When it comes to tales of woe, Kathy and I really don’t have very much to complain about . . . not in the grand scheme of things. . . and most of the time, we feel ridiculously and extravagantly fortunate. But not so much this week. I for one felt like life kicked me in the teeth more in this single week than in all the previous weeks of the year combined.
Let me count the ways.
SCHOOL DAZE: The first week of school, even for someone who loves teaching, can be an exhausting and frustrating gauntlet- and of course for public school teachers these are tremendously challenging times. Kathy would not want me rattling off all that made this first week of school incredibly difficult; suffice to say that it took all of her own strength and some help from above to keep her smiling. But add to that. . .
HEAT WAVE: What heat wave, you ask? The one which struck 5631 Hillside Drive when our air conditioner conked out. We are thankful that it didn’t happen during the height of the summer – but still, it was very warm and muggy out- and like most pampered Americans who have grown very accustomed to A/C, we felt like we had been suddenly and unceremoniously transferred to Bangladesh. Then add to that. . .
DOG DAYS: This was the week that Ellie had surgery to remove a growth from one of her eyelids. It was a procedure that had to be done and we’re grateful that everything went well . . . and I’ve even managed to come to grips with the price tag, which was $200 more than I paid for my first car. That was a fun , flashy thing to spend money on . . . part of life’s fluff. But how can that compare to spending money on the well-being of someone you love? And we really do love Ellie. But . . .
RAIN DANCE: Our love for Ellie doesn’t make it easy to put up with the maddening hassles that are part of her recovery. Poor Ellie gets to wear a protective collar cone for two weeks. Two whole hellish weeks. Actually, she’s tolerating it better than we thought she might (in some ways better than we are) but she’s still crashing into chairs and scraping against our newly-painted walls (it’s hard not to shriek every time that happens). But the single most frustrating part of this is that she’s not allowed to run freely outside. . . so when it’s time for her to “do her duty,” she has to be taken out on a leash – and in the pouring rain, that is just about as miserable as life gets, short of the seven plagues of Egypt or the Book of Job. By the way, the last time we let her run freely in the yard, she spent most of the time crawling through our bushes, trying to pry her collar off- and when that didn’t work, she tried sticking her snout down into the mulch and then scraping the ground like a shovel – again, trying to get the collar off. She gets E for Effort and I for Ingenuity . . . and I got a P for Patience when it came time to clean all of a mulch bits and pieces of grass off of the cone, once I had finally corralled her and gotten her back in the house. And I haven’t even mentioned the three medications she gets every day – including an eye salve that she fights off as though it were battery acid. This is basically Kathy’s deal and I’m so impressed with the technique she has developed to get this done. But to do this twice a day is absolutely exhausting- and we’re not even through the first of the two weeks yet. But add to that . . .
BEAN DIP: We needed one mishap . . . one bone-headed bumble to really make the week complete. And it happened Thursday night as I was driving to the first senior choir practice of the year. It was yet another frantic, complicated day at the Bergs, so Kathy and I had to grab our own suppers, and in an effort to eat a relatively healthy supper, I stopped at KFC for a grilled chicken meal, and ordered white meat for a change. (Believe it or not, I usually order dark meat because it seems like nobody else ever does and I sort of feel sorry for the dark meat; on my long list of personal quirks, that may be the quirkiest of them all.) And to be still healthier, I skipped my preferred mashed potatoes & gravy in favor of green beans. What thanks do I get? As I drove off, I discovered that everything in my little KFC box had been packed upside down, for some reason – and easing things out to be eaten was a little bit complicated, even for me. (I mastered eating and driving a long time ago.) So I shouldn’t have been shocked, and yet I was, when I grabbed the container of green beans, upside down, and suddenly found piping hot green beans and their liquid all over my shirt and lap. I vowed then and there NEVER to order drive -thru KFC and eat it while I drive – and then I drove to Kohl’s Department Store to buy a new shirt off of the clearance rack so I could lead the first choir rehearsal of the new season without the smell of green beans wafting through the air.
Oddly enough, that seemed to be the turning point in the week. Church choir rehearsal was a delightful time – as was the fellowship afterwards with raspberry and almond kringles that my wife brought from O&H Bakery. SUCH fun. Friday, Matt Boresi and I heard a wonderful array of singers audition for our Gilbert & Sullivan production. Friday night, Kathy and I took our niece Lorelai out for supper at Olive Garden, where I had a brand new menu item that I absolutely loved – and then we had ourselves a good time at our local Barnes & Noble Bookstore. Later that night and Saturday morning, I played for Carthage Choir’s fall retreat- and then came home to find that our downstairs had been spectacularly transformed by Kathy and our good friend from the Racine Theater Guild, Bob Benson. Tonight we had a wonderful time with Jeff, Kate and Jackson Barrow- and tomorrow, we are welcoming a new pastor to Holy Communion- someone we could not be more excited about. And saints be praised, my best friend Marshall is home an doing well after a week in the hospital.
The message in all this? I’m not sure it’s anything more than Hold On. Hang in There. Don’t Give Up The Ship. Take your pick. There is some Joy awaiting you, around the corner, maybe when and where you least expect it. And in the meantime, there are lessons we get to learn while we’re waiting for Joy to return. I wish there were a way we could somehow teach that lesson to Ellie, whose cone is still such a source of frustration for her. I wish there were a way we could look in her eyes and help her understand that this frustration will not last forever- that the cone is there to help her heal and that it will be worth it in the end. And broken air conditioners can be fixed . . . and teaching issues can be addressed . . . and just about anything that befalls us can be survived. There is almost always something brighter at the other end of whatever it is that’s making us sad.
I’m no expert, but it seems to me that depression is when that clear corridor to the something better becomes clouded or even completely opaque – and all we can see is the gray of the current moment. I must confess to more than a couple of moments of such pervasive gray in my vision during this past week, when it seemed like life had turned irreversibly adverse. But the weekend proved that to be emphatically wrong. There’s always joy to come – you just have to hang on through the cone of shame and the spilled green bean juice and the broken air conditioner that makes the subsequent joys we savor ever so much sweeter.
pictured above: Ellie. A lot of you probably recognize the term “cone of shame” from the movie UP. And there’s something to that – As much as anything, Ellie seems to look at us with an expression that says “what in the world did I do to deserve this?!?!”