THURSDAY: LOOKING FOR THE DOOR INTO SUMMER
My roommate my senior year in college, the late, great Mike Treman (RIP), got me hooked on the science fiction and fantasy stories of Robert Heinlein. I’ve read all his books, some of them several times. They are great stories, usually either great stories for young adults or the other kind , with very adult subjects and events.
One of my favorites, the PG-rated kind, is called the “Door Into Summer.” IT’s about an inventor living with his cat, a feisty tomcat names Pete. Pete HATES the snow. When winter arrives, he spends much of his waking hours going from door to door in their house and meowing for it to be opened, hoping it would be the door that leads to the warm sun of summer. There’s a lot of other things that happen as well, but that’s enough for this blog.
Hastening summer is not our objective at the moment. It’s already showing its hot humid presence. Where we are, in central Oklahoma, summer means high temperatures and even higher humidity. Not ideal, but that’s not our primary concern these days.
What I, and I’m sure many, many others are looking for right now is the door back to normality, to a world that makes sense again. It was far from perfect, all sorts of issues and problems to face every day. But the longer this goes on, this abnormal world, the more we yearn for a return to what we used to have, as bad as it might have seemed.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got it pretty good right now. We have a safe place to live, a full pantry and refrigerator, even access to the internet to see how the rest of the world is coping.
But I’m like many of you. I miss friends and family (I REALLY miss the grand-kids!). I miss going to the store and not worrying about keeping my face covered, watching what I touch, and figuring out what to substitute for things I can’t get. I miss the brothers and sisters of my church family.
Maybe this will have a positive effect. Not the deaths and sickness. Those will always be bad, horrible, negative. And the restrictions on social gatherings already have serious economic effects on many people and organizations. some of which will be permanent.
But maybe we can find among all the doom and gloom some bright spots. Maybe we will see that a kinder, gentler world where we respect each other more, give each other a break that we might not have before.
Maybe we will discover that while we can’t attend services in a church building, we can still worship God, in ways we hadn’t considered before.
And maybe we will develop an appreciation for other people for things that they’ve always done for us, we just didn’t see.
We’re all in this together. Maybe that’s the biggest, most valuable lesson of all.
