Tag: Hope

The Storm

Her name was Betty, and how exactly we were kin is a long story that involves marriages, divorces, widows, and time, but it’s far easier to just tell you she was my cousin’s wife which, while true, downplays her role in my life.

She had always been beautiful – I remember being six or seven and going to the bank where she worked as a loan officer and seeing her at her desk, in the lobby, thinking she must be the most beautiful woman in the world.

Her husband was my cousin but was also 30 years older than I was, and 10 years older than Dad. He was the oldest of his generation and served as sort of the patriarch of our extended family (see, I told you it was complicated). He died 24 years ago, but since then, Betty had stepped into the role. And for the last 15 or so years, she put together a potluck dinner on Easter Sunday.

For most of that time, I lived far away. In 2019, I was on staff at a church, and it was my first Easter there, so I felt like I needed to be there. We left right after but got there just as everyone was leaving. In 2020 they canceled because of COVID. In October of 2020, Dad died.

In 2021, it was back on, and it was fabulous. Renee and I had been locked down for more than a year at that point, our vaccinations were current, and so we made the trip north, our first real trip in ages. We took the Natchez Trace north, spent the night in Tupelo, spent an afternoon in Oxford, and then on to home, turning a three-hour trip into a 24-hour one, but feeling a little bit alive again.

Betty was 79 at that point, and all during the pandemic had been in the most severe of lockdowns because of her health. But now there were vaccines, and she was fully vaccinated, and this was the first time she was in the presence of people who were not carefully screened or her doctors. After a full year of virtual isolation, she was there, grinning like a cat in the cream, so happy to just see people.

She would come up to folks and say, “I’m fully vaccinated. Can I hug you?”. I bet she hugged everyone at least twice. We all had so much hope that the nightmare was over then, in the spring of 2021 after the vaccines came out.

Betty talked to me last year about how it just seemed wrong without Dad there. Dad was always the man with the camera at any gathering. And 2021 was the first year he wasn’t. We all felt his absence.

In August, Betty would suddenly die from an unrelated illness.

So this year was very solemn indeed. A whole generation was gone. And while it was so good to see everyone, it was far from festive.

On the way home after the potluck yesterday, we got caught in a rainstorm. I hate driving in the rain under the best of times, and this was more than 2 hours of brutal rain and thunder and lightning, and being buffeted all around the road. It was exhausting.

Driving back home from being in my hometown is always a time of introspection for me, as I reflect on the ways things turned out, on roads not taken, promises unkept. None of that is easier when you are doing it in a thunderstorm.

We stopped at the rest area to get some relief from the storm, to stretch, and catch our breath. And standing under the pavilion, watching the rain pour around us, we read the text message from a dear friend telling us that her husband – who has been fighting COVID for months – is most likely going into hospice later this week and that, baring a literal miracle, he won’t be recovering.

Well, shit.

I stare at the rain some more before getting back in the car to continue toward home.

So much loss in the last few years. Every time I’m convinced I cannot take more, more happens anyway.

We were some 30 minutes away from home when the sun came out. It was still raining, but it had slowed dramatically, and the sun was shining fiercely and, off to the east, I saw a large double rainbow arching up from the horizon.

I know the old story about how, after destroying the world with a flood, God promised Noah that would never happen again, and the sign of that promise was a rainbow. And if I’m honest, I always wondered why a rainbow would be taken seriously as such a sign.

But yesterday – on Easter Sunday, no less, when I had come through that storm and was carrying so much death and despair with me, when I saw those bows in the East I knew that we would get through. That we could keep going. That we had to persist, to carry on, and build a better world.

So I kept driving.

Children and Ancestors

When I was doing homeless work, there were children everywhere.

I knew children that lived in cars, who got cleaned up in gas station restrooms, and who wrote their school papers on old cellphones that were submitted using the wifi stolen from a Mcdonald’s parking lot. There were children abandoned on literal church doorsteps. Children who ate cold hotdogs for supper, while watching porn with their Dad. Children who had multiple diagnoses, but no services. Children on a rash of medications. And children who had executive function skills off the charts. The latter were often the oldest child, who had to step in as surrogate parents for their younger siblings because their parents were dysfunctional.

So many children.

