Once Upon a Time

How contemplation re-weaves life’s fraying ends

Once upon a time, I was a Ranger. The high school from which I graduated in the early 1980s had as its mascot a Ranger, as in one who works on an iron range, because a couple of generations earlier this community was formed from the steel industry’s quest for raw iron ore. My peers’ grandparents and great-grandparents emigrated from southeastern Europe and Finland at the turn of the last century to work at what they knew best: they mined. Local history recounts raucous times in those early days between miners and their employers, so much so that in December 1932 one Karl Emil Nygard was elected the nation’s first Communist party in this small, north-central Minnesota town.

Sixty years later, when I was a Ranger, all that remained of those days was a large open-pit mine which has become Portsmouth Mine Pit Lake, the deepest lake in the Land of 10,000. I was a classmate of many of the descendants of these first-generation Americans, and it was often a rough-and-tumble social experience for students gathered from four smaller communities in a consolidated school district. I grew up in a rural area eighteen miles north of the high school community, and my forbears were loggers and erstwhile farmers, not miners. And sadly, I grew up to reflect little of my local culture: while I loved the outdoors, I was not a hunter, I was not an athlete, I was not a logger (though my mother did her best to drag me into the woods with her to load large chunks of wood onto trailers for our winter fuel), and I was no farmer (ditto the previous maternal efforts for me to weed or harvest the garden produce).

I was a Ranger in name only and found my identity in the arts and academics. I dabbled with debate (too much research and confining hortatory conventions for my tastes), enjoyed some time on the stage acting (though with little talent, buried or otherwise), participated in competitive speech, tooted an alto and baritone saxophone all those years, and eventually ended up my senior year as Class President, much to everyone’s surprise (including my own). I was not part of the Ranger “elite” (an oxymoron of sorts), but I found myself hurled into a leadership role that I loved. In my own way I was a bit of a firebrand by my dismissive attitude of school administration, but I finished my senior year feeling like a very different person, having been voted Most Likely to Succeed by my peers.

You may wonder what elicits these reflections on a Substack largely taken with my slog through grief. It began this morning when I left my home quite early to drive more than an hour to watch my twelve-year-old grandson (who carries my middle and last names) play his final game of the baseball season. Earlier in the season his dad had told me the team had done pretty well, so my expectations were (too) high. Throughout the season, my grandson explained to me following the brief game, “We just sorta fizzled as the season went on.”

All that to say that when I arrived at his game and looked across the baseball diamond, I was struck by my grandson’s team’s uniforms. They were maroon and gold (my high school colors), and their team name is the Rangers. Although I never played baseball (or any other sport for that matter) in high school, I was immediately taken back in time to another era of my life, one largely tucked away away in the recesses of my mind. Post-high school I have returned infrequently to visit family, all of whom live eighteen miles from my high school town. Due to vocational assignments and educational pursuits and busyness with my own children’s lives throughout the past four decades, I have been disconnected from my early educational and social roots.

But this morning as I pondered my Ranger days and my grandson’s current Ranger days, a sense of completion eked into my lonely soul. Learning to live without my life partner of thirty years is like discovering a loose thread in a favorite garment or textile. At first glance the loose thread appears annoying and out of place, and the natural human inclination is to pull at it, to make it disappear. Sometimes it works; the thread snaps loose and based on appearance it seems like things are back to what they once were. But in a matter of time (sometimes a short period of time) the loose strand serves to unravel progressively the remainder of the textile, until what you hold in your hand is not a beautifully woven tapestry, but a mass of twisted, knotting string. It may be one string, but without its weave it serves no practical or aesthetic purpose any longer.

For me grief is an attempt to re-weave my life’s fraying ends. What I once contentedly took for granted is no longer certain. My life doesn’t feel the same, it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t provide for me what it once did. Left unabated, grief will tug at that loose string until my life is an unwieldy mass of disparate fibers, lacking meaning and purpose and direction.

In my contemplation (which is growing on me as a spiritual practice), I continue to seek ways to re-weave the strands of my life to once again make sense of it all. I recognize that it will not look or feel the same anymore; it is so very different, even though most of the my life’s strands are present. For grievers like me, it is a daunting daily necessity to allow the errant strand to exist, even while we repair the remaining fragments of what we once knew.

Following today’s game my young Ranger met my old Ranger. I wanted a picture to remember the moment, so I handed my phone to my son. I squatted down to be more on my grandson’s height level and we momentarily navigated our shared space. In the blink of an eye, I heard my grandson advise his dad, “Wait. I want to put my arms around Grandpa Bart.”

Once upon a time I was a Ranger, and then life moved me in many other directions, becoming better year by year. Until it wasn’t: Claudia died and my life began to unravel. But this morning, embraced by my grandson’s sun-burnished arms and next to his beaming face, I felt a few more frayed strands of life fit back into the tapestry of what is becoming my new life.

And maybe, I think, my new life will one day be good once again.