Getting Past Pandemic Fears

Carolyn J. Rose

 

 

 

Fear can cause us to fight. But fear can also cause us to freeze. And early reports about the pandemic did that to me. Even with a mask and gloves and a pop-up dispenser of wipes, I was afraid to leave the house. Paralyzed with fear, I brooded about all the activities I was missing out on, took my temperature several times a day, and read every scrap of information that appeared in the paper or on the internet.

And then, because so many reports conflicted with others, I got a grip and forced myself to get past the fear. Quarantine days can seem to be all the same. To counter that, I made a plan and designed a structure for each day. My goal was to begin with anticipation and direction, and end with a sense of accomplishment.

The first step was to eat right and exercise to stay as healthy as possible. The pool and gym were closed, but I got out into the yard and out on the streets for a long walk every day. I raked and weeded and pruned. When it got warmer, I painted and planted. I tried new recipes and ordered meals I’d never tried from local restaurants to do my bit to help them stay afloat.

The second step was to create ways to generate positive feelings and feel I was making progress instead of marking time. I made a list of chores I’ve been meaning to get around to for years and, one by one, I got around to them. I cleaned and sorted and reorganized, I enjoyed the tasks because, with nowhere else to go and not much else to do, I was able to take my time.

The third step was to network close to home. While I was walking and weeding, I waved at and then talked to neighbors whose names I didn’t know. I learned their names quickly and now we have social-distancing get-togethers where we bring our own drinks and food and chat for an hour or two. We help each other by shopping and running errands, lending books, recommending movies and TV shows, and passing along advice and recipes.

The fourth step was to reach out. As I culled and reorganized, I sent photos and knickknacks and books to friends I hadn’t seen for years. They responded. I wrote back. Now, I begin each day by emailing about 40 people who live all across the country, in Mexico, and in Scotland. I send short essays about the hummingbirds at my feeder, stealthy ways to give away zucchini under cover of darkness, worst and best teachers, memories of life in the 1950s, etc. When people respond and react, I often share their comments. We have a sense of community.

The final step was to make a list of what’s really important to me now and another of what will be important when the pandemic passes. As it turns out, the same things are on both lists—health, friendship, and a sense of purpose.

 

    

 

 

 

 

WHERE AM I AND HOW DID I GET HERE?

By Michael Nettleton 

Into The Great Wide Open

Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne

Eddie waited ‘til he finished high school.

He went to Hollywood, got a tattoo

He met a girl out there with a tattoo too

The future was wide open.

My wife asked me an interesting question the other day.

“When you were a kid, did you ever visualize where life would take you? The things you would do, the places you would live, where you’d end up?”

Keep in mind, when I was a tubby little saxophone player wanna-be living with my folks in tiny timber town Bandon-by-the-Sea, deep thinking wasn’t exactly my strong suit. To be fair to my younger self, sleeping, eating, and being an all-around pain-in-the ass didn’t leave much time for self-reflection.

I mean, I knew I didn’t want to end up like my folks. First of all, they were really, really, old. My dad, at the time was fifty-something. And Mom was in her forties. I was never, never, never, going to be that old. And I’d never wear a Lions Club sweater with a caption that read The Sons of the Beaches like Pop. Talk about unhip. I also had a feeling that I’d leave that one horse town and go somewhere really urban, really sophisticated, really hip and groovy. Like Coos Bay. Or maybe, in the wildest stretches of my imagination, Tillamook.

They moved into a place they both could afford

He found a night club, he could work at the door

She had a guitar and she taught him some chords

The sky was the limit

Well, I’m seventy-one now, kinda creaky and crabby and I’ve been lucky enough to have had my share of adventures. Stumbling into a career that turned me into a radio gypsy, I’ve lived in a number of medium sized and big cities, traveled to some fairly exotic locales and with the help of my wife and co-conspirator Carolyn, written half a dozen books, a stage play and a couple of screenplays. (Anybody wanna make a movie? I’ll make you a deal on a script).

