all of the selves we Have ever been
The proliferation of technology and social media seems to have elevated speed over accuracy, impulsiveness over deliberateness, “influence” over integrity. I often think of a quote by Yogi Berra, the Yankee’s catcher turned manager and coach, “We’re lost but we’re making good time.” In the typical rhythm of daily life, we’re moving so fast we forget there is a destination. We’re going wherever we land. There seems to be a shrug your shoulders, “Oh, well,” attitude that leads to much frustration when trying to solve problems. Time and again, I have observed people in meetings talk over each other and then watched as each person left the gathering with a different idea of the marching orders. Chaos ensues. Sometimes the damage done in chaos is difficult to repair. Back in 1989 Stephen Covey wrote a wildly popular business/self-help book titled The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the important habits recommended by Covey was to begin with the end in mind. Even though we are a long way from 1989, I still prefer begin with the end in mind to “Oh, well.” In a prior post, Closing Up For the Night, I wrote of a Holocaust survivor I met who shared her survival story from World War II. Her family was in hiding on a neighbor’s farm when Nazi officers came to speak with the owners. Fearing they had been discovered or soon would be, the woman’s father gathered his family together and said, “We must separate.” The father also reassured his children, “This war will end, and when it does, we will meet again.” The father divided his family into pairs and gave each pair a new location to hide. He also gave each one an address where they should meet when the war was over. Miraculously, they survived. When I first heard that story, I felt as though I had been struck in the head. I had to do some serious self-examination. What kind of parent would I be under those circumstances? Would I be brave and reassuring? Or would I be frightened, predicting the worst, saying my good byes instead of making plans to save my family? Would I have begun with the preferred end in mind? Or would I have panicked and helped to create the terrible outcome I feared? The father of the Holocaust survivor could see to the end of the war. He made a thoughtful, deliberate plan for the survival of his children and family. What if he had said, “Oh, well,” instead? What if he had begun running as soon as the Nazi soldiers left the farm, moving fast but without a destination? Without a plan? We have been thrust into grave uncertainty, “not ordinary times,” as Governor Mike DeWine quoted today when I tuned into the press conference given by the Ohio governor’s office. I am relieved to hear the experts speak about a plan that begins with the end in mind. I appreciate their thoughtful, deliberate actions and recommendations, and I am moved by their intelligence, kindness and integrity. I can only imagine their level of exhaustion. They are not just government officials, but parents, spouses, grandparents, brothers, sisters, friends, children of aging parents…They have all the same worries that I do, and yet, they bravely face this situation and remain available twenty-four hours a day. Politicians have developed a poor reputation in recent years. These people are bringing back honor to public service. I am also moved by the ingenuity and generosity of individuals in government and the private sector given shout-outs by the Governor today. These people are joining forces to ensure that there will be hospital beds, protective supplies and equipment, benefits, essential services, and protection of our rights as citizens. Compared to that father back in the barn who was trying to save his family from a holocaust, I have been asked to do so little. I am certain he would have preferred my orders—stay home. For now, we must separate. When this war against the coronavirus ends, we will meet again. When we arrive at our meeting place, I want to be able to say that I was brave and kind. I want it to be said that I thoughtfully and deliberately contributed to a positive outcome and the safety of my family and community. It helps to know where you are headed and to have someone who knows how to get you there.
