A Voice In The Wildernesss

A Voice In The Wilderness

Our copy of The Hidden Meadows News was in our mailbox when we got home and it was hard not to notice that Kim’s profile in the local gazette has risen to quite a noticeable level. She and her activities represent 3 out of the 8 pages of editorial coverage in our community and she is pictured 4 times. She was given credit for her “respected” co-leadership of the Garden Club and for opening her home for the Women’s Group. Besides her wonderful kitchen, she was credited with her collection of ancient antiquities in her “elegant” living room, her “magnificent” views and her “horticultural masterpiece” of a garden featuring her integrated massive buffalo sculpture and “charming” Hobbit House (also pictured). What a nice way to give Kim a birthday present today even though they wrote and published this without knowledge of her special day. Kim has certainly come into her own with all these activities plus her singing with Encore and now this local jazz band, Straight No Chaser, that plays monthly over in San Marcos. She deserves every bit of the attention she is getting and more. It is a small price to pay for having such a bright light among us. It reminds us that its good to be home in a place like the song from Cheers says, where everybody knows your name.

I am having some funny thoughts this morning. The combination of returning home after a few days back east with the kids, the world that is crashing around us in so many ways, and my own physical aches and pains have all left me in a very pensive spot. More than most times, this morning I am being weighed down by two text chains I am involved in. The first and bilateral one is with an old friend from high school. I knew Tom for perhaps at most two years back 55 years ago. We hardly kept in touch for most of our lives, but reconnected about twenty years ago and have stayed in touch since then. We know each other more than the cumulative time spent together might imply. Tom is seeing the world through the lens of a family that was persecuted during the last century and fled to find a better life. I view the world through the lens of a child expat who has only ever loved one country even though I have lived in five and visited many more. I sit on my hilltop and ponder the world afar. He is a photographer who lives in Santa Fe and has his lens focused on distant lands and better lives. He thinks in terms of escape for his family before it is too late. My modern family is woven in tightly to life in these United States with strings attaching it every which way to insure its immobility.

I think of all those stories I have seen of late 1930s Europe when the young have an opportunity to escape oppression and the old, still staunchly mired in their refusal to completely accept the coming Anschluss and yet not totally oblivious to what is happening around them, bolt themselves to their spots which we all too well know causes them to end badly in some unspoken way. On this hilltop, I have the feeling that nothing can touch me. Of course, one of my “moving out to the hilltop” stories is that we did so just as COVID smacked the world in the groin and we both said “nothing can touch us on this remote hilltop” and within a week we learned that our quiet and unknown neighbor, himself probably hunkering down thinking nothing could touch him on his hilltop, turned up dead…and the post-mortem told us that he had died of COVID. So much for hiding from the realities of the modern world. One of the things about where we have chosen to park ourselves in retirement is that, as nice as it is, it is simply not a luxury community like you find in Rancho Santa Fe or Del Mar or La Jolla, all fancy addresses that are known far and wide. When I tell people where we live, I triangulate it by saying we are on the hill above the Lawrence Welk Resort they might have seen on the 15. What could be more obscure and hidden amidst the rolling hills of normality than that. A one and a two….

My friend Tom tells me he feels he needs to get out of this closing vice grip of authoritarianism we see tightening around us with no visible relief (once the Supreme Court goes, so goes the nation for God knows how many years). He feels his resources will more effectively support his loved ones if removed to distant Australia. He thinks I am different because he thinks I have sufficient resources to spare my entire family any hardship that might befall. He is wrong on many counts. Like the wealthy of Krakow or Vienna who were forcibly removed from their luxurious halls by hobnail booted thugs, it was not their resources that could save them, it is their flexibility and willingness to run. My aches and pains alone do not allow me the luxury of getting up and going whenever I chose. Add to that that my “family” as extended is 50 plus with entanglements in every direction and with at lest a national diasporatic span and I know my lovely Kim’s and my hearts are not so easily bifurcated from those 50 plus to allow us to run very far.

And then there is the serenity of my hilltop. How could anything so peaceful and beautiful be interrupted by the ugliness of the world? Why would I risk losing what I have for the off chance that there is somewhere better or safer out there to welcome me and mine? The one advantage the internet and mass media give us today that people in the 1930’s did not enjoy was a decent awareness of what is going on in all the dark corners of the earth. This authoritarian putsch that approaches, now with not so much subtlety, may be centered in visibility in this country, but it is hardly confined to these shores. Distant lands are simply not so distant any more. We are all connected. I actually think that we are more able to hide by doing what they suggest during a tornado, shelter in place. Burrow down into the root cellar. Keep your head low and hope that the storm passes and the brighter days we all want will come with one of the next rising suns. We do know that nothing that man does, short of total nuclear annihilation, will outlast nature, and that man getting stopped in his own tracks, no matter what the nastiness of the cause, is inevitable if we continue on our path or, worse yet, let the autocratic forces with their denialism, accelerate our journey to oblivion. I am the world’s last and best optimist. I have so much serotonin coursing through my bloodstream and into my brain stem and limbic midbrain that I cannot help but expect that good will prevail. That means that if or when they do come to drag me away I will at least have a wan smile on my face.

In my solitary mind and with my daily bodily woes, it is easy to feel like a voice in the wilderness, crying out in futile despair. But then I get another friend who reads my blog, sending me a note, saying that she has had enough of crying and donating and is now motivated to find something she can do to fight back. I don’t know what my proverbial pitchfork will be, but I too need to find some implement to wield so that I am not just howling at the moon or, worse yet, siting dumbfounded, while the forces of evil trample the vintages of my hilltop and the hopes I have for my children and theirs. I have a T-shirt that says RESIST from the days of family separations under the Trump border policy. I think I need a new T-shirt that says DISSENT & RESIST, understanding that we can never go as low as they will go and revert to violence, but that we can and must vocally dissent and resist. None of us is a lone voice in the wilderness. We are the majority and we must stand for country and posterity and do what we must.