in shock. Not until last Monday, anyway, when reality hit harder than any linebacker. A player fell. A nation watched. And the bright lights of the NFL faded into the background. When the league said the game would stay canceled, no one was really surprised.

After all, it’s only a game.

And at a moment like that, so many things loom larger than the score.

**

You didn’t have to be a Buffalo Bills fan to feel it. I’ve never been within 100 miles of Buffalo. My wife barely follows football at all. Both of us were stunned when Damar Hamlin collapsed from an on-field cardiac arrest. We had a lot of company.

After all, sports has a way of insulating us from reality. It’s entertainment, and like any good movie, play or TV show, it plunges us into another world for a couple of hours. Life’s frustrations fall away for a little while, subsumed in the action.

But once in a while, the walls don’t hold.

Maybe it’s an earthquake. Or an attack. Or a young man abruptly going down like his strings were cut. Whatever the cause, reality breaks the film, stops the play, shakes us out of the dream. We get reminded that we’re not watching a video game. That the helmets and numbers are people, as vulnerable in some ways as any of us.

We’ve spent hours, months, years watching these people. But sometimes it’s only in these shattering moments that we really see them.

And that’s in a world of cameras and spotlights. When we walk back into our world, surrounded with everyday people instead of superstars … how much more do we still not see?

**

We all do it. Not maliciously, but we do. Faces in our life become like cars on the highway, a blur only noticed when one of them veers near our lane. We go through the routine, used to everyone playing their part, not really looking closely.

And then something happens to make us pay attention and … we look. We see the struggles below the surface, maybe for the first time. And we wonder how we could miss it for so long.

It shouldn’t take a crisis. But attention takes work. And it’s a work we often put off until we have to.

So this year, if you do nothing else, take a moment to see. Friends. Neighbors. Family. The stranger on the street. Look up from your own world and into someone else’s. Find the connection that makes us human.

It doesn’t have to be somber or grim. It may even lead to great joy or comfort. But it won’t start by itself. We have to be the ones to do it and to go where it calls.

That’s how we build a neighborhood. A community. A nation.

A family.

**

As I write this, Hamlin seems to be on the mend. It’s a relief, to be sure. And long after most of us have forgotten his name, I hope we remember the care and connection that the moment sparked in so many of us.

After all, it’s only a game.

And when we break out from our own sidelines, there’s a lot that’s worth seeing.

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Dr. Jekyll, I Presume?

My theatre life is still in semi-hibernation at the moment.  But I suddenly feel like I’ve been drafted into a production of Jekyll & Hyde.

If you’re not familiar with the 1990 musical, it’s another take on the famous Robert Louis Stevenson story about a well-meaning scientist who unleashes his own dark side with an experiment that works far too well. Several of the songs reflect the same divide: that the people and the world around us can have two different natures, and you can’t always be sure which one you’re seeing.

Now, I haven’t started transforming at night into a brutish ogre of a man who’s deadly with a walking stick … well, not unless there are some really strange Pfizer side effects that I haven’t heard about yet. But as we all start to poke around the edges of this thing called “post-pandemic,” I’m noticing the same sort of split.

My household is immunized. Missy and I are starting to resume our lunch outings again. (Outside, of course.) Heather is emerging from the depths of Chez Rochat to get eyeglasses and do other long-postponed errands. Signs of change are popping up everywhere, from careful and joyful get-togethers to the re-opening of the local movie theater.

And yet.

There’s an uncertainty. Not just about the fragility of this beginning-of-normal … by now, I think we all know that we’re at a tipping point where a bit of action or inaction can make all the difference in how this pandemic is resolved. But it goes beyond that.

We’re getting caught up in our own double vision.

We’ve spent more than a year training to handle a paradox. Like any disaster, we’ve had to look to each other for help and support. But with a pandemic, we are the disaster … and so we’ve also had to look at each other as possible dangers, potential plague vectors that could become deadly with a moment’s carelessness.

From that, an odd dance evolved: the world of being “together apart,” being a neighbor while keeping our distance. The steps have changed as we’ve learned more but the basic figure has remained the same.

