Getting Through

I helped my friend refill a hummingbird feeder that was attached to a post at the side of his house. We lowered it with a pulley, unscrewed the lid, carefully poured in a rose-colored liquid, then hoisted it back up. A tiny emerald hummingbird was already hovering eagerly nearby.

Small, tangible tasks like this are what calm and focus me, briefly giving purpose, and muting the onslaught of all the disturbing news out there. I felt this way when we cracked and sorted macadamia nuts last week. We had gathered them months earlier and left them to dry on trays. Now we scooped them up and poured them into the noisy nutcracker, which rumbled as it spit out smooth white nuts and shards of shells. We pulled away the bits of shells that still clung, re-cracked nuts that had managed to escape intact, then sorted them by size and wholeness and apportioned them into small plastic bags. Hours went by in the nut room, and for the time being, nothing else mattered. It was an oddly satisfying job, even the cleanup afterwards.

I feel this way when I prune and groom the shrubs that line the driveway. They always look untidy, but they are better when their branchy arms don’t poke out so far and the dead dry leaves are raked away. Improvement is subtle; there is never a completed state. But until the sun becomes too much for me or the bending makes me ache, I tend to it mindlessly. The doing becomes my being, and vexing questions of meaning evaporate.

Cooking, when I’m in the mood, cleaning out my clothes closet, wiping the grime off the prism in the window, or tapping at my computer in an inconsequential stream-of-consciousness as I am doing right now—small, soothing tasks like these offer time out. There is absolutely never “nothing to do” around here.

Yesterday we engaged in the weekly FaceTime chat with our grandson in England. He is a schoolboy now, already so different from the toddler he was a year ago when we last saw him in person, and he’s always very busy with important endeavors like building Lego structures on the floor. We never know whether he will deem to acknowledge us, and it’s a thrill if he looks up and interacts. I tried to entice his attention by bringing up the subject of presents, and I suggested items I thought might be useful when he patrols the neighborhood to assist in emergencies.

“I don’t do rescue work anymore,” he announced, in his precise English accent. He sounded like an executive who had decided to take early retirement and switch to a new career.

I felt inexplicably sad. I had always been charmed by the little guy’s earnest desire to rescue folks. Every foray of his imagination involved being on patrol, responding quickly and competently to emergencies and danger—in charge, saving lives, knowing what to do. He was bossy, it’s true, and a big shot, but I found it very touching that my grandson possessed such a strong innate sense of responsibility and empathy. He approached the world with a mission, a rescue worker to the core. And now, he had abruptly abandoned the work. Had he grown bored with it? Lost his confidence? Been lured away by a different siren call?

And what was my problem, anyway, to be feeling so deflated because a four-year-old had reconsidered his job? But it seemed to render the world less certain, and my place in it ambiguous. I would never again be his trusty assistant, following him around as he barked orders at me, with privileged “only Nonna” access on the front lines of all sorts of calamities. Oh, those were heady days!

It was also a reminder that he is growing up so very fast without me.

“But what will you do now?” I asked.

He mumbled something about switching to the police, and he could catch bad guys and solve mysteries, but he was also into putting together a Lego transformer, and he seemed interested in constructing bridges, like a particular one he saw in France. He’s learning how to read, and he’d had the ‘best day ever' in school that day but wouldn’t tell us anything at all about it. At this point, he was clearly becoming weary of the conversation with his two-dimensional faraway grandparents. We said good-bye and he scampered upstairs to do a poo. I suppose we should be grateful for whatever glimpses technology grants us.

Speaking of being grateful, Thanksgiving draws near, and a memory has come back to me of a drive from Chicago to my family house on Long Island in a ferocious November blizzard. It must have been 1971, and I was newly married to my medical student boyfriend, who bravely took the wheel of our VW Bug. Trucks were jack-knifed, cars were stalled, and we slowly made our way through what felt like a long white tunnel, cold and cramped, a miserable sixteen hours of driving if all went well. But it was a formidable force that shoved us forward, the force of love and yearning. I would have done anything to sit at the Thanksgiving table with my family.

My father was always the cook, rising early in the morning to get started on tomato sauce, because a pasta dish was essential, the turkey merely obligatory. My mother was somewhat in exile, sitting apart, uncertain of her role, and there were often fights and tears. It was a discordant kind of home, tenderness infused with tumult and tragedy, and nothing was simple and sweet, but I wanted more than anything to be there––until, over time, I guess I somehow didn’t. I told myself it was too painful, which it probably was, and I was fully immersed by then in the chaos of my own clumsy attempts at living. I simply stopped showing up, becoming a random, irrelevant guest at other tables.

Of course, I understand too late how selfish this was, and how dearly I was missed. Almost all of those beloved ones are dead now; the house itself has literally vanished, burned to the ground in a suspicious fire that allowed its new owners to rebuild from scratch. But on Thanksgiving Day in 1971, it was still home, and I made it back across a thousand miles of snow. Nothing could have stopped me.

Now more than fifty years have fled, and suddenly I am Nonna, grandmother to a retired rescue worker, doing my own small-time rescue work right here, like watering parched seedlings, gathering oranges, and looking out for hummingbirds. I’m also committed to salvaging myself, consistent with my resolve to turn setbacks into strengths. I’m saying yes more often, setting aside time for real reading, and limiting news input to that which informs and inspires. I’m being more diligent about checking in with friends, making room on our metaphorical life raft, cultivating a sense of community. Walks outdoors are of course an unfailing source of solace, the sky has much to say, and those tiny, tangible tasks present themselves constantly. I want to approach this strange new era with spirit and defiance, as opposed to resignation.

And so, I’m good–-rescuing and resting, genuinely grateful.

But I cannot shake that image of driving through a long white tunnel, treacherous and icy, no peripheral vision, a blur of snow ahead, the entire expedition an act of faith, propelled by monumental love. Who is to say the tunnel did not ultimately curve around and continue in the place where I now stand? It’s a mysterious passage, all of it, sustained by memory and the murmur of friends, our only compass the truth of our hearts. The force of that great love endures. I can feel it now, holding me up, pushing me forward.