In a normal March in Seattle with daylight silently creeping over darkness like Ivy taking over a hillside, I would be up at first light.  This morning, I could not pull myself from beneath the covers even after Melissa, trying to drag me from my lethargy, wrapped herself around me.  Instead of sweet nothings, she began whispering in my ear, “go make me some coffee, please!”  Today is her birthday, a thought that finally pierced the sleepy shell of my brain igniting motion in my calcified limbs.  

This is not a normal March, a flair for the obvious, I know.  The challenge with the obvious is that its ubiquitousness hides it in plain sight.  In other words, even the most unusual, abnormal things can become unnoticed or normalized with time.  This may be another way of saying humans have an uncanny knack for adapting to their environment.  Amidst the turmoil of the current events, we are adapting to social distancing.  Melissa and I, via zoom, had a “quarantini” with some friends the other day.  On a walk, Melissa saw two women enjoying each other’s company while holding the end of a six-foot long rope to ensure a contagion-free space between them.  Via the Internet, Meg has spent as much time with her friends as she would have in a normal situation, with the added bonus of spending time with different friend groups from different stages of life (high school, college, study abroad) all in the same day.  

Still, some things, even with time, do not disappear into the ether of the obvious or blend into yet another shade of beige.  I have known Melissa longer and more intimately than any other human on the planet – more than my parents, my siblings, even my first, best friend, Tom Furbish, from whom I was inseparable until the seventh grade when he moved to a different school.  Melissa has become so much a part of my reality that it is now difficult to understand myself apart from her.  It is not that I have lost myself in another person.  I still love listening to Neil Diamond at high volume while cooking, and she still thinks it is cheesy as hell.  She cannot resist birthday cake while I prefer (and will devour) an entire plate of chocolate chip cookies.  I will spend hours reading a good fantasy novel despite her almost contemptuous reproach, and she will veg-out on Grey’s Anatomy, or This is Us while I huff away in disgust.

Even our differences operate as part of the life-force holding us in each other’s orbit.  It is precisely that intangible, complex, beautifully choreographed interplay of forces that has created our shared reality, our aurora, our Northern Lights. We collide. The collision excites energy.  We give off light.  Something new blooms in the thin air between us.  It is perhaps more appropriate to describe ourselves less in terms of two interacting physical bodies and more in terms of the forces, like laws of physics, that define our perpetual motion, our gravitational pull, our relationship.  Many modern physicists feel the same way about our universe.  It is less about the physical objects we see in a telescope, and more about the way those objects relate to one another.  

Yesterday, I spent the morning reacquainting myself with Paul Tillich, a brilliant theologian I studied at Seattle University.  I stumbled across this wonderful definition of a wonderful word.  “Ecstasy is the ability to stand outside of oneself without ceasing to be oneself.”  Although I am not suggesting that our married life has been one long moment of ecstasy, it has produced in me the ability to stand outside of myself without ceasing to be myself.  Side note: when I first met Melissa in Atlanta way back in 1988, I was so smitten that one of my work colleagues, both done with my giddiness and worried for my state of mind, said, “Don, you need to knock this off or it’s going to kill you.”  About five years later, as proof of his wisdom, my colleague gave up his lucrative career in the law firm, moved his wife and child to Texas, and became a Texas Ranger.  

Reading Tillich, it occurred to me — in that way that the most obvious thing in your life can suddenly and without explanation take on a whole new depth of meaning — that I have been twisted and warped by my relationship to Trump in the exact opposite way I have been renewed and energized by my relationship with Melissa.  Sometimes I am filled with pure, unvarnished hate for Trump and his supporters.  Justified or not, it is a state I do not want to be in.  It robs me of a sense of who I am.  If ecstasy allows me to stand outside of myself without losing myself, Trumpian rage does the opposite.  I lose myself in some place disconnected from anything familiar, anything I love, anything that brings meaning and purpose to my life.  Rather than stand outside of myself without losing myself, I fall endlessly into nothingness until even my sense of self becomes as thin and fragile as morning mist rising from the dew.  