But now things are changing. A transition has begun. And we still have our well-honed reflexes, perfect for a 2020 world, that may suddenly be out of step.

We’re entering a world with more faces again – or at least, more places where those faces aren’t sitting in a square, looking for the Unmute button. And for many of us, the reflexes are still telling us “Careful! Danger! What are we doing here?”

The heck of it is, we can’t even say yet that we’re wrong. It looks like Henry Jekyll out there – but are we seeing the right face? Even if we are, could it still shift to Edward Hyde without warning?

We’re re-learning. And it’s not going to be comfortable.

The good news is, we’ve been there before.

In 2013, a September flood hit that split Longmont in two. In 2014, the first significant spring rainfalls began to hit … and I know many of us immediately tensed, looking to the filling creeks, mesmerized by the gushing gutters.

We had to get through those next rainfalls to really see rain again. Just rain. To re-learn that while floods can happen and we need to be prepared, not every storm will be a flood. To be ready for the dangerous and the normal.

I think we can get there again.

It’s OK to be uncertain right now. It’s OK to be cautious. And it will reach a point where it’s OK to exhale. It’ll take time and some careful practice, but we will get there. Not forgetting the lessons we’ve gained, but able to judge when and where they’re needed.

After all, you’ve got to watch out for your own Hyde.

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It’s About Time

Time marches on. Except about now, when it decides to run an obstacle course instead.

This is when the Great Christmas Invasion continues the offensive it began about three weeks before Halloween, driving Pilgrims and turkeys into a distant corner to mutter and reflect.

This is when baseball peeks ever so briefly into November, long enough to confuse hardcore football fans, and add the sting of frozen skies to a world Series defeat. (Well, as frozen as it ever gets in Los Angeles, anyway.)

And of course, inevitably, this is the time of the Great Sleep Restoration. Of the Real Time Revolution. Of the End to All Clock Mockery.

Or, more simply, the end of Daylight Saving Time. Thank goodness.

I’ve never been a fan of the twice-a-year clock jumping. It saves no energy. It makes drivers a little more groggy and a little less safe. And it confuses dogs and cats across the country who have no idea what the silly clock says, they just know they’re hungry NOW. (Granted, our Big Blake is always hungry now. But go with me on this one.)

I used to offer my lifetime vote to any politician who succeeded in ending the madness … preferably (in my opinion) by falling back and staying back, so an hour of sleep wouldn’t fall permanently into the abyss. And slowly, the country seems to be getting the message. Over the last few years, bills to lock the clock have been seen in Utah, in Canada, even here in Colorado. The latest effort, out of New England, involves three states trying to coordinate a change, and maybe jumpstart a movement.

Granted, none of them have won yet, not counting longtime holdouts like Hawaii and Arizona. But Bill Murray didn’t get it right the first time in Groundhog Day either. Or the second time. Or the … all right, it took a while, OK?

In fact, if there is any value to Daylight Savings at all, it’s in reminding us that time is what we make of it.

As usual, Missy sets the example in our house. For most folks, the Christmas season starts after Thanksgiving (unless you run a superstore, of course). For our developmentally disabled ward, there is never a bad time to play Christmas music. Pop in a Pentatonix holiday album a week after Memorial Day? Why not?

For most folks, an evening activity at 6 p.m. means a certain amount of time on your hands until then. For Missy, it means keeping an eye on the door and the window in breathless excitement, even if it’s 2 in the afternoon, in case the world changes and it’s suddenly time to go.

And of course, the notion of the clock governing bedtime is approximate at best. We manage to hit roughly the same time each night, but the real deciding factors are things like: Is it dark? Have I listened to enough music? Have I had my story yet? Do I feel tired? Scared? Frustrated? Did I get my evening’s worth today?

It can be a little disorienting. But it’s also more than a little freeing, as you start to sort out what HAS to happen now and what can be displaced. Sure, the world goes around, the seasons go by, everything changes and ages. But how we greet it all, how we mark and measure it, how we fill the time and make it our own – that’s up to us. We can make it a mess or a joy. (And since Colorado can have four seasons in 24 hours, we may even get multiple opportunities.)

