Feb
12
(This blog post is rated PG-Geezer. If you’re under 55, come back next week.)
First, Aunt Nancy sold the big house she and her husband had lived in. Keeping it was too expensive and too much work. So she sold a lot of stuff and gave away a lot of stuff and compressed the essentials of her life — a console TV, a cabinet sewing machine, a sprawling sofa, a mega recliner — into a one-bedroom apartment in a senior citizens community. The apartment bulged at the seams with oversized furnishings.
A decade or so later, Aunt Nancy broke her shoulder and her wrist and everyone realized it was time for her to pare down her life again. Her mind was sharp, but arthritis and diabetes and obesity had taken their toll. She moved into a nursing home.
She told us how to dispose of everything, and we did. She knew the move was permanent.
But even knowing it was permanent, she shielded a part of her soul from the truth that her world had shrunk forevermore to those four green walls, that bed with buttons to raise her head or lower her feet, that tiny built-in closet full of pull-on knit pants (no buttons, no zippers) and pull-over knit tops (no buttons, no zippers).
One day, six months or so after she moved into the nursing home, Aunt Nancy asked me about three pleated skirts that had been in her closet before the move. When I told her they had been donated to a charity, she was so disappointed. They were like new. She might wear them someday. Someday, when she got through this rough patch.
This particular rough patch, of course, was not one she would be getting through. She would never again wear panty hose or dress-up shoes or pleated skirts that made her think of earlier years, better times. This further shrinking of her life was the beginning of the 10-year decline that would eventually end in her death. But for quite a while, no matter how clear her thinking, Aunt Nancy kept a lady-like hold on the notion that she would one day sashay back out into the world in one of those pleated skirts and a pair of two-toned pumps, not too high, just enough to give her calves a little boost.
I look at the ways my life is shrinking and wonder if I have begun the long decline that will end wherever it ends for me.
I turn 60 this year. My finances are unreliable and retirement looms. So I look at my car and I’m grateful its life-expectancy is nearly as long as my own. Other things give me more concern. My computer has been with me for seven years, my Nikes for six, my heavy winter coat that just popped a snap has also been around half-a-decade or more. That’s like 40 in coat years — not really old, but beginning to look a little tired and fashion-challenged.
Sixty may be the new 45, but even so I feel a shrinking of my potential to reinvent or reinvigorate. I wonder if someone has already begun to roll up my sidewalk – the sidewalk that could lead anywhere — leaving me stranded here in my incredible shrinking life, the only one who still believes that the best truly is yet to be.
Jan
16
Who is our prophet today?
Who is leading us out of this wilderness in which we find ourselves today? Who is pointing the way to a promised land that seems at least as far away today as it was 40 years ago?
When I was growing into young adulthood in the 1960s, the world was a frightening and dangerous place. A place of war and violence in the streets and hatred based on fear of the unknown and the different. In other words, it was a lot like today. The biggest difference may have been that we had prophets who were pointing the way out of the wilderness.
We had Bob Dylan, who sang to us about a different way to live in that dangerous world. We had Bobby Kennedy, who vowed to help us build a different kind of world.
And, of course, we had Martin Luther King, Jr., who reminded us that God had a different plan from the plan we were living out.
On this day of celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I scroll down my Facebook news feed, read the messages King left us and I teeter between hope and despair. Hope because he spoke with the authority and the authenticity of one who had inded been to the mountaintop, had seen the promised land. And if it was true then, if there was a promised land then, surely there must still be one today.
And despair, because in these 40-plus years since his death, so much of the progress we had made seems to be eroding. It is eroding at least in part, I believe, because the voices that dominate today’s conversation are the voices of self-interest and antagonism and sarcasm.
Where are the voices of hope and reconciliation? Where are the voices that lift us out of our small lives and onto the mountaintop? Who is urging us to act with courage, to live from that place inside us where we are kinder and braver and more compassionate than our fear or complacency or pettiness? In 50 years, who will we remember as the voice we followed out of this wilderness?
Are we without prophets today? Or do we choose not to listen when they speak?
Dec
19
Christmas, 1995.
Christmas had not been merry for two or three years. I wanted to do something different. I wanted it to mean something again.
My small family decided to adopt another small family for the holidays through one of the social service agencies in town. They give you names and ages and a wish list from people whose Christmas won’t be merry without a little help. People, hopefully, with little kids who will be fun to buy for and fun to imagine on Christmas morning.
This year, our family was one little old lady.
Her needs were minimal. All she really, really wanted was to cook a nice holiday meal for her extended family. Turkey or ham, some pies, maybe two kinds of potatoes, the mashed ones and the sweet ones. Soft yeast rolls and butter. Real butter maybe. She wanted to set it up on card tables in her little house, which was neat and sparsely furnished. The social service agency mentioned that grocery store gift cards give people the dignity of shopping for themselves. So that’s what we did.
No cute little toddler-sized winter coats, no teddy bears or computer games. No Santa wrapping paper, no big bows, no imagining on Christmas morning that the children in our little adopted family are wide-eyed and squealing over Santa’s visit.
Just one little old lady and a gift card from the grocery store for a couple hundred dollars.
We delivered the gift card about a week before Christmas. We probably gave her a few wrapped presents as well, house slippers maybe, or a soft cardigan. She was a dignified lady and thanked us politely and we left the house with nothing but the satisfaction of knowing that we’d done a good deed.
The door had barely closed behind us. We were barely off the front stoop when we heard it. Behind that closed door, an unrestrained shout from the dignified little old lady. “Praise the Lord!”
I cried all the way home. I cry everytime I think of it. And that, for the friend who asked earlier today, was the very best Christmas present I ever had.
Oct
11
When hopelessness turns to hopefulness
Is it really possible that some people don’t understand why other people are gathering to voice their dissatisfaction in cities across the U.S.?
Agree or not with the people who are gathering under the Occupy Wall Street banner, the reasons are so simple. The reasons are economic and political. The reasons are related to social justice. The reasons are the anger and fear and hopelessness growing like a cancer where there is hunger or joblessness or empty pockets. Others have said what needs to be said about those reasons better than I can. But I see another reason, a reason beyond the economics and the anger.
When I look at people taking to the streets, I see so much more than fear and hopelessness. I also see a hopefulness born of a collective belief that sooner or later in our nation something righteous always wins.
We often seem to wade through ugliness to get there. We are a nation built on bloodshed and hatred, among other things. But our story is also the story of a people who always believe something greater waits on the other side of the ugliness. And we are always hopeful about that righteous prize. We believe in it beyond reason, even when ugliness stares us straight in the eyes.
Claiming not to understand why people are discontented in today’s economic and social climate smacks of contempt, and contempt so easily leads to actions far worse than simply standing up to be heard. Worse has happened, other places and other times, and if we think it cannot happen here again — as it did in Birmingham or at Kent State or in a 1920s mill village right down the road from where I sit today – we are not paying attention.
When I see people gathering and I see the gatherings growing, I am hopeful. Because wherever people care enough to believe they can make a difference, sooner or later, something righteous always wins.
(Photo courtesy of Canadian film maker Velcrow Ripper, from his site http://occupylove.org/ )
