What All of This Has Cost
I have some great new stuff to wear this winter because our friend died this past summer and his wife gave them to me and they fit. Zip up hoodies, warm vests, an almost unworn LL Bean winter coat, windbreakers for several different temperature extremes, even a couple of nice shirts. I like wearing them and think about him whenever I do. I didn’t “pay” anything, but we lost him.
We have new gas-fired equipment in our house as a byproduct of the natural gas explosions in September resulting in thousands of people being inconvenienced for weeks, many hospitalized, scores of houses burned, and one young man even dying. There was no charge to us, but there was a great cost.
In America we live with all this freedom and we just celebrated Veterans Day when we’re challenged to think about how we don’t have all this without the deaths of thousands and thousands of American GIs throughout our history. The War in the Pacific was predicated on the dead bodies of tens of thousands of those GIs lying in rows on the beaches, for example, but because of them we have what we have today. Freedom isn’t free, the saying goes.
Edward Abbey wrote in Desert Solitaire about having a gas refrigerator. “Not indispensable,” he noted, “but useful. It is in fact one of the few positive contributions of scientific technology to civilization and I am grateful for it. Every time I drop a couple of ice cubes into a glass I think with favor of all the iron and coal miners, bargemen, railroaders, steelworkers, technicians, designers, factory assemblers, wholesalers, truck drivers and retailers who have combined their labors (often quite taxing) to provide me with this simple but pleasant convenience, without which the highball or the Cuba libre would be poor things indeed.”
Looks like a pattern here.
Right now I’m grateful as hell for the new stove and the water heaters and high efficiency boilers. We pick up the smallest crumb from around the burners and have vowed to keep clear and organized the corner of the cellar where that equipment is, just like a new car whose care you are so solicitous of. Yet, the other day I walked out and saw the pasta I was cooking and realized, I absolutely knew, I would eventually be taking these new blue flames, this handy indoor cooking fire, for granted again. I will take for granted that, my wife, my life, all of it.
Someday I will put on one of Richard’s vests and no longer be thinking about him. It might have a Rorschach coffee stain and maybe a zipper won’t work anymore and I’ll be pissed off and call it a piece of shit. I will most certainly take for granted living in America and get caught up in partisan divisiveness. I know for sure that Abbey took his refrigerator in the desert for granted most of the time.
I saw it without judgment and wondered if that is one byproduct of this work, for me and others. To lift out that which we take for granted, and shine a light on it. To take what we have for granted is surely in our DNA. It makes life easier to have these established neuropathways requiring no thought or concern. It is so deeply human.
Well, here we are this day, rushing headlong towards Thanksgiving and football and gatherings on Thursday. Might be a good day to remember Rumi’s words to “sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” It’s hard to figure this all out. Be OK with our humanity and that we take what we have for granted and let yourself be enchanted and bewildered and, as best you know how, grateful for all we have been given and what it all cost.
