A Walker in the Suburbs

It’s been a long hot summer, and September has dawned cool and rainy. The plants are lapping it up. The parched soil is getting a well-earned dousing.

The mums I’ve stored in the basement are up on the deck now, awaiting final placement but getting sprinkled with the real thing rather than a cup of water.

And here at Wedding Central, we’re about to run a zillion errands. Homo Errandus, the errand-running human. In and out of the car, in and out of stores, always with the list in hand. The bible. Crossing things off, blessed relief.

Here we go.

Last week I drove through the neighborhood in the slanting late-afternoon sun to see small plastic flags flying at the foot of every mailbox. They hadn’t been there when I left in the morning but there they were, a full week before Flag Day.

Turns out they were a gift from our representative, but that’s not what struck me about them then or now.

What I’ve been noticing is that, although they all started at the same place they have ended up all over. Some are hanging from the mailbox, others are attached to the lamppost or planted near the house. Mine is in the fern garden.

They have, in short, been individualized. How very American of us. It’s what we do best.

I thought of this idea last week, and planned to use it to celebrate our individuality. But now, flags are flying at half mast. Now I’m once again thinking about how the push for independence and autonomy that makes us strong has also made us vulnerable.

The flags are still flying, in all their unique positions. I hope they always will.

Some of us remember that this year the national holiday falls on the real Memorial Day, May 30.

But the double I’m thinking of is at Camp Nelson, the veteran’s cemetery nestled in the rolling hills half an hour south of Lexington. There Mom and Dad lie together. A hero’s grave.

I commute now through Arlington Cemetery, and I look up from my newspaper when we briefly come above ground there. I see the orderly stones, the tidiness of death at a military burial ground.

Life is so messy — but life is what we remember. And the least tidy lives we remember most. The passions and the excesses and the outbursts and the love. These can never be contained in measured plots and structured rows. 

And on this double Memorial Day I’m feeling doubly this way.

Advent is the season of waiting, of ancient chants and plainsong. It is the season of patience and hope and muted gladness, a glimpse of distant mountains, the lure of the promised land.

Advent is, therefore, a good time for new beginnings, for celebrations of all kinds, planned and unplanned.

I write today on one of the latter. Unless you count the two years in a dusty African village, the nine months awaiting a visa, the long years before that.

It is, for my family, a day of fulfillment and rejoicing. To which we all say “Amen.”

On the day of the latest mass shooting in the United States, I took part in an active shooter exercise at my workplace. We learned how to run — low to the ground in a zigzag pattern. We learned how to hide — turn off the lights, close and lock your door, barricade it if possible. And we learned how to fight — go for the hand that is holding the gun, do whatever you can to slow or disrupt the killer.

I sat politely, even took notes. Colleagues joked and laughed about crawling under their desks, George Costanza-style. “I learned a lot from watching Seinfeld,” said our presenter. 

I don’t know if employees at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino had taken active shooter training. But could a 30-minute presentation have helped them  counter the assault rifles and semiautomatic handguns? And more to the point … is this how we want to live?

(M2 Browning machine gun, courtesy Wikipedia)

It’s a mild day so I write with the French doors slightly ajar. A small breeze wafts in across the deck. The deck where we hung out yesterday eating crab dip before the big feast.

Afterward there was a game of bocce ball — and some energetic raking preceded it. (Hard to play bocce ball with leaf piles everywhere.)

It was a different kind of Thanksgiving. New people to share it with. A tinge of sadness, too. A dish or two we’ve never tried before. All befitting a change, a shift.

I liken the shift to the door ajar. A door through which one sort of life has ended and another sort of life has begun.