Connections

Let me tell you about yesterday. You know by now how I try to connect all things. I think it comes from two sources. The first was a line from a Walt Whitman poem I read in the 11^th grade: “There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day . . . . or for many years or stretching cycles of years.”

Another reason came up in a conversation last week with an old friend. I mentioned my long-standing love-hate relationship with my military service. (As I get older, it tends more toward the love.) The point I made to my friend, though, was that I learned one great lesson in dealing with said military service. That is that you had best decide, early in life, that you will try to be happy wherever you are, no matter the location or circumstances. Life has a habit of testing you, out of pure orneriness, and you’d best be ready.

Yesterday proved my point. My pal, roommate, partner, and caretaker and I spent an afternoon in the hot August (it waited until September this year) sun mowing pastures and yards at her farm. Then we made a dump-run to finish the day. (Yeah, she’s cheap date.) Pretty much hot, exhausted, and cranky, we stopped at “big-box-orama” and purchased a couple of salads for supper. Now for relaxed evening with a nice drink and the last episode of the first season of Goliath, the one where Billy Bob tries to slay the Giant.

Yeah well. We noticed some slightly darker clouds hanging over our “small-town” residence. “Going to get a little shower,” she predicted. I shrugged. For the umpteenth and yet still futile time, I hoped she’d be wrong. Nope. The rain came as if following orders.

We parked and she went into the house. “Lights are out,” she yelled. That’s Southern talk for “the electricity is not working.”

Well crap.

We sat in the dark for a spell. It was dark in the house. What to do? Wait it out. That’s all we could do. We tried that for a spell and it didn’t make “our socks roll up and down,” as they say.

Then she went outside. The rain had stopped. “It’s nice out here,” she said. Indeed, the sun had “crossed over the yard arm,” but it was till light outdoors.

You know what happened next. We dried the chairs, sat on our patio, enjoyed the lower temperature, observed Happy Hour, told whoppers, and feasted on our store-bought salads. I’ll swear, the misty sundown made her look like the 20-year old I’d married 47 years ago.

It was a magic time, and I wouldn’t have taken a thousand dollars for it.

During breaks, she checked messages on her cell phone. People were apoplectic about the outage. Ideas for revenge against the power company ranged from strongly-worded letters to: “a riot is an ugly thing but I think that it’s just about time that we had one.”

Me? I puffed a cigar and thought about what a miracle it is that puny homo sapiens could devise, through the seemingly outdated concepts of education and science, a system of powering a society in such a manner as we have. My wonder was not why the service was out, but how, and by what body of knowledge, it stays on so reliably most times.

We live in an age selected entitlements, don’t we? While we are all entitled to lights coming on whenever and wherever we flip a switch, we don’t seem to want to expand that entitlement to health care or human comfort to what the Galilean called, “the least of those among us.” Nor do we wish to expand it to provide fresh air upon which our gasping planet depends. And of course, some of our most treasured entitlements, especially the right to vote for politicians of our choice, stand in the path of complete extinction, like our planet.

It’s all connected and a little frightening, n'est-ce pas ?