Carolyn decided to go to college in Arizona for one primal reason. She was cold and wanted to live somewhere warm. Tucson and the New York Catskills are on opposite ends of the meteorological spectrum. I, on the other hand, started city-hopping based on a voice on the other end of the phone saying “We’ve got a slot open for you. We’ll pay you $50 more a week than you’re making.” I had U-haul on retainer. I didn’t so much live places as hover there.

Facebook is an interesting, frightening, and sometimes repulsive phenomenon. Because of its addictive nature, I’ve reconnected with people from places all up and down my personal timeline. Sometimes communicating with them can evoke a warm smile and trigger expansive memories. At other times I find myself wondering how the two of us ever tolerated each other. As lifestyle, political, and religious ideas get indelibly imprinted on us, we find that our differences sometimes outweigh our common history and one-time fondness for each other.

Recently I heard from a very old friend from high school and college days. He’s retired, living in Florida and seemed happy to reconnect with me. At one point we were very tight, almost brothers. It’s been fifty years since we last saw one another. I fear for what may come: The irreconcilable differences we may discover, the disdain we may harbor for each other’s opinions. Of course, that may just be the creaky, crabby, pessimistic me emerging from my self-imposed social cocoon. Maybe, it will just be two old friends rediscovering one another. Maybe some of the same things will make us smile and laugh as we used to. But I have a niggling fear, impossible to ignore, that the past is never enough to overcome the realities of the present.

Nostalgia’s not what it used to be.

Into the great wide open,

Under them skies so blue.

Out in the great wide open.

A rebel without a clue.

Forward! Into the past.

By Michael A. Nettleton         

 I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of time travel. I think it might have started with reading the H. G. Wells story and reinforced by watching Peabody’s Improbable History on Bullwinkle. Weekly, the brainy dog and his boy Sherman transported themselves back to another age in the Way-back machine.  

Recently, I’ve been reading Jodi Taylor’s delightful series The Chronicles of St. Mary’s. It centers on a group of historians who use time travel to go back and observe and record historical events, with the proviso that they do nothing to interfere with or change anything. What could possibly go wrong, right? (Spoiler: Plenty)

          We all know you shouldn’t muck about with the past. The butterfly effect and all that. But what if you could go back and visit your own past? At least to answer the question “What the hell was I thinking there?” There are pivotal events in our life stories that affected what happened for the rest of our lives. What if you’d made a different decision? What if that girl who jilted me decided I was Robert Redford in the flesh and had called to apologize the same night? What if . . .

          I got into the radio business, because I was a bad actor. Not horrible, you understand, but when I announced to my theater teacher at Southern Oregon College that I intended to go to New York and pursue a career on the Broadway stage, she got a look on her face that was a cross between a deer trapped in the headlights and “Oh, dear God, I’ve got to tell him”.

Kind lady that she was, she gulped and said “Well, you’ve got the voice for it, but you move on stage like a hippo emerging from his wallow.” Or words to that effect. She suggested I go talk to Dave Allen, who had started a student radio station because “You’ll need a way to support yourself while trying to find acting jobs. And there are already enough waiters in New York.” So I did, and 40 years later, retired from a semi-rewarding career in radio. But what if I’d ignored her and hitchhiked to New York and started auditioning? Could I have become a big star? Had my own entourage? Or at least found a job waiting table at a nice restaurant?

Or . . . I could have gotten discouraged and found an entirely different profession. But, what? I know I wouldn’t have gone back to my home town and signed on to pull green chain at a lumber mill. I’m butt lazy and needed to find a way to pay my rent without breaking a sweat.

          The second moment I’d like to revisit involves an on-air phone call. I was doing an afternoon on-air shift at a station in Eugene. Because I often engaged my mouth long before firing up my brain, I shared a newspaper blurb about the local nudist colony, The Willametans. They invited people to an open house on Saturday. Glibly (code word for stupidly) I said; “Volleyball is nudism’s national game. It’s a little known fact that we have one of the world’s best nude volleyball teams right here at (station call letters). That would have been a fun throwaway, (move along, nothing to see here!) but the phone rang. In another moment of temporary insanity, I put the call on the air. “Hi,” a friendly voice said, “This is Tim, the social director of the Willametans and your team is officially challenged. One pm Saturday. Bring a gallon of sun screen.”

