Perfect Days

Once the morning chores were done and we’d had lunch, Nana would chase Ruthie and me and often the dogs out into the sunshine with the same parting words, “Mind me! Home by dark or I’ll fetch me a stick!” Not everyone, I’ve since learned, is comfortable with saying “I love you.” My grandmother said it often but never used the exact words.

We ran up the gravel driveway and across the strawberry field, headed for the Old Road and the open pasture land beyond Uncle Willie’s farm where all you could see was ocean and wildflowers.

It was late June, a perfect day, there was a sweet breeze coming from the cove and the tide was coming in gently. We didn’t know it then but to be a child in a world you love is a precious gift.

We made our way to the breakwater, then all the way down Water Street to what passed as the town square, then up the highway to the church and left and down Lovers Lane to Beautiful Cove. We passed James and Lily working in the newly planted church flower beds, saw Doc McDonald drinking coffee on his side porch, waved to Uncle Bernie bouncing along on his tractor.

All was right with the world

We had all the shells we needed so we worked on collecting driftwood and by noon we had a respectable pile. We went through it carefully, choosing only the smoothest and most bleached pieces to haul home. Some of the villagers – my daddy among them – could transform the wood into lamps. Others created pieces of artwork for the tourist trade and the villagers were more than willing to part with a nickel or a dime if we saved them the trouble of retrieving the wood. Ruthie and I could make a fair amount of pocket change if we chose well. When we were done, we sat in the shade and ate the sandwiches Nana had packed for us then keeping a careful watch, shared a cigarette we had purloined from my mother’s pack of Parliament 1oo’s. We were so young, so innocent, so naive and so happy.

On the way home, Bill Melanson passed us in his hay wagon and waved us aboard. We climbed on and burrowed happily in the sweet smelling straw all the way to The Point, getting home just as the sun was beginning to set across the pastel sky. The bells on the oxen tinkled brightly and Bill sang lustily the whole way, unending choruses of “The Church in the Wildwood”, his rumbling voice slightly off key but sincere and joyful. Supper was on the stove and afterwards we played cribbage on the sun porch and went to bed to dream of the next perfect day.

Choose with Care

“In the end,” Nick Catricala wrote, “We are our choices.”

Somewhere in the space between the darkness and the light, there may be a precious few seconds where you get to choose between hope or despair, flight or flight, yesterday or today.

It’s a good time to honor the moment.

When this plague passes and we are able to resume our lives, what, I wonder, will we have learned and what, if anything, will we be willing to change. Even if the greedy, selfish and stupid among us are substantially decreased, I’ve lived seven decades and I suspect it will be very little of either. Since the 2016 election, I’ve come to realize that we aren’t built to care or consider others or share even a small amount of kindness. We are out for ourselves. From the highest elected office to the lowliest among us, we have become the very essence of “I’ve Got Mine, Fuck You”. It’s running rampant in government, in religion, in medicine, in business, in education. It’s not confined to any class or political party or skin color or socio-economic level.

We may be, as I recently read, all in the same storm but we’re most definitely not in the same boat. Those that have will survive and if the current government has its way, likely thrive. Those that don’t will be sacrificed. Oh, a few of the idle rich may not be able to buy their way out of the virus and a handful of the poor will recover in spite of not having medical care or equal footing, but in the main, ignorance, arrogance racism, and avarice are going to carry the day. It’s cruel, it’s callous, it’s unfair and it’s unforgivable but it’s what we have become and perhaps most shameful of all, we’re proud of it.

After a decent meal and a good night’s sleep, I am able to regroup and re-evaluate and re-locate that tiny spark that might be optimism. Hope isn’t exactly springing eternal and the light at the end of the tunnel could still be an oncoming freight train or flamethrower but the fog of despair has lifted slightly. I search for and find something positive to hold onto – some small sign of sanity and accountability in a world gone mad. I remind myself that there are more good people than bad in the world and though the bad make for better and more attention grabbing headlines, the good do not give up. And sometimes they win.

Peace At Last

Chalk it up to morbid curiosity but every few years I make a small effort to see what’s going on with the people I have left behind. It’s how I learned my second husband and brother were dead, that my other brother’s first born had OD’d on drugs and died, that a precious friend had a grown son who had become a reasonably successful musician, and most recently, that an old lover was in the hospital. Except for the last, I felt no need to do anything, no urge to reach out and re-connect, no desire to make peace or amends. Except for the last, the past is the past and as the popular saying goes, I’m not going that way and will not look back. Except for the last. When you feel you have failed someone you love, there’s no amount of time or distance that can ease the guilt. It retreats and regroups, seduces you into thinking you’ve gotten past it, and then slams back at you when you least expect it. It’’s a nighttime intruder with a lethal weapon and darkness on his side. Too late you realize you left a window open.

