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Ophelia Anxiety

Ophelia Anxiety

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Boards on the window, mail by the door
What would anybody leave so quickly for?
Ophelia
Where have you gone?

(from “Ophelia”)

 

“Ophelia” is a song written by Robbie Robertson, a member of The Band.  “Ophelia” was first released by the band called The Band on their 1975 album Northern Lights-Southern Cross.

If you are a fan of The Band, you know that Robbie Robertson passed away this past August 9, another sad loss.    If you grew into your teens in the late sixties and early 70’s, then music performed by The Band no doubt made up a part of the musical score of your growing up.  Whether it was the iconic Music From Big Pink in 1968 or the self-titled brown album, Stage Fright, or Cahoots or whichever, music by The Band was no doubt playing somewhere in your background.

 

But of course, this week we weren’t focused on an old tune by The Band named “Ophelia,” it was tropical storm Ophelia that got our attention in the Delmarva area, though the verse above seemed somewhat fitting for an impending storm.

 

I was still in bed Friday morning when Kim and I got the message via Messenger, a warning from my grandson Christian.

Christian is our family Hurricane Tracker.

I hadn’t planned on going anywhere this past weekend, and I hadn’t heard of any impending weather event.

But thanks to Christian I was made aware of a tropical storm named Ophelia heading towards the Chesapeake Bay.

I immediately went to the Woolford, Maryland weather forecast on the internet and read Woolford was smack in the middle of the Tropical Storm Warning.

Kim and I began to discuss our options as I pondered what to do.

Was there some unwritten rule that said you couldn’t let your almost 90-year-old mother fend for herself in a Tropical Storm?

I thought about the time I helped my dad put plywood over the windows on the river side of the house before a threatening hurricane came up the bay some years ago.

Then I remembered my dad paddling around the neighborhood when the water came up after Hurricane Isabel.

I envisioned the tide up over the bulkhead, the aluminum rowboat floating and banging up against the tree in the 70 mile an hour winds, and my 89-year-old mother out in knee deep water, her ninety-five-pound body getting knocked around in the white caps as she tried to secure the boat before it floated away…

Yeah, okay, so needless to say,  I got to packing.

 

So, after dinner on Friday evening after traffic died down but before the worst of storm arrived in our area, I headed out to the eastern shore to batten down the hatches and erase the image from my mind of my mother fending for herself in the floods, the wind, and the rain.

 

I have been in kind of a funk lately.

Summer is winding down, impending darkness in the coming weeks.

I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on, but it is not uncommon for me as the summer ends to get like this.  But then I heard of a theory worth serious consideration.

The Vice President of the United States introduced the threat of Climate Anxiety.

Yes, Climate Anxiety.

And according to the VP, it’s causing people to not want to have children and not want to buy houses.

Oh, my goodness, I thought.

That’s me!

That must be what I am suffering from.

I too don’t want to have any more children, but I actually attributed that to Daughter Anxiety but, maybe that is not so.

And I don’t want to buy any new houses either.

Yes, Climate Anxiety, I am sure that is the cause of my recent funk.

 

But, I digress.

So early Saturday morning I secured the four kayaks, the deck furniture, and the aluminum boat.  I took down the Steelers flag flying on the flagpole on the dock because the rope was fraying, and it was taking a serious beating. I didn’t want to lose it.

 

And then my mother and I settled in for whatever Ophelia was to deliver.

We watched the river.

We watched the wind intensity and direction in the trees and the flag.

We watched the weather on CNN.

We watched the Hallmark Channel.

We watched Fox News.

(That’s how I learned I had climate anxiety.)

And in the end, compared to other storms that visited in the past,

Ophelia was a yawner.

 

Ashes of laughter, the ghost is clear
Why do the best things always disappear
Like Ophelia
Please darken my door

(from “Ophelia”)

 

And I should say thankfully Ophelia was a yawner, because no one wants what could have been.

So, Sunday morning, three hours before high tide, with the water already over the dock, but comfortable that it wouldn’t get much worse, I dipped out and went back home.

I got to spend some time with my mother and was now able to substitute my daughter anxiety with the real culprit, climate anxiety.

Life was good again.

 

And speaking of daughter anxiety, I read this morning that yesterday was National Daughters Day.

Sorry guys, I missed another one.

But you know, I love you more than meatballs.

