Anger and the Boys
Dear Friend,
I’m struggling a little, or more than a little. Questioning so much. Even questioning whether this note belongs here, at all. Maybe I’ll just write it, and worry about whether to hit send after I’m done. You do this, too. Don’t you?
What’s the struggle? This could get confusing, because it’s confusing to me. There’s this saying that I low-key love. Goes something like this: “When there’s fog in the pulpit, there’s rain in the pews.” I hope you don’t take that to mean that I imagine myself to be preaching a sermon. Please no! But wherever it is I’m standing, there’s plenty of fog, so it may well rain wherever you find yourself reading this. Bear with me?
My anger and I are having issues. Up to now, he has mostly been sitting quietly in the passenger’s seat of our station wagon, letting Joy and Peace and Wonder and even Sadness do most of the driving. Anger spends most days scanning the traffic and the horizon and keeping an eye on the weather and texting back and forth with Fear - who usually doesn’t like to ride along - and managing the playlist. Anger is always, always careful to include a little bit of everything: Kacey Musgraves gets a lot of air time, and so do the Avett Brothers and Andrea Bocelli and Joni Mitchell and Radiohead and The National and Bruce. Anger tends to lean into Mac Miller and Nick Cave and sometimes the soundtrack to Hadestown - especially the song about the wall, but he doesn’t let his music dominate. Sometimes Anger puts something for everyone else to listen to on the speakers, then puts in his airpods and gets worked up by Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro. But even then, he keeps to himself, mostly, and continues to look ahead for potholes and drunk drivers and to warn whoever happens to be driving that day. Anger is not a jerk. He has no business behind the wheel, and even he acknowledges that. But he is not a jerk.
Not normally.
Maybe he is feeling neglected or lonely or under-appreciated or who knows what, but the last couple of days, Anger has been acting restless. Acting out. Last night we were making our way home from dinner or something. It was dark and raining but traffic on the highway was light and Contentment was driving, and Peace and Wonder were chatting nicely about the goldfinches that had come to the feeder earlier in the afternoon. Even Sadness said something lovely about the birds in winter time.
When out of nowhere, a silver Toyota flies by us on the right and a carful of twenty-somethings give us a choreographed finger and a harmonized sneer before cutting us off and hitting their brakes just as they come into our lane. Contentment does some voodoo magic thing and we mercifully avoid contact. Somehow.
And it feels like we have averted catastrophe and that everything is right with the world.
But Anger just can’t let it go. He does this thing where he grabs the steering wheel and it was almost like he was intentionally trying to drive our little station wagon either into the Toyota or straight into the ditch, and Contentment was too stunned to take his foot off the gas and maybe even, for a moment, pressed down harder on the accelerator The others in the car go instantly silent until Contentment gathers himself and gently brakes, takes the wheel back, and guides the car to the shoulder.
He looks at Anger. “Dude, what was that?”
—
Thirty-three years ago today on a snowy New York City morning, Abi was born at Mt. Sinai. Do you ever do that thing where you imagine the life-to-come of a new-born? Imagine who that tiny baby is and what he sees and how he makes sense of what he sees without the benefit of language. When we do infant baptisms at the church I attend, one of the pastors is so intentional about making space for this very thing and I am overcome every single time. Overcome by the joy. Overcome by the sadness. Overcome by the wonder. Overcome by first sunrises and first lilies and first words. Overcome by last sunrises and last lilies and last words. Overcome by joy and the sadness and the wonder of the knowing-unknowingness of life.
My friend Paudrig writes:
The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked,
And our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning.
Maybe I thought about this thirty-three years ago, or maybe I was too young or too preoccupied with fear to consider what lie ahead for Abi. But it’s not hard for me to go back to that moment now and to imagine what I would have imagined. It would have been more questions than guesses, I think.
What will be your favorite flowers?
Will you be a beach person or a mountain person and why will you definitely be both?
Will you love college football or will you be a dancer and will you be graceful and laugh at your own jokes?
How will you feel about oysters and mushrooms and oyster mushrooms?
Mostly this: How will you live up to your impossible name?
Abi is still answering most of these questions, especially the last one. My dear friend, Andrea, reminded me of this just last week.
Thank you, dear friend.
As for Anger, I want to ask him what sparked his passions last night, but he hasn’t yet stirred this morning. I wonder if he saw his cousins in the Toyota, and just for a moment, thought he was missing out on all the fun. We have talked about this in the past, and I totally get it. Anger comes to life around his cousins. (Don’t we all?) Most of the time he is able to stay centered. But sometimes, even after years of therapy, he just can’t pause to take deep breaths or to count to ten. Certainly not last night, but that, I want to believe, was exceptional.
I do wonder if there was more to it than that, though. Was he concerned that I would forget Abi today? Was he reminding me, in a way that only he could, that today was a day where it is okay to feel all the feels, including anger, and seeing his cousins gave him the courage to speak up?
I can promise you this. I won’t be shaming him when he finally gets out of bed, completely embarrassed, later today. I’ll bring him a cup of tea, and we’ll take deep breaths and count to ten,. Together. And maybe we’ll invite the others to join in, as well.
As for the rest: This round of chemo ended, mercifully and uneventfully, last night. My step-daughter took me to radiation yesterday and she knew exactly what buttons to push to welcome laughter and joy into the cancer center, and she was even generous enough to share some of her own internal conversations. (Seems we’re a lot alike. That makes me happy.) I am feeling well and excited that tomorrow is my last radiation treatment (so far as we know), I am still sensing God everywhere I turn if I can just be still enough, and there is so much joy in knowing that circumstances play no part in God’s here-ness and with-ness, nor in our ability to behold.
Imagine that (and I guess I’m hitting Send).
Oremus,
Chris
Beautiful. ❤️
Keep hitting Send, homie.