Snow Angel Friday Round-Up (One Day Early)

Few things rival a bowl of potato chips and a Coke when you want a fine snack. A friend used to tell the story of how, on Saturday afternoons, her widowed mother would buy a bag of potato chips and divvy up the chips among her four children who would sit at the kitchen table and eat their chips in silence, each child savoring each chip as if it was the most perfect chip on earth. I feel that way about the sour cream and onion chips in a yellow bowl that I just ate while writing this paragraph.

I’m not heroic but I know a lot of heroic people. It was my big goal a couple of years ago to refigure myself into a kickass homeless advocate, completely shed my paper-pushing persona, and just, you know, fry it up in a pan. But it didn’t work out that way. I’d like to blame it on the pandemic but the truth is, I’m really good at pushing paper and not so good at helping homeless people figure out what they ought to do next. So, now I’m back to pushing paper, which might be disappointing but actually feels super-righteous. It’s all in the company you keep, right? #StreetAngels

Oddly, self-reliance is one of the good things that has come out of this year. We put up the storm windows, fixed the lock on the back door, painted the porches, stood on the kitchen counters to wash the windows, replaced the knobs that Swirl ate off a dresser with knobs we found in a deconstructed dresser in the attic, shoveled the snow, all things that, a year ago, we might have gotten one of our sons to do. And I like that an awful lot. Not that I don’t like having our sons around but I like not having calling them be a reflex for whenever something is broken or irksome. We do remember how to get up on a ladder without killing ourselves. We just have to spot each other.

There’s nothing wrong with being directionless. That’s another lesson from 2020. I’ve basically dropped all my highfalutin’ goals like last night’s pajamas on the bathroom floor. There’s always more pajamas, right? There’ll always be more goals. I don’t need to have a goal every single second. I can, instead, aspire to nothing other than living my life. It is a queer feeling to be free of the chains of accomplishment, the traps of self-improvement, the big expectations like when I told a friend a few years ago that turning 70 meant that I could be ‘remarkable in a new way.’ Now, I am remarkable in no way and it feels great. It makes me feel like a kid skating on a pond with no one watching.

Today, passing a big hill facing Lake Michigan, I felt a powerful urge to go sledding. And I thought – did the last time I was to go sledding already happen or is the last time in the future? I don’t know but it’s an interesting question. We hardly ever know when the last time of something is – that’s a blessing, I think. If we knew, it would become too important, require some kind of ceremonial conclusion instead just being the last of many times of something. That’s my parting reflection for 2020. Happy New Year to everyone who’s read this far.

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Photo credit: Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash