Navigating Our Waters

My grandfather had Type I diabetes in a time when insulin shots were the only treatment. My Grandmother learned to cook with saccharin, the only sugar substitute available. They ran their small farm experimenting with many things. I remember them caring for ducks, rabbits, dogs, cats, pigs, cows, horses, mules, and more. My grandmother was good with flowers, plants, tatting, wallpapering, sewing, crocheting, knitting, and growing little chicks. I can tend African violets in a temperature controlled house and they will die. Mamaw could stick them behind the wood stove on a cold window ledge and they would bloom all year. My Granddad could make sounds like the animals he hunted, catch a turtle, and make turtle soup. I was fascinated with the farm.

My other grandparents were divorced after ten children. They had lived mostly in the city of Nashville, Tennessee. My grandfather worked for a utility and retired with a pension. He liked country music and his pipe. At eighty-four, he declined a phone call because he was up on his roof, fixing a bad spot. Grandma was much different from my Mamaw on the farm. She would run out and invite in mothers who were visiting their sons at the Tennessee State Penitentiary. She knew they hadn’t the money to stay anywhere, so she helped when she could. She was not someone I could emulate in most things, but she loved us all she could.  

I have come to see that these were people who navigated the rivers they were in. Sometimes they did well with it, other times, we would find them failing. But at all times, they were people of their age.

We are people of our age. We watch each other navigate our own waters and we realize times have changed. Some of us are global, helping those in other lands. Some of us never leave the clearing. Most of us face problems other generations did not have to consider.

Have you seen modern divorce? It is the epitome of our modern rough waters.  It is called “no fault.” No one who has gone through divorce thinks of it that way. It is full of hurt, and “fault.” And there are no manuals for handling the myriad of emotions that come with it. This is not your grandmothers’ waters. You can feel alone because in many ways, you are alone. In the past, they had the ability to “name a correspondent,” which was giving the name of the third person who came into a marriage relationship. This gave an individual “fault.” It gave them a way to think about what was happening. Either an “I screwed up,” or a “they screwed up.” Now, the ship goes down and no one is supposed to see the mine that hit it. It was hit. It is gone. Let’s flounder our way to better shores. While it is similar in its result to my great-grandmother losing her husband to pneumonia with two small boys and no way to make her own income, it seems foreign. Great-grandmother papered her walls with clean newsprint. There is aloneness and tragedy there. But at least people saw her agony. Divorce waters are as cold as those that took the Titanic. Loss needs a way back. But many circumstances are given a shrug and a “you will get over it.”

We also struggle with the quick eddy of technology, especially when it comes to our children. Technology is the new “Paris;” keeping clear of its evil side is our “farm.” Our grandparents wondered how to return their boys to the farm after they had been to war; we wonder how to return our children to innocence when they have traveled the web. They, and we, are navigating the waters we are in.

I think if we can see kinship with the past, we can find comfort with it, too. They once had special steamships whose job it was to clear underbrush and hazards in rivers. They were not the ships of note that carried passengers and goods, but working unnoticed, they kept the way safe. We will have to find our own workhorses on our equally perilous waters. And I think connecting to the shared emotions, if not shared circumstances, can tutor us in going forward. Upstream is all we are given. But it was all they were given, too. It is all our children will have, and our grandchildren. Sharing those human connections will give us better guidance away from hidden dangers and rocky shores.

Going forward, we should want to be the map that brings others home.