More than fifty years ago, in a time defined by the atrocities of Nazism and southern lynchings, Tillich asked: “Have the people of our time still a feeling of the meaning of sin? Do they, and do we, still realize that sin does not mean an immoral act, that ‘sin’ should never be used in the plural, and that not our sins, but rather our sin is the great, all-pervading problem of our life?”  As Tillich recognized, “sin” has lost its meaning, partly because of its ubiquitousness.  He suggested we substitute the word “separation” for “sin.”  We all experience separation: separation from ourselves, from each other, and from whatever it is we call the touchstone that gives meaning and purpose to our lives. 

I am tired of being spiritually shredded by a relationship with someone who represents everything I do not want to be or become.  It has absolutely nothing to do with my politics, with fiscal policy, with capitalism or socialism, with political parties.  It has everything to do with the recognition that sin or separation is a real, menacing, destructive force in the myriad forces that define our universe.  

 Fortunately, grace is also a force that defines our universe.  As Tillich says, “In grace something is overcome; grace occurs in spite of something; grace occurs in spite of separation and estrangement. Grace is the reunion of life with life, the reconciliation of the self with itself. Grace is the acceptance of that which is rejected. Grace transforms fate into a meaningful destiny; it changes guilt into confidence and courage. There is something triumphant in the word grace: in spite of the abounding of sin grace abounds much more.”

Today is Melissa’s birthday.  Today, I will view the world from that perch of ecstasy even as the number of those infected with Covid 19 increases.  Today, I will allow grace to overcome my anger and guilt and keep me connected to myself, to others, to purpose and meaning.  Today, I will make coffee for Melissa and eat birthday cake.  Today, I will affirm that grace abounds much more. 

Footnote: the phrase “grace abounds much more” is from Romans 5:20. The quotes from Tillich are from his essay/sermon called “You Are Accepted.”

            My trouble with writing is not knowing where to begin.  How do I name one event as the genesis of everything I am, my biases, likes, dislikes, prejudices, fears, loves?  Even writing that sentence suggests that now, at this moment, I have the perspective (the authority?) to name my reality.  Does one ever gain such perfect perspective on one’s life?

            After my mother-in-law died on November 8, 2019, I stayed in Atlanta to clean out her small apartment.  My wife returned to Seattle.  She is still employed; I am not.  I’ve been retired for several years, thanks to luck, perseverance, intellect, and white privilege, all those things.  It has taken several years, but I have become better at holding the tension in that last sentence, adept at maintaining a precarious equilibrium between guilt and anger.  Guilt over unearned advantages and anger at how those advantages tend to minimize the hard work and sacrifices I made to take advantage of them.  

            For such a small apartment, there was quite a bit to sort through.  The hardest part was not the few pieces of furniture and art worth anything, or the jewelry and china, or even the ten-year-old Honda Civic with only 38,000 miles on it.  The hardest part was dealing with the boxes of photographs, her original social security card, the scraps of paper on which Carol scribbled poems.  I felt good about giving the furniture to the employees who cared for Carol over the last few years of her life.  Carol’s brother-in-law took charge of selling the car just as he had taken care of her finances for many years.  The china and jewelry went to my wife.  We turned everything else into cash or gave it away, everything except those two banker’s boxes of photographs, poetry, thank you notes, love letters, her original birth certificate.  I shipped those boxes to Seattle, unable to sort through them or throw out bits and pieces of her life.  I rationalized my decision by convincing myself I would sort through the memorabilia when I returned to Seattle, create, I imagined, a lasting pictorial biography of a woman I had come to love more than I realized when she was alive. 

