Maybe We Shall Know Each Other Better

The rain has arrived, a quiet storm. I am watching it through the window like a silent movie on a big screen, droplets rolling in misty currents through the dark trees, splashing on the rocks, distance merging into white sky, the ocean invisible. We are suspended in a cloud, a respite for the fortunate. My emotions keep sliding around in this shared national grief we are enduring, not so much shock anymore as sadness. I know we cannot give up, but it sure looks like a long and wearisome road ahead. I feel angry, too, but the anger seems to simultaneously work me up and weigh me down, so of what use is it?

We are going to see our family in England next month, and I'm already pre-packing for the trip. I like to carry a little notebook with me when I travel, and I found a tiny red journal on a shelf upstairs that seemed perfect for this purpose. I assumed it was blank, but I opened it up to find the words "26 Weeks: A Journey, Or the Start of One" in my daughter's familiar handwriting. On each of the twenty-six pages that followed, she had written a writing prompt for me, breathtakingly thoughtful, meticulous, and lovely. I could not even remember how long ago she had given this to me, and I was ashamed to realize that not only had I failed to enter a single word, but I'd placed it on a shelf and completely forgotten about it. But on the very last page she had written I love you, and this message felt current and real. It comforts and delights me.

Speaking of comforts and delights, a few days ago, I walked with friends in the backcountry of an old local ranch, stood on a high grassy ridge, and looked down at a vast green network of oaks. I had not realized how verdant and dense a forest they are! Along the trail, a small gray fox watched us, utterly tranquil and unafraid. Back at home, I glimpsed the turtle family in the pond, climbing on each other's backs, playful and cautiously curious. A few of the cottonwoods and sycamores are beginning to look autumnal, flinging yellow coins into the air like it's Mardi Gras, and it's nothing like those extravagant northeastern falls, but oh, how I love California! I am endlessly grateful for the miracles of each day, and for the friends who walk beside me.

But the breaking news is breaking us, as one witty blogger put it, and we have had to learn to tune it out and selectively listen for advice and information that is useful. “I don’t understand the world anymore,” a dear friend confessed. She’s been depressed, as down as she ever gets. “I feel irrelevant, obsolete, bewildered, and betrayed.”

I can relate to those feelings. The world is a very different place than the one in which we came of age. Okay, Boomer. Just the other day, tending to errands, passing through some starkly lit commercial center, I noticed that everyone was mentally elsewhere, receiving input via phones or earbuds, enclosed in their own cocoons, milling about in sweat pants, at home in a science fiction realm that suddenly felt so alien to me. Meeanwhile, half the electorate have apparently rejected the most basic, old-fashioned teachings about decency, merit, and democracy.

And yet I do not believe my cohorts and I are irrelevant or obsolete, and I refuse to go gently. Yes, we need to recognize when it’s time to get out of the way, and a couple of examples come readily to mind of well-meaning folks in important roles who stayed too long. There is a certain grace and sense in knowing when to go. But that isn’t at all the same as being worthless or irrelevant. I have wisdom, seven decades of learning. I know things, and these things have value. There is a wide-eyed young girl inside me forever, but I am also an elder of the tribe, and I intend to rise to this responsibility. Let us each give whatever gifts are ours to give.

For "Week 26" in that aforementioned tiny red notebook, my daughter had copied out a beautiful poem by Louis MacNeice, a poet I had not heard of until she told me about him years ago. The poem is called Coda:

Maybe we knew each other better
When the night was young and unrepeated
And the moon stood still over Jericho.

So much for the past; in the present
There are moments caught between heart-beats
When maybe we know each other better.

But what is that clinking in the darkness?
Maybe we shall know each other better
When the tunnels meet beneath the mountain.

And as a poem often will, this one found its way straight into my heart. It was the world speaking to me, and life itself. How well we knew each other in the tender days of youth, when the very moon stood still for us! Now events are rushing toward us at rapid-fire speed, some so wrong and heart wrenching, they threaten to undermine all meaning. Friends have grown frail, many dear ones have fallen, and the ephemeral nature of our time here has become quite evident to us. With that, however, in those moments caught between heartbeats, there comes a deep intensity of gratitude, purpose, and love. I am standing tall in this space, and I am seeing more clearly. The story may yet unfold in surprising ways, and it is up to us not to abandon it in despair.

Yes, maybe we shall know each other better when the tunnels meet beneath the mountain. I think they are meeting right now.