Challenges and changes: a meditation

 

Bill Knight column for 10-26, 27 or 28

 A buckeye bridged the feelings, and the seasons, and years.

            Hobbling some after a minor hip injury, tiring of the ice, painkillers and the swelling (that became a bruise as colorful as a galactic nebula), I happened upon a buckeye beneath the old horse chestnut tree and thought of my late father.

            Gone four years, Dad would’ve sympathized and shared a laugh at the thought of the leashed 90-pound lab pulling me off my feet with a crash onto a concrete parking lot.

I like to laugh, but 2020 hasn’t been very funny, just challenging and confusing, resulting in occasional feelings of emptiness in one corner or another.

Holding the buckeye and thinking of Dad – a rock-ribbed Republican who’d loved Obama and loathed Trump – I remembered being a preschooler one Autumn and bringing some buckeyes home as if they were unearthed treasure, like the half geode I’d found shining like diamonds and gave Dad, shouting “We’re rich!” He laughed; then I did.

We’re weren’t rich. Nighttime treats meant popcorn made in a stovetop pressure cooker. Dad also liked Saltine crackers crushed into a glass of milk; Grandpa enjoyed salted peanuts dropped into his bottle of Pepsi.

Such memories soften Summer fading as fast as the common ground we used to take for granted, flitting away like lightning bugs streaking into the brush, or lightning itself, its electricity sizzling through clouds clapping with thunder that reverberates in the chest when smells of coming rain blow in from the fields, where corn and beans, wheat and clover rock and wave.

Summer’s predawn dog walks – weeks before my spill – offered a sight humbling and reassuring: reddish Mars hanging in the southern sky and in the east, Venus, a vivid point of light as brilliant as a shard of quartz in an Illinois geode. Last month, trees’ leaves offered a stunning palette, seeming clouds of gold and green and burnt orange from maples, reds from some oaks, persimmons and sassafras, plus shrubs and weeds playing their parts in the seasonal symphony, luscious honeysuckle, morning glories winding through the dwarf crabapple, trumpet vines wrapped around a cherry tree in the shadows of big pines.

Now, the departures of geese and robins and the arrival of Asian beetles and stinkbugs show Fall is settling in.

I’d retreated, I realized, enjoying coffee, newspapers and comic strips before sunrise, missing meaningless but fulfilling chats about science wonders and writers, new music and old movies or other moments, talking with friendly strangers and even delighting in the steering-wheel “hand greeting” from other Jeep Wrangler drivers and in carefully revived baseball.

A favorite author, Robert Parker, once said, “Baseball is the most important thing that doesn’t matter,” which nails the charm and melancholy of discussing Designated Hitters, the strike zone and defensive shifts in the bleachers next to amiable people who don’t care whether you worship on Saturdays or Sundays or at all, love the Cubs or Sox, or favor Trump or Bernie Sanders.

I’ve lived in cities on both coasts and enjoyed them, and I like visiting wildernesses, too. But mountains and skyscrapers seem to peer down at me like giant snoops. I’m a flatlander whose true treasures have been Midwest seasons and family and small towns where politeness was valued and handshakes meant something, where approaching winter was signaled by roads busy with combines or semi-trucks loaded with crops for grain elevators or pumpkins for processing,

I still recall wetlands’ wide sweep, river bottoms bordered by bluffs and timber, miles of levees and streams spilling silt into the La Moine, Spoon or Kickapoo, into the Illinois, Mississippi and Gulf.

The world where I was raised (“Forgottonia,” some say) was as lyrical and plaintive as a Springsteen tune, a haven that others dismissed as filled with rubes or radicals too contented or conflicted. Not wrong, that’s incomplete, mere edges of a vibrant picture.

Such recent observations form a backdrop to unexpected calls or contacts from family and friends, and the smile of our 10-month-old granddaughter as I let her sample a few spoonfuls of ice cream for the first time.

In a week, the voting will be over; the counting may take longer. I can’t help feeling a little loss and dread, but it’s tempered with hope and increasingly full of Fall and fun memories.

I pray we – the nation and the world in this difficult year – find and feel moments of joy and wonder and keep them in our hearts, warming us through icy times ahead.