It is a strange September.  I was slated to be in China on a long anticipated diplomatic tour as part of a handpicked family mental health delegation.  The terrorist attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Centers grounded all plans, including our flight to Shanghai.  Instead of being wined and dined in grand style, my world traveler and professional identity rejoined, I find myself with two weeks cleared in my schedule.  There are piles of paperwork glaring at me, minutia to clean up, and my arms are submerged to the elbows in dirty dishes, real ones with crusty corners and food slime, accumulation in the sink that someone else was going to do.

I’m somber as I watch the rescue workers sifting through the soggy rubble on CNN.  I anticipate the stock market tumble.  I stare at the images on the television with incredulity and horror and consider how all of our lives have been changed forever.  I feel personally bent out of shape and lost.  I’d rather be on an adventure in Asia than facing two weeks of tedious impotence watching our nation try to sort itself out in the face of disaster.  The newscasters are reeling as they try to get a handle on the carnage, up close and personal with the stench of suffering and evil in the world.  The focal point of my day looks like it will be walking to visit my mother in the nursing home.

I don my Patagonia, strap weight to my wrists, and storm down the wooded interurban trail.  Dappled with green and sun-gilded shine on this fresh autumn day, the blackberries hang heavy and fragrant; the trees arch their tunnels of safety and invitation.  It is a kindness that the trail is still and empty of other foot-traffic.  I am alone in a moving sanctuary.  I play exultant praise music on my portable CD player and thrash my arms through the air; fierce unfocused energy posing as power walking.  The week’s events crash in on my temples, sinews, and tendons.  I am crying now, running and yelling out, “Damn, damn, damn it all!  What’s it all about?  Why even try?”  I am raw emotion.  I am spent anticipation.  I am frustrated fury… with Ron Cannoli and a black gospel choir singing somewhere in the background about the power of God.  Eventually, I get to the Mt. Baker Care Center where my mother is regrouping after a stroke.

The wheelchair brigade is in the morning room. They are lined up in rows four deep around the television set.  The news is on here as well, but most of this audience is sleeping through the disaster, eyes unseeing or their heads bowed as in church.  I pick out my mother’s white head and pull her chair around for a visit.  “Hi mom.”  I’m sweaty and my armbands stink in a way that I notice even in a nursing home.  My mom doesn’t have much to say but her eyes are bright and she’s glad to see me.  I feel that mixture of gratitude, awkwardness, and deep sorrow creeping around the ankles of our conversation like a tide pool.

Suddenly another hunched form arouses itself from the fleet of parked aluminum and cries out, “Take me home.  I want to go home!”  I ignore her and focus on mom.  “You!  Take me home!”  This woman is looking at me but I dismiss it as just a demented outcry to punctuate the stilted social milieu of the day room.  A few white wooly heads bob up and look at her or me indifferently.  But the twisted little woman won’t let it go.  “Please take me hoooome.  You!  Help me.  Help me please!”  She’s swiveled around and is staring at me, has me pegged as her savior.

She begins sobbing in her hands and gesturing pitifully.  After a long minute of this, I excuse myself to find a nurse.  He comes back with me to the room and wheels the lady out, clucking consoling comments.  She turns and says ‘thank you’ looking directly at me as she’s pushed through the door.

My mother is smiling.  It’s a cute, crooked smile.  She had a stroke that immobilized her left side, but the facial muscles on her right side that work are positively beaming.  “What are you smiling at?”  I ask her.  “You helped that old lady,” she says.  My eighty-three year old mother, who seems to have lost all interest in everyone around her, is pleased that I responded to a senile woman’s cries.

I feel conflicted as I walk the loop back home.  I crave interesting conversation, beauty, stimulation, freedom, creativity, regeneration, and action.  I’m impatient with death and decay.  I dislike sickness, oldness, slowness, frailty, and pain.  I want to get on with things.  Yet despite our aversion, much of life seems to require dealing with damage, other people’s messes, picking up debris, sifting rubble heaps around us … and in us; hoping to find something alive and breathing underneath it all.  Aren’t we all on search and rescue efforts of some sort, staving off mortality, challenging entropy, looking for something, someone?  I don’t want to be philosophizing.  I don’t want to be stuck here.  I want to be in China.  I don’t want to be on anybody’s salvage crew, including my own.

The lady that sweeps the sidewalks on the route through the park says hi.  She asks about my day.  She has flat features, skewed eyes, and a bristle of red hair that looks like it was cropped by a lawn mower.  I think she’s mentally deficient, talking with slurred speech and sweeping with jerky mechanical movements.  Occasionally, we exchange greetings as I march through her territory on my aerobic missions. I’ve reflected on who hired her to sweep sidewalks, if it’s some publicly funded program or if she just does it on her own for something to do.  In all honesty, I haven’t given her much thought.

Today, she wants to visit.  “I haven’t seen you in a long time,” she calls out. 

“Looks like you’re doing a good job,” I throw this back over my shoulder as I pass her by.  “I try,” she keeps talking to me.  Catching my breath, I decide to stop. I turn and listen.  She wants to discuss the complications of sweeping the sidewalk with all the trees dropping leaves, different cars going by.  Seems like there’s always new dirt or wrappers, sticks of other things falling on the ground, but she does her best to keep things tidy.  “The sun’s out today,” she says.  There’s not much more to converse about so she hunkers down to her sweeping and I take off.  “It was nice talking to you,” she calls after my retreating figure.  I look back at her and she’s smiling like my mother.

So simple. And she’s unsettled another layer of detritus covering my derailed quest for forward motion fulfillment, with her bristly broom that matches her hair.  I feel self-centered and off-base. Calloused. Crusted over.  It’s not about me.  I press on through the park as if more vigorous exercise might realign me..  I want to fly away.  Instead, here I am left like a bird rummaging blindly for an egg lost in the fire. Dust to dust.  From dirt and clay we come. To dirt and rubble and debris we return.  Maybe the remains of this day will uncover more than just ashes.  I pray I’ll find a living soul intact.