Roads Go Ever Ever On...

Reflections on a strange day in a strange year

Today Annie and Elise went to school in-person for this first time in exactly a year. (It’s the Ides of March, so what could possibly go wrong?) It is the strangest thing, to put your child on the bus to kindergarten for the very first time on a day when the spring breezes are blowing and the air smells like new and growing things (she was stoic; I wept uncontrollably). It is strange, too, to help your third-grader through all of her first day jitters, when it’s not the first day of third grade at all, but day one hundred and something.

I’ve been reading The Lord of the Rings to Vee at night for a few months now. (Although maybe I shouldn’t, given that the character she liked and empathized with most in The Hobbit was Gollum. Heaven help us all if she decides that Sauron was just misunderstood!) And it occurs to me that the journey through this last year has some interesting parallels with Bilbo and Frodo’s epic adventures. There simply hasn’t been the opportunity or time in this mad landscape we’re traveling through to stop and really adjust, which is a blessing in disguise, since there’s no option but to keep moving forward, just as the heroes of those books were propelled along by events far outside of their control.

And so, last March, school closed and everything closed and it was all deeply unsettling and scary, but pretty soon it was also just how life worked. (Like Bilbo, then Frodo, riding trepidatiously but resolutely away from the safety of their hobbit world, into the great unknown.) And we all started wearing masks and staying close to home - the decent humans among us, anyway - and changing our daily routines, and teleworking and telelearning, and we gave up a thousand pleasures and constructed new lives with new pleasures, even if those pleasures were smaller and shabbier than what preceded them. (Like our hobbit heroes adjusting to new landscapes and finding friends in unexpected places and learning to love the joys of the road where once they only knew the joys of hearth and home.) And we woke up - we still wake up - every blessed morning, determined to prevail over the hardships and traumas that have filled our worlds, and determined to outlast and outmaneuver the enemies and perils that threaten us. (Like two little hobbits, and their brave hobbit friends, finding that they possessed more courage and derring-do than they ever could have imagined.)

And so here we are, living lives that were entirely unimaginable just one short year ago. And at some point we will - maybe slowly, maybe quickly - revert back to many of the routines and practices that now seem so strange and so far in the past. Yes, there has been an incredible toll on each and every one of us (this powerful piece is a perfect explanation of one aspect of the damage), and for many of us, the traumas and destruction will far outlive the current emergency. But isn’t it wild that you woke up this morning, and you went about your day, and you didn’t stop and marvel every minute at the strangeness of it all? Now it takes a truly unusual event - like waving goodbye to your baby as the school bus pulls away for the very first time…in March - to hold a mirror up to our daily existence so we can see how bizarre it really is. And that’s fine with me! Let’s keep adjusting, adapting, moving forward, and facing down threats with the quiet courage of unlikely heroes, knowing that hopefully one day soon, we will crest the ridge of a familiar hill, and sing, like Bilbo:

Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known.