Sustainer

Well, it’s been a rough week out here on the edge of the prairie.

On Monday night, Jon and I were driving up to the hospital in Grand Forks to visit a friend of ours who was comatose in the ICU. As the sun set on I-29 he asked if I had heard about Bob, another friend of ours.

“No. What’s up with him?”

“He accidentally shot his little girl.”

“Shot her?”

Jon nodded.

“How?”

“He was putting his rifle together for deer hunting…I guess the magazine jammed…somehow it went off. The bullet ricocheted around the room. He went and checked on her in the crib. She was quiet and awake, but when he picked her up…there was a lot of blood.”

“Jesus Christ. Is she alive?”

“Yeah. Sounds like she’ll be okay. They’re at Mayo right now. I guess it somehow missed all the major stuff. He told Jeff that he needs $20,000 just to get a lawyer. Jeff said he’d put collection jars out all over town. But it’s just a drop in the bucket. People don’t donate to a cause they know nothing about.”

I sent a text to Bob: “Hang in there, buddy.”

At the hospital, we flanked our friend’s bed, hands in pockets, searching for things to say. We were always glad when our paths crossed with his but this time the circumstances didn’t allow for any of the playful back-and-forth we had come to enjoy when in his company. His body limp, his eyes closed, his mouth slack-jawed and filled by a breathing tube. Our jokes and wisecracks fell on deaf ears. It was like playing badminton alone.

“How ya doin’ buddy?”

The birdie would sail over the net and fall silently to the ground, save for a steady beep from the heart monitor.

“Hey, how ‘bout them Cubbies?”

The ventilator would draw, then push sterile air into his lungs.

“Did ya hear the one about the Norwegian farmer?”

After a few minutes we told our woebegone buddy that he’d be in our prayers.

Tuesday, of course, was the big presidential election, which meant Wednesday morning some of us were rudely awakened by a bad joke—the reality that many of our neighbors were not who we thought they were. Apparently, a quarter of the voting population were willing to accept a candidate with zero working experience, a serious lack of human decency, and an exuberant endorsement from America’s most extreme hate group, effectively putting a juvenile orangutan behind the wheel of our country. (My apologies to orangutans everywhere.)

By Thursday night, Facebook had been flooded with reports of hate crimes from across the country—American citizens terrorized by other Americans, simply because they didn’t look like them. At the gas station, I overheard two retired white guys smiling and talking. “Yeah, all these people saying they were gonna move to Canada. I don’t see too many taking off though. I’d be happy to give ‘em a free ride. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

On Saturday, we drove up to Grand Forks again. Our buddy was awake, yet heavily sedated, and watching TV. “I suppose you know that Donald Trump is your new president,” Jon asked. Our friend conjured up all his energy into an exasperated grunt. Instead of forcing him to think, we just sat and watched NCIS: New Orleans with him. The audio was barely perceptible over the noise of the machines keeping him alive. Two of the detectives went to a pier to interview a lady, one of them happened to find a clue underfoot. “Hmmm, looks like some explosive putty…the same kind we took from the crime scene.” “What are the odds?” I sarcastically quipped. Our buddy grunted a laugh.

My phone chimed. I looked at it and then turned to our frail friend. “Bob sends his best,” I told him. To our surprise, he mustered his strength and moved his body! Leaning toward me, he spoke his first words: “Tell. Him. I. Send. My. Best. Too.”

Afterwards, Jon and I stopped at my brother’s for a visit.

“Well, how’s he doing?” my sister-in-law asked.

“Better than before, I guess. He’s in there. I think I got a laugh out of him. What a week, huh?”

“Yeah, I don’t know what’s gotten into people,” my brother said. “I almost got in like four accidents today. People parked in the middle of the road, people pulling out in front of me at the last second, people yelling out their windows. Something’s going on.”

“Yeah, everything’s a little off.”

I looked out the picture window at the waxing moon. “You know how people that work in ERs say that full moons are extra busy times? Maybe it’s the supermoon coming up that’s throwing everything off a little. I mean, the moon does affect us, it creates the tides, right?”

“Yeah,” he says, “and what do they say, our bodies are something like 60% water, so…”

So, anyway, the world keeps turning. Sometimes the tide is high and sometimes it’s low. Against all of our better judgment we try our best to make sense of it. Sometimes we are at a loss so we look to the heavens for answers. Sometimes we rely on jokes to fill the void.

As Jon and I were leaving, I shared one that Fred Eaglesmith told at his concert a month before: “I knew a Norwegian farmer that was so in love with his wife…that he almost told her.”

“Ha. Yeah,” my brother said while hugging us goodbye.

“Love you guys.”

“We love you too.”