Oatmeal Colored Fog

 

Walking up our stairs I am suddenly trudging up a greige carpeted mountain path. On the hiker's scale, it's got a rating of  'Strenuous'.

 

My vision blurs and I am a six year old grasping for the flimsy, frayed nylon exit rope after stepping off the Tilt-a-Whirl. All pigtails and white canvas Keds and between the fingers cotton candy stickiness, I'm stiff from gripping down so hard on a hot steel safety bar. 

 

My palms feel clammy. 

 

I swear I smell fairground metal. 

 

I close my eyes, breathe, and try not to lean too far left or right. My heart beat is a skippity-dippity-do bayoneting its way through the side of my neck. In what now looks like oatmeal colored fog, I dramatically and fitfully seek out the sturdy wooden railing on my first to second floor staircase and force myself to kneel. Remembering what my meditation app says, I picture low tide waves, cerulean and cushy, softly washing over my knees and feet. I conjure my yellow and brown tube of suntan lotion with the smug looking monkey on it. I hear a boom box, grit in all its joints from having fallen over in the sand, stuttering the bass line from 'Come Together'. 

Finally, after a moment of panic, I've got feet down below my knees. 

One thing I can tell you is [I've] got to be free... 

 

of this fucking anxiousness.

 

Later, I'm preparing dinner, stubbornly squinting because I was too lazy to look for one of my ninety nine pairs of reading glasses. I'm pointing and dragging my index finger, ashen and ancient-looking from being washed in million degree anti-bacterial water 82 times a day for the last 731 days, down a cookbook page of rudimentary ingredients like noodles and butter. I question why I even require a recipe for a meal as simple as this when my iPod travels to one of the old George Harrison songs I used to crank in college. I hear the first five notes and begin weeping without an ounce of control. 

 

I'm a Dark Horse. Running on a dark race course. 

 

It's just one of those days.

Because, like you, if I have to read about one more person whose last breath looked a lot like the last breaths of a bug-eyed guppy discarded on the beach by the 4 year old who'd not been taught better, dumping her water pail full of stolen sea creatures out on the sand before grabbing her moldy towel and dragging it, tripping over and over on the way back to her family's summer retreat; or one more small businesses owner first watching her last two employees nail sheets of cheap splintery plywood to the windows of what was to be her American Dream, and then going home to cry silently behind the door of the freezer so the kids don't hear her pitchy gulps as she pulls the last pound of overly fatty ground beef out of the freezer to cook with a box of Hamburger Helper found in the back of the cabinet from 2019 when it seemed more like a cheeky nod-to-nostalgia impulse buy than an actual end-of-our-working-life-as-we-know-it meal; or one more exhaustively walloped health care provider following the familiar footpath from the ER to his favorite hospital parking spot for the last time, scrubs sweaty with the acrid funk of fright and forced out of his job over a choice about what he puts in his body despite saving thousands of lives over the course of his 20 plus year career, I'm going to crack. 

 

I am a handful of peppermint Mentos, quickly and sinisterly forced one by one, into a tepid can of Diet Coke on Granny's doily-covered end table.

It's the bad news. It's the hatred. It's the shaming. It's the hopelessness. 

 

It's the lack of accountability. It's the politics. It's the fear factor.

But, I wipe my nose, find a pair of horn-rimmed readers, and slip into my thirty year old clogs, not so much brown but more the color of that dead pelican I found. Just an enormous bill, bleached white bones and clustery tufts washed ashore. I feel my aching feet loosen up in the worn leather, thawing from having numbed atop the icy kitchen tile, and I look out the frosty window pane to admire the fresh snow and know this too shall pass.

 

It just has to.

Everyone my age has a long list of sufferings and nearly all of it has shifted, either temporarily or  permanently. And if it hasn't, we have figured out a way to live with and among the misfortune. We might make it through the day with a healthy jog on the treadmill or we might make it through the night with a hearty swig (or five) of Jack Daniels. We might have steel resolve forged by confidence and the knowledge that we can stand strong against whatever we encounter or we might have an invisible exoskeleton created by thousands of alternating layers of panic and recovery, like thick bubbly varnish on a beautiful antique.

Either way, we make it through.

 

Today, I scratched out a list of things that I have endured and, very significantly, which have passed. I used a bubble gum pink marker which I realized the irony of after item 35. The list is long, or maybe it just feels so fucking long because of where we are in the world. But as I look at it and try to just regard the events as "times gone by", I reinforce that I've motored through and figured out every last hurt, tragedy, trauma, and disappointment. I've proven that the abandonment, the recklessness, the harm done, and the abrasions are no match for me. 

 

I am triumphant. 

I am a blue ribbon and a first place trophy.  

I am more undefeated than the 2007 Patriots.

For just a brief moment I am more Jolene than Dolly.

 

Most importantly, I'm still here. 

 

I flip through the list again. It can be viewed, as can most things in the human condition, multiple ways. It can be looked at as a life that has been less than saccharine sweet, or it can be viewed, as I am choosing to see it right now, as a life that has prepared me for disaster and recovery, calamity and recuperation, strife and calm, cataclysm and rebirth.

 

Normally, I wold totally choose the Oatmeal Fog as a paint color, but today, if I were selecting something new for the hallway where I stumbled for a moment overcome by panic, I would choose one of these, as sentimentally cloying as they are, just to make sure I am focused on the possibility of a happy tomorrow. 

 

 

Keep going, friends. 

We are journeying through this together and one day we will emerge, like baby voles blinking at a corona of concentric circles surrounding the white summer sun, stunned by the notion that this new day is for nothing more than our collective enjoyment.

 

Keep going. 

 

Keep. 

 

Going. 

#mushroomtumbler