And then there were the pregnant people. Many of whom were, in fact, still children themselves, having ran away (or were kicked out) when they told their parents they were pregnant. The women I took to the gynecologist’s office. The women I took over to Chapel Hill to the Planned Parenthood office after they made difficult choices. The women I was the only person there when they came out of labor. The women I stood with when the state took their babies away.

There were children everywhere.

One of the biggest populations of people who were experiencing homelessness I came across was people who were anywhere from 18-25, who had been children in foster care, and who had aged out. This means that they had turned 18 and, being adults in the eyes of the law, their foster parents would no longer receive stipends toward their care, so they got kicked out. So many people I knew who were homeless had aged out of the system.

A coworker was pregnant with her first child, and I asked if she was nervous.

“Absolutely”, she said. “There are so many ways to screw this up, it feels like. However, working here makes me feel better, ironically. You see this many babies and you realize there is a wide range of conditions under which humans can grow and develop.”

It’s true.

I am incredibly lucky in so many ways. My parents were just children themselves, having had me when they were but 20. My grandparents either died or were hundreds of miles away when I was very small. We had very little money. And yet I had parents that taught me to love books, encouraged my creativity and curiosity, gave me independence and that loved me without question. It truly was like winning the genetic lottery, without buying a ticket.

A critique of my writing is that I romanticize things about the past. But I don’t see it as romanticizing as much as I do curation. I am really clear I am who I am because of who I come from – because of who my people are. Had I been born under different circumstances, in a different place, to different people, I would be different. Heck, my two brothers and I are all very different, despite having grown up in the same house, with the same parents, and gone to the same schools.

Last week, while in the mountains, some friends were talking about my writing, and they said the thing they connected with the most was my hopefulness that doesn’t attempt to minimize the very real horrors of the world.

There are so many ways people maintain their resilience in the light of the chaos of the world. Some focus on self-care. Some drink. Some become jaded and hard.

I have, on various occasions, done all of those, and more.

But the sustaining belief I hold onto – that allows me to be hopeful in spite of the facts – really comes down to children and ancestors.

When I say children, I recognize that not all of us are bio-parents, nor can we be. But we can all put creative effort into the world, we can all leave legacies behind, and we can all be generative and supportive of people that will outlive us. Many of us have raised babies we did not give birth to. What are children but an investment in the world after we are gone? And all of us can make such an investment – not just those of us who have biological children.

If there is such a thing as a chosen family – and there is – then I can have chosen children.

But if we can all have children, then we are all ancestors. And more and more I resonate with the words of Jonas Salk, who said that our greatest responsibility was to be good ancestors. I am who I am because they were who they were. I am because of them.

Much like the quote credited to Gandhi about being the change we want to see in the world, I believe we have a responsibility to be the person for young people that the younger version of us needed. Even if we didn’t get it ourselves. Probably especially if we didn’t get it ourselves.

By doing that, we are bullish on the future. We are rolling the dice in favor of a better world, we are modeling the world we want to see, and living in such a way that is a defiance of the present darkness that surrounds us. By focusing on being the best ancestor I can be, I deprive the bleak reality of oxygen.

So that’s it, really. The source of any hope I can muster is that I have a responsibility to my ancestors as well as to my chosen children to be an ancestor, and what’s more, to be a good one.

Rage

My personality is such that I get furious when others are mistreated, but tend to give little thought to how I am treated. I am always going to fight for someone else, even if I am largely unwilling to fight for myself. There have been times I walked away without getting paid rather than fight about it, or I have had to pay more than I should have had to rather than fight about it, yet let me see someone else get taken advantage of and I will go into full-bore Hulk-smash mode. I am a much better negotiator for you than I am for me.

This has not always led to positive outcomes for me.

For more than 12 years, I survived on rage. I was deep in the fight on behalf of people whose voices had long been suppressed, and the sheer rage I felt on their behalf kept me going, long after it was no longer a good idea for me to do so. This rage led me to fight a city, several neighborhoods, more than a handful of slumlords, at least three churches, and dozens of individuals. Rage was my fuel.

Rage as fuel, however, is not sustainable, and I burned out – literally. In the years since then, as I have been in recovery from that period in my life, I have been working hard on anger management, on acceptance, and on advocating better for myself. I’ve been trying hard to learn to survive on hope instead of rage.

