Mr. Industrious
Call me Mr. Industrious. Yesterday. I got my car inspected. Pruned a peach tree and dug up a dead one. I spent three hours burning a pile of brush. The burn ban expired four days earlier and a call to dispatch was requested before you burned. I called. I talked to a nice lady at the Sheriff’s department. Told her where I lived, what I was doing, and explained how the fire trucks could get in if needed. They weren’t. My pile of sequestered carbon went up without hardly a spark because I kept the fire small and a hose handy. Satisfying work. The youngest son helped.
In the late afternoon I watched a little TV and felt good about myself. That evening, my brother called, we talked, and then I got a text from a friend with a video of her granddaughter singing a song she wrote. At that point, I became Mr. Mushiness. The song was wonderful, its execution superb, and the child’s voice angelic. And then right as the song ended, the singer hit the last chord, muted the strings, looked at the videographer, and smiled, with her eyes and her face and practically her whole being. There is no other way to put it, my heart melted.
That song of lost love and that look of love made my day. Because I’m unabashedly a fan of love songs and people being in love, any sort of love. Sentimental to a fault. After all, love is where most of us live, in that space between two people who care about one another. And I feel it’s a space almost infinite in its depth and complexities. And it’s a space that probably exists between almost everyone we know. You just have to look. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard, but it’s almost always there in one form or another. And that prevalence of love, in all its permutations, is what makes it possible to survive the loss of love or a love. You know there’s more, and that knowing is what gives us hope.