I have a question: is there anybody out there for whom 2020 is the year you dreamed of? Or planned for? Or, ok. . .just expected?
I don’t mean to be silly or to rub your face in your disappointment, but I just want to establish that I am not the only one who is often floundering in the fog and needing to talk about it.
You see, late last year I published a book, so this year was supposed to be all about the things authors need to do afterwards. I was scheduling events: speaking engagements and book signings. I meant to support book clubs that were gearing up to read and discuss Helping Yourself Grow Old. I hoped to publish news pieces and blog consistently, offering a kind of ongoing story about aging happily, productively.
Instead I woke up one morning stuck 2700 miles from home with doors shutting and the pieces of my week, my month, my year falling from “maybe” to “if” to “sorry.”
There were positives, I admit. A chance to hang out with just one or two favorite people. The opportunity to sleep late. No place to go, no need to put on nice shoes. (We banned the bra.) Time to read stacks of books that have been on my list and watch old movies. Hours alone to be creative.
So I thought, all in the middle of a tumultuous world. A global pandemic with people dying everywhere. This coming in an election year with our mailboxes full of indignation and ridicule and anger. Tension between our right to choose and our responsibility to care about our community. A rash of murders to which we were witnesses. Grief. Shame. Anger. Protests. Riots. Something new every day.
In the middle of all this, personal drama did not cease. A phone call brought me bad news. If you have read my book you may remember Julie, my Hungarian Brazilian roommate, who dubbed our tight group of friends “the four muskets.” Together for only one school year when we were 21, we formed a bond that lasted. . .well, some of it lasted 70 years, until that phone call telling me that Julie was gone, leaving me the sole survivor of our loyal group.
Getting old is dangerous that way. Trying to make me feel better, somebody said, “But the last musket is still firing.”
I kept trying. I wrote little blog essays, always saving them overnight to see if they could survive the light of a new morning. And every morning’s news made them seem obsolete. I started to look a lot like the world I live in. Without focus. Unable to concentrate. Contradicting myself between breakfast and dinner. If Amazon didn’t sell any of my books, it was the least of my concerns.
After three and a half months, at what seemed like a safer moment, with airlines better prepared to protect passengers, I made a run for it. So here I am at home in time for another California fire season, with the need to make a list and pack for an emergency, but also a new chance to apply my mind and my hands to things deemed fundamental, essential.
I read somewhere the other day a little story about a young boy who had a special talent. He whittled pieces of wood into dogs. Again and again he could produce a lovely statue of man’s best friend. When someone asked him how he did it, he said that he just took a block of wood and cut away everything that didn’t look like a dog.
Yesterday I went into my husband’s abandoned office, a place he made famous for clutter out of which he could bring all kinds of treasures. I almost never dusted his desk, because I never had time to move 1000 objects. Three years already he has been gone, and slowly we are rescuing what we want and getting brave enough to throw other things in the trash. In two hours yesterday I consigned to the shredder years of meticulously preserved financial records, complete with cancelled checks.
And I found something. Along with several unused checks for bank accounts that don’t even exist anymore, I discovered three pads of checks for Fuller’s Bank of Gratitude. Each check is already written for one million thanks, with the date, the recipient, services received and a Fuller signature to be filled in. Seeing these again, still here after many years, I wondered how many times we might have failed to send thanks that we owed. And because the checks are printed in both English and Arabic, I realized that the people who deserved to receive them were scattered across this country and several other continents. Many of them were faithful friends no matter what happened. Some were neighbors, others kind strangers.
I remembered them deliberately. All evening I lived with this little parade of people who made me believe there is goodness in the world. And I basked in my accomplishment. I had found a blessing by whittling away two file drawers of useless paper, dead wood that was hiding it. And The Fuller Bank of Gratitude is still a viable account.