          I still could have saved my ass. All I had to do was laugh, say “I was just joking,” and go on with my life. Instead, I piped up “You’re on!” My death wish once again trumped any common sense I may have possessed.

          So, I was forced to recruit some of my co-workers to go and play nude volleyball the following Saturday. Oddly enough, a great number of them agreed and we were able to field a team. We lost the game, (I did play by play on-air),gained some new friends. I also earned myself a rapid job search as the evangelistic general manager didn’t find my antics even remotely funny. On the plus side of the equation, I fulfilled one of my ongoing fantasies. I got to see my program director’s most excellent girlfriend naked.

So. If allowed to travel back in time, would I have made more mature responsible decisions at pivotal moments in my life? Probably not. But I wouldn’t mind going back there again anyway, if for no other reason, to get another 

peek at Darla. 

An Agnostic Talks To God

By Michael Nettleton

I’ve always been a skeptic. I was that kid in Sunday school whose parent were most likely to get a call saying “It would be a good idea if you came and took Michael home.” 

Not that I went out of my way to be disruptive. It’s just that I tended to blurt out questions that made the Sunday school teacher get that “deer in the headlights” look and raise his eyes to heaven for help. Questions like “Adam and Eve were the first and only people on earth. They had sons. Where did the sons’ wives come from?” and “Noah put two of every living thing in the ark and they stayed there for forty days and forty nights. Didn’t it really smell in there?” The “God works in mysterious ways” answer never quite cut it with the 9 year-old me.

Maybe it’s the imminent threat of the Corona virus or just my advancing age, but lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about God and Pascal’s wager.

Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth century philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. He proposed that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell). This was the Christian God Pascal had in mind, but other religions advance similar propositions.

All righty then. Simple enough. Except . . . To tell yourself you believe in God is to suspend the disbelief that comes with being a rational, logical, thinking human being. Who, if you believe, God created the brain that helps you reason things out.  And if you profess to believe in God, when deep down you don’t, and it turns out he does indeed sit on a golden throne with a flowing white beard and a retinue of angels, won’t he take points off for insincerity? Only one person (is a deity a person?) to pose this question to and that’s the big Kahuna himself. Or possibly herself.  And, to be honest, I feel funny about praying to either gender, when I can’t find any definitive proof of their presence up in the clouds somewhere. After all, God didn’t answer any of my prayers when I was nine. Ronnie Flanagan, the neighborhood bully never got hit by a bolt of lightning. My parents never came into a gazillion dollars so my mom could quit working her fingers to the bone. My dog Panda never quit chasing cars, even after getting hit and almost killed by one.

Perhaps God will read this blog and leave answers in the comments section. I’ll just pose the rest of this as a series of questions.

1.      Why did you let the election of 2016 come out the way it did? Could this guy actually be your representative on earth like some people believe? On which day of creation did you come up with liquid tanning products? Aren’t the things he says and does supposed to send you straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200?

2.      If I’ve been a sinner (and we all are) and I don’t worship you during my entire life until the final 10 seconds before I pass into the next world, but if I profess to be a believer at the end, will I ascend to the same heaven as Jim Baker, who spent a lifetime fleecing his followers in your name and is now hawking a bogus Corona virus cure to make money to fuel his limo?

3.      Do you really take sides for fans of one team or the other in NFL football games? How about hockey?

4.      Are you really that easily flattered? Do the people who constantly sing your praises and drop your name into every conversation really have an inside line to your Kingdom?

5.      Of all of the hundreds (or is it thousands) of religions that exist worldwide, could it be possible that only one of them is on the money? And what are the chances that it’s only one narrow interpretation of that religion?

6.      Where did Adam and Eve’s sons find wives? (This one’s bothered me since I was frog-marched out of Sunday school so many years ago.) A tip. The “God works in mysterious ways” still doesn’t track with me.

Well I’ll post this now and wait to read your feedback in the comments section. If you respond, perhaps I’ll take Pascal’s wager and start believing. Then I could start praying again. After all Ronnie Flanagan’s probably still out there beating up people and stealing their lunch money.