            Five months after shipping the boxes to Seattle, they remain on the floor of our T.V. room next to the antique secretary we inherited from Nana, Carol’s mother.  It, too, is filled with photographs spanning our lives, from our marriage through three kids.  Will these photos still be in that secretary when Melissa and I die?  Will our three kids box them up and store them in their closets or attics?  More than Carol’s death, more than the dozen times I have caught myself since she died, halfway to dialing her number to tell her something funny or to check in, more even than the spam email I received just this morning from Carol Watson with a smiley face, those photographs stored in boxes, filling that secretary, haunt me.  How do we throw out a life?  Or, do we catalogue it?  Sort and organize it?  

            I’ve been working my way through a book by Jim Holt called Why Does The World Exist?  An Existential Detective Story.  Even better than that title is the blurb about the author.  It reads, “Jim Holt . . . has written on string theory, time, infinity, numbers, truth, and bullshit, among other subjects…”  Among other subjects?  What’s left?  Reading his book, I come away with two thoughts: Holt is way above my intellectual pay grade; and, how much fun would it be to have a beer with this guy.  Although I admit to grasping only about a tenth of his material – a survey of the great philosophers and scientists who have attempted to answer that ultimate metaphysical question, none of whom, for Holt, have the definitive answer – I am clear on one point.  Holt is dead set against turning to religion for help in his quest.  God is not the answer.  For Holt, God is a cop-out, a crutch, intellectual laziness.  I don’t blame or judge him for that.  Sadly, for many people, religion and God have become synonymous with corruption, hypocrisy and hatred, and for quite understandable reasons.  Today, the words “evangelical Christian” more often evoke images of brain-dead, Trump sycophants, or money-grubbing snake-oil salesmen than devout, joyful believers in the Gospel of love.  So too, Catholicism, my original faith tradition, has become more aligned with misogyny, patriarchy and pedophilia than social justice. 

            I did learn one thing from reading Holt’s book, if learn is the right word.  It feels more like discover or connect with rather than learn.  Every great mind he interviewed about this “impossible-to-ignore” question, regardless of their starting point, regardless of their expertise – string theory, quantum physics, multi-universes, philosophy or mathematics – admitted that there is no sufficient answer to how something came from nothing.  We are no closer to the answer to that ultimate question than were our Neanderthal ancestors.  It remains, at the end of rational thinking, a mystery.  Yet all of these brilliant minds have their own word or combination of words to describe this mystery, words like cosmic void, Big Bang, ideal forms, and Infinite Mind.  When you really stop to consider it, aren’t the words “God” or “Allah” or “Yahweh” in that same category?

When faced with something we know must have a reality, but unable to explain what that reality is, we turn to metaphor, art, music, poetry, prose.  In these times of irrational reliance on – metaphorically speaking – the left side of my brain, I feel good about giving a shout out to the liberal arts, the underappreciated right side of my brain.  Of course, as I sit here writing, I fully appreciate how self-serving that last thought is.  Nonetheless, to stare in the face of a question like “why does anything exist?” elicits, after mind-numbing mental gymnastics, a surrender to humility, quickly followed by gratitude, and ending in laughter.  Yes, truly, where was I when God or the Big Bang created the cosmos?

For the time being, I’m not going to do anything with those boxes of photos and memorabilia.  I’ll let them sit there in the corner, and sometimes I will stare at them and laugh or cry and not feel the need to do a thing.  To surrender to a mystery, whatever name we place on it, is not a cop-out.  It’s an act of courage.

The sun finally came out even if the air still has that touch of winter in it.  Maybe it’s a reaction to the constant barrage of Covid 19 news, but I spent the last few days pressure washing every concrete and brick surface around my house.  I started with my little, ten-year-old washer until it became unavoidably obvious that the “pressure” part of its name no longer applied.  I held the nozzle half an inch from a patch of moss, and I could hear the moss singing like it was in the shower.  Such a display of impertinence.  An hour later after a brief foray on the Internet and a quick trip to Home Depot, I obliterated that saucy little patch of moss and most of the grout between the bricks with my new, supersized pressure washer, 2300 PSI, baby.  A man, a power tool, a sunny day.  My concrete surfaces have no viruses.