With that kind of freedom, why spend any of it in reprogramming car clocks and microwaves?

Think about it. Make your time what you want it to be.

And if you want it to be without a certain spring-forward-fall-back ritual – well, that’s clearly an idea whose time has come.

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Hidden Stories

Not long after Roger Moore passed, a friend sent a clip of him I had never seen before. It had no car chases or amazing gadgets, no beautiful women and hideous henchmen, not even a single utterance of “Bond … James Bond.”

Instead, an older Roger was reciting poetry, his still-charming voice capturing the keenly observant soldier of Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy Atkins”:

 

“For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’

But it’s ‘Saviour of ‘is country’ when the guns begin to shoot;

And it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;

And Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!”

 

The poem had always been a favorite of mine. And the time couldn’t be better to bring it back again. Not just because we’re into the Memorial Day holiday, when we remember to remember our own fallen fighters, but because of what it says about ourselves and the stories in our head.

We all have them. Our inner monologues, our lens we see through, the set of expectations that each of us builds from the moment we wake up and fumble toward the shower. It’s not often conscious. In fact, it’s usually a reflex, trained over years, the smooth and invisible way of deciding how to think and what to think about.

And because the assumptions are invisible, we forget they’re assumptions. Or fail to notice when they contradict each other. Or worse, grow toxic.

Sometimes the stories become so compelling, they force themselves into visibility, they have to come out. Sometimes when they do, they add something new and wonderful to the world – a “Star Wars,” say, that enters the world 40 years ago and touches the imagination of millions, teaching them a new way to see.

Other times, the stories that force themselves on the world do so in blood. Smoke rises in Oklahoma City, in New York, in Manchester, carrying panic and pain and death. Why? A thousand reasons and more could be given, but they all start in the human heart and head. No bomber thinks “I’m going to wake up and be evil today,” consciously putting on villainy like Oddjob putting on a hat or Darth Vader donning a mask. Each has internalized a story that seems to justify their anger at the world or a piece of it, to inflame it, to demand retribution.

This is not an excuse. It’s not a call to sympathize with a murderer or make a killer the next guest on “Dr. Phil.” But it does suggest that the problem is one not easily solved with guns and missiles, one that even Kipling’s “thin red line of ‘eroes” would strain to defend against.

We have to look longer and farther and deeper.

Where do stories come from? Any writer would say they come from everywhere. Every piece of day to day life provides another idea, another connection, another piece of fuel. It’s why those who consciously create stories – writers, actors, and more besides – frequently read, frequently experience, frequently get out to learn something new.

Change the seeds, and you change the story.

Step outside the fictional, and it’s still true. Anger and hatred and radicalization can be hardy flowers … but only in a certain soil. A rebuilding Germany had little use for the nascent Nazi party. A desperate Germany was all too susceptible.

Change conditions and you change assumptions. Change assumptions and you change the world.

It will be long. It will be frustrating. It will require constant effort in numerous fields: economics, education, medicine, diplomacy, personal experience and more. And you can’t ignore symptoms while treating causes, so we will still have to defend against and deal with the angry and the evil and the violent.

But down that road waits understanding. And hope. And maybe a greater ability to see past the easy answer.

“We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes,” Kipling wrote, “nor we aren’t no blackguards too/ But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you.”

Remarkable indeed.

So today, let us remember.

Tomorrow, like Tommy, let us see.

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A Time to Remember

Missy’s been down lately.

Nothing unusual in that, of course. We’ve all been there. To parody the old title, Even Disabled Women Get the Blues, and Missy has occasionally had her own reasons to need a little comfort. Sometimes it’s an illness. Sometimes it’s an emotional moment in a movie. Sometimes it’s because Blake the Canine Trash Compactor has just eaten her crayons. All the usual motives.

But what’s interesting now is the timing. This one keeps a schedule.

My wife Heather first noticed it a few years ago when she was still just visiting and helping Missy, before we became guardians to the woman of few words and many mischievous smiles. At first we thought it was a coincidence. Then, after the second or third year, we realized what it had to be. By now, we’re positive.

