first time out there

Yesterday I went shopping in a store for the first time since about March 15.

I needed more banana pepper and cucumber seeds after sowing our first batch in soil that had only been tilled once and desperately needed compost. Red Tennessee clay may be beautiful, but it’s rotten for planting. This year, pandemic made early soil prep impossible, so I’m giving it a second shake.

I put off leaving my house to enter the great OUT THERE for hours and hours. A single errand seemed like such a big leap after months of sanitizing delivered groceries. The old days of stay home orders left me no choices. I’m a bit disappointed in how much comfort I felt in resigning to this.

Timothy Snyder’s introduction to Czechoslovakian dissident Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless says, “Normalization meant accepting the way things were without any argument about how they should be…” Havel saw the dangers of a controlling government pacifying the masses, and I don’t want to be the sort who accepts bread and circuses without making waves.

“Give me liberty or give me death” runs deep in my bones. Yet in this past crisis, when the fool choice of one could harm thousands, I admit I was encouraged by external boundaries. Despite all the fears and frustrations of early Covid 19, at least I had the comfort of not having to decide all things.

Some of my fellow citizens yanked against those constraints from the beginning. I saw the masses revolt recklessly, selfishly, foolishly. So much bravado and so little love. I hated how they behaved. I also understood their concerns, even as I mocked them. Thank God for the rebels. Shut up, rebels. You’re saving us. You’re wrecking us.

All this.

It’s complicated, isn’t it? America is complicated.

I will also admit that for me, deciding whether banana pepper and cucumber seeds are “worth it” is exhausting. See, my adopted child’s lungs were damaged for three years in pollution and poverty. Basic flu could kill him, let alone Covid 19. Because of this new freedom, I’m alone in the struggles of choosing what steps to take. The risk of government dominance is lower. The risk of contagion is higher. He needs liberty and he needs oxygen.

Intellectually, I believe in a parent’s role and responsibility. Emotionally, I feel the weight of choosing redistributed on my shoulders. It was easier to blame others for missteps than face up to making a mistake myself.

Riding in a car was a bigger thrill than I had expected. Motion at the high speed of 35 MPH felt like flying. The sounds of ignition and motors, the engine smell, the sensations of turning, stopping. Windows down. Other people’s stereos coming in and fading out. The sight of their bare feet on the dashboards. Fat arms hanging over car sides. You’d call them rednecks, and they were. But Lord, people are beautiful in 3D. I guess I‘d never noticed before.

Thousands of Covid 19 tests have been completed in my county, and we have six or seven active cases right now. The viral fear of early March is subsiding around here. Those eager to accuse the reentering would call their movement recklessness, and some movement is reckless. But that’s not how I would describe most of what I witnessed.

A lot of the folks I passed looked flat tired—like they’ve come to terms with having to fight through one more danger in a life that was never safe for them—like they’re now feeling the burden of paying off another load of debt from accounts that were already strained. It’s easy to define the evil in fool protestors brandishing big guns and hanging effigies —easy to see the wickedness of an infantile President babbling egotistical nonsense. How I resent those voices.

Yet there are also so many hearty salt-of-the-earth folks who have scratched out a living for decades, accepting danger because life didn’t afford them the privileges of safety. They’ve worked jobs in coal mines, and in road construction, and around sick people. They’ve eaten cheap food that’s always been killing them. They’ve missed medical appointments because staying alive is too expensive.

You tell these folks there’s a .04% mortality rate for their demographic, in the midst of a life that was already far more certain to do them in. You tell them that, and you’ll see what I saw yesterday—people making a life in the middle of a dying world.

I wore a mask. A couple of others did, too. I wish everybody had. It would have been the most loving thing to do, I think. But I didn’t hate those who did not. I didn’t glare at them. I didn’t point or yell.

Pulling through a parking lot, the guy in front of me had one of those metal Darwin “Truth” fish on his trunk—a fish with legs eating a Christian Icthus. ‪His other bumper sticker said, “I hate socialism.”‬ He was shirtless and didn’t wear a seat belt—and I watched him nearly have a wreck, reaching over the passenger seat while driving, trying to grab something out of the floorboard.

Watching him, I remembered that people did dumb, selfish, or necessary things that killed other people before Covid. I remembered how someone I know always gets out on icy roads the minute the public service announcement hits asking people to stay inside. “I gotta 4-wheel drive,” he says. I remembered statistics about drunk driving, and STD’s, and landlords who don’t fix toxic mold, and moms who bring snacks with pecans and peanuts to classroom parties. I remembered the waitress with regular flu working three jobs to feed her kids, serving the old couple at Chili’s.

Reckless accidents. Oblivious oversights. Moments of entitlement. Harm committed out of desperately limited options.

The human race.

There have always been sensitive among us; and there have always been the narcissistic; and there have always been the common folk staying busy, trying to make ends meet.

Aside from ghost peppers and spaghetti squash, the garden store was out of vegetable plants. They were mostly out of vegetable seeds. I bought purple sage, rosemary, marjoram. I held my breath through my mask as I passed those huge fans they always have blowing in greenhouses.

I also bought huge packets of flower mixes—the sort of packets I never buy because I’m OCD and like to plan exactly where things go. When I left the house, I thought I was risking my life for vegetables. I guess I risked it for herbs and flower seeds. Not sure where that falls on the scale of “should have.” It’s what fell out.

Through my mask, I shyly told the girl at the counter this was the first time I’d been anywhere since March. She and the other teenager working laughed and said, “Must be nice. I been here almost every day.” Both were bare faced. “Has it been nice for anybody?” I asked, gently. They smiled, and we got quiet and saw each other.

Maybe I was imagining things because I’ve been out of the loop too long, but in that moment, it felt like we looked beyond everything our too-complicated-to-unpack life situations had driven us to do to survive the past few months. Despite our choices, and despite all we didn’t get to choose, over three packs of flowers and three pots of herbs, we saw human beings.