Calvin Ross, Our Lives They Are a-Changin’

By 1964 we had graduated from East and taken a four-year stride into our future—maybe in the workplace, maybe married, maybe a parent, maybe in college. That was the year Bob Dylan released an album with the title track song “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” It became an anthem for the changes shattering the established order of that time. The first verse sets the tone:

Come gather ‘round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

Little wonder his song struck a chord with American audiences. You can likely recall mental images of civil and political turbulence then: black batons striking and dog teeth snarling, city buildings in flames, and widespread protests against Americans dying on Southeast Asian soil. By one account between 1964 and 1971, there were 752 riots and 15,835 cases of arson (WSJ; June 5, 2020; A17).

Now the entire earth is assaulted by a COVID-19 invasion that crashes coastlines then comes in swells like alien, half-mile high tsunamis sweeping inland from country to country. Furthermore, in America racial unrest persists in an apocalypse of long repressed truths about us and our society. While we wait for large scale scientific and political solutions, each person faces an existential question: “What of me now with macro social and microscopic powers threatening my accustomed order, my money, and my breath-by-breath life itself? With demons grinning-in all around, how summon my higher angels?”

Except for three decades ago when my marriage nearly ended, Ross family life has never been as imperiled as it is today. My wife Nancy’s type 2 diabetes, while controlled by lifestyle, still increases her health risks. My hypertension, though managed by meds, raises mine. Daughter-in-law Casey’s Parkinson’s disease, son Dan’s work as an ER physician, and daughter Elizabeth’s as an occupational therapist with ICU patients increase their vulnerability.

During these uncertain days, I’ve been encouraged by three writers. First, is Peggy Noonan. In an essay entitled “A Plainer People in a Plainer Time” Noonan surveys the pandemic’s grim effects. She then writes, “As the lockdown forces us to turn inward, we rethink what’s important and what we were meant to do.” She continues, “Here is what I am certain of. We will emerge a plainer people in a plainer country, and maybe a deeper one. Something big inside us shifted.” (WSJ, May 23-24, 2020 A15) Noonan mentions the editor of Vogue magazine who commented that for the first time in ages no high fashion model is on the cover of Vogue. It’s simply a rose.

Something has shifted in me, something akin to Richard Rohr’s notion of falling upward. I’ve started reading the New Testament not for professional, but for personal reasons. I’ve begun to push aside external trappings for clearer glimpses of an interior self. While I’ve not seen there anything like Vogue’s front cover rose, I’m turning introspective pages toward a singular faith reflective of Soren Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.

Next, I cite Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winning poet. From your own wanderings in poetry, perhaps you’ve read her “Instructions for living a life” in her poem “Sometimes” (Red Bird [2008] 37):

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

If ever a time called for us to pay outward and inward attention, to be astounded whenever our eyes dilate in delight or danger, to hear whispers from ethereal realms upon our mortal ears, to tell and to write about it, that time is now.

Finally, I return to the lyrical insights of Bob Dylan. In the second verse of his signature song, he calls on us to prophesy with prudent imagination. It’s a verse to print, to read and re-read for its rhyme to artistically anchor in our literary unconscious:

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’

The coronavirus spin unleashes uncertainty loosening fears of loneliness and death. How shall we then live? Peggy Noonan, Mary Oliver, and Bob Dylan hold high a banner. Its message: Turn Brokenness to Blessing. Let storms of incessant lightning illumine pathways to a simpler, more graceful, authentic life.

Starting with our first sophomore day at East in the fall of 1957, you and I have walked a lifelong journey since our seasons of bustling down locker-lined hallways to the next class or meandering home after school up Douglas Ave or along Grove. As we now pick our way on COVID’s craggy terrain between narrow canyon walls, may we find a pace and enough rest and energy to share experiences and insights with our children, grandchildren, relatives and friends, or here on the class website. Whatever is important to you will mean the most to us. Put your epiphanies on paper.

What are your counter punches to the pandemic’s bare-fisted blows? Have you been lifted by warm, rising thermals to transcend wind shears of fear? Remember the poet’s encouragement to tell about it. Let’s get a-writin’ on how our lives “they are a-changin’.”