Most days it seems to be working.

Today, however, it did not.

I have been involved in a local campaign around working to make sure Black-owned businesses get their fair share of the city contracts here. In a city that is 85% people of color, less than 5% of city contract dollars go to businesses owned by people of color. This has led to all sorts of interesting interactions with the business community, local politicians, and the media.

And today I got interviewed by someone in the press who managed to piss me off. As far as this story goes, it doesn’t matter how they did it or why they did it, but in any event, I got pissed. Experience has taught me that when you are angry and in front of a television camera, that is not the time to take it out on the person who has angered you, so there I was, on camera, getting angrier and angrier.

And then I got angry at myself because none of my hard-won coping mechanisms were working. I was getting angry that I was getting angry. But I survived the interview and lived to fight another day.

But I got angry. Like not the general, have-you-seen-the-news-generalized-hellscape angry, but I felt real, genuine rage, at someone else and then at me.

I let them get to me. That was… disappointing.

I’m OK. And it’s fine, really. Nobody got hurt, my passion probably moved some things forward, and I came home and went for a long walk, and watched the tiny sparrows play in the leaves that had gathered in the corners of the creek, and came to terms with the fact that I still have more work to do.

I’m just glad I have a chance to get to do it.

 

The Apocaloptomist

It was Thanksgiving morning in 1986, I think, that my Daddy’s friend got gunned down in a trailer park by his cousin. There was liquor involved, and a shotgun, and much screaming, and my Dad’s friend, who had tried to get his cousin to put down the gun and go sober up, was instead shot down and left to bleed out on the gravel in front of his house.

I remember it was Thanksgiving because we were getting ready to go to my grandmother’s when Dad heard the news. He told Mom he would be back soon, and then hopped in his truck and went over to see the family. It was a dirty, shabby story, with no way to clean it up or make it make sense. It was the sort of tragedy that happens when families squabble and there is both alcohol and guns involved.

Eventually, Dad came home, and we went to my grandmothers and ate, while Dad pushed the food around on his plate, and then got up and went for a walk, leaving us all at the table.

In the weeks that followed, I heard Dad and others talk about the man who had died. He had been a leader in his small community, had served on the Volunteer Fire Department, and was generally seen as someone to look up to. That he died trying to de-escalate a bad situation only added to his personal legend.

It was the first time I really thought about what people would say about you after you were dead.

* * *

A while back, a friend sent me the Urban Dictionary entry for an Apocaloptomist and said, “It’s you!”

I looked at it and realized, sadly, that it was. I do believe the world is going to shit, but still at least hope it turns out OK. I am inordinately hopeful, in the midst of overwhelming evidence that the world is crumbling around me.

I’m not some Pollyanna – In fact, I’m somewhat resigned to the facts: The world is getting warmer, the systems that hold us together are failing us, and our politicians have sold us out for campaign contributions. But if the world is ending, well, what sort of person do I want to be when the world ends?

Do I want to be the guy on the jet, eeeking out every bit of hedonistic pleasure, or the person committed to the very end to hold on as long as possible, to scratch and scrimp to save as many people as possible for as long as possible?

“What sort of person will I be when the world ends?”

I think about this question all the time. Not the specific form, but the general: What sort of person will I be when X happens?

What sort of person will I be when the supply chain runs out of food? Will I be the sort of person who had enough food to share with their neighbors, or the sort of person who sits on their roof with a gun, to defend their homestead?

When I am old and my grandchildren learn in school about the Obergefell v. Hodges, the same way I learned about Brown v. The Board of Education, what sort of story will I have for them when I get asked about where I was? What sort of person was I in the years up to Obergfell v. Hodges? In the years after?

When I am “…layin’ on [my] back, lookin’ at the roof of the church / Preacher tellin’ the truth and it hurts”, to quote DMX, well, what sort of person do I want them to say I was? What sort of person do you want to be when you are dead?

I don’t believe in the great man theory of history – that some are born great, waiting on history to recognize them. Instead, I believe history is made by those who show up, who decide to take a stand, who, when given a choice to do something or to do nothing, choose to do something.

And I will, as long as I can, be the person who does something. And I know I’m not alone in that. It doesn’t all depend on me – there are lots of us that choose, in the moment of truth, to do something.

