Our society is based on so many constructs, on the collective belief that things mean something…money, laws, religion, ethics. In many ways right now we are governing ourselves. I thought about this as I was driving to work yesterday.

There was no one on the road. Usually I have twenty cars in my line of sight. Yesterday I had three. We were all going seventy in a fifty-five, which is standard for route 9. There’s usually that one jackass who flies by at 80, in a Camry or Tercel clearly not made for that purpose. That person didn’t show up yesterday. And I thought to myself, “we could all be that person today”. Who’s going to pull us over at a time like this? The cops don’t have PPE. Is speeding really a priority?

And just then I passed a cop parked in the median. And we all flew by at 70, instinctively braking too late and insultingly, like we were going to fool Dad when we got home late reeking like rum. And do you know what the cop did? He flashed his headlights at us. To warn us about him. Like we all do about him as well. I laughed out loud in my car. We had gotten the “don’t do this again – I’m very disappointed” from Dad.

And it made me think about the spirit that I’m seeing for the most part these days, that we’re all in this together. We are separate, we are isolated, but we are sharing and supporting – in stores and on mom’s pages and on the phone. In any way we can. For the most part we are banding together against a common enemy. It’s heartening, especially considering how very heartbreakingly divided we’ve been. I’ve been sharing it with my children. Finn is most touched by this. He is my sensitive child – the one who once said that he believes that there aren’t bad people, just good people doing bad things because they’re trying to survive.

It also made me think of a line from a sign by Jesse Malin, that references “a town called “resume speed””. I grew up in that town. Lake Wylie got a fast food restaurant when I was in high school. It got a stop light when I went to college. It never got its own postal code, sharing it always with the larger and older nearby town of Clover – “the town with “love” in the middle”.

I am grateful to say that I loved growing up there. I didn’t actively appreciate it, but I loved the beauty and adventure of hiking King’s Mountain, I loved that I could build forts in my own woods if I avoided the chiggers, I loved that my backyard had its own four-wheeler track. In middle and junior high school I loved the Rescue Squad dances, where they’d pull all of the ambulances out of the bay and set up a dee-jay and disco ball and let loose a bunch of ten to thirteen year olds to learn how to dance like the Holy Spirit was no longer between them and decide that French kissing was no longer disgusting. We’d spend or our quarters on soda and eat Little Debbie’s with reckless abandon. Though this was the South in the eighties. People did that anyway.

I loved cruising the railroad tracks in downtown Clover in high school (there wasn’t much to do). I loved hanging out at a place that was, and we literally called it, “The End of the Road”, at the end of a gravel road that my friend Jennifer lived on. See above – there wasn’t much to do. I loved parties at the guy Chris’s house in Charlotte who was older, and bought us alcohol, and we once played a round of liquor golf with a different drink in every room. That ended badly.

I loved my job at Harris Teeter, the local grocery store. I made $4.25 and I couldn’t believe they paid me. I remember trying to get the highest items per minute on the scanner and knowing the codes for produce and the things that often wouldn’t scan. I still know bananas are 4011. I still know the ten digit code for the store brand two percent milk. I have a friend who remembered my mom’s phone number four years later from when you had to write it on your check if it wasn’t included. That was thirty years ago, when we still had some expectation of privacy.

I loved skipping school for Lollapalooza in the second week of senior year. Do they still do that? I think it’s been replaced by much cooler festivals where they burn things and take ayahuasca. I remember eating popcorn chicken with my friends at the KFC in the late morning hours before we went, basking in a parent-approved day off, prepping to see Eddie Vedder under the sun and, later, Anthony Keidis’s voice break out through the darkness. The Jesus and Mary Chain was the angst that all of us felt, pent up teenage emotions that conflicted and wouldn’t learn to live peacefully for years, if ever. Ice Cube voiced something that a bunch of white kids from South Carolina could never understand, but that didn’t stop us from fumbling the words and trying.

I had dark times, and I had times when I grew up on fire with life. I have a somewhat eidetic memory, a blessing and a curse, and I can still feel the emotions of all of those days.

I wonder what our children will feel about this time. We didn’t know anything like this. We are the free-range generation, the latchkey kids, the children of the Challenger. Our children will have COVID, global warming, a political divisiveness rarely seen before. We are a day late and a dollar short on many things for them. Let’s show them in this crisis that we can stand together while apart. Let’s stay connected while not physically connecting. Let’s hold each other up without hugging. Let’s touch each other’s hearts, even while we cannot touch. Let’s show them we’re unstoppable.

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