Backslider

I wake up feeling hopelessly depressed and discouraged. The feelings are impossible to shake off and it takes every bit of energy and will for me to leave the bed. Even the two small, anxious faces of the dogs don’t motivate me. We are headed toward a country and a world I don’t want to live in and if it weren’t for my animals, I think I’d have checked out already. I know this is toxic thinking, I tell myself it will pass because everything does, but I’m worn out and weary and ready to quit. The thought occurs to me: Damn the consequences, it won’t be my problem. But there are those two small faces and those eyes. Not to mention the four felines that share my life. Even if I was committed and had the courage and was dead serious, the exit is blocked. So I get up, pull on yesterday’s clothes and make up my mind to start again. Waiting on the dogs to finish their breakfast and deliberately turning off the news, I begin to scribble on the back of an envelope things to be grateful for. I’m still above ground, have a roof that doesn’t leak, six healthy and well fed animals, a car that runs, unemployment benefits, a job I will eventually return to, a select few friends, a cupboard full of food, and a few thousand in the bank, just in case. I remind myself that there are people who would kill for a quarter of what I have and while It doesn’t completely eliminate the darkness, it is enough for me to pull myself together for another day.

When you find yourself drowning in negativity, searching for the good becomes a full time occupation. It takes energy and faith and practice. In the words of the Greg Brown song,

I’m a poor backslider,

in a pit of sin.

I try to crawl out,

and fall back in.

Just for today, I tell myself, I’ll hold on and wait to see what’s around the next corner.

Bad Blood

Memorial Day starts with cool air and gray skies. The sun is trying but not having much luck and there’s still a little leftover rain in the trees. It brings back a fuzzy memory of my grandmother and I driving to the cemetery to put flowers on my grandfather’s grave. All I really remember is that it was a long, quiet drive – he was buried in Northborough, a considerable distance from Boston but I never knew why. She is in Cambridge, at Mount Auburn Cemetery, my mother is buried in a small New Hampshire town and my daddy’s grave is in Nova Scotia, near where he was born and raised. It seems even in death, the family is fractured and disconnected.

All families, so it is said, are dysfunctional in their own way. In my house, we were, at best, five people who lived under one roof but had only the barest of interactions. We did not share our lives except in the most superficial and accidental manner. Except for anger, any display of emotion was non-existent. We didn’t touch, didn’t talk, didn’t meet except for meals which were far too often a painfully tense prelude to open warfare. Except for church on Christmas and Easter, we didn’t to anything as a family - no vacations, no picnics, no birthday parties, no weddings or funerals, no shopping excursions, no school projects or movies or family nights. My daddy worked, my mother drank, my brothers kept to themselves and I hid out at the library.

Temporary and always changing alliances formed and reformed but they had no depth and were invariably based on no more than self interest. When I discovered that not all families were like ours, that some genuinely seemed to love and enjoy each other and spend time together, it was a shock. Those families talked to each other, cared about each other, got mad at one another and worked it out. Those families knew each other. They could make one another cry with a particularly well considered Christmas gift. To my mind, it was dreadfully foreign behavior.

The other thing we did exceptionally well was keep up secrets and appearances. We didn’t talk about my ogre of a grandfather’s temper or my mother’s drinking or my daddy’s long term ladyfriend. We never mentioned my mother’s illegitimate half sister (I was in my 20’s before I even learned of her) or my grandfather’s alcoholism or my brother’s pathological side. It felt as if we didn’t care enough to even be dysfunctional. When I look back now, I think we were closer to being a boarding house than a family.

Adulthood and leaving home didn’t improve things. We carried the indifference with us and became acquaintances with nothing in common. Leading separate lives had become ingrained.

When the inevitable split happened and the estrangement became permanent, I had no sense of loss. I still don’t. You can’t grieve for something you never had.

Still, idle curiosity sometimes stirs inside me. I don’t know how, when or where my parents met. I don’t know if they courted, where they were married, who was there. I have no idea how he supported her or if she ever worked. I know they were both in the military because I’ve seen pictures of them in uniforms but I don’t know how they came to be in Springfield, where I was born, or later to Waltham and finally to Arlington. At some point, my daddy went to work for my grandfather and there he stayed but how that came to pass I don’t know either.

In the end, I don’t suppose it matters much. It all wound up in hurt feelings and bad blood and there it stays. All families – so it is said often and rightly, I think – are dysfunctional in their own way. We love our families or we survive them.

Monsters Among Us

Monsters are real,” Stephen King wrote, “and sometimes they win.”

I’m not young enough or naive enough to still believe that good always overcomes evil. I think that the very best we can hope for – but not count on – is that it will mostly even out. And that’s only on days when I can manage to convince myself that hope itself is not one massive illusion. Those days are becoming fewer and farther between.

In some places around the world, the plague has been beaten back or kept at bay but in my own country, it’s winning. We denied it and downplayed it and offered it a firm grasp, not bothering to put up any resistance until it was too late. We provided a handful of masks and a fraction of the testing required and declared we’d won. And only now with the death tolls at staggering levels and the infection rates sky rocketing like a California wildfire, do we realize that we’re losing. Greed and profit matter more than lives. Ignorance combined with arrogance is the most deadly sin and it will be our undoing. No matter how this ends, if it ever does, life is never, ever going to be the same. The resulting economic crash was inevitable as was the mendacity that pushed for the reckless and fatal re-openings of states. Politicians and a selfish, lawless citizenry pushed for re-openings and are now paying the price. I have searched my soul and cannot find a single shred of sympathy for Texas or Florida. Small wonder that the virus has the upper hand – we invited the damn thing in.

Meanwhile, black lives are still being sacrificed in the cause of law and order. An illiterate, incoherent, lying, too stupid to live white supremacist sits in the White House and is protected and shielded by a cadre of bought and paid for congressmen and a cult of supporters too racist and willfully blind to see what’s happening. God and guns and fuck you, I got mine is the rule of the land. We have elected a cruel and delusional fool and chosen a path that can only lead to self destruction.

It’s remarkable how little time and effort it took to get to the “Just let’em die and be done with it” stage.