And maybe, together, we can change things. We can definitely try.

And that gives me hope, in spite of the facts.

 

No Man’s Land

The pool at my gym is in a huge room, with a knotty pine ceiling, pierced by large, square skylights. The room is at least 20 feet tall, and the skylights are at least 15 feet across, so you feel like you are under the open sky if you look up. Or, if you are like me, prefer to swim the backstroke.

I say prefer there, like I have a quiver full of strokes available to me, but swimming is a skill I learned as an adult, so it’s pretty much backstroke, breaststroke, or sink. But it’s fine – I like the backstroke and the relaxed pace it forces upon me. It’s hard to stress about much when you are in the rhythm of the backstroke.

The guy in the lane next to mine, however, was doing the freestyle crawl, and he had lots of gear with him. He had a person who was timing his laps, and while I’m strolling along, leisurely stroking (Tickle, T, Touch. Tickle, T, Touch…), he is powering through. It’s obvious he is preparing for some form of competition.

I decidedly, am not. As I make my slow way down the lane, he passes me multiple times. Part of me feels some form of atavistic urge to accelerate,  some concern that he is doing better than I am, that he is somehow superior to me, somehow more masculine than I am.

As I swim down the lane, I am looking at the sky overhead – another reason I prefer the backstroke in this pool. The clear blue sky with traces of white clouds sail by, and the 25-meter pool has two and a half skylights under which I will pass as I swim each length. As the swimmer next to me flails past, I suppress the urge to push ahead, to be faster, to engage in some futile attempt at competition, and instead notice, high above, a jet airplane headed west, away from the airport.

I wonder briefly where they are headed, the people on that plane. Are they on a business trip, the fate of the account depending on their being sharp at the meeting to which they are headed? Is it for pleasure – perhaps a trip to see grandma, after almost two years apart because of COVID? Or an emergency trip home, because someone’s unvaccinated parent is about to be taken off the ventilator?

This passes through my head as I count my strokes, while Greg Louganis in the next lane is splashing for all he’s worth, and the time keeper shouts encouragement. I have to count my strokes, because this is not a pool designed for races, and thus has no row of flags near the end of the swim lane. Which means that if you lose yourself in your thoughts while doing the backstroke, you will smash your head into the wall of the pool.

As a person with ADHD, I have before described my inner monologue as actually like being in the electronics department at a store, where there is a wall of televisions, but all with the volume up and all tuned to different channels. At times I can tune into one, while the others drift into the background, but it always requires concentration to do, and if I relax too much, it all becomes just noise.

So here I am, counting my strokes – I hit the wall somewhere between 21 and 23, so at 21 I become careful. But while I’m counting my strokes, I’m also aware of swimmer guy in the next lane, and also balancing my urge to compete with my awareness that the vast sky is above me, seemingly going on forever (12, 13, 14). And it occurs to me that competitiveness is based on scarcity – the certainty that only one of us can win, that there are only so many ways to win, that the person in second place is the first loser, and all that – while the unfolding blue sky is a sign of the abundance that exists all around me, and (16, 17) there is no reason to think that I should be denied participation in that natural abundance.

THUNK!

I hit the wall. Hard. And not for the first time in my life, I reflect on the balance that I came up against in that moment, in the deep end of the pool, as I thrash about for air. The desire to live in my head, where I feel connected and integrated, and the necessity to maintain an awareness of the world around me so I do not hit my head on the wall, or lose my license because of a forgotten ticket, or watch undocumented folks get scapegoated.

That no man’s land on the border, between the aspiration of what could be and the stark reality of what actually is, seems to be my lot in which to dwell, and so I find myself here in the Deep South, living between Humidity and Hope.

Hope is a choice.

I met a new friend today. At least, I think we will be friends.

It was one of those conversations where you just agree to meet up for coffee and before you know it, three hours have passed and you have talked about 5 or 6 different things, and the conversation flows easily from one thing to the next. Those are rare for me, but I love it when they happen.

And one of the things we talked about was how change happens. I have these conversations a lot these days. We look around us and feel like things are bleak and divided, and we wonder if there is any way out. If those who work to oppress others, those who would take rights from others, those who work for their own self-interest even when it hurts others, and we wonder how we get them to change.

