A Touch of Grey
Thanks to the late Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia for the title and inspiration behind this week’s article.
I’m on staycation for a couple of weeks…
The original vacation plan was to be hanging one house from the beach in Harvey Cedars, New Jersey, for our first Long Beach Island family reunion in decades. As luck, a pandemic, family air-travel and moving-quarantine targets would have it, our numbers slipped from 12 all the way down to 5…
And as June and July unfolded and things seemed to get ever-weirder and more wobbly – including 35 Long Beach Island lifeguards (many from Harvey Cedars) testing positive after what was hopefully a party that allows them to see their silliness as somehow worthwhile – a big honkin’ beach house just made less and less sense and, with little left in our hands except maintaining our health and cutting our losses, we pulled the plug.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was a let-down of a call, if only because after months of business and personal travel limited to a few rooms at home – with the occasional foray out for shopping and take-out dinners – just the idea of a change of venue and surf-as-background music went way beyond appealing…
But, disappointingly, this was not to be the summer I’d imagined.
By the way, I’m simply reporting what’s gone down in my little corner…
And given the bigger picture of 2020, my little corner has become a fine place from which to view how good we have it, how, as my dear friend Kevin so often reminds me – with just a couple of notable “oh, so this is what it’s like facing life or death” exceptions – it’s hard to convincingly argue that I’ve ever had a truly hard day…
As an adolescent, I might have tried to sell you a different bill of goods – but as a conscious adult (on a good day) I wouldn’t so much as try.
Because I’m on staycation, I’m gonna keep this one short…
Writing from beneath an umbrella on the deck overlooking the woodsy back yard of our semi-suburban home in Upstate New York, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to imagine that the madness of the world of 2020 didn’t exist at all.
It wouldn’t take much for me to slip into thinking that, because I get to live this way in a neighborhood surrounded by others who get to live their version of the same, this is the way the rest of the world looks and lives…
Of course it ain’t.
Make no mistake, I’m absolutely unplugging and getting off the grid as much as I possibly can for the next couple of weeks. That’s what vacations are for, after all…
But as I’m going about the business of staycationing, I’m making it a point to do a keep a couple of things in my consciousness…
The first is a practice of counting the waves, if not those splashing on a wide beach, of the blessings and goodness my family and I get to enjoy. They are many and good.
The second is to remind myself over and over that the beautiful world of blessings in which I live is, at the same time, achingly in need of healing…
Both are true and bring to mind one of Hunter’s lines containing the title – more likely due to its poppy, radio-friendly groove than lyrical content – of what would become the Grateful Dead’s only hit: “Every silver lining’s got a touch of grey.”
One more thing…
I’m not mentioning any of this to encourage comparisons.
I’m asking that, regardless of your own silver linings and/or touches of grey, you keep looking at the World, your country, your family, your community, your culture in ways that allow you to count and hold, at the same time, both the blessings and wounds in need of healing…
Because even on vacation, the call to and for responsibility, attention, care – and gratitude – remains.