Facing the Future: Silence and Miracles (because we need them more than ever)
The Miracle
Thanks to Jesse Gardner for sharing their work on Unsplash
Let me start with the miracle.
For me, the year began with a burial. This in itself doesn’t seem unusual; my grandmother used to say that an old year is like a tide going out, which takes people with it. The older one gets, the truer that saying seems: people’s lives seem to run out with the old year, stepping from one world to another as November becomes December, as December becomes a new year.
Last year was no exception for our family. We entered the Christmas season with one homegoing service and entered the new year with another.
That’s the reality.
That’s not the miracle. This was the miracle.
On the first Saturday of the year, the first Saturday of this new decade, I left the house to go to a funeral. Being a woman, I carried a bag. In that bag were the few things that one needs to go everywhere: my phone, my wallet, and my keys.
I needed my phone because this is the twenty-first century and one needs phones to stay safe and connected.
I needed my keys because this is Nassau and important things (like cars) and places (like home) mostly use keys to keep them secure.
I needed my wallet just in case something happened to one of those two necessities. I needed it just in case something went wrong somewhere. In case I needed to put gas in the car, call a tow truck, reward an angel ... just in case.
The phone was necessary also because I had been asked by my husband’s family, which is large and spread out across the globe and who could not all come to respect their aunt/great-aunt/cousin for the last time, to live-feed the funeral. The church was equipped to do a multi-camera feed, but the technician to whom I had spoken told me to set up the phone just in case. In the end, the phone was the instrument we used. In the scramble to set up the feed I emptied my bag. After the service I collected everything I’d used for the feed and went on.
That day I went to the church, the graveside, to the restaurant where the repast was being held, back home. In the evening I went to the theatre to serve in the bar.
It was when the time came for me to get ice for the bar that I noticed something: I didn’t have my wallet. I didn’t think much of it at that time. We women are used to the nuisance of switching bags. Most of us have more than one bag, even if, like me, one likes to travel light. I’d used the dress bag for church and I had brought the everyday bag to the theatre. I assumed that I hadn’t remembered to switch the wallet from one bag to the other. Nuff said.
But on Monday when the time came to pack my backpack to go to work, I couldn’t find the wallet at all.
We looked everywhere. Ours, thankfully, is a small house, so it didn’t take long to search all the places a wallet could be. It wasn’t there, or in the car, or in the yard.
I started thinking what I might have to do to replace it. Because wallets, I learned last Monday, are critical things. In mine I didn’t just carry money (there really wasn’t that much in it, anyway), but I did carry the most important pieces of plastic in my life: ID, insurance cards, bank cards. Last Monday I realized that to replace these things would take weeks, and to navigate that replacement would require long hours of wasted time.
I’m a Bahamian. I prayed. But I can’t explain the answer.
Words came into my head. There was no voice, no vision, no clap of thunder: just words.
Now because I’m a writer, I live with words in my head. They run through my brain like a river: words, and sometimes pictures, images of things and places past, but mostly words. Most of those words are fickle. They shine bright and silver like pilchers underwater, flashing in front of me and flicking away when I reach for them, running through my mind like water as I complete mundane tasks—showering or driving or washing dishes. They sound wonderful but they don’t stick, and when I sit down to write they’re far away, gathered in some ocean that I have trouble reaching.
These words were different. They were precise. They didn’t run or flick. They stuck.
Wait two days.
So I waited.
This seemed counterintuitive. People I told about the wallet asked me if I had reported the loss, if I’d called the banks, made the police report, started the process of replacement. They all said these were things I had to do right away. I’d called the church, called the restaurant, had the bar at the Dundas checked. The wallet was gone, and I had to drive on the road. If anything happened in traffic, I did not possess a physical license. If I needed to see a doctor, I didn’t have an insurance card to show. If I needed to pay for lunch or a ticket or a doctor’s visit, I didn’t have the means to do so.
But the words had stuck, so I waited.
Wednesday morning came. I got up and called the office to say I was heading to the police station and the bank to report the loss of the wallet. I went into the shower and batted away the words that came into my head.
When I came out of the shower, Philip was there.
He held my wallet in his hand.
