In that time between holidays, when the delight of Christmas has come and gone and the hope of the New Year has not yet arrived, I find myself full of doubts and regrets. All of the “should haves” of the past year crowd into my consciousness and remind me of the many things I am not. Excuses and reasons cannot mitigate the doubt.
Anubis, the Jackal god of Ancient Egypt, weighed the heart of the dead Pharaoh on a scale. On the other side of the scale was a feather. If the heart was lighter than the feather, the Pharaoh could move on to his reward. In this cusp of holidays, who of us could have such lightness of heart and who would not fear that judgement?
We must remember, however, that the world is a very large, very needy place and that we are only small. Our hands are not big enough…our arms not long enough to reach around all the things which touch our heart. In life, as in any job, there are things that we must do, things that we should do, and things that we could do. We need to be content to work our way through the “musts” and some of the “shoulds”. If we get to a few of the “coulds”, we need to be proud.
A professor once told me that she wished that life was like college in that there should be a “Drop – Add” option. Instead of grinding our way through a bad situation and having the failure stain our record, we could say, “Oh, I dropped that course.” No harm, no foul. No failure, no guilt.
This year has been a year of a raging pandemic, and a time of division and angry words…it has been a year, like all years, in which we have lost friends and acquaintances. Two-thousand twenty is a year we will be glad to forget and, in thirty years, when a newscaster harkens back to this year, people will shake their heads and tell their children and grandchildren about the year of the mask or the year of anger and contention.
This year is certainly not the first bad year and certainly not the worst. We know all about plagues and devastating storms and war. We know our lives could be much harsher. When I begin to feel sorry for myself and bemoan the world’s condition, I remember Eleanor.
In the 1970s, I met an English couple, Simon and Karine and we became friends. There were several years of visits back and forth and over time Jane, my wife at the time, and I were fortunate enough to get to know Simon’s parents. Reginald and Eleanor Clark lived in two floors of a house in Wimbledon, outside London. Yes, it is the town where the tennis tournament is held each year but the Clarks were not part of the upper-crust British society. They had no pretensions of being so. They were, like most of us, a middle-class family who sometimes struggled to get by.
Reg Clark was a veteran of the Africa Campaign in WWII and a Mason. He was a gentle man who worked, I believe, with the postal service. Eleanor probably worked too but when I knew her, she kept up the home. It was a home with two cats and a tortoise and kindness.
Eleanor was as charming as pixie dust and as English as a tea cozy. She rose early every morning and walked the half mile up the hill to the bakery for fresh bread, to the butcher for bacon and perhaps a little bit of rabbit for the cats, and to the greengrocer for fresh eggs or tomatoes. When the family showed up for breakfast, everything was lovingly prepared, the table set and tea was steeping in the small blue pot.
I loved a chance to talk to her when everyone else was busy around the house or at the “telly”. Eleanor was a teenager during World War II. Unlike the American experience, war was not across an ocean, it was outside the door and, pray to God, not falling from the sky onto the house. She told me about travelling into London on the train and about seeing St. Paul’s Cathedral. “It will never be that beautiful again,” she told me. “The buildings around it had been leveled by bombs and it stood out as a symbol of our hope that we would endure.” She told me how firemen had stood on the roof to put out firebombs and keep the cathedral from burning.
I remember most, the time she talked about the warm spring day when she and another girl were bicycling in the countryside. They were carrying baskets for a picnic on a pleasant afternoon when they heard the buzz.
The German V1 rocket, called a “Buzz Bomb”, was an unguided missile launched from Germany and designed to run out of fuel at some random spot over England. It had no value in war, its purpose was to frighten the English people into surrendering without more fighting. The English learned to stop and listen. As long as they heard the buzz of the engine, they were safe and the low-flying missile would pass them by. If the buzz stopped, however, the missile would begin its fall to the ground.
Eleanor and her friend listened. The buzz drew nearer and then stopped. They knew what to do, everyone did. There were daily cautions on the radio and in the newspapers. They abandoned their bicycles and picnic baskets and dove into a roadside ditch, covering their heads for protection. They were lucky. The V1 landed a couple of hundred yards past them and exploded harmlessly in a field.
I could not imagine a life where such danger was part of every day. I tried to empathize but nothing in my life could begin to relate to such a perilous time. “How could you stand to live like that?” I asked her.
“It was a terrifying time and we were often afraid,” she told me, “But I have never felt more alive than I did then.”
As this year ends, take courage that, in time, so will the perils it has brought us. Realize the things 2020 helped us understand. Did we ever realize how much our family or friends meant to us when we were free to see them without fear? Did we ever before understand how much a handshake or a hug or a kiss on the cheek brightened us? It has been a year which disrupted school but taught us lessons we will never forget. We didn’t know the freedom of every breath until we wore the mask.
As 2020 comes to an end and we make inroads toward vaccines to protect us from Covid 19, what opportunities we will have, as we finally are able to see each other face to face. From our shared difficulties may we find our common humanity.
The new year is a time to resolve to do better and to begin to forgive ourselves for the many things we left undone.
Raise a glass with me, if you will, to celebrate the future with friends and family and to remember those loved ones who are no longer within our reach.
May 2021 bring all the joy a year can bring.
Mike
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