I ALWAYS WANTED A MAP.

I thought it should make sense, this life.

Children are pretty matter of fact. What is, is. I see it in the traveling families. Tonight we sleep by the road, tonight we sleep in a tent, now we must try to be quiet in the car. I saw it in myself, a military kid. Today we move across the ocean.

And maybe because I grew up traveling, maybe because maps were guides…well, maps and airport lights and beacons and static filled radio broadcasts—I have long thought of life in terms of travel. The dusty roads, the places we go, the people we bump into, share a moment with, remember, the journey ahead.

I always wanted a map.

When I was 8 or 9 I prayed a lot for guidance. I wanted an angel to appear, shiny and feathery, holding a map or maybe the directions that apparently were left out of my baby hand when I tumbled into this world, nicely wrapped in my caul, and totally bewildered.

The map would be large and scrolly. There would be some sort of ribbon, and there would be stars and dotted lines and maybe a picture or two. And the angel would point to a place marked You are Here and then show me, moment by moment, year by year, the paths my feet would take.

I saw it as sort of a tangled and meandering path, even then, but I knew if I prayed enough the angel would come, and certainly the angel would tell me what it was all about.

Because…well, let’s face it, it was all pretty confusing. Even to a fairly sheltered child. Death was happening, and there were things called wars, and my mother was not expected to live..and the angel just never came with the map. Other things happened that gave me some measure of peace, but…no map for a pilgrim’s journey.

Okay, I was an odd kid. But I think of that map that never arrived and I think we are making our maps day by day, step by step, all along the way. Our own designs, canny as any spider spinning. Our own trail of memories, encounters. Our own meaning, though maybe we’d never put it into words.

I saw the man early this morning as he rose from his shelter of bushes beside the freeway. He didn’t notice me, or my dog. We were well screened by redwoods, and on a higher road. He moved awkwardly, but I didn’t stop to stare. We had appointments with squirrels and stellar jays and ravens.

But I saw him later, sitting on a low wall. I nodded hello. He had kind, wary eyes. He nodded back.  When I next saw him, having completed my uptown errand, he was walking. And he was walking with a lot of pain.

I stopped. “Your leg is hurting you?” I made it a question, because it was ridiculously apparent that this was so, and probably my remark was stupid…but I needed to ask. Yes, he said. He said he’d broken his foot a few days before, and he was out sleeping rough and had no place to go, but he had made it to the local hospital.

They said there were two breaks. They said there wasn’t a thing to be done about them. They sent him on his way.

I told him about the health center and promised respect and…well, maybe there was something to be done? His knee was paining him a lot as well. Walking was hard. He figured…well, he’d heard there was a shelter up north and he thought if he could get the bus up there, and if he could have a bed, and if he could rest up a day or two…well, then he could go on.

He refused, gently, my offer of bus fare. I’m all right, he said. Just a little broken now.

I told him when and where the bus would come, and wished him a good journey, and a place to rest, and the ability to go on.

And here we are, all of us, on our journey. Not so far apart, though oceans might separate us, though some are in deserts and some in cities and there are crises and bombs and revolutions and terrors and great delights. And we are all, maybe, just a little broken, though we are lucky and our feet don’t pain us at the moment.

And no angel came with a big map.

But you know, I think I do know the way. It’s still confusing. Death is still around. My mother died…but after more years than we imagined. Things don’t make sense.

But it doesn’t matter. I take a step at a time. Sometimes I hold someone’s hand.  I try to love the journey.

Welcome the Wild Geese

Apparently there are flocks of wild geese enjoying the water that laps over the porch & window sills of the family house on the banks of the Souris River in Minot, North Dakota. I saw a couple photos today. The street sign was helpfully in the middle of the flood waters. Otherwise it’s hard to tell. One neighborhood under flood looks kinda like another, one shocked human, counting the losses, pretty much like another. Cats perched on rooftops—well, they look like cats. That one is a dead ringer for my old cat Perdita, but Perdita left this life years ago.

I wait for word from my brother and meanwhile chat with strangers, witnessing the unfolding of drama, connections, & concern from hundreds of miles away via the online stream of a family run North Dakota TV station.

I’m not from the Magic City myself, though my kids and I spent the summer before my mother’s death there at that now flooded house, and my brother has lived there since then, more than a decade now.

So I ask questions, and there, instantly, people tell me what they know. People trying to figure out their own futures—how to clean clothes for their newborn, where to go for clean drinking water—tell me how the mail is being delivered for the flood refugees, where the shelter is, how to find photos and information specific to my family’s neighborhood.

Lots of online hugs & encouraging words are exchanged. The TV newscaster has evacuated his 4 cats & doesn’t quite know when he’ll get to go back to his own submerged home.

He stays on all through the night. 11,000 people were evacuated. The waters are still high. Of those 11,000 most were taken on by friends, family, and strangers. Churches on high ground converted extra rooms to temporary homes. Some hundreds sleep on cots at the Dome, my brother presumably among them. When there are stories from the Dome I watch eagerly, hoping to catch a glimpse of his profile, a moment in the background. To know he’s really safe.

It makes me think of the thousands throughout this world who are separated from loved ones, who have no clear lines of communication. I’m lucky. I know this flood caused no immediate deaths. I know there is not—as in Japan—an unstable reactor in the process of meltdown. I know that—although there are certainly many soldiers on the ground—my brother need not fear them. I know no drone is likely to hit the shelter in which he sleeps. And I can send word out, however tentatively, however randomly, and know that, perhaps, word will reach him.

A kind stranger let him use a cellphone to call our Mississippi brother, the one who sold his cows because of the long drought.

Tough times all over. But I can’t sit remembering my mother or the house or the watercolor paintings my uncle did, the small family treasures floating somewhere through the floodwaters, the little birch tree, the lilies of the valley.

The wild geese look really content. And I’m impressed with the city, with the warmhearted reaching out to others, the kindness of strangers and the determination to survive, to do better, to have hope.

As I waited for word of my brother and the flood, two in person conversations struck my heart.

The first was an exchange with a young travelling girl who asked early in the morning when I opened the shop. I told her, and she waited patiently, and then came in—yeah, I opened up a bit early. She needed some water. I showed her the spigot and told her to be careful of my goldfish, and said “I’m sorry you had to wait; you should have just told me, I’d have been happy to show you right then”
And she said “well, I know businesses don’t like to have people like me hanging round.”
Nonsense, I said, you’re people. Period. And you’re just fine.
But I wondered at what hurts had proceeded our encounter, what insults, how many rejections.

The second came at an official meeting at which a colleague said “well, you’re an extremist” I looked at him, asking what that meant. He said “You believe this town should treat everyone as if they were human, welcome them with respect and kindness and open arms.”
“Yes,” I said.
“But no where on earth has that ever happened. How can you think that it could happen here?”

Well, I said, we always need goals…We can’t be stymied by “it’s impossible” or “it has never happened”.

And if we’d welcome the wild geese, we can welcome our brothers and sisters. Wherever, however we find them safe.

(the beautiful photo is by someone named, obviously, Ed Porter. I hope he doesn't mind my borrowing it.)