Hurricane Depletion

I had started the summer off feeling flat and dipping toward hopelessness. If you know me, hope is something I have in spades. I am generally optimistic about how things will play out, whether or not I am in control. I am a risk-taker. People ask me what I am worried about and I say, "Not enough." I am not wired to fear that things will go terribly wrong; I am only wired to blithely make the first move and see if this batter I am whipping up makes a good enough birthday cake. The strangest thing about my early summer hopelessness was that I couldn't pinpoint the source. There were no health issues or looming bills we couldn't pay; no one close to me had died and I didn't even have to teach. This was summer, that rosy-cheeked girl that lives for poolside lemonade.

Still, I woke up every day thinking, This is all there is? Why even try? Why not just go back and take a nap.

*** I am at Nerd Camp now and it is on the campus of a Benedictine university. Last night we went to evening prayer with the monks. We have been assigned Brother John who will give us a tour of the Abbey afterward. Brother John  sits next to me and I can tell he is irritated that I don't follow numbered pages well. I like Brother John, and I like that our group has its own monk. Our monk. Prayer begins and it is clear I am a poor candidate for the Benedictine monastery. The contemplative prayer, the reciting of verses slowly--I have to pull from my deep-think reserves to abide this. But as we sit, I start to invent pictures in my head of what is being said in the Psalms we are reciting. I start to welcome the silence less as a threat and more as a space to breathe.

*** I ask my colleague Andy to promise me he won't keep sending me freelance work through his colleagues. I say, "You know I can't say 'no' to these pastors! It's like saying 'no' to Jesus!"

Andy says, "No. Jesus says, 'Come and rest awhile.' Also, I have no problem saying 'no' to them :)'"

*** I sit on the amazing couch and I tell the therapist that the hopelessness has been fading little by little and that I think I know what it was all about. It had blown in with the hurricane of finishing the semester and having to move and then having all kinds of new work to do. I was just tired. My faith was strong but my body was just.so.tired.

***

"Why am I soft in the middle
The rest of my life is so hard"

- Paul Simon, "You Can Call Me Al"

*** The therapist tells me I should give the end of the semester times a name, like we name hurricanes. That way, I can recognize the storm when it appears on my radar and I can anticipate it and batten down the hatches and know what is happening, because it's about to flatten me and leave me scrounging for resources as I rebuild.

So I have named this time Hurricane Depletion. And right now, at Nerd Camp, I am glad to be out of its path.

We do not have just this moment.

At the end of Season 6 of "Mad Men," Don Draper paints a beautiful scene for the executives of Hershey. Draper pitches them on the meaning of a Hershey bar to a little boy, accompanied by his father, knowing that the wrapper would not misrepresent the contents within. The wrapper looks just like the bar. The promise of what would be enjoyed was almost as good as enjoying it.

Moments later, Draper crumbles and reveals this was an invented story. Draper was an orphan, raised in a whorehouse. It's a false nostalgia. He then shares the real sense-memory of consuming a Hershey bar in one of the rooms of his fractured past.

The Hershey Bar pitch is one of the most powerful in Season 6 and echoes "The Carousel"--arguably the best season finale in all of Mad Men stock.

***

Our tenant asked to borrow our can opener. We hadn't moved the electric one yet so all we could lend was our all-in-one corkscrew can opener Boy Scoutish gadget. He said he'd Google how to use it. I reminded him this was his Camp, Part II. This would be his first summer in a few where he would not be working at his beloved camp. "Don't remind me," he said, "Been having those 'no camp this summer' heartaches." He was having heartache over what was his Summers Past, over what was his Not This Summer.

***

We do not have just this moment. We do not register in our minds every time we see a tree: Look at that tall structure with its strong totem and its many arms and its fluttering green dangling appendages. What is that? Is it alive? Are there others like it? We have all the moments that inform this moment and we know: that is a tree with a thick trunk and abundant leaves.

***

They, the sages and the poets and the YOLO campaign are wrong about how we only have this moment.

***

We get to have this precious moment that is transposed by all the moments before in memory--some more foggy than others--and we get all the moments of the future that we can imagine in our mind's eye.

I am starting to lose memories that I once kept like aged photos tucked into a locket, strung around my neck. I am losing the crisp lines around faces and the context and the details are slipping through the holes of my pockets. Even though my recall is becoming poorer, somehow I am wealthier because I still get to live in the body with the feet that have run across these bridges, with heart that has beat for these loves.

Is that not a rich, rich life? What Creator crafted our consciousnesses so, that we have the capacity to reflect back on and project forward and to experience the presence as in a hall of mirrors?

*** And yet none of us are guaranteed another moment. So we live, trying not to rush through this one or to squander the next, because each one is as a hundred soft kisses, a thousand words, a million guesses as to how stupid blessed we are just to be.

4 pairs of Converse high-tops

We bought four pairs. You came into the world with four pairs of Converse hightop shoes. Daddy bought unisex colors: two sets of aqua (unisex? debatable) and two sets of black, because we didn't know if you were a boy or girl. But we were prepared with hightops, sizes 3, 5, 7, 9.

We didn't know how this would work, you joining us, no other family member for 1000 miles, Mama in grad school, Daddy working 3 jobs. When the nurses handed you to me, I couldn't tell if it was just the anesthesia making me shiver or if the great and profound weight of this new life in my care was making me quake. I was holding 8 lb. 1 oz. of beautiful you but the pull of gravity at that moment was much greater. Like a Mac truck had backed into my hospital bed and dropped a heap-ton of work and sleeplessness into my lap. Somehow--and I can't explain it because I think you have to experience it firsthand--a feeling washed over me that you were the only one thing in my life that I couldn't get out of, and yet we were going to be ok, you and I and Daddy, and that we were going to be so, so happy together.

I mean, for starters, at least we had shoes.

The first time I saw your Daddy walking up the hill of Schultz lawn, he was wearing Converse. They were red Chucks, the only appropriate choice for the man who captured my young heart.

Whenever we would go to visit your grandparents in Ann Arbor, we would visit Sam's to buy ourselves a new pair of Cons.

***

It's terribly naive to think that we should make this bulk investment in Converse for a girl who would not walk for another 13 months, but I suppose the shoes symbolize our naivete and our induction of you into our Converse club.

***

You put the last pair on today, the bookends on this shoe collection, and you complained that they were pinching your toes. It felt unfair, that you had outgrown these shoes that had once seemed so impossibly big without our even noticing it.

This, too, is a symbol of the invisible ache that your own growth causes the people who love you most in this world, and also of the wonderful shoes you have yet to fill that you do not yet own, in sizes we cannot yet fathom.