Giving in to the panic, briefly, I stocked up on extra food, at least the stuff that was still on the shelves.  No chicken.  Seriously, no chicken, not in two different stores.  I am standing there staring at the empty case thinking, will I be doing this in a month grabbing any damn cut of meat still on the shelf, even the one slightly past its due date?  Ham hocks anyone?  It gave me a real, deeply felt moment of what it must have been like for my parents in the Great Depression and leading into the shortages caused by WWII.  Throughout my childhood, my mother, age 89, delightfully and gratefully ate a poached egg every single morning for breakfast, something she could not get as a child.  

Life has changed, but that is not to say it has become unbearable or even terribly difficult.  In fact, Melissa spends the day at home teaching her classes online.  Right now, I am sitting with the sun on my back not ten feet from her half listening to her students discuss whatever novel they have been reading.  Yesterday, Melissa dressed up for an online class.  “What, I need to be on,” she said in response to my raised eyebrows.  Understand, I was wearing REI moss-spattered rain pants and a sweatshirt way beyond the “give-away” stage.  I had a date with some doomed moss.  I walked outside in my rain garb, protective goggles perched on my nose looking like some crazed owl.  I am king of my damn castle, buddy.

Not everything is one hundred percent.  We are anxious to get Meg home from Chile.  My heart goes out to the other parents whose kids were in Europe.  As things go, she should be better off than most of the stranded kids across the globe.  Some of her friends have flights that connect through Brazil.  Border crossings are not great right now.  Meg has a long flight, but at least it has two hops inside Chile before the long trek to L.A.  She’s moved through the disappointment into her Wonder Woman resilience.  She told me on Facetime yesterday in that not so subtle, but devilishly playful way that if I felt like making a pie, now would be a good time.  Maybe life really is a more dynamic version of a slot machine.  Every so often, a child happens to hit with the perfect combination of genes.  Of course, I would say the same thing about all my kids.  Maybe the better way to put this is that every so often a child, unfortunately, hits with the worse possible combination of genes, and then becomes president, or the CEO of American Airlines, who, to protect profits, has cancelled 70% of his airlines flights despite the thousands of people, mostly college kids, trying to get home.  

On Friday I watched the PBS News Hour, the last real news show on T.V.  David Brooks, appearing as he always does on Friday with Mark Shields, was asked for his take on the Covid 19 virus.  Brooks, a republican, called Trump a sociopath who cares more about “the numbers” than human lives.  Sadly, he is right.  Consider for a moment that Trump’s inability (or refusal) to effectively test for the virus nearly two months since the first case appeared will undoubtedly result in otherwise avoidable deaths.  If I let that fact sink in too deeply, I can’t deal with my rage.  Mark Shields reminded David that Americans found the courage and wisdom to pull together to get through the shortages and fears surrounding WWII as well as the polio outbreak.  For years those two thoughtful, respected journalists have civilly discussed about every divisive issue in politics.  I find hope in the strength of their relationship. 

The ski season has come to an abrupt close like most everything else.  Josh, like a pig in slop, wallowed in the slopes last weekend for the final hurrah.  I understand people in New York are still in a state of stunned disbelief that bars are closing, and this during the week of St. Patrick’s Day.  I don’t mean to make light of these changes.  It is disconcerting to say the least.  Yet, I wonder if this isn’t exactly the kind of two by four upside our heads we needed to stop already with the obsessive, incessant fearmongering and hate speech.  Maybe, cloistered as we will be, we will find a breakthrough, a moment of stillness, an awakening to the present.  Maybe we will stop thinking and feel how real and good it is to be alive, to be with family (even virtually), to remember what it is like to let go of the seething mass of ultimately inconsequential “urgent” tasks that have become a perversion of life.  Maybe we will feel the deep, rich, inexpressible joy of remembering that we love and are loved.  As we hunker down in our moss-free homes, let that thought fill us.  I do not understand why suffering exists, but I take comfort in knowing that in the worse suffering there is always a glimmer of joy, a redemption that confounds any attempt at rational thought, or any thought.  It simply is. This too shall pass, but I sincerely hope I don’t lose the lesson in it.