 

Postscript:

The happy photo of me and my little chickens above was taken many years ago, before they got together and traumatized me.

 

This is Christian’s Atlantic Ocean Hurricane tracking map (he has the Pacific too)
Sunday morning, three hours until high tide
Daughter anxiety

 

Funambulism

Funambulism

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I have written before about my “word of the day” that comes in my email every day.  One day last week the word was Funambulism.

Okay so I admit I had no idea what this word meant, but it looked like a really fun word.

Right?

Fun…ambulism.

So, I knew what “fun” was…I mean I do, I can be fun sometimes.

And then I looked up “ambulism,” and learned that meant “a disorder involving walking.”

Ah okay, I thought, having trouble walking after having too much fun, that makes sense to me.

Fun-ambulism.

Even I may have funambulated once or twice before in my life.

 

But then, to my disappointment, I got deeper into my email and learned the word wasn’t funambulism at all, it was funambulism pronounced fyoo-NAM-byə-lizm.

And this funambulism meant “the art of walking on a tightrope.”

 

Back in November, I was repairing a picnic table the kids used on the playground at the church by replacing the top and benches with pressure-treated wood after the original plastic parts had broken.

During the process of attaching one of the boards, I hit my left thumb with my hammer just below the thumbnail.

Even though I was at church, I reacted pretty much as you might expect anyone who has hit their left thumb with a hammer to react.

Only I asked for forgiveness after.

Anyway, I finished the table and after the pain went away, I forgot about the incident with my thumb and the hammer.

Until one day, as my thumbnail began to grow, the blood blistery kind of thing that shows up under your nail after you hit it with a hammer began to take shape.

Sitting at the bar of the Hard Rock Café at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor on New Year’s Day as we ate dinner while preparing to go watch the Steelers versus the Ravens game at M & T Bank Stadium, I realized I had something very unusual looking on my thumb.

“Kim,” I said,  “look at my thumb…who does that look like to you?

“Oh my gosh,” she said, “Donald Trump!  You have Donald Trump on your thumb!”

I did.

I had a caricature of Donald Trump, blood blistered tattooed on my thumbnail!

Not that there is anything wrong with that.

But I realized that to share this remarkable occurrence, was kind of like funambulism!

Because let’s face it, there are a lot of people out there I am sure, and some might even be reading this, that would probably like to tell me where to stick that thumb with the Donald Trump image on it!

But I would have to decline because that’s not nice and I need that thumb, and in fact, that might cause some of that ambulism I was discussing earlier since it would be hard to walk like that.

And the sad thing is, trying to write something that mentions Donald Trump, or anything political, or anything that might mention the differences we might have with one another really is kind of like funambulism.

It is like the art of walking a tightrope.

And that’s too bad.

 

 

Here is the table
What’s At Stake Is the Democracy Stupid!

What’s At Stake Is the Democracy Stupid!

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For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.  They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.  But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work …

 

2 Timothy 4:3-5

 

Mary (not her real name) tells the story of her 70-year-old mom, a retired schoolteacher, who just went back to work out of necessity.

Joe (also not his real name), is an African American man who understands Mary’s story. He and his wife were retired but are also now back working because they need to.

The conversations of average Americans in a waiting room of a doctor’s office.

Conversations, in this case, telling the stories of Americans who have worked hard all their lives to earn the ability to take a pause in their later years and relax, now finding it necessary to return to work.

 

I heard a good sermon recently.

It was about the importance of sound doctrine.

Teachings that agree with the Bible.

Something that is not so popular anymore.

The preacher went on to say that sound doctrine is important because it promotes health and holiness and in fact could be considered a matter of life and death.

That good works are the mark of sound doctrine and that actions we believe are good make the world a better place.

Sound doctrine gives us the ability to determine truth from falsehood.

 

The preacher spoke about the devaluation of prayer.

When people stop praying, we suffer.  The world suffers.

Because to some degree, humans have relied on prayer to maintain their mental status.

A world without prayer is bleak, and leads to stress, and possibly destructive behaviors.

When we are experiencing stress, prayer gives us that all-important ability to pause, and allow God’s perspective to determine what we do from there.

Because human thriving is declining.

And we need to pray about it.

 

I don’t like to write about politics, frankly, I am not qualified.  But that never stops other people from talking or writing about it.

But never the less, in my case I think I will write about prayer instead, which I also may not be qualified to write about, but I will anyway.

