People Live Here

 

From the time I was a backseat passenger in my family’s Chevrolet station wagon on trips to visit relatives in Minnesota or Nebraska, to vacation in sunny California, or to get away for a weekend to cabins in the Rockies, I remember looking at the tiny towns we passed, the isolated houses, once just a single-wide mobile home in the middle of the Arizona desert, and marveling–people live here. What do they do? How do they manage, so far away from, well, everything?

As I began my October journey, across the miles of open country of northeastern Oregon and into Washington, passing these small communities and homes, I wondered these things again, but I also found myself making assumptions: These people don’t watch the NewsHour. They will never hear (or hear of) Billie Eilish. They don’t like me and my kind, zipping through their territory in my shiny new Forester (goD, I love this car!), on my way to somewhere worthwhile. What sad, small lives, I thought.

But as I drove, I was also listening to The Midnight Library, the story of a woman, suspended between life and death after turning to suicide, who is given the chance to live briefly in any life she left behind when she made a decision she now regrets. Her not-so-profound discovery, after testing out multiple versions of her life, is that nothing is perfect, which, of course, makes everything perfect. In that light, these small-town, small-scope lives seem just fine. Given a different decision, somewhere along the line, this could be me. These people are doing what all people everywhere are doing–making do, looking for connections, finding joy and sadness, hope and despair. And it’s fine.