It was found, he told me, in the roots of a tree in the Dundas yard. It was found by a child who was waiting for a class to start. Everything was in the wallet. There was no damage, there’d been no rain. No dogs or rats had got it. No one else had touched it. I tried to remember when I’d been near the tree. I’d parked there, but that was after I’d missed the wallet, after I’d looked for it to go for the ice. I thought about it, and decided just to accept it. I’d waited two days, and now the wallet was back.
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OK. So I don’t know what that means. I’m a Bahamian and the words I use to explain / describe this event are words like “praise the Lord” and “miracle”. I’m also a social scientist and skepticism is a setting that settles my brain. In my profession there are words we use like coincidence, like serendipity. But this seems to be just a little too specific an occurrence to be dismissed so easily. “Wait two days” is a very precise idea. And the discovery of the wallet was very precisely timed. The only thing my Bahamian mind can do with it is call it a miracle and say,
Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord.
September 1, 2020
I began this post on January 14, 2020. I never published it. I don’t remember why. But last night I came across it in my collection of draft posts, and thought that today, this day, is maybe the right time.
After Hurricane Dorian - ABC News
So I’m posting it now. Because this is the anniversary of Hurricane Dorian’s strike on our two northernmost islands.
Why now? Maybe because I’m still awed by the fact that this year, this decade, this awful send-it-back 2020, began with this thing I’m claiming as miracle, tiny as it was.
And certainly because these are dark and dangerous times in which we live. We need all the miracles we can get.
Fellow Bahamians, the passage of Hurricane Dorian revealed the greatest weaknesses and fissures in the nation in which we live. These are:
The inability of our central government to respond in any way to any major crisis that alleviates suffering or initiates recovery. Let us face this fact. After Dorian, our leaders sat back and stared, helpless, as the hurricane destroyed communities and drowned people. That was all they could do, because that is all our structure of government, with all the power and authority and money collected in Nassau, allows us to do. They are almost as helpless today, although COVID-19 has taught them, to some small degree, how to accept help and to admit their limitations. We haven’t yet freed up citizens to govern and to help themselves, and so we will continue to struggle to rebuild, to overcome.
The refusal of our leaders to get out of the way and let the citizens of the affected areas help themselves. This is as true of COVID-19 as it was of Hurricane Dorian. Communities can help themselves, if they are given the tools and the right to do so. But to give them that right, to share those tools, means to give up some elements of power and control from the top, and this is not yet sufficiently encouraged.
The reliance of our leaders on external assistance (which is not fairly or efficiently distributed) in the wake of the hurricane. Shell shock is a real thing, but our governments have been slow, too slow, to mobilize after natural disasters. This was as true of Dorian as it was of Joaquin and of Irma; it was as real for Grand Bahama and Abaco as it was for Long Island and Ragged Island. I have to say that this has changed somewhat in the face of COVID-19, where local expertise has been consulted, applauded, included. But we still have some way to go.
The continuing complete lack of practical response to the tragedy that was Dorian. Where are the shelters? The evacuation plans? The solutions? The alternatives? The contingencies? What have we put in place that suggests that anything will be any different if a storm like Dorian hit, God forbid, New Providence, come hurricane season 2020, 2021, 2022 and beyond?
We’re doomed. Unless we change our ways, change our structure, change the way we govern ourselves, we are doomed. No doubt about it. There is no way—no way at all—that we can stop a hurricane of Dorian’s magnitude from striking anywhere else in the Bahamas at any time in the future; and, given what happened to Abaco and Grand Bahama last year, the impact of such a storm on a place such as Nassau is unimaginable.
But inevitable.
I welcomed the tiny miracle of my wallet because it made me believe just a little that maybe miracles could happen on a larger scale, and maybe a generation of leaders will rise up—soon—with the vision and courage and determination to make the country better not just for themselves and their families and the people who worship them but for us all. Every citizen. Every resident. For us all.
We’re facing a future in which sea levels rise, hurricanes grow more severe, and COVID-19 will stick around.
We need something different, something better, something constructive to give us hope that there is even a future to face.
And so I hold to the miracle of my wallet because.
In miracles we all need to believe.