I’ve been pining for nostalgia. For a thought process beyond the immediate. I mean it’s natural that this would be hard right now but I’ve been amazed at the crippling affects of it all. Everyone deals differently and to think I’d just flip a switch and be able to dive into some sort of creative abundance is both naive and wishful.
This morning a spring storm crashed through the town. All storms remind me of my grandmother, who lived the last 40 years of her life by herself on a peninsula sticking out into Lake Erie. When the storms would come, she’d sit in her little kitchen and watch the light show, revel in the crash of the thunder and worry little about the sturdiness of the power grid. I think most of us can revel in the power of a storm and soak up a bit of the calm that the rain brings.
I, like everyone, have been thinking a lot about what’s next. I waffle between two or three absolutes living in opposition on the hands of a compass. North means we return to what things were. Then there’s SE and SW, murky and squishy, neither with any lines to color within. Equal parts economic collapse, personal rebirth, ruin and triumph. I just don’t know which way to point the van.
I keep coming back to being okay. I really do. I’m not sure what it is, I’m just not as phased as I was 6 weeks ago. I’ve read a lot about the collapse of the restaurant and retail world, and full disclosure, one of my stores bank accounts has either been living well below the zero mark or at best, like this morning, at $72.43.
When this first started, I couldn’t fathom how you can return a business from that. I think the fact of the matter is, you just do. That’s what I’ve been returning to over and over. You just do. Rent, bills and the like simply get pushed back. Because they have to. I’ll likely figure out how to stay open on reduced revenue and will improvise. Because. You just do.
I can of course be wrong, but how could I know that. How could any of us?
In 1992 or so, I took a weekend road trip to Oxford, MS. Having 10-12 hours of riding in a car time, I brought a book I had to read for the following week. It was Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. I didn’t read it, of course, because, well road trip. I am sure I fumbled through a crap paper and got a C or something. For whatever reasons, the title has stuck with me as some sort of blanket explanation of life.
In 2000-2001, my brother in law was battling cancer and I wrote a song about it. Like a lot of songs, they are sparked by some visual that enters your head. Somehow I started at my brother in laws cancer battle and ended up with a fictional story of him as a young boy thinking he was going to get kidnapped in a mall by a man who was really just there shopping. He hid in between the clothes on a retail display. Cloaked in the safety of the center of the shirts.
Some of the lyrics were
“mommy hold my hand, it’s cold in here, and I feel, so small.
This world of wonder, I’ve found in this mall.
Stay real close, and don’t talk. To the strangers.
And then a man with an evil voice he says.
Things fall apart my friend
Now don’t be scared
or you will be forgone
Ive been broken, Bound my hands but not alone.”
Maybe it just rhymed we’ll but this feeling of being scared and doomed and it just being something that happens, that things fall apart, was the feeling I come to when even when I play it today. It’s similar to what I feel today.
That things fall apart. They always do. We are mostly always broken and bound but not alone.
We always just do. Because there aren’t other options.
#hugsandhi5s