This particular stretch always hits in late January. Right around the time that Andy died.

Andy was Missy’s brother and Heather’s uncle, a man who liked to tease and joke about as much as he liked to fly. And like many a brother, one favorite subject of his teasing was his little sister – not in a mean-spirited way, but in one that often set her laughing, too. Not a big , boisterous man but an open and friendly one that no one could help but like and smile along with.

But nine years ago, our favorite high flier came to Earth too soon. Brain cancer. It hit all of us pretty hard and still does.

But I’m not sure any of us realized at the time just how deeply it touched Missy.

Sometimes Missy almost seems to live in a world without time. Oh, not in the small sense. She remembers the daily routines: when her “bus” is supposed to come for her day program, when lunch is supposed to be, when to start arguing about having to go to bed. But on a larger scale, it’d be forgivable to wonder how much of an impression time makes, outside of major events like Christmas or Halloween (which carry their own rather obvious cues). Both she and her world seem to go on much as they always have, moving at her own pace in her own way.

But when the same “down” period always seems to hit in late January, centered around the same day each year – well, it becomes harder and harder to not notice.

Understand, we’ve never made a big deal of it around her. We’ve put up pictures and memories on Facebook like the rest of the family, but it’s not like she sees us stalking around the house in crepe and gets reminded. In so many ways, it could seem like just another day.

But to her, it obviously isn’t.

And while that’s sad, it also leaves me impressed. Because once again, it shows there is so much more to this lady than anyone would realize at first sight.

The mental disability that took or blocked so much has not taken her memory.

Not where it counts. Not where it ties her to the larger world.

It’s easy for that world itself to forget. To look at someone like Missy and dismiss her as “other,” unaware, apart. But she notices. She learns. She understands, even if it isn’t always the same understanding that an adult of her age would usually have.

Open and welcoming, she will avoid someone she’s been given reason not to trust.

Normally near-silent, she will react to the plot twists of a loved bedtime story – often with comments.

And for all the seeming changelessness of her life, she too holds close the ones no longer there.

It sounds obvious when you think about it. But how often do we?

The time will pass. The blues will lift. And soon we’ll be dealing with a restless Missy again, eager to bowl or swim or venture out on a Saturday morning trip downtown.

I think Andy would be pretty proud of her.

I know Missy still has one more smile for him.

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No Laughing Matter

Picture a driver whose wrists are handcuffed to the steering wheel. A short chain, at that, so no hand-over-hand turns. The gear shift is barely reachable, with the fingertips.

Now send that driver on a trip from Limon to Grand Junction. How much of a miracle will it be to make it? If and when the inevitable happens, how many will blame the driver? How many will see that the driver was largely a prisoner of his own car?

In the end, I think that’s where Robin Williams was. Careening off a mountain road in a vehicle he could not control.

The crash has left echoes in all our ears.

There’s been a lot said and written about Robin these days. Not surprising. For many of us, the brilliant comic and actor was one of the constant presences, always there, always doing something new, always on the move, like a lightning storm that had been distilled into a human body. Too much energy to be contained.

My own personal memory is of a performance he gave in London in the 1980s, part of a royal gala for Prince Charles and Princess Di. My family and I taped the show on TV and darned near wore it out, as we watched his hurricane of stand-up over and over again. The effects of playing rugby without pads. The difference between New York and London cab drivers. The sharks watching airline crash survivors bobbing on seat cushions. (“Oh, look, Tom, isn’t that nice? Canapés!”)

At one point, white-hot, he broke off his routine. Running beneath the royal box, he pointed upward, looked to the rest of the audience and stage-whispered “Are they laughing?”

Everyone broke up. Charles included.

But now I wonder. How much of that question lay at the heart of Robin’s own life? Are they laughing? Do they really like me or just the face I show? Does any of this matter?

Those can be uncomfortable questions even without a poisonous brain chemistry. But that is exactly what Robin Williams had.

I don’t have depression myself. Too many of my friends do, including some of the oldest friends I have in the world. From them and from a number of acquaintances, I have at least a second-hand idea, like a reporter in a war zone watching people in the line of fire.

