Connections

Our Survival Starts by Looking Within

It was a stunning moment when I became tangibly connected to the Enola Gay.

At one time my dream was to have a historic house in the country, with a barn and a little bit of property. I had that for a while, but it was a love-hate relationship. Old houses are hard work, but I loved being the caretaker. That’s how I viewed myself, as someone passing through with a responsibility to leave a small piece of history better than I found it. I had every deed to that home, many written in quill pen, dating to 1840, when Henry Thorpe built the place, as well as the church two doors up. On the four corners was the road house, still in operation as a restaurant and tavern, where a passerby on horse back could get a meal and room for the night. We became friends with the young family up the road in the former village school house, converted to a beautiful home.

Our house was a well-preserved post and beam, that never less needed significant love. It had wide plank pine floors and lovely, bubbly glass windows. There was an addition, probably circa 1900, with a raised hearth fireplace that served as a dining room and a family room on the back that was originally a barn, attached around 1970. The stairs to the second floor were worn by one hundred-sixty years of families and friends climbing them. My favorite room though, was the parlor.

Typical of working class homes in the era, the parlor was where you entertained guests, so it was the fanciest room in the house. Our parlor had a fireplace and tall, elegant windows with wide moldings and paneled bottoms. It was the prettiest room in the house. Ironically, we used the family room more, the coldest one, primarily heated by a wood stove, fed by split logs stacked high on the screen porch. During the winter I could see my breath in that room in the mornings. Lighting the stove was a priority. I bought wood from old Stanley, the farmer who had lived in the area since the 1950s and an excellent local historian. Stanley and I would chat on his deck and he generously gave me thousands of pounds of rocks from his land, for building stone walls on my property, which I hauled in my tired, underpowered truck, over the hills, nose pointed high to the sky. The wood was two days of labor, hauling, stacking and occasional splinters and the stone walls were often back breaking, but I loved it.

As I worked on the house I felt a strong connection to history. In the parlor I could easily imagine neighbors, their carriages parked outside, conversing about the Civil War, the marvel of the invention of electricity, or the suffrage movement. Next door lived Bun Brooker, the hardy, wiry widow, also a resident since the 1950s, constantly in her yard, tending gardens and riding her tractors. Talk about strange connections. Bun’s husband served as an airplane mechanic during WWII. He worked on the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. I hugged Bun, who hugged her husband, who touched the Enola Gay with his own hands, that dropped the bomb that killed and destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands Japanese civilians. The justification of that decision is for historians to argue, but somehow I became connected to that world changing event in an unexpected and strangely direct way.

My sense of responsibility to the house ran deep. When I needed to build closets for the master bedroom and my daughter’s room, big box stores would not do. I found an architectural salvage business 40 miles away and bought beautiful, ancient doors and hardware that turned into projects themselves, freeing rusty hinges, stripping paint and repairing. The paint stripping, layer upon layer, upon layer, was particularly enervating. When I got to bare wood, I cheered myself by the fact that I was the first person to see its grain since the artisan who had constructed the door one hundred and fifty or more years ago.

I suppose I have been a quiet rebel all my life. I was born to a generation that was awake to the injustices of the world and taught the importance of questioning power. I felt a sense of hopelessness watching my own father’s struggles against corruption, awareness of how we were destroying the planet and the senseless, orchestrated hatred of those deemed to be different, who aren’t the problem at all. As well as I could I opted out, choosing to live my life in the moment and quitting employers who demanded too much, for too little.

We are dangerously divided at this critical moment for survival on our endangered planet. I feel too many of us suffer from a lack of connection to a real, physical community. My village, being rural, was generally more conservative than I am (some of it disturbingly so), but we were neighborly and helped each other. We could speak without anger and weren’t abstractions in the twisted news cycle, or toxic fumes of the internet.

We’ve all been misled to one degree or another, by false dreams instilled by an unrelenting advertising industry and dishonest politicians. Although people in positions of power need to be held accountable, ironically studies show that they are miserable, too. Never sated, they repeat their destructive behavior over and over expecting a different outcome. They have misled even themselves.

I don’t see average people, even most of those who stormed the Capital as evil, but rather, as victims of manipulation. Racism and hatred are taught, not born and they have been leveraged in recent years by Donald Trump and an increasingly traitorous Republican Party. We need to bring as many of these people back to reality as we can, by being respectful and patient listeners, to even the craziest conspiracy theories. Those of us who are better informed have the tools and responsibility to change as many of those minds as we can. That can’t be accomplished through confrontation and belittlement. Changing even a few votes could be profoundly critical.

My concern and frustration run deep. When I was younger, I often reacted with anger and sarcasm. I looked inside myself and realized that was destructive. I have tried to change. Perhaps most of us need to make changes. As Martin Luther King said in sacrificing his own life for change:

“Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.”

The path to our survival starts with looking inside ourselves and becoming the best we can.