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As I looked through my kitchen cabinets wondering how creative I can be with the contents should I face quarantine or empty store shelves, I had a flashback. Something I had not thought about in…well, maybe ever. There were four children in my immediate family. I had one brother. The males were outnumbered two-to-one. As my brother got further along in grade school, our father began a manly Saturday night ritual. After all the girls went to bed, my dad and brother would stay up for the late night movie. It was usually some horrible, grotesque, old, black-and-white sci-fi flick. By today’s movie standards, those films were primitive. Might as well have been cave drawings. The ladies of the house were far too sophisticated for such nonsense. We were glad to go to bed. We later learned that the movie was not the main attraction on those Saturday nights. What was really going on downstairs in the kitchen below us was the crazy sandwich contest. My dad threw down the gauntlet. Each contestant had to create a sandwich for the other to eat. And the player HAD to eat the concoction. Any ingredient was fair game as long as it was edible. The sandwich could be flat or tall as long as it could stand on a plate between two slices of bread. The creations became outrageous. A sandwich might contain peanut butter, lunchmeat, pickles, mashed potatoes, raisins, and maybe an Oreo cookie or two. The combinations were endless and often unimaginable. My stomach would become squishy just hearing about it, but my brother loved this time with our dad. The ritual went on until our parents divorced. It just occurred to me now how much my brother must have missed those Saturday nights. My father died many years later. My brother died not too long after our father. My brother was never really able to regain his footing after dad died. I miss them both. Today, I am grateful for this delicious memory of abundance in a frightening moment of scarcity. Our people come back to us when we need them! When we are years away from this coronavirus pandemic, may we look back and see that it was a unique, heaven-sent opportunity to slow down and be together, a time for family bonding and new rituals. May our children's memories of this time be sustenance for them when they are faced with a scary time in the future, a time we cannot yet see. “In the dark times, will there be singing? Yes. There will be singing about the dark times. -- Bertolt Brecht I stepped away from my computer today to spend time with my family. The expanding measures to protect the safety of the public mean that my family may not be together again for some time. Overwhelming and unfamiliar situations can cause feelings of unreality, and I am trying to digest the full scope of what is happening. I am shoring up, repeating my mantra, “faith over fear.” And I do have faith in the Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine. I have faith in the Director of the Ohio Public Health Department, Dr. Amy Acton. I offer my support for their thoughtful, deliberate action and for courage under fire. I believe the actions they are taking are both wise and kind. And for now, wisdom and kindness are the only antidotes to this disease that are widely available. I have faith in my family, friends and neighbors. Coronavirus is highly contagious. But so are laughter, hope, happiness, confidence, courage, self-control, and kindness. I am told that it is easy to catch this disease, this COVID-19. I have faith that while I do what is asked of me, I can, instead, catch some tunes, catch some shows, catch some waves, catch some rays, or catch some z’s. I prefer those alternatives. I am not taking this situation lightly. I hope you catch my drift. And I have faith that I will catch you all tomorrow. Stay well. I awaken to a gloomy day. Not sure if the gloom is a product of the weather or the shadow cast by the coronavirus. Yesterday, slowing the spread of disease became a collective, world-wide mission. Schools are closing. Employees are being asked to work from home. We are all asked to practice hand washing and social-distancing. Not since 09/11 has the air contained so much uncertainty, so much unease. While others head out to stock up on toilet paper, I make a start for the library. At 5:00 PM this evening, all of the library systems will close for at least two weeks. I want to be well-stocked. As Thomas Jefferson said, “I cannot live in a world without books.” If I should be forced to spend weeks at home alone, I will need some good company. I arrive at my community library to find more people there than I have ever seen before. Despite the number of people and increased activity, the library is quiet, the patrons on a mission. Normally, I enjoy lingering at the library, browsing each section, but today I pick out a couple of novels and move on with some other routine errands, just in case… The streets are quieter than usual. Without the typical Saturday bustle, it is hard to determine which shops and restaurants are open and which are closed. I make a quick stop at the bank and then the post office. As I walk from place to place, I try to anticipate how the world will be tomorrow when the normally hectic twenty-four hour world we live in comes to a halt in a universal time-out. Sundays are the only other state-imposed time-out that I can recall in my lifetime. Nothing was open for business on