Out of the Corner of My Eye

I don’t believe in chance meetings, although I do have a habit of assigning meaning to those seemingly unplanned junctures that occur in our lives, sometimes to my disappointment. Pick any place, name your players. You will have to pay attention. If you’ve concluded that your life is pretty much set, you may have to re-think your reading of life.

Yesterday alone, I had a lion’s share of opportunities to take notice. Not the least was an ancient couple I watched making their way into a Church’s Fried Chicken, as a friend and I left Roswell. I had tagged along on this museum-related business trip, mostly for the company, but as it turned out I had my own museum experience. As we accelerated onto the highway after refueling for the trip back to Santa Fe, I had to turn in my seat so that I could watch a stick-like woman and man make their way across a concrete parking lot header that separated them from the sidewalk and a mid-afternoon fried chicken treat. I couldn’t tell which one was helping the other. From where I sat they seemed to lean into one another as each gingerly raised a leg to set it forward—she on the left with her right arm raised to grip his raised left hand, eyes cast downward so as not to be tripped up by one of those evil concrete curbs that mark each position in some parking lots. In another time and place, this very lean couple could have been positioned for a folk dance, a promenade. I didn’t see their faces. I didn’t really need this information to observe that they were on a Thursday afternoon outing, the outings most of us take for granted, but an event from a shared life that I want to believe is filled with meaning. They are past the time in life where many of us continue multi-tasking to distraction. This couple was just trying to “make it to the sidewalk from here”.

My thinking on life is that if you’re not growing you’re dying. Okay, we’re dying anyway—from the beginning. But I’ll have none of this sitting with your hands folded in your lap, as if to say, “I’m done”.  A neighbor told me over coffee the other morning that he hates change. Yet, he came here from farther west, and his life has been variously defined over four decades of adulthood. Probably no one welcomes those things that try to turn us upside down, upheavals that threaten our earning power and consequently take aim at just about everything that defines living, at least in our western culture—like our home and other necessities grown more precious in tough times.

For some, changing residences and risking that something we think we cherish might have to be jettisoned in the process throws them into a tailspin. Many of us are stuff magnets, hoarders, and in the course of plying our instincts and habits we live our chosen destiny, proving for ourselves that the more things we own, the more our things own us. Another neighbor here said recently that dying was going to be hard for her because she doesn’t want to leave behind her stuff. Finally, though, we likely will just give thanks that we can lift our withered, arthritic limbs, and will acknowledge that we are blessed to have someone’s hand—perhaps even a partner in love—steady us as we slowly make our way forward. As the saying goes, change is inevitable—growth a choice.

Every day life keeps on requesting, sometimes demanding, and if we take heed, we answer the call. Maybe it is with our hands folded, but in steely resignation that molds and mends souls and hearts. Perhaps the greatest fear any of us has is not being able to make it on our own. Our mother mourned the loss of her independence and suffered an anger that she couldn’t reconcile. She had been without her partner and spouse for over a quarter century. She clung to her losses, but when her own death sentence had been put into words, she didn’t talk so much about Daddy, Grandma, and the others whose deaths had tried to re-define her. She completed her journey, mostly trying to keep her own terms alive, arm raised in the end to her children, they old enough to contemplate seriously the prospect of their own crossover on this journey that asks much of us.

Out of the Corner of My Eye—Santa Fe, New Mexico (July 19 2008)

R. Harold Hollis