Fixing Doors, Unlocking Minds

I’m writing this over a couple of unexpected free days while my granddaughter, Maeve, stays home with a nasty cold instead of her usual Monday and Tuesday with my partner Mick and me. I am grateful she wasn’t here when the garage door broke Monday, forcing us to call someone to repair it as soon as possible. We were going to run to Target before Mick’s softball game for a brace for his injured thumb (a hiking mishap), but a spring broke, rendering the garage door opener useless. The two-car-wide door is too heavy for us to open manually. So, I wrapped Mick’s thumb instead, he called a teammate for a ride to the softball game, and I stayed home to wait for the repair technician.  While I waited, I did research for an upcoming One Minnesota Crone post.

It wasn’t long before a guy named AJ rode up our driveway in his white truck with assorted ladders and garage door parts in the back. He replaced the springs as well as the rusty cable that was only a thin strand away from snapping. Now the door works beautifully.

If only we could fix bigger things so easily. Things like minds slammed shut to new ideas, scientific evidence, and thoughtful discourse.

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Last week, I didn’t watch all of the State of the Union address. It wasn’t a matter of disinterest as much as whether I could stand to watch the combative behaviors on full display by our elected representatives. I did watch the last 15 minutes or so, relieved to hear President Biden deliver a fiery and coherent address. Then my relief turned to dismay as Alabama Senator Katie Britt gave her weird, creepy Republican response from the damn kitchen. Why, oh why, would a professional woman agree to such a setting for a speech of this importance? And why would she use a baby voice, enunciating every word like she was in high school drama class, to talk to grown-ups? Never mind that the response also lacked factual substance. I felt, for a few minutes, like the slide of our country into a heap of smoldering wreckage is inevitable, with these divided sides that will not work together even when it’s in their best interests to do so. The opposing views of how this country could and should function share almost no common ground, both sides vilifying the other, civil rights sliding backwards for women, LGBTQ+, and others who are not old white men or their complicit wives. Education goes undervalued. Critical thinking does not happen.

What does happen? Knee-jerk reactions. Fear-based gossip. Immigrant stories told without all the supporting facts. Potential solutions shut down before they can be tested. Minds closed. Guns drawn. 

And elected officials more concerned with re-election than doing the right thing.

I cannot and will not let that be where my mind stops. 

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There’s something about pouring paint, tilting a surface to make the colors run off the edge, swiping a silicon wedge across that same surface, then running a kitchen torch over everything to pop air bubbles that soothes me. The tactile-ness of it. The quiet of it. The elementary activity, using colors that match my mood or reflect what’s happening outside. This is where I go when I’m not writing, when I need another creative outlet, when my thoughts will not be still.

I can’t paint when Maeve is here. She is two-and-a-half; wet paint is a magnet for her little fingers. I save the kid watercolors for her, nontoxic paints that I can wash off her hands. My hands are encased in nitrile gloves, damp shop towels at the ready, an old apron over my clothes. 

This week, the colors I use are mostly blues: phthalo blue, cerulean blue, light blue. I decide to toss in some silver. I like hints of shimmer. Titanium white for the base color. 

My mind wanders as I mix the paints with Floetrol. When did Democrats become associated with blue? When I Google it later, I learn that the New York Times used blue for Democrats and yellow for Republicans in a special color map way back in 1908 to show the details of Teddy Roosevelt’s election, but red states and blue states weren’t a thing until 2000. I think red, the color of anger, is the better choice for Republicans. 

But I’m not here to focus on anger. 

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Opening a closed mind is a lot harder than opening a broken garage door. At least with a garage door, the broken spring is unmistakable. The rusty cable is right there in front of you. You remove the broken bits, replace them, re-engage the opener, and voila. You can open the door, take the car out, get to Target or softball or the next volunteer gig. You can go to work, to school, to the doctor’s office – all with your own vehicle that you’ve been lucky enough to park in a garage. 

Lucky. That’s the part we forget about a lot. If I were someone fleeing a war zone, a drug cartel, or climate change that rendered my land unusable, a garage door is not something I’d be worried about. It would be down to basics: food, shelter, safety. Closer to home, if I were trying to get away from an abusive relationship, I’d be worried about the same things. I’d be pretty pissed off, panicky, and sad if there was nowhere to go, if no one would give me or my family a chance to live. 

What someone is worried about or running from is not always visible. We can’t always see when someone’s luck has run out, especially when we’re not even aware of our own extremely good fortune.

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I think a lot about how mean everything feels right now. How many people are upset over immigration policies and health care and school curriculums and support for Israel vs. support for Palestinians. How Russia’s unending assault on Ukraine has become a hum in the background. 

Four years ago this week, things shut down because of COVID. For a brief time, we seemed to be united in trying to do something right, something good. Most people tried to be careful, respectful, sympathetic to those who lost family members and friends to COVID. Then some started chafing beneath COVID restrictions, George Floyd was murdered, Trump tried to overturn an election, anti-vaxxers raised hell. Compassion dwindled in supply.

We’ve never recovered.

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I’ve thought and thought and thought. How do we move forward from such a fractured place? I said earlier that I wouldn’t let my mind stop at the reactionary view offered in Katie Britt’s post-State-of-the-Union address. And I mean that, but, damn, it’s hard to get past it. Every day, I can’t resist the pull of the news, absorb story after story that involves violence, misinformation, selfishness, more reactionary talk. Sometimes, it’s overwhelming and I take a break for a day. But then I’m right back at it, convinced that it’s better to know what’s happening than not. 

There need to be more stories of compassion. Less lashing out in anger. More listening. More of that thing we learned in elementary school about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. I said earlier that there is almost no common ground between the two political sides. Not none. Humans all want to be happy and safe. 

Let’s start there. 

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cover image by kcmickelson 2024