My new friend was somewhat cynical. “I think I have given up on their changing,” she said. “I mean, I want to believe they can, but it doesn’t feel like a real possibility”.

I told her I didn’t have enough self-esteem to believe that people can’t change.

She was puzzled. So I explained that I once believed very different things than I do now about… almost everything. I used to be an Evangelical who wanted to save your soul from Hell, and now I’m not. I used to believe God did not love Gay people, and now I don’t believe that. I used to chase money, and now I chase relationships. I used to want to distance myself from the South, and now it’s a core part of my identity.

“But here’s the thing: In every one of those instances, I didn’t change because I accidentally had a change of heart, but because of a relationship I had that caused me to reconsider my position.  I changed because who I knew changed, and I changed because my ideology had to follow my relationships. My heart changed, and then waited for my head to catch up.

The Jewish mystic Abraham Heschel said that when it came to God, there were no proofs, but only witnesses. In other words, some things can’t be proven but only experienced. I believe people can change because I have changed. A lot.  I can’t prove that people can change, but I am a witness to the fact that they do.

And I don’t believe I’m special. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m not. I’m pretty mundane, actually. And if I can change, as un-special as I am, then pretty much anyone can, given time and the right relationships. Or else I have to assume I’m so special that I think I can change, but they can’t. And I don’t have enough ego for that.

“That is… hopeful. Maybe more hope than I have right now,” she said.

“Oh yeah. It’s hopeful as hell. Because I want things to change. And I believe that the only way things will change is because people change. And if I thought people couldn’t change, then what choice would I have but despair? So I find myself having to choose between hope and despair.

“And I choose hope.”

Planting as resistance

I went tree shopping today.

We live on half an acre, in a former suburb. The house was outside the city limits when my neighborhood was built, but it would be annexed just five years later while the Korean War was smoldering.

It was nearly a blank slate when we bought it nearly three years ago, with a beautiful southern magnolia in the front yard and seven pine trees scattered around the lot and not much else. It was a great house with good bones, not looking its seventy years. It had been a church parsonage for its whole life before we bought it, which meant it had been cared for but never loved. We decided to love it.

Along came the pandemic, and then we endured hell as foster parents (not from the kids – from the system) and then my Dad died from COVID and then we had a damn insurrection in Washington and through it all, the old house began to love us back.

It’s easy to anthropomorphize things like a house. Heck, I just did it in that last paragraph. But it did seem like the house was happier being cared for, like it liked having the perennial bed planted in the front yard, liked the new deck we put up after cutting down the overgrown wisteria crawling all over the back patio. It’s like it knew we were looking out for it when we fixed the leak in the roof and replaced the sewer pipes.

But it isn’t just because we love the house.

One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers… Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” – Leonard Wolf, in Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939

So I went tree shopping today. I’m currently looking for a particular crab apple tree, one that has edible fruit and long blooms and is disease resistant and can put up with our severe summer humidity. I love crab apples – I planted three at our last house – but here I am going to try growing apples as well, and I need the crab for a pollinator, in addition to its being beautiful and a gift to the wildlife.

By next spring, we will have 2 apple trees, a crab apple, six plum trees, a peach, two figs, 10 blueberry bushes, four blackberries and two muscadine vines. The apples and crab will go in this fall, and the peach is currently sitting in the driveway waiting for me to plant it.

It’s not just the fruit. It’s that planting things that will endure are acts of resistance to a world gone mad. It’s a form of resistance against all the forces that try to harm us, that try to drag us down, that try to dehumanize us.

Growing fruit is a long-term commitment to a place. We will have figs and blueberries next year, but it will be at least 3 years before we have peaches, and perhaps five before we have apples. But they will feed people long after current politicians are long- dead, they provide us nourishment and flowers and pollen for the bees and food for the birds and perhaps most off all, they are our vote for a future that looks very different than the present.

They are living, growing monuments to hope, to the future, to a world that will long outlast the one we have now. They let me remember who I am and what I hope for in the midst of a world gone mad.And while I don’t think you have to plant trees – maybe you plant iris instead, or flowers, or raise children – I’m all in favor of planting something.

Do you have practices that sustain you in the midst of all this? If so, tell us about them in the comments below.

Photo by Jacob Farrar on Unsplash