I recognize the absurdity of this — spending thousands to repair a porch, hauling 2 tons of river stones, wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load, to give the landscaping on each side a uniform appearance. We’re getting it ready for the next owner. We’re keeping up appearances, and sharpening our home’s curb appeal and investing to up its resale value. I need to purge the monetized terms I’ve brought into my vocabulary, ugh!
It is our home though, so we make it pretty, more comfortable, ever thankful we have a home when so many these days do not, but now, often, our daily actions seem designed more to keep us busy, plunged into an unthinking flow, than to serve a larger purpose.
I love the feel of “flow”, the unstinting focus of it, the smoothness of time within it, the steady satisfaction of seeing something accomplished in increments, but two days ago I hit a saturation point, and I sat outside the gym for a minute before I drove away, breaking my routine, and came home to sit in a chair under a tree and wonder what the f*** I’m doing at 68 with a few healthy years left making something pretty, more efficient, more durable for another? What am I doing with what is left of this life in a place where these green fields around us are green because of Round-Up, where too many farmers are chemical polluters of the first order and my wife has seen so few pollinators this season that she almost wept in despair? What am I doing to make anything better in a nation that I fear is in the terminal stages of actually dying as a nation?
I don’t have any answers today, two days after, and I’ve gone back to the gym, and I have about a ton of stones left to move, both the pillar and the school bell that rests atop it need painting, the lawn needs mowing, the dogs are anxious for play, the kitchen needs cleaning and I have to work at the bookstore tomorrow. I should be clothed in sackcloth and shouting on street corners that we must change … making sure the vid is clear enough for Tik-Tok, of course, but instead I’m dreaming of a low-slung fast car on a narrow road. Any escape, I guess.
A poet may have said it best for me in this context of thrashing indecision. I do not have “… the will to kill tsars,/ nor to live in the streets, nor to live/ in men ….”*
Yesterday I also understood, as never before, why Americans love the dream of ‘the open road’, the get-in-your-car-and-just-go ideal. It is the quintessential version of “flow”, of movement for its own sake, for letting the present fester because the only future that really counts is at the front of your car’s grill where it all fades away second by second, mile by State by hills morphing into mountains and then into the magical opening up of the plains. Huck knew what he was talking about when he said, “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
I’m fine with being ‘sivilized’. It is its creeping loss I mourn and the waning of time and energy.
An old friend who I have not seen for over 20 years recently wrote to me. As a senior in high school he owned a vintage Bug-eyed Sprite sports car that he was trying to restore. I thought of him and a ride we took once. I was 17.
I don’t remember the season, but the top was down, and we were riding through northern Berks County, then a sprawling rural band of old market roads, narrow twisty things filled with blind spots and sudden turns. We were flying, sometimes really flying, as we ripped up small hills to rocket off the crest. Seated inches from the road surface, ignoring common sense and law, we were shouting, laughing, roaring with joy, and in the rare straightaways, my friend cranked her up. Nothing mattered except that speed, that engine roar, and that future opening before us every single instant.
*“My Madness Is My Love Toward Mankind” by Devon Walker-Figueroa
