Getting Back Home

Time is neither a friend nor foe. Instead it embraces both foolishness and nobleness equally. Friday morning at 10:00 am I was just struggling to wake up. I could hear the sounds of my grandchildren clinking their spoons against ceramic bowls that were sure to be filled with dried cereal. The occasional crunching and clicking broke the otherwise silent morning while they played mindless games on their phone or tablets. I just laid there in my bed, with a marbled light of sun and clouds slipped through the blinds. It was going to be a partly cloudy day and I pondered whether I could get out of my promise to take my grandkids up to the pool. Life has become an empty glass these days. I’d spent my time and focus almost everyday on preparing myself and family for the fight against COVID-19 as well as the scourge of racial hate oozing over everything. I'd lose the appetite for going to pools and watching my grandkids play. It just took too much energy. It became less about seeing and hearing the joy of children's laughter and more about how to keep them safe outside of our cocoon.

At 11:00 am I had the grands geared up with swimsuits, sunblock, pool toys, water and hand sanitizers and the most important item, lecturing them about safety: “Remember the rule, if there are more than two or three people in the pool we can’t go, okay! You have to stay on your end of the pool, you understand that right?”

When we arrived I could see the tops of heads bobbing up and down in the pool. The cries of “awwww”, filled the car as we approached. I pulled into my parking stall with the intent on turning around to leave. When on closer observation we discovered we knew the people in the pool. It was my neighbor with her two small girls and she had our other neighbors three children two which were the age of my grandchildren and their only other playmates in the neighborhood. The kids went crazy in the backseat seeing them. I simply smiled and chided them and recited the rules of not getting right up in their faces and not touching even if we believe they have been social distancing. 

The kids had a great time splashing about the pool, and we, my neighbor and I, the only adults there, spent our time monitoring their safety and talking about concerns about the lack of social distancing overall, while making sure the little guys were just able to follow basic pool safety rules. An hour and a half had come and gone when I told the kids it was time to head home for lunch. That’s when one of the kids spotted a dog pacing back and forth outside the pool's fence. My neighbor said he was there earlier when they first got there and now back again. The dog was a beautiful blonde Lab with a choke chain and another collar with some sort of box like device on it. We thought it might possibly be a shock collar. The kids ran to the fence and tried to call the dog but he simply trotted back and forth cautiously. How could we help? We all thought and said aloud. Then we gathered our things and headed to our cars. I watched him from a distance, we were now on one side of the pool in the parking lot and he on the other side. I could feel the gentleness of the animal and his anxiety as well as he practiced his own social distancing from us for his own safety reasons. There was something profound about this situation and the very circumstance we find our humanity in. Both needing one another and yet fearful of what we can do to each other through the virus or hate.  

So, I rummaged through my car looking for something to put water in to leave for the dog. My neighbor packed her kids in the car and then found a Halloween pumpkin basket and handed it to me to use before she left. I’d called the office and asked them if a dog had been reported missing in our complex and would they call animal control. I also made a very feeble attempt to locate a local neighborhood social networking group in my emails to post about the dog. I’d joined this group hoping to meet new people when we first moved here and found little success with that, but might have had greater success with posting a missing dog ad instead of trying to make new friends.

I filled the pumpkin with the rest of our bottled water and set it on the ground in front of the hesitant dog then headed home with him still on my mind the rest of the day. The next morning came like all of the others had for the past 7-8 months with reluctance to participate and fill the day with meaningless acts of purpose. Then the phone rang and it changed everything, if for only that moment or day. 

“Hello Olivia, this is Marisa, you called the office yesterday about the dog? Well I posted it on facebook and the owner contacted me and he came and got him. You know the dog hung around for a couple of hours after you left. I saw you out there trying to help him. Well you know how skittish he was, but when he saw his owner you should have seen him. He was jumping and wiggling all over the place with joy. I thought you might want to know.” 

“Thank you, thank you so much you’ll never know how much it means to me to know he got home,” I said. The truth is I didn’t know how much it was going to mean to me until later when I woke this morning at 7am. The sound of lighting and rumbling of thunder filled my room. I got up and opened the blinds to let it all in and see what life was calling me too. I went downstairs in the silence of the house and out onto the deck to put the umbrella cover on the umbrella. The air was cool and warm at the same time and my bare feet squished on the outdoor carpet, wet from an earlier shower and awaiting the next. I took a moment and breathed deeply, felt the cool wetness under my feet, counted the paper skins forming on my tomatillo plants that are beginning to make fruit and I absorbed the energy from the crack of lighting that came in the sky over my head. I’m filled with gratitude this morning that the blonde Labrador is safe at home and my children and grandchildren sleep peacefully inside and I still have purpose, great or small. That I am alive to fill the glass.