And now, there is the sidewalk that requires my attention.   

We did the whole daylight savings time thing again this past weekend, spinning the clocks forward an hour.  For what?  To see the sun set an hour later?  Great, but it means the sun rises an hour later as well.  I got up at five this morning.  It was dark.  I had no reason to be up that early.  I read the New York Times.  The stock market was plummeting as cases of coronavirus were sky rocketing.  As far as I can tell, the only thing switching our clocks accomplishes anymore is to throw off our collective circadian rhythms for a day or two.  Like we need that with everything else that is going on.  It’s like doing shots of Red Bull with coffee in the morning.

As much as I want to see the Democratic nominee beat Trump, and as much as I think the Democratic President should spend his first twenty-four hours reversing or eliminating every single one of Trump’ Executive Orders, I’d love to see the new President call it quits on the change the clocks absurdity.  He could get rid of pennies too while he’s at it.  Think about it.  Who would even notice?  Today, the newly elected President reinstated the DACA program, banned the separation of families at the border, ordered the Justice Department to cease investigations into debunked Russian conspiracies, reinstated the Obama-era rules on auto emissions, and eliminated pennies and daylight savings time.  You won’t get that extra hour of sleep this fall, and you’ll have to start throwing nickels into the tip jar of your favorite barista.  Deal with it.

Speaking of pennies, when was the last time you said to someone, “A penny for your thoughts?”  This curious question popped into my head this morning around 9:30.  I had already read as much of the paper as I could handle, folded the sheets that had been sitting in the chaise lounge in our bedroom since last Thursday, and ridden my bike while watching (for the sixth or seventh time) an episode of Game of Thrones.  Don’t judge me.  Each episode is about an hour long and it gets me on the bike.  Still, after all that, it was only 9:30.

Nick showed up to return the car before heading into work, but first he raided the refrigerator.  We sat four feet apart at the table eating breakfast – his first, my second.  After a few minutes of silence, I looked up from my iPad thinking I had been rude to ignore Nick.  His eyes, and presumably his brain, were trained on his phone.  It was then, in the awareness that we had been sitting so close in silence that I realized we no longer use that phrase, “a penny for your thoughts,” because we never see anyone idly staring into space, daydreaming, or zoning out.  What exactly does that mean?  Do we not have our own thoughts anymore?

In addition to the other things I had more or less accomplished that morning, I had forced myself, after being ginned up to the point of combustion, to take a few deep breaths, sit quietly and watch my thoughts parade through my head.  I tried to pinpoint the exact moment each thought popped into my head while simultaneously trying to extend the time between one thought vanishing and the next one appearing.  This is an exercise Eckhardt Tolle suggests in his book The Power of Now.  When I become intensely focused without judgment on watching my thoughts, a curious thing happens.  I begin to sense a difference between the person watching the thoughts and the thought itself.  That “gap,” that awareness, eventually stops the incessant parade of thoughts, like force quitting a program that refuses to shut down.  

Nick finished his bagel, said good-bye and headed out the door, with, I might add, the leftovers from dinner the night before.  We pay it forward, even the little stuff.

I’m sitting here now unable to stop wondering about what I used to daydream about. What did it feel like to drift off without noticing that I was drifting off?  Was it the same as intentionally watching my thoughts? I don’t remember, but I do remember my mom and dad catching me staring into space and asking, “a penny for your thoughts.”  And I remember never having a good answer.  I don’t remember what I was thinking, except that it was pleasant, a respite, a cool, long drink of cold water on a hot day.  

I will probably fall to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight. I will probably wake up at a more reasonable hour tomorrow.  And, I will inevitably turn on my iPad and read the New York Times.  But first, I think I’ll sit in a comfortable chair with a cup of coffee and drift off into a daydream.