The Hawks have been hovering on the edges of my awareness lately. I have felt their grit and their determination that’s been passed to me. It’s as though I feel them walking with me, holding me up when I am tired.

My dad’s mom was born in 1894, she was 100 years old when she died. She raised 9 kids, of which my dad was the youngest. My grandparents were poor. They were tenant farmers, never having enough money to own land of their own. Neither of them were educated beyond middle school.

My dad remembered the cycle of farms they rented. When they would arrive at a new place, they would find the land farmed out and exhausted. They would invest years in bringing the land back to productivity. And then the land would become too expensive for them to continue renting. Repeat cycle.

They never had much. My dad recalled that his Christmas gifts were always hand-sewn clothing that he would need for the following year. The only frivolous gift he received was an orange.

It brings a smile to my face thinking of how he would eat an orange. He would eat them as his after-dinner treat. He would sit at the table with a paring knife and remove the skin, then every scrap of pith, then separating each segment methodically picking off any bit of tasteless fiber. Only after each section has been thoroughly inspected for unnecessary pith and fiber, would he savor each and every segment. I remember countless times climbing into his lap while he worked, and we would eat a segment for me a segment for him. Even as a surly teenager, when I would encounter him in the kitchen eating an orange he would set aside half of his segments for me.

Growing up The Hawks where just as they were. I didn’t see all the ways poverty marked all of them. I’ve only just realized the ways it manifested in my dad. The elaborate way he enjoyed an orange. Why he wouldn’t eat peanut butter. Why he would never wear jeans. I cannot know now, but in retrospect I suspect his dungarees were his uniform, the only pants he had until he started earning his own money as a grown man. They were a symbol of what he had broken free from.

The whole family over-achieved. My grandmother kept her garden up until she was 90 years old. It was a massive plot of 20 feet by 40 feet. My earliest memory of her is of her teaching me how to hoe. My dad accidentally slammed the car trunk on my grandmother’s hand, and she wrapped a handkerchief around it and went and picked strawberries without a single complaint. My dad’s older brother retired at 80 from his second job as the head doctor for a nursing home, and went into day trading. The way in which they were never idle betrays how hard they were trying to make sure the past stayed the past.

I think I have been feeling the energy of his family because of the current uncertainty. I feel lucky, because I have an in demand skillset. And although I don’t know exactly what comes next, I have good reason to believe Jeannine and I will weather this ok. But I know that many other Americans will not be so lucky. And I am afraid that in this hard moment we, in aggregate, will not be capable of making good choices.

I have been thinking about this quote from LOTR.

“Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me, I wish none of this had happened. Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times but that is not for them to decide, All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.”

The Hawks made incredible use of the time that was given them. It was their grit that set my early path on far easier ground than what they had to walk. I am so thankful to them. I am thankful for they work they did to make my path easier, and I am thankful that I carry their legacy. I can only hope to live up to their example.

 
Aside: There are stories that didn’t make it into this blog post. I think I should set those down, but they didn’t belong here. My dad had dreams that came true. My grandmother saved the family car from being stolen by hopping on the running board and punching the get-away-driver until he gave-up and fled. My uncle got impaled on a pitchfork, the remedy for which was to pull it out and hope for the best (he lived). But those are for another day.

The Coronavirus shelter in place order has been so for Ohio for a couple weeks now, and while I am certainly an introvert this almost complete lack of social contact is hard even for me. In addition, I have been a 5-day-a-week gym visitor since college, and I really miss the routine, the social aspect of it, and the much needed sweat therapy to manage anxiety and depression.

And yet I have plenty of food and resources. I have a secure income. And I have an amazing wife to share evenings with. And I feel a little frustrated with myself, that these things alone aren’t enough to manage my unruly brain chemistry. Because I know so many others don’t have these things. I have to keep reminding myself that I’ve never successfully talked myself out of depression. All I can do is cultivate a habit of counting the things I can be thankful for, and accept my mind is going to do what it does.

Oddly enough I am not terribly worried about getting sick. I think part of if is that I am fortunate enough to not have any additional conditions that make me more vulnerable to it. The other part of it is that I suspect I’ve already had it.

Jeannine got sick in mid January, and she seemed to pass whatever it was on to me. We assumed it was Flu B at the time. I got sicker than she did with it, but the broad brush-strokes of the illness were the same. It started with fever and body fatigue and aches. It’s that feeling that often comes with the flu, where you’ve been hit by a truck and simply cannot get off the couch. That lasted a few days.

Then the coughing started. It sounded as though there was funk in my chest when I was coughing, but nothing really ever came out. The coughing fits happened easily 20 to 30 times every 24 hours day and night. I remember thinking the physical exhaustion could have simply been due to the amount of effort the coughing took. The only thing that held me back from the fits ending in gagging was drinking water. The coughing went on for about 7 to 8 days.

Then I started to feel better. After a few days I tried getting back to the gym. That proved a big mistake. Once I got home I had to spend the rest of the day on the couch. That easily exhausted state lasted for about another 6 days.

The whole illness lasted about 3 weeks. I was never so sick I would have contemplated going to a hospital. But I was certainly uncomfortable enough that holding to my normal routine was out of the question.

I know this time will pass. But I definitely have some worries about what comes next. First, I cannot imagine there won’t be more waves of the illness spiking, and what’s that going to look like? And I am pretty sure lots of small businesses won’t survive this current period of zero revenue while still paying all their fixed expenses like rent and utilities. And I cannot imagine the economic impact of that won’t last years.

To me the clear lesson here is that our society is very brittle. After decades of telling Americans that only the individual matters, the reality that we are only as well as our most vulnerable people becomes apparent. That we have no flexibility in our supply for face masks and gloves is a glittering success of capitalism, or failure depending on how you want to look at it. Those supply chains became so narrow because it was the most profitable. Redundancy is waste, says capitalism.

To me this whole thing reveals massive cracks in the system that need to be addressed. I’m afraid that won’t be the outcome. I’m afraid the outcome will be much like the financial crisis of 2008, yet another massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.