Faux Endor
He went to West Point and did two tours in Iraq. Now he's stuck indoors.
Bishop Garrison is one of those people idealists think should be running the world. After graduating from West Point in 2002, he served two tours in Iraq with the U.S. Army. After that, he graduated from the William and Mary School of Law and worked in the Obama administration in a variety of national security roles before serving as the Deputy Foreign Policy Adviser on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Bishop has two Bronze Stars, a Meritorious Service Medal, and a Combat Action Badge, as well as the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service. I asked him to write something about how he sees the world right now. He took me literally.
by Bishop Garrison
It is eight-thirty in the morning. My household has been up for over two hours. The boy cries because I won’t let him draw on the floor with broken up Crayolas. I place my phone on the floor. There’s an app called Cosmic Yoga wherein a British woman with a cheery disposition mixes simple yoga poses with nursery rhymes and adventure stories. If this is a good morning, the instructor should hold his attention for thirty minutes, maybe. He does his own take on downward dog, but moments later he’s using me and the couch as a jungle gym. My wife is upstairs on an early morning call. That’s just as well – she’s thirty weeks pregnant, so subbing in as a toddler’s playground equipment wouldn’t be prudent for her right now. I ask him to hang in there until nine o’clock, then quickly remember he has no concept of time. He giggles while sliding head-first, face up off the couch again. I cringe, grabbing him before he lands awkwardly and twists his neck.
We’ll make this work. We have no other choice.
Same goes for the world. The future is as uncertain as it is unknown, but that’s nothing new. We are simultaneously more and less connected than any other time in our existence, so we feel things faster, stronger, and more definitively. The extremes of our experiences, the totality of who and what we’ve become feels incapsulated in breaths. We breath in: Microscopes can magnify down to a nanometer, twenty-two hundred artificial satellites are in orbit in space, and we can print three-dimensional objects in our garage. U.S. society has grown exponentially and matured quickly when compared to the entire length of the course of human history. But we exhale: every ten seconds a child dies from hunger; the polar ice caps are melting at a rate that will potentially create 400 million climate refugees by the end of this century; income inequality is at an all-time high. The lists go on. Now life is captured by a pandemic, a fly in a web. A research study stipulates the virus is mutating. Even as we slowly attempt to reopen the nation, we may find continue social distancing. Breath in, breath out.
I sit and look at the small forest across the street from our home. There’s a stillness, a quiet, in those woods. Emerald canopies and birdsongs in the distance feel like the planet Endor rather than Northern Virginia. For the first time in weeks it feels like Friday. That feeling won’t last. The news from our smart device leads with a quick mention of Ahmaud Arbery, the twenty-five-year-old man gun down while on a jog back in late February. The father-son team that killed him during what they claimed was a citizen’s arrest in a mistaken-identity situation are finally arrested and charged with murder. It took the release of the video and the subsequent social media firestorm to force the hand of the George Bureau of Investigation into taking on the case the local District Attorney declined to touch. This news is juxtaposed with the Department of Justice dropping charges for former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn for lying to authorities, twice. In its reasoning, the government stated that Mr. Flynn, also the former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, “previously pleaded guilty to making false statements. In the Government’s assessment, however, he did so without full awareness of the circumstances…” Some allies, including the President, hail him as a hero. I shot off a tweet the previous night comparing the two situations. Both instances simultaneously has the feel of an abandoned draft of a Grisham novel. His editors would have