Sundays except church and your grandmother’s house. After services and shedding those stiff, itchy, uncomfortable church clothes, we enjoyed big meals together, playing cards or board games, watching television, and listening to the stories of grandparents, aunts and uncles. Sometimes we just sat on the porch swing and rocked away a few hours. Sundays were good days, a welcome relief from the usual demands of life. The only other personal history on which I can draw is the bouts of childhood illnesses common back then. Those were the years before vaccines when most children experienced rubella, measles, mumps, and chickenpox. In big families, the children usually went down like dominoes, so I often had a mate when I felt up to playing. We sprawled out on the couch or the carpet in our pajamas and read books, colored, watched cartoons, played board games, and slept. The treatments were few—remove the child from circulation and rest. We had baby aspirin and Vick’s Vapo-rub, but I don’t recall much else. We didn’t go to the doctors. If things got serious, the doctor made a house call. When I wake up tomorrow, it will be Sunday. A new week, but I will be in a time-out of sorts. I think I will try to adopt the Sunday spirit of my youth. In the following days, I will try to ride out the germ storm as I learned to do during my childhood illnesses. I might even color and play some board games. Apart from my children, friendship has been my greatest, longest-lasting, most rewarding gift. Many of my dearest friends entered my life as neighbors. Robert Frost wrote a poem, Mending Wall, about a neighbor who believed that “good fences make good neighbors.” I’m not sure what neighborhood he lived in, but it is nowhere I want to be. I am more akin to Mr. Rogers in my philosophy about the neighborhood. I have moved many times and had many different neighbors. There have been neighborly neighbors, neighbors turned friends, and neighbors turned friends turned family. It is difficult to firmly assign each to a category because the nature of the relationship evolves with time and circumstances. When I moved away from my parents’ house and into my first apartment, I met a couple of other young women. Pat lived across the hall from me, and we met in our daily comings and goings. Kathy lived in an adjacent building. We met on long, daily bus rides to and from our work downtown. These women are among my oldest and most faithful friends. We share a long past, and we will care for each other in our future old age. They are neighbors turned friends turned family. Many years later, while going through a divorce, my children and I moved into a duplex. A couple, Lois and Gary, lived on the other side. Their children were grown and lived out of state. Lois and Gary became loving grandparents to my children and supportive parents to me during that difficult time. They watched the children when I needed to work or make an unexpected visit to the emergency room. Gary took the children to the playground to shoot basketballs. They taught us to play the card game Pit. We gathered together for Ohio State football games and every birthday and holiday. Lois and Gary retired to Cambodia. When they moved, they offered to give me their car! I miss them terribly as one misses the comfortable, reliable, loving security of parents and family. I am thankful for the internet that keeps us connected. I had a group of wonderful neighborly neighbors in the last home I owned. There was an older woman who lived next door. Her name was difficult for my toddler son to pronounce, and so she became known to us as “Mrs. Wiggly.” She lived alone and often enjoyed sitting out on her porch. My little children enjoyed the small freedom to leave the yard at will, to wander over and sit with Mrs. Wiggly. She enjoyed their company too and was often the one to call them over. On the other side of my house lived a couple I knew casually. I rarely saw the husband because he worked shifts and was asleep during most of my waking hours. One day he appeared in my yard after observing me struggle with a lawn mower that would not start. With few words, he got the mower going. I don’t think I saw him much after that, but I never forgot his kindness. Across the street lived a man who spent much of his day taking meticulous care of his yard. I would swear in court that he tended the grass with tweezers so intense was his attention to the lawn. He was always pleasant in passing and watchful of the neighborhood. He came right over the day a fire truck pulled up in front of our house after I smelled gas in the basement. I developed an unexpected relationship with one special neighbor, a relationship that defies all categories. When my husband and I moved into our first house, the woman next door came by with treats to welcome us. She was single and worked just outside of town. Doris often dropped by for short visits. She was talented at quilting and other crafts. When my daughter was born, Doris came by with a hand-made doll. When my son was born, she hand-stitched a brightly colored quilt with pictures of trains and cars and trucks. On one occasion Doris became ill and confused. She knocked on our door. I became her advocate, guiding her through the health care system and getting her help when her phone calls to the doctor’s office were minimized or ignored. Years later, after I moved from that neighborhood, Doris called me to report that she