A Turning Point

I just turned a corner with a recent birthday. 63. Not sure if I’m almost there, or still have a long way to go. But it feels like I’ve turned a corner.

Perhaps it is the huge life-changes that have taken place in the past year. A year ago I was voting—and waiting for the election results. I was struggling to pull together a writing life and find my place in the religious community I’d been a part of since 1982. I was still coming down from a summer bike trip of over 2,400 miles, Chicago to Seaside, Oregon. I desperately wanted to know the future. Then . . .

I got the call that a close friend had Covid and I was immediately thrown into testing, quarantine, observing my birthday inside the 4 walls of my room. Even my birthday ice cream was being held hostage in a refrigerator down the hall that I was not allowed to access until the results of my test were clear. The whole time I waited: to hear who would be our next president and if I was going to die, or maybe die if I had Covid.

I wondered what life held for me.

More than anything I felt like I was living a shadow life, as if walking through a fog, a continuous state of jet-lag. I recognized it was more than wanderlust, a desire to be elsewhere—but to be home.

Where was that place?

It had never occurred to me that I might actually move away from Chicago, from my religious community. I’d been there for almost 40 years, through festivals, summer-killing heat, gang wars, the start of the shelter, run-ins with the alderman, black lives matter, gentrification, and now a pandemic. But now, I felt like a tape measure that had hit the end, that tug of resistance where it can go no farther. I had to ask myself: What do you want?

And, I didn’t have a good answer. I have known since a child that I had a sense of mission, a need to be involved in charity work of feeding and clothing the poor. I wasn’t ready to give that up—but the poor was being shipped out of neighborhood, pushed out by luxury highrises, TIFs meant for schools given to developers, egregious zoning decisions that drowned out the lower and working classes. Yes, there were tents under the bridge and still litter on the streets, but the voices being raised, objecting to the presence of the poor, the marginalized, chattered in the background. How much fight did I have left?

Politics and news had combined to push me down. I needed a fulcrum, a balancing point.

So I decided to take it in stages. A sojourn. I left the end of December 2020 on a plane with a bicycle and a suitcase to Eugene, OR. I would spend the holiday through the birth of my grandchild—and possibly longer. Within 10 days I had a grandson, a job, and an apartment. A new mission.

Now in Michigan, things have fallen into place. Not yet home, but I feel like I’m turning a corner. A new life and a new sense of purpose.