Honea Express

Archive for the ‘Do the Right Thing’ Category

I was fairly stationary as a child. I lived in the same house until college. Then I lived in the same area for another ten years. I was never more than 40 minutes away from anyone, friend, family or foe. Not that I had any foes, but I did have a love for alliteration.

I met my wife, and on a whim we hit the road. Once the moving started we couldn’t stop — kind of like dancing, except with less alcohol. My wife and I dropped pins all over the left side of the map. We were up, down and then up again. We had U-Haul on speed dial. Our last stop found us just outside of Seattle.

There are things here that we love. There are friendly people, incredible neighbors, wonderful summers, scenic beauty in every direction, fantastic schools and a sense of community that I haven’t known since my childhood. We live in a quaint town where roots are deep and well-watered. It is a perfect setting in which to raise a family.

But there are things that are dark and press against us, and the silver lining has become harder and harder to find within them. The clouds stretch from the sea to the summer, and their constant soaking leaves a layer of cold tucked tight between skin and bone. There will never be enough logs upon the fire.

Seasonal affective disorder comes and goes, literally with the seasons, but with each ebb it grows slower, and every flow seems more fond of shadows than sunlight.  Sadness grows like mold in the corners of our happy household.

The children do not go through bouts of depression, but rather sit beside them and grow restless and frustrated. They do not want to go outside into the cold and the rain, but they would enjoy it if we took them there.  The trips are few and far between. The children suffer secondhand, which is full of shame and lacking in justice.

We have tried to compensate with manufactured light, an overextended calendar and daily supplements, but all it has done is make us face the truth. It is time to pay heed to Harry Nilsson and go where the weather suits our clothes. It is time for sailing on a summer breeze.

Come June, when we are done with school and leases, we will follow our footsteps back to the sands of California. There is where opportunity awaits, and with it a warmth to bask in. Our running is equal parts to and from.

The leaving is bittersweet, and it packs a heavy heart, but the journey should find us nearly healed and the arrival somewhat lighter.

The ocean stretches from July to forever. We are the stones that skip across it.

I was born in Tucson, Arizona. I lived in the area for over 28 years. I ran barefoot through the green-spotted desert as it turned from the square quilts of cotton fields to the oval patches of over-watered golf courses. I rode my bike on gravel-lined dirt roads that grew overnight into car-filled highways. I shot a BB gun in my front yard and waved at passersby, calling to each by name.  I remember when that Dairy Queen was the only thing out there.

The majority of my youth was spent in Marana, a town just north of the city that my family helped to settle and govern. My father has served the town of Marana through seats on the council, and now as the mayor, for over 30 years. Unlike the indigenous vegetation in the area, the roots of my family have grown thick and deep into the clay-baked soil of the Sonoran Desert.

I attended the University of Arizona and graduated without honors. Somebody has to. I met my wife on two-for-one night in a bar just off campus. I was drunk on whiskey, and I’m still hearing about it.

Many of my family and friends remain, meaning my ties to Tucson are more than just margaritas and sunsets, although both are fantastic.

I grew up in a conservative home. The earliest jokes that I can remember had Jimmy Carter as a punchline. We went to church every Sunday, and on holidays my uncles would sit in the shade of my grandparents’ porch, sip iced tea and wrap themselves in layers of racism, homophobia and laughter. I didn’t know innocence from ignorance, and I laughed just as hard as they did, happy but to be there.

My parents taught me things that transcended politics. They taught me how to be happy with very little money, and how to treat people with respect, courtesy and humor.  They never suggested that I consider violence as an option, and when I outgrew religion they never tried to tether me to it.

Ours was built firmly on trust and understanding.

I left Tucson as an adult, and although I’ve returned for weddings and funerals, each visit made it more and more clear, you can’t go home again.

It used to be the heat that kept me away.

And then technology went forward as technology is prone to do, and suddenly I found myself looking into metaphorical windows, staring into a world that I had left behind — a world where many never noticed that other paths diverged, and so they continued along the only way that they had ever known, easy and slow and bending forever backward. The path most traveled is paved without thought, and it has made all the difference.