After a nearly lethal stroke, which left him paralyzed on one side, he has spent the last several years in and out of rehab hospitals and psychiatric wards and nursing homes. At one point, he was calling me 4 and 5 times a day, in tears, incoherent and desperate, pleading with me to help him. The calls were agonizing and futile – I had no standing to do anything – and in time to preserve my own sanity, I changed my number. It felt like the worst kind of betrayal but I saw no alternative. I talked often and at length with his daughter, more to assuage my own guilt than anything else, and she assured me she understood and that I shouldn’t feel it was my responsibility. Technically he still had a wife, she reminded me, although they were separated and she would soon be arrested for multiple counts of domestic abuse and assault against him and in the meantime she promised me she was working hard to move him to her state where she could care for him. I allowed myself to be convinced but it never happened and over time I persuaded myself that I’d done the only possible thing and I stopped letting myself think about it.

I tried to remember him in better times – he never lost his British accent and his sense of humor was quick, sharp and desert dry. He loved animals fiercely, thrived on clutter and chaos, drank far more than was good for him, was passionate about a good Indian curry and loved his child beyond words. Despite her severe mental illness and relentless abuse and alcoholism, he never completely abandoned the woman he married and allowed her to dominate him. Loyalty was only one of his his fatal flaws. He never thought he was meant to be happy and was terrified of leaving the frying pan for the fire. I coaxed, pleaded, reasoned, promised and threatened but all to no avail. I finally realized you cannot help someone who is unwilling to give up the things that make him suffer.

He had spent the last few weeks in hospice and his death was not unexpected but even so, it’s a body blow. His presence in my life was a gift. I dearly hope he has found some peace.

Technical Difficulties

Several years ago I had to buy a new refrigerator and Sears kindly gave me an address for a rebate. I wouldn’t ordinarily have bothered but a major appliance is a major appliance and the amount of the rebate was considerable. I thought it would be worth a little time and trouble. Hours and hours later as I was still navigating the forms and trying to find information that they hadn’t given me (and making a number of calls to be told “Wrong department”), I finally realized that the entire process was designed to make you give up. No one was going to part with a dime of precious rebate money unless they were absolutely against a wall. It took hours more time and trouble but out of nothing but sheer stubbornness, I persisted and several months later, I finally received a check and a thank you for my business.

Now, in the age of plague, I understand that this is exactly how government operates. From food stamps to unemployment claims to the Internal Revenue Service and the Small Business Administration loan programs, it’s one long, complicated, convoluted rebate scam, written in doublespeak and meticulously designed to make you throw up your hands in disgust and do without. The portals don’t work, the claim trackers are useless, the websites are a joke and the telephones are not answered. You can’t log on or call in or check status. And if by some divine intervention, you should get on the websites or manage to get into a call queue, you can safely give up the next several hours of your life waiting until the office closes or the website crashes. Either way, you lose. Even a successfully placed claim or application will be challenged if not outright denied (more or less automatically) and the appeal process makes the whole initial application process look like child’s play. It’s all justified by the systems being overwhelmed by the numbers of people needing help or the old stand by, “technical difficulties”. In other words,

call it malice or stupidity or ineptitude or fate, we’re mostly on our own.

I don’t know what we’ll be going back to or whether we’ll have learned anything when this is over. But my gut tells me that no matter what life on the other side of this virus is like, nothing is ever going to be the same again.

Just For This Morning

I am not used to feeling inarticulate but lately, I don’t seem to be able to organize or express my thoughts. I feel weighted down and defenseless with an army of what if’s attacking from every direction. I feel a little anxious, a little sick, a little panicky, and a lot enraged. When I think of all the things I could be accomplishing and am not, I feel guilty, but it takes all my energy and strength just to lay on the love seat and catnap and worry. In spite of what my reason and common sense are telling me, in spite of the fact that I have $3000 in savings, in spite of my knowing absolutely that this will pass, I feel doomed. I have no hope for my country and no faith in humanity, especially the humanity in my part of the country. It’s irrational and unhealthy and morbid but there it is.

I have moments when I think it’s the end of the world and that the current government really is committed to killing us all in the name of greed, profit and reelection. I have moments when the only peace/solace/relief/hope I can find is under the covers with the dogs. I have far too many “What’s the point” moments when I feel sick and suicidal. The world is upside down and coming apart at the seams from stress and uncertainty and isolation and despair. One more story about the lethal shortage of protective equipment or the push for untested drugs or mass graves on Hart’s Island will do me in. One more incoherent and indefensible lie from the president will send me over the edge. One more evangelical extortion ad to send money or burn in hell will make me want to take up arms. In South Louisiana, we have an infamous preacher who is still shouting proud to bus his flock in for Sunday services. I say let them come. Then bar the doors of the church and set it on fire. If their preacher and their God save them, well and good. If not, there’ll be a smidgen less evil and ignorance in the world.

