Friday, September 27, 2024

Making Sense


 (This odd little essay is from three-and-a-half years ago.)

It's back to the present tense today after a week where my recollections of the early days of the pandemic suddenly took over my writing impulse completely. Maybe the seemingly sudden end of the Covid crisis led to my obsession with how it all began.

In both fiction and nonfiction, you often discover you can't really begin a story properly until you know how it ends. That's why so many murder mysteries start with the body of the victim. Knowing how the story ends makes everything leading up to that conclusion an extended state of anticipation, of dread and thus a quest for some logic and meaning for it all.

For everyone's sake, you want things to make sense, don’t you? That's what I'm trying to do with the pandemic and also with my life story.

It feels like I've been asleep for the past 15 months or so, but now I'm awake, I'm wondering whether things really happened as I remember or whether it was all just a dream. 

***

Friday started out with my daughter Julia's graduation from Goucher College in Maryland. The president of the college in his commencement remarks cited Bureau of Labor Statistics data  predicting that the class of '21 will have an average of 11 different jobs during their careers. Starting now.

Also at the ceremony, the mayor of Baltimore noted that the graduates are entering a world where racism, poverty, gun violence, and other severe problems await new leaders to propose new solutions.

Indeed. And we need to be hopeful for their sake and ours as we welcome the next generation of 22-year-olds to the struggle to make our only partially democratic society much more equitable, peaceful and inclusive.

Their work is cut out for them. That is a cliche and it is true. At least eleven jobs each -- that's what it will take to reach retirement, the experts believe. Personally,  I hope Julia can retire a half-century from now knowing she did her best to make this a better world to the best of her ability.

But for now she stands where I did in May 1969. Did I do everything I could have done to make the world a better place?

Not by any measure. Like most people, my most idealistic self struggled over and over with my pragmatic self, and sometimes pragmatism won out. I can rationalize that as well as the next guy, but the universal battle seems to be how to balance self-realization with loftier work on behalf of everybody else.

(Painting by Daisy Comolli, aged 10)

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