And that’s what it is. A silent war against your own mind.

“Your brain is literally lying to you,” one online acquaintance said. Even when you realize that, he added, it’s still your brain and you still want to believe it.

That’s a terrifying thing to consider.

Mind you, I’m used to the idea that your own brain can ambush you. I’m epileptic. If someday my medication fails or it gets missed for too long, I can have a literal brainstorm. But that’s a sometimes thing, a sneak attack out of the bushes.

This is more insidious. This is the command center taken over by the enemy. When you can’t trust your own mind, your own perceptions and impulses, what do you do?

There are more tools than there used to be. I have friends who use medicine to fight the chemistry, who use cognitive-behavioral therapy to find a path through the labyrinth, who reach for reasons to even get out of bed in the morning: family, faith, pets.

“Unless brain transplants become a thing, I will always require medication,” one dear friend said. “But I’ll always need glasses, too, and that’s the context I try to keep it in.”

But among these tools, we also have one other thing. A society that doesn’t fully understand. A place where the glasses and the pills aren’t seen the same way, where people see depression as a personal failing instead of a mental illness.

Where it’s the driver’s fault for not sawing through the handcuffs in time.

Like many, I wish Robin Williams were still with us. But also like many, I hope his death gives more of us a chance to understand, to see, to ask questions and really listen to the answers. And by listening, to lift some of the stigma so that more people can get more help.

It takes all of us. Together, in understanding.

And that’s no joke.

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An Orbit Observed

Halley’s Comet never fails to orbit the sun.

Haley the Collie Mix never failed to orbit my parents’ house.

Yes, past tense. Darn it.

Sigh.

If you didn’t know Haley – well, you were probably in the majority. She was a beautiful but shy dog, one who made our own Duchess the Timid look like Robin Williams. How shy? The first time I met Haley, while I visited home on a Christmas vacation, it took about a week before I could pat her.

Did I say shy? More like scared. She had reason to be. Like most of my family’s animals, she was a rescue dog. She’d endured more by the age of 2 than any living thing should be asked, and had learned that the world could be a frightening place. Anyone who wasn’t my parents would hear the barking as they came in the front door, and then see absolutely no sign that a dog existed.

And then … a quick glimpse.

And another.

Quietly, Haley would circle the downstairs, moving from room to room, keeping her distance while finding out just who had invaded her house.

The orbit was under way.

It’s been about two weeks now since she left us. Probable liver cancer was the diagnosis. In any event, she was failing badly enough to prompt the hardest choice any pet owner has to make, the decision to love by letting go.

And even though it’s been two weeks, even though she kept herself at such a distance – she still floats through my mind sometimes, still offering little glimpses here and there, still staying in sight and out of reach.

Maybe that’s how it always is, even with the bolder and the braver.

Some people touch a lot of lives while they’re here. When I lived in Emporia, Kansas, it was folks like the Rev. Ralph Jackman, whose hands and heart turned up everywhere. Since moving back here, I could name many more, most recently Frank Kaven, the Martini’s Bistro co-owner who seemed to befriend an entire city.

And even with people that known, that loved, we find one more story we didn’t know after they pass. One more surprise. Something that reminds us that all we got were glimpses of a life, pieces that peeked out during an all-too-short time here.

It doesn’t make those memories worth any less. But it holds a powerful lesson for the living left behind.

Make those glimpses count.

Remember that you don’t know another’s whole life and they don’t know yours. Reach out with kindness and compassion for the hurts you may never see. Be patient and understanding for the reasons that may never be explained.

Think of the pieces of life you are showing, the bits of you that cross another’s orbit. What are they seeing? What are they believing because of what they see?

Treasure every moment of true sight, however small. Those glimpses form lives, loves, friendships – and eventually, memories.

They will not feel like enough. But they’re what we get to keep. A moment of blurry light crossing the sky, Halley’s Comet returned one more time.

My orbit was crossed by Haley’s all too few times. But in those times came a building of tentative trust. She never became outgoing – but she did reach a point where she would take food from me without fear.

Our small moments at a distance brought us near, ever so briefly.

May your own moments and memories bring you close now.