 

There is an election coming up fairly soon.

An election where nothing short of our democracy itself is at stake.

I listened to the President’s speech the other evening.

Though I thought it was a bit bizarre, it certainly would have played well in any time slot on MSNBC.

I have been listening to MSNBC lately.

It was kind of a tired topic, given all the other piles of doo-doo we are up to our necks in right now; more about Trump, more about January 6th, and more about how election integrity will threaten our democracy.

And how the rest of us dumbasses aren’t getting it.

Democracy is what is at stake stupid!

 

Democracy.

 

A government by the people…

 

The rule of the majority…

 

A government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections…

A political unit that has a democratic government…

The common people especially when constituting the source of political authority…

The absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges…

The word democracy most often refers to a form of government in which people choose leaders by voting…

 

A democratic system of government is a form of government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodic free elections…

 

I don’t know about where you folks live, but I am pretty sure I live in a democracy, and in a few days that will be proven because a democracy is  “a form of government in which people choose leaders by voting.”

 

And unless you are going to allow yourself to be led by the nose into believing something otherwise, our democracy is not at stake.

In fact, I think that those who would tell us that our democracy is at stake might be the ones putting our democracy at stake.  It sounds to me like they might be encouraging a one-party system of rule, they might be the ones attempting to seize control, trying to restrict our rights, arrest anyone who disagrees, and control the narrative.

 

I may be a dumbass, but I am not stupid.

And neither are you.

And we may have a generation or two without the life experiences or the knowledge of history to the extent to be able to discern what is right or wrong, good or evil, and not beyond the limits of our rights as Americans.

We have had civil unrest before in this country.  January 6th was a mob that included some right-wing nut cases and bad actors doing what Abbie Hoffman would explain as seizing an opportunity.  But I would bet the majority of those people were simply regular folks armed with nothing more than their cell phones, with their worst intentions grabbing a selfie to post on social media later that evening.

“The attempted coup that almost threatened our democracy” was neither an attempted coup nor a threat to our democracy.  Yet there are a lot of people in very influential roles that would try to have us believe that, or worse, have us believe that they believe that.

President Biden mentioned the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi and made the parallel between that unfortunate incident and the events of January 6 as a further example of a threat to our democracy.

 

I don’t know, I don’t really think that guy represented the sentiments of the average American.  In fact, he is not even an American, he is a Canadian.  A guy who once lived in a storage unit and was “consumed by darkness.”  Mental illness at least in this man’s case, does not threaten our democracy.

Our country has experienced Presidential assassinations like John Kennedy; Presidential candidates assassinated like Robert Kennedy; attempted assassinations like Ronald Reagan; and prominent  Civil Rights activists like Martin Luther King assassinated.  None of these events threatened our democracy, they may have in fact strengthened our resolve.

But you might be expected to think otherwise.

And then there was guy on MSNBC the other day who questioned the “fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.” This was proposed by MSNBC commentator Michael Beschloss.

Scary stuff.

All made up to scare us into lining up the right way.

 

But I am supposed to be writing about prayer.

About taking a pause.

About doing good works that make the world a better place to live.

About remembering the words of 2 Timothy:

And you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work …

About the wisdom of the message that if your ears itch, don’t just surround yourself with those that will tell you what you want to hear.

Take some chances, do the work.  If you don’t find your sound doctrine in the Bible, maybe you will find it somewhere else, from someone you know and respect, your parents maybe.

And if you do find your sound doctrine in MSNBC, maybe try listening to Foxnews.

Or if it’s Foxnews, maybe try listening to MSNBC.

And before you vote, take a pause.

Pray about it, or meditate on it, or do whatever it takes to make you thrive and be less stressed.

Then vote for whatever you think is the common sense thing to do for you, your family, and your country.

Because we are a government by the people.

We are a democracy, and in a democracy, we the people, shouldn’t feel threatened.

 

 

Postscript:

This afternoon, feeling empowered and patriotic, I did my due diligence, I paused, I prayed, and I voted.  No one offered me a bottle of water or a glass of wine, and though I was disappointed, I understood, that could be interpreted as coercion.  They verified I was who I was, and where I lived by me showing my driver’s license and handed me a ballot.

The photo above was taken from a post in April 2020 around the fourth week of our covid shutdown. A reminder of different times indeed.