had been diagnosed with end-stage bladder cancer. Doris was frightened. We re-united, and I was with her in the hospital and later in the nursing home where she took her last breaths. Sometimes the word “neighbor” is too small for the significance of these relationships, the importance of our meetings. Divine intervention might better describe our acquaintances--preparation for a time that is coming, a time we cannot yet see. If there is ever a TV show called America’s Most Decent, I am sure that, one-by-one, each of my old neighbors will be profiled for the world to meet. What makes a good neighbor? Surely, not fences. What makes a good neighbor is someone who is aware and concerned but not intrusive. A good neighbor is thoughtful but not overbearing. A good neighbor respects the natural boundaries of space and privacy, and knows exactly when to cross over the line. I love to-do lists. I have a general one that I update each morning. No matter how stressful the day ahead, it feels manageable when I see the tasks and deadlines outlined and orderly. I feel empowered by crossing items from the list, so much so that I always start the list with something I have already completed just for the pleasure of drawing a line through it. Recently, however, I have been thinking about the things I am not going to do any more. This brought me to the recollection of a man I met who was going through a divorce. He said, “It seems like women get into their forties and they just go crazy!” Hmm. Seems to me that women get into their forties and become peri-menopausal. Their estrogen tanks and their testosterone starts to show off. Technically, I think that makes women over forty more like men. Call me crazy. Truth is we all grow stronger in our convictions as we get older. I now consider it a privilege, if not a duty, of aging. Blame it on hormones or life experience. At some point, we have all we can take and then we take a stand. We are not so much “set in our ways,” as we are busting loose. So here are some of the items on my growing not-to-do list:
I could go on, but that would be crazy. Shuffling through my book and papers, I come across an article, “The Geography of Childhood.” Sounds technical. I reflect on my memories of geography class, and I wonder:
I read on and discover that I am completely off course. The article is about shrinking play areas. Turns out that, today, many children never play outside the confines of their own backyards without parental supervision. Wow! That is a big change in geography. In Childhood where I grew up, we left the house in the morning with instructions to be back by dinner time or dark whichever came first. Sometimes we wandered back sooner if we were hungry or if the population of Childhood had shifted to our own backyard. Trick-or-treat was always a big deal because things only got started at dark. As pre-teens and teens, we wandered the neighborhood until every single last porch light went out. That could be close to midnight in the suburbs. No one called the police because we were out or because we were teenagers. Back then, teens were part of Childhood too. We played outdoors rain and shine. We were really good at getting dirty. There was no professional lawn care back then, so we could munch on grass and clover without risk of death or brain damage. We found a thousand uses for dandelions. The only pest control business in town was the fifty kids chasing lightening bugs on summer evenings. None of us had an entire set of anything. We imported and exported and used our natural resources. It was also known as sharing. We made our way to an empty lot or big back yard. One kid brought a bat. Someone else had a ball. We scrounged from nature to come up with the bases, and we shared gloves. Someone might use my roller skates while I rode her bicycle. The clouds were free for a lengthy viewing and so were the stars. We didn’t have folding chairs and rolled up mats. We had our play clothes, and we stretched out on our backs. Further shuffling of the items on my shelf brings me to an old book about nature-deficit disorder. Turns out the problem is not just shrinking outdoor space, but also limited time spent outside. I’m no scientist, but I think there might be a relationship between time and space. And what about kids who don’t even have backyards? They might need intensive care. The nature-deficit disorder author reports that he spoke to groups of children asking them why they didn’t play outside more often. Many of the children replied that they didn’t play outside because there weren’t enough outlets. Back in the day when Childhood was a simple, old frontier town, outlets had nothing to do with electricity. The word was associated with the many ways children dispensed with their own energy outdoors. Grown-ups did not want those outlets in their houses. That kind of power resulted in damaged furniture and pictures falling off the walls. I have seen evidence of the changing science and geography of Childhood. For years I have driven through neighborhoods on beautiful summer days and never seen a single child. Are they becoming extinct? I know I should worry about disappearing polar bears and rhinos, melting ice and climate change, and I do care about those things. But will they matter if Childhood falls off the map? Will there be anyone left to care? |
AuthorLilli-ann Buffin Archives
April 2024
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