Slowing Down in the Fast Lane

Slowing Down in the Fast Lane, or Down the River and Over the Falls

This is one of those days I feel as if I am reclining in my Lazyboy in the middle of a freeway, or another analogy would be that I’m on a small eroding island in a river. At any rate, with diminishing faculties and assets, my progress in life has slowed to a crawl. I sit and watch the ebb and flow of other people’s lives around me. It seems as if they are traveling at an ever-increasing speed as they rush down a river where tributaries keep adding volume to the water. As they go faster and faster I worry that they will not be able to navigate the rapids ahead. All the while, I am aware that my eroding island isn’t fixed, but somehow it is also traveling down that river of no return.

Last month some people foundered when they lost their homes and treasures to the huge wildfires that raged in Southern California almost to the Pacific ocean before the wind changed and turned the flames back to threaten or burn areas untouched before. Some people lost their lives or the lives of loved ones. The lucky ones have a special awareness of what to be thankful for this day that was put aside for Thanksgiving.

Getting back to the freeway analogy, yesterday as I drove on the country blacktop through an underpass, I saw on the freeway above me, many folks driving east for the Thanksgiving holiday. In the traffic mix were SUVs pulling trailers or ORVs, all gas-guzzlers. Their owners are apparently impervious to the more than $3.50 a gallon cost of gasoline that may already be $4.00 a gallon at remote stations. They behave as if there is no tomorrow. On this holiday they have family traditions to camp in the desert and to drive their dune buggies over the dunes of the park created for that sport at Glamis west of the Colorado River. Nothing yet has caused them to change their plans.

My holiday plans are not really plans; they are the result of the default conditions of my life. All the rushing about of other people touches me only a little. I have known an unlucly  couple for about eight years, who were recently made homeless by a combination of bad luck and bad management. They are living in a flimsy tent and paying their expenses at a county park by redeeming cans and bottles. I have become a fallback option for them. They are storing some of their belongings with me, and I have given a home to their old blind and crippled dog, Sherpa. At times I have given them food and supplies, and also loaned or outright given them money as I could spare it, for emergencies. Yesterday they came by to borrow money for gasoline. They, too, are going to the dunes of Glamis to collect discarded cans and bottles of the more affluent revelers on this holiday weekend. They have been told there are cans by the truckload to be collected and redeemed when the campers return home. They say they can collect another truckload at the rest stop not far from here. Sounds promising, and they promised to return my loan next Monday. I think they will.

My daughter lives in another trailer at this horse camp, and we had our Thanksgiving dinner yesterday at the annual feast put on by the Kiwanis club in Campo. It was plentiful and good. I have fixings for today, but I haven’t decided for sure if I will bother. My daughter will be working at home all day at her medical transcription job and doesn’t want to be interrupted. After my visit here with you, my Gather friends, I will probably watch the comforting movies scheduled on the Hallmark channel on TV. Later I will watch the news of all the people returning home from their holiday getaways. I sit here near the end of my life, I feel as if I were a ghost reclining in my Lazyboy in the middle of the freeway.