can-be attitude

This morning I reluctantly said goodbye to my very sick husband, then an excellent friend came and collected my children to take them to an early church service, and by eight I was driving to my social work alma mater, Bryn Mawr, to take an all day licensure prep course.

On the way, I discovered If You're Feeling Sinister was in the CD player and so had the distinctive pleasure of singing along to every song. I first encountered that album nearly twenty years ago (it's shocking, I know! - but do the math, you'll see); it's tied up with the first months of my relationship with Mike, an essential part of the soundtrack to a string of dizzy, romantic, on-the-cusp-of-adulthood hours passed together in his tiny Williamsburg apartment on Metropolitan Avenue at the tail end of the twentieth century.

That's one of the benefits of falling in love with one's partner relatively early in life: so much of the music that moves me is somehow tied to us. Even the things we each loved in high school, before we met, seem to have been folded in - at this point I have embraced (at least in theory) countless obscure 90s hip hop lyrics as my own.

Anyway. I was driving through the lush spring green of Bryn Mawr (I had forgotten how beautiful it was) intermittently singing and crying and praying and worrying. When I hit the last track I could not help but belt out:

The best looking boys are taken

The best looking girls are staying inside

So Judy where does that leave you?

Walking the streets from morning to night

Judy! I heard your song about the dream of horses in a new way this morning. Sometimes there are simply no good choices to be had. Sometimes you feel sad and restless; unmoored.

I do things all day long. I make breakfast, and brush little rows of teeth, and bike to work, and take kids to baseball games and piano lessons, and chat with friends at the fair down the street. All those things happen, and often even go well, but a part of my heart is nearly always pacing. Like Judy. My heart is walking the streets from morning till night.

Having choices, solving problems, putting a can-do attitude to work - it's basically our birthright as Americans. Right? I love to make things happen. But our fragile bodies (and families and communities and planet) trouble that comforting approach to the problems of life. In the face of my own true love's suffering these past days, the limits of action - the poverty of options - are rough stone walls hemming me in. It seems all I can do now is suffer with. And pace, and feel afraid, and press my forehead against the cold stone.

And tell you guys about it.

Mike was admitted to the hospital while I was learning test-taking strategies this afternoon. His dad took him through the emergency department. I feared that would happen today, while I was away. He's there now, I hope resting well, and I am here at home, in between many loads of laundry, elbow-deep in a bag of tortilla chips.

I just remembered the next part of the song:

With a star above your shoulder lighting up the path that you walk

With a parrot on your shoulder, singing everything when you talk

Starlight, yes! It's soft and hazy, but gentle too. Dear friends, maybe - oh maybe - this moment of limits and uncertainty will prove more illuminating and more beautiful than we could ever now comprehend.