I found that I missed it less and less.

Days ago a young girl was shot and killed. A judge joined her. The tally rose to six innocents dead and many others wounded. The target had been a congresswoman, full of courage and reason.  The shooter had been a boy, full of madness and confusion.

I blame the line between fear and reason. It zigs where we are told that it should zag.

Of the victims, know that their story is not here. I am not qualified to write words on the victims or their loved ones. I cannot comprehend the depths of their loss, nor will I cheapen their memories by attempting to do so. Just know that I grieve like we all grieve. I anger like we all anger. I can only wish things weren’t as they are and think thoughts of better days for those they’ve left behind.

I once thought of Tucson as a beacon of light in a state of gray and darkness, but in the years since my absence I have watched it grow overcast and haunted. Or, I thought, perhaps I am only now seeing how it has always been.

That’s not to say that there are not stars there. They are many, and I reflect upon them fondly. But the night is bold, loud and howling. It twists words like the wind and wrings sweat from the brows of the misguided. It is spreading swiftly.

I feared that the Tucson I knew, or thought that I did, was on the verge of disappearing forever.

And yet, the stars shine brighter but for the darkness.

Last night I watched a memorial for the fallen. The president spoke. My father was in the stands. There were tears as far as the eye could see.

For the first time in a long time I saw a glimpse of what I once took for granted. What has always been there, only hidden too often by levels of bureaucracy and the sad fact that ignorance and hate sell more papers than rational quotes and the good deeds of everyday people.  Amid the pain and loss of a country I saw the courage and strength of a city, and from its collective diversity came a roar of passion that the media couldn’t comprehend. I saw Tucson’s heart and it was sad, but strongly beating.

For the first time in a long time I saw the place that I used to know.

I saw Tucson, and it felt like home.

Inland was warmth and sunshine and days of summer stretching wearily. The coast, however, was 20 degrees cooler and worked in so many shades of gray.  The sky fell into the sea and the waves rolled across my cold feet before running up the stairs to take their place at the end of the line.  Clouds waited patiently.

The rocks in the ocean were the size of ships, and ships were the size of small birds flying off in the distance.  There was a cave on the beach and in it sat a family around a campfire.  Their dog ran free and happy, a green ball held tightly in its mouth.

She stopped in mid-sentence, her words lost beneath the beat of a tide rolling in.  I hadn’t been listening.  I was writing poems in my head as I am prone to do, and then promptly forgetting them as that requires much less effort than actually writing them down.  Most of them were rubbish, but one may have been damn near perfect.  I watched her watch the ground.  She was brilliant against the sepia shore.

She bent down and picked a drop of red out of the surf-trodden sand. It was a ladybug, caked in grains and left for dead.  Suddenly, the beach was alive with polka-dots in reds and yellows and the polka-dots were, in turn, covered in dots of their own.  We sat on our knees in the sand and dug ladybug after ladybug from their collective coastline grave.  Our shoes, which had long ago left our feet and become something meaningless to hold on to, became the soles of rebirth. It was on the bottom of my left flip-flop that one ladybug found breath and another was once again able to crawl.  It was somewhere opposite where my big toe would be that a ladybug shook the sand from its wings and flew away home.

It seems that they live in the trees that tremble from the side of steep ocean cliffs, and when certain winds blow the way that certain winds do, the ladybugs are pulled from whatever life they have known and dropped without warning over deep waters and hungry fish. Assuming they don’t drown, are not eaten or lost at sea, they are marooned on beaches not 50 feet from the trees on which they started.  But they are pounded with ebbs and flows, and they are forgotten amongst shells and bits of seaweed.  All in all, it’s no way to treat a lady.

And so we gathered those that we could and we carried them on flip-flops covered with newfound meaning to a piece of driftwood just below the tree line. The ladybugs wandered aimlessly and probably thought things about mortality and what to make of second chances.

Every so often one of us would say how much the boys would like this while the other would nod, skip a stone or stare out at the sea. They were on a different beach in a different state looking over the same nothingness and the endless everything. Our day was a glass half hollow, half lined with romance. We played the percentages.