This plague will pass, I suppose, and maybe the world will eventually right itself in time for the next one. Or not if the pestilence that currently rules us stays in charge.

The weekend arrives, although it’s almost impossible to tell one day from another, and I’m up early to be at the grocery store for the Elder Shopping Hour. They are out of Country Crock but there’s plenty of Diet Coke in the 6 ounce glass bottles – apart from cigarettes and Ghirardelli Caramel Squares, the only thing I cannot live without – and then I make a quick stop at the bank to deposit my check (remembering to be grateful for still being able to work and be paid) and I’m done. I retreat to the quiet isolation of my small house and distract myself with the laundry and the dusting and the litter boxes. Just for this morning, I will not give in to the urge to hide under the covers and weep.

The Honest Working Man

May Elizabeth Albright was a hulk of a woman, nigh onto 200 pounds and just shy of 6 foot tall in her stocking feet. It was said she could out work, out drink, out shoot and out fight anyone on either of the islands. An early widowhood had left her with precious few options - she had four sons to provide for when her husband was lost at sea during a hurricane – and she became the only female captain in the fishing fleet by necessity. She was, as the old men who gathered at Curt’s store liked to say, “….an imposin’ figure of a woman…” and not one to be trifled with.

After the second hurricane, when she had to bury all four of the boys she had birthed and raised,

the loss was incomprehensible and the entire village went into mourning with her. It was a full six weeks before she emerged from the battered house overlooking the passage. She spent the remainder of the summer repairing and rebuilding the roof and the fences and the barn. She worked mostly alone, a solitary figure in overalls and hip boots turned down to the ankles with only an old hound dog and a yoke of oxen for company. Every few days, Nana would send me to her house with a fresh apple pie or a plate of biscuits and May Elizabeth would nod and thank me but she never stopped whatever work she was doing.

“She needs to be done by Labor Day,” Sparrow said, “Afore the winter gits here and the weather turns.”

“Ayuh,” my grandmother agreed, “If anybody can do it, May Elizabeth can.”

And she did. It took working from dawn to dusk, 7 days a week, through the rain and fog as well as the fine days. The village marveled at her energy and persistence and sheer stubborn spirit. Help was offered but she most always turned it down – she wanted to heal in her own way and her own time.

“Grief,” Sparrow said once, “is a private place. Ain’t no way out ‘cept straight through. And there be times when you got to go alone.”

So when there was a knock on the back door the day before we were to leave for home, nobody was more surprised then we were to see May Elizabeth. She looked tired and there was more gray in her hair than I remembered – also there were flecks of paint here and there in her hair and on her flannel shirt and overalls – but she stood tall and straight and even managed a hesitant half-smile.

“I’m beholden to you, Missus,” she told my grandmother, “You and the little ones been right kind to me these past weeks and it ain’t like I ain’t noticed. I been thinkin’ I might oughta come round and thank you ‘fore you head out. Mebbe see if you needed any help packin’ up or what not.”

It took a lot to render my grandmother speechless and to her credit, she recovered quickly, assuring May Elizabeth that though she appreciated the offer, we were fine and not in need of anything and she declared, where were her manners, would she come in for coffee and a sweet roll. May shook her head immediately, mumbled something about having to finish whitewashing the fence, and then produced a bakery box tied with twine, placed it in the woodbox and before Nana could even open the screen door, was half way down the front path and out of sight.

Opening the bakery box, my grandmother could only laugh. May Elizabeth had packed us a bag of dulse, two Jersey Milk bars, a tin of aspirin, a box of crayons and several coloring books, a book of crossword puzzles, a glass canning jar crammed with beach glass and assorted shells, a pair of dice in a tiny velvet drawstring bag and a slightly ragged stuffed bear wearing a t shirt with “I Love Digby” written on it. Resting on top of this odd collection of gifts was a clearly well worn record album – “Diane Oxner Sings the Helen Creighton Traditional Songs of Nova Scotia”.

Here’s the chorus to one I still remember, “The Honest Working Man”.

Do you want to buy the mitt, the sock, the ganzy frock,
The juniper post, the mussel or the clam,
The blueberry, the foxberry, the huckleberry, the cranberry,
The smelt, the pelt, the forty-foot ladder.
The thousand of brick or the sand.

Some of the best gifts are tied with ribbons of memory.