Sanity never came my way
Sanity never came my way
I don’t know what I’ll do today
‘Cause sanity never came my way
-Anastasio, Fishman, Mcconnell, Gordon, Pollack, Marshall
Life and work; the whirring clutter of the ins and outs, comings and goings, risings and sleepings; the peeing, the pooping, baths, dishes, clothes, e-mails, news postings and on and on can create a din that we come to accept as normal. A mental white noise to which we are as inured as New Yorkers sleeping through 6 alarm fires. When sanity does come, it settles on you like a peaceful snow; a quietude where you say things like “Oh, hi Self. I know you.”
As K. and I finished up this week’s meals and prepared for pack-out I realized that the quiet reverie descending upon my mind was a dose of sanity. The source: my parents were in town and the help they offered by spending time with the kids was beyond therapeutic. It was humanizing.
One of my driving cultural inquiries is: How and when were we convinced to accept quantity over quality? For example, why make and eat only one or two good strawberry -rhubarb pies each year when you can get a limitless supply of crappy ones year round at the super market? Somehow we accepted this trade a few generations ago with all the trappings of prosperity and ingenuity that nearly replaced breast milk with “Formula!” Now we know better. Nothing beats what mom makes, and it is probably just as true for pie. For strawberries too.
Precipitate from this: Why did we ever abandon the multi-generation model of home and community? According to Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America and Wes Jackson’s Becoming Native to this Place the fracturing of American culture from settled communities into scattered ‘nuclear’ units was not an incidental consequence of natural progression. It was the calculated impact of economic policies deliberately designed to drain rural America of its population and autonomy so as to flood urban centers with cheap labor, and to replace homemade with Made in China. In hindsight, we allowed ourselves to be flossed of our insurance, our health, our history, our faith and culture, our know how, our safe havens - our humanity. No wonder people are already lining up to become compu-symbiants.
My family is no different. My closest sibling is 200 miles away. My parents are 1000 miles away. My children’s aunts, uncles, and cousins of varying degree are scattered all over the US east of the Mississippi, and some overseas. I’m guilty of it myself. And no, Facebook does not make it better. So when they eventually get fed up with me and run away from everything I taught them, to whom will they go? Someone who loves them, or someone with something to sell?
I confess I don’t have answers. This is a lament. All I have learned is that you can’t make your kids stay near you, but perhaps you can work to make something they want to come back to. It is inevitable that as teens and young adults they will want to get out into the world to walkabout and make themselves. But at some point, probably when they turn to forming their own family, they will begin to feel like coming home. It would be nice to have something to offer them other than a commute.