Then we walked back across the beach, our shoes once again empty, our feet still cold and bare.  We passed big rocks, small ships, a family around a fire and a dog with a ball and the constant need to wag.   Our car was waiting for us, and beyond it a green forest and blue skies and something pretty on the radio.

We got sand everywhere.

The food court was alive. Tables were double-booked. It was a sea of trays and Gap bags.  There was a TV on without sound and music in the background that lacked any sort of soul.

I was a boy having lunch with his mother.  I was twelve. Give or take.

One man sat one table over.  He was in a suit that wore him cheaply. Even then I could see the frumpiness of it all.  He was wearing the required uniform and they did each other no favors.  He may have worked in the mall or perhaps the car lot across the street.  His lunch was in a brown paper sack as wrinkled as his jacket.  The shadows against it fell from the cloud looming above him.  His tension was cartoonish.

One man had a hampered gait and a fast smile.  He moved as quickly as his body would let him, darting between the busy tide of people to which he was all but invisible.  He took trays and wiped tables and he sang a little something to himself that echoed of happiness on repeat.  His manners were impeccable.

The crumpled man in the crumpled suit crumpled once more his once crumpled bag. He was careworn. He wore the ill-fitting suit like it had once been his father’s and the faded tweed was a weave of ghosts and disappointment pressed firmly across his back.  The cloud above him was dark and full of rain.  He rose from the table, put his hands in his pockets and walked away with far too much focus for a man of his nature.

The bag sat in the center of the table, a monument to his once was.  It sat there and slowly unraveled.  Time marched onward and the bag remained just one less thing that the man had to carry.

The man with the song on his breath circled the shrine.  Then again.  His eyes restless.  His mouth never stopping.  He searched the crowd for shades of tweed and finding none he took the brown bag and placed it in the trash.  He wiped the table until it glowed. And then his attentions were needed elsewhere.

I sat with my mother and ate my lunch.  Perhaps we chatted.  Perhaps my gaze returned to the quiet television.  Perhaps we were already done.

The man in the suit seemed taller when he returned.  His chin was firmer.  His face more red.  He stood at the glowing table and asked above the din as to the whereabouts of the bag he had left.

“The guy tossed it,” someone had said and suddenly the guy was standing there, no longer singing but looking sheepish and lost.  He tried to apologize but his tongue failed him.  He tried to apologize for doing his job.

The man in the suit proceeded to belittle, deprave and defame.  The man in the apron grew smaller and smaller.  The sparkle in his eyes turned soft and gray. His simple song fell muffled beyond silence.

The crowd marched onward. They cast glances and even looks of disgust, but they had trays in their hands and Gap bags on their wrists and there was something on the TV without sound that they could hide from their life in.  Theirs was a sound lacking any sort of soul.

“Stop it,” said a shaking voice from my shaking mouth. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Mind your own business, kid,” replied the man, more or less, and his look was for my mother.

“You left the bag on the table,” I continued. “It was trash.”

And then he said other things that I can’t recall because I was overcome with anger and by that time someone much bigger than myself had decided that shouting at a child for defending a man with needs was even more than they could ignore. As the crowd grew bigger his cloud did too, and then the angry man went away for the second time without his bag and I think he looked at me but I wasn’t watching him.

I was watching a spark of doubt grow where happiness used to be.

Everybody falls from grace sometime. Athletes, politicians and actors tend to fall the farthest due to their pedestals being placed so high. And yet, fame bounces. The minute they hit bottom they start clawing their way back up.

Grace rains all around us. We know nothing but the space between dreams and the trampoline and the slight change of view that each direction brings.

Some find solace in having the grace to fall from. Some find hope in the promise of a net.

Some climb steps just to jump from the highest one. They dive deeper than where they started. We score them on their splash.

Some trip and slide over misplaced trust and misguided confidence. They are pulled down by others and some grasp for the ankles above them.

Most of us take two steps forward for every step back. More or less. We face each day and await our spin, not seeing the chutes for the ladders.

It isn’t the fall from grace that need define you but how you stick the landing. Remember to bend your knees.