The Next Chapter

These days, Labor Day weekend feels a little novel. If the novel were written by George R.R. Martin, anyway.

Maybe I should explain.

This is the time of year when I usually spend a lot of time looking forward and looking back. The looking forward is one that I share with millions of Americans as I try to stare into a crystal ball and put together two viable fantasy football teams. It’s an exercise in trying to predict greatness, injury, and whether you can scramble to the fridge for another Dr Pepper before the next Draft Day round pops up on your computer screen.

The looking back? That involves Missy. As I’ve sometimes mentioned here, September is when my wife Heather and I have to put together our annual guardian’s report on Missy, combing through receipts, bank statements and memories by the score. It’s time-consuming but oddly rewarding as well as we reaffirm another wonderful year together.

It’s a well-worn routine. In any other year, it’d be utter reflex.

Any other year isn’t 2020.

This is the year when football prognostication means guessing whether there’ll be a full season at all – not exactly a guarantee when the team stats may include points against, yards allowed and positivity rate.

It’s the year when most of Missy’s usual activities and expectations were turned upside down. No bowling. No softball. No hugs with her favorite band (Face) after a great show – kind of hard when you’re crowding the monitor for a livestream performance.

In many ways, life has become month-to-month, if not week-to-week. Grand plans for the future? These days, if we can figure out what’s available at the grocery store, we’re probably doing well.

It’s a little like living in a Paul Simon song: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.”

Even more, it’s like living in a novel.

Not reading one. Writing one.

Readers, after all, have the benefit of knowing how much of the book is left before major plot points have to be resolved. (Assuming the absence of a sequel, anyway.) They can cheat, skip ahead, look up a review on Amazon.

Writers don’t necessarily have that luxury. Oh, some laboriously outline everything – and still get surprised. Others go in with a starting point, a destination, and a loose idea of how to get there, discovering the path as they go. The reader is almost guaranteed to be surprised by the next chapter because … well, so was the writer.

As E.L. Doctorow put it (and many others have quoted), it’s like driving at night. All you can see is what’s in front of your headlights. But you can make the entire trip that way.

That’s our life at the best of times. 2020 just made it obvious.

The good news is, some truly epic journeys have been made that way.

It’s how J.R.R. Tolkien picked his way across the landscape of the Lord of the Rings, discovering each new bend as he came to it.

It’s how Stephen King walked every step of “The Green Mile,” staying just barely ahead of his readers as he wrote each new installment.

And it’s how we’ve survived crisis after crisis, both as individuals and as a nation.

That’s not saying foresight and planning are useless. When you hit a crisis, your preparation shows, as anyone knows who’s ever plunged the depths of a blizzard-bound grocery store in search of milk and bread. But however well we’ve trained our reflexes, we’re still living life at one second per second. We can only see so far ahead. And we may be wrong about that.

But as long as we’re staying aware – of ourselves, of the moment, of each other – we have a chance of building a story worth remembering.

Maybe we’ll even get a decent quarterback out of it.

2020, Get Me Rewrite

Not long ago, a friend posted a cartoon where the unspeakable horror Cthulhu arises from the sea … side-by-side with Godzilla doing the same.

“How strange 2020 is ….” Cthulhu mutters as the confused monsters try to untangle their schedules, just in time for the planet-eating Galactus of Marvel Comics to make an apologetic appearance.

“Ahem – am I early?”

No, sir. This year, you’re par for the course.

In a way, this year feels like 1989-1990 in reverse. Back then, every headline seemed to bring news that was amazing beyond belief. The Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet Union broke up. Nelson Mandela walked free. The World Wide Web took its first baby steps.  Absolutely anything seemed to be possible (which made it all the more devastating when the Tiananmen Square protests in China went so terribly wrong).

Today? Well, we’re amazed all right. Or is “stunned” a better choice of words? It says something about the present day when horrific wildfires on the Western Slope are the most normal thing that’s happened all year.

No wonder a new “Bill and Ted” movie sounds so good. Who doesn’t want a time-traveling phone booth right now?

I’ve seen some people joke about living in a horror story. To be honest, they’re not far off the mark.

And that’s more hopeful than you might think.

Horror has two key qualities: uncertainty and isolation. You know something’s coming for you, but you don’t have all the information – it’s out there, ready to come at any time, just beyond sight, building the tension. And you’re facing it alone. Maybe you’re in an isolated place, or cut off by a disaster, or simply in a situation where no one else believes you, but for whatever reason, no help is coming.

Alone in the dark. It’s the core of every scary story since campfire days.

But if you change those qualities, you break the story’s power.

Uncertainty’s the harder one. We plan and strategize and arm ourselves with information, and it undoubtedly helps. But none of us have yet been gifted (cursed?) with the ability to see the future, so our extrapolations only take us so far. That’s not an excuse for not planning, of course – just an admission that reality can be even stranger than our imaginations.

The real key is in isolation.

That’s going to sound ironic in a year where social distancing can save lives. But while physical isolation is crucial to survival, mental isolation is deadly. That’s when we stop being a community and turn into a collection of despairing or self-centered individuals.

Alone, we’re overwhelmed.

Together, we can make it.

We make it by thinking of the safety of others and not just our own ability to tough it out.

We make it by reaching out to friends and neighbors and finding ways to help.

We make it by breaking down the anger and fear that drive us into a corner and reaching for a hope that can open doors.

We make it by being us. By caring. By standing behind others when they need us, and being able to trust that someone will stand behind us, too.

It’s not easy. It takes more than just misty optimism. We have to work and build, not just wait for everything to magically get better.

But if we do that – if we look to our neighbor and do what needs doing – something pretty wonderful can arise.

Maybe it’ll even be in time for Godzilla.