Dirt Roads

This is the world we live in

And these are the hands we’re given

Use them and let’s start trying

To make it a place worth living in

— Disturbed feat Phil Collins — Genesis

I remember vividly, as a young girl, having deep conversations with my mother. Last night, I had one of those with my son. We usually talk about topics like…”What happens when we die?” “What is heaven?” Or “What happened to the Internet?” On this night, we talked about his generation, and his thoughts made me pause. After taking my dogs, Maggy and Atticus, for a long walk, my son and I decided to drive over to Charlotte to pick up my grooming scissors that I had left several days before to be sharpened at Blackhawk Hardware. It was already dark, and so everywhere we looked, Christmas lights twinkled. It was shortly past six, so traffic was still quite heavy. As we exited the interstate, we could see airliner after airliner, coming and going, lights twinkling in the sky. We mentioned how many people there were in the air, even with the new COVID variant about to explode. “Where might they be traveling?” we thought? We decided maybe somewhere far, far away, and yet as Thomas à Kempis once wrote, “Wherever you go, there you are.” Where we were was on the ground, traveling on a dark road, and we would arrive at Blackhawk in just a few lights. At every corner, at almost every intersection, homeless people were asking for a means to survive, as cars flew by them; only one slowed down for a gaze. It seemed people were in a rush, all going somewhere. No one, it seemed, was really right there, where we were, in that present moment we called Christmastime.

Blackhawk, I might mention, is an old, local hardware store that has recently been expanded. It is now two floors just full of an array of very interesting stuff. Of all the places this holiday season, in my mind, it has felt the most festive, in a very timely, yet nostalgic way. I fell in love with their bird ornaments. Some were glass and some were carved from wood. The wooden ones were handmade, and painted in brilliant hues of nature. They had unusual lights for the Christmas tree and the yard. They had bird seed, Festool tools, paint, and cards to send by mail. Most of all, they had everything to remind me that tomorrow will come, and we should imagine it, build it, live it, and cherish it. I felt hope while exiting the store with my scissors in hand. The cold night hit my face as we ran through the parking lot to the car.

Once in the car, I noticed the stars, and their constellations were gracing the very dark sky. I said to my son, “Hey, let’s go to Southpark Mall.” He said “Okay,” and we hopped in his red MINI and drove the streets that felt very much like home, all the way to the mall entrance. Barclay Downs was covered in lights, the holy scene of Joseph and Mary on camels was lit up in colors and still displayed across from the entrance of Southpark, on Morrison Boulevard, just like it had been every other Christmas that I can remember. There was an eerie feel as we entered the parking lot; it was mostly empty, it was an unmistakable feeling of quiet, as we pulled into a space. There were no busy shoppers with bags of wrapped gifts, no Santa Claus waiting inside, no Frontgate outside of Belk with trees of every kind, no line at the door to the Apple Store, there was no feeling of Christmas joy anywhere. There was no feeling that a tomorrow was promised. It felt like the end of a good story where everyone disappears into the abyss, a few items hanging by hangers, and some unknown melody drones in the background as lives have been dismantled brick by brick. We walked the mall reflecting on the past and on the present, mentioning how sad the world has become, how lonely, how empty, how hollow we now exist.

Garren grew up most of his life in Charlotte, except for one year in Chapel Hill. He has noted the before and after memories of his world. When he was in kindergarten, he attended the Duke School, a rare jewel that Duke University had once created to study the psychology of learning. There was one standard of expectation at this school, and that was the ability to think. His fondest memory was the water pump on the playground where he and his classmates would, hour upon hour, build rivers and lakes, cities and lives, economies and governments…a world of their own. They were given time to just think and create, to ponder their existence. Too soon, however, we moved, and we could not replace this very special school. Life became a list of expectations, a list of standards that got in the way of deep imagination and thought. Although he had twelve more years of schooling to go, at that point, my son luckily had already experienced something different, something rare. He knew, for so many questions, that there were no answers in the back of a book, no A, B, C, or D that would be correct, and no true nor false in our paradoxical world. That things are not always best, the way they have always been done. I think he always knew there was much that was possible, yet overtly ignored, out there, in a world that sadly seemed always for sale.

We walked quietly to the car. Once inside, we headed towards I-85 with a few side trips to look at lights that lured us, and the conversation turned to the hopelessness of the lives we all collectively live today. He said he was on Reddit the other day, and some guy had posted an experiment where he gave away all his current technology and instead lived like it was the year 2000. He found he was engaged with a remarkable amount of face-to-face interaction with actual humans, he spent less time at home, he met strangers in stores, he looked at real things, not at pictures online with 1000 reviews. Garren said that the thread became an interesting discussion of how his contemporaries were nostalgic for a time they knew once existed, yet barely remember. A time where malls were alive with human activity and an abundance of stores where you could actually touch and feel. I imparted onto his thought, “And my generation, so nostalgic for downtown stores and busy streets with people actually a part of the landscape.” We can’t live in the past, yet in some way we are denying our future, and my son’s future, too. He said the discussion on Reddit drifted to the loneliness of his generation. It began for them with the horror of 9/11, then the constant mass shootings, the financial global collapse, uncertainty, unrest, and now COVID and climate disaster. Gen Z, natives to technology, truly desire a real world, with real people, a sense of belonging that eludes them online. Where on Earth did we go wrong?

We agonize over the rise in depression and the rise of suicides in young people today, and we stare blankly and say, “Why?” So what exactly do we not get about the unanchored lives of young people today? How much trauma must they face? How many labels must we attach? How little time do they have to think? How many adults are in love with their unconditional lives? As we exchanged thoughts on the world today, we concluded how ghostly it all had become. We are all invisible skin and bones in a race to the unknown. And what will we find when we arrive? Maybe we need more water pumps on the playgrounds. Maybe we let our children get dirty and wet and create the world they deserve. We can no longer sit by and just offer them thoughts and prayers.

We kept driving on the empty highway. A few eighteen wheelers rolled past. We exited on a highway I have known my entire life. Garren has had many homes, many cities, many faces, and finds it hard to comprehend my growing up and only having one place, and yet, he feels the lure of having a dock in which to anchor. He mentioned all the multi-story apartments in Charlotte being built on every corner and on every empty space. He said, “I don’t think we want what THEY are forcing on us. I think we want something else. We want a chance to live without anxiety, without fear.” I looked at the darkness on the two-lane highway ahead of me, and I said, “Maybe your generation deserves more dirt roads. More wilderness. Maybe the chance to make this place your own.” He was thinking and said with a certainty, “Maybe so. I really think so. Maybe we all do.”

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. — Robert Frost

Art- “Dirt Road” by Joe Alleman