The Way, the Path and the Small Events of Days at Home

After work yesterday I drove to a local Knights of Columbus Hall to donate blood. I usually feel twice-blessed, somehow. Thoreau said splitting firewood warms you twice, first in the physical work and later in the burning, and I think it’s like that with giving blood.

You take it on faith that the blood will make a difference in another person’s life, but you also get to have the experience of giving, in the moment, having sacrificed something to be there at the appointed hour. All you have to do is show up and lie down on the table and surrender to the process. It feels good.

Blood is biologically a connective tissue, touching all the body’s systems and, after I donate, my B+ (I like my blood type, it’s good advice coursing through my body–“Be Positive”) connects me with someone else. Of course, it is still connection at a distance.

I noticed that the hall didn’t have the stale odor of cigarette smoke, since large indoor meetings have not been allowed for months. It was a reminder of what’s going on outside, albeit a pleasant one for non-smokers. The blood drive was a hint of normalcy, even with all the new protocols of mask wearing, temperatures being taken at the door and distance between chairs, where you wait your turn on a gurney, placed further from others than usual.

There is an undeniable and understandable gravitational pull toward the “normal.” We were talking about it the other night at our first indoor restaurant meal in months. We intended to eat our salmon tacos and have our wine al fresco, on a picnic table, but that venue was closed. We decided to stay inside, as all the servers had masks and there were only two other tables being used, spaced a safe distance apart.

We could see a college football game on the flat screen behind the bar, where one customer watched from a high top. Very few fans at the game, but the contest went on apace, another push for the normal.

I am meeting a friend for an outdoor beer tonight after work, also a first after these many months. We will have to order food, as our Commonwealth has decreed, to ensure bars are not masquerading as restaurants because they serve prepackaged foods.

We have some library books in our house now, because of curbside pickup. I have had a couple of haircuts. We’re still a long way from business as usual, of course, but all these stirrings have helped.

Yet, throughout all of these months, I have been able to look at my wife and say “I’d go through a pandemic with you anytime.” That is worth knowing and worth saying repeatedly. Many people have learned that about their spouses or family members or housemates while, sadly, others have not.

That has meant “go through a pandemic with you here at home, with no one else around.” No big events, no travel to Sweden to see grandchildren, no library books, no barbers, no giving blood, no sports, no beers after work.

Just the small events of days at home, as Peter Matthiessen wrote in The Snow Leopard (1978). He teed it up for us here in 2020.

“Perhaps this is what Tukten knows — that the journey to Dolpo, step by step and day by day, is the Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus, the Tao, the Way, the Path, but no more so than the small events of days at home.…The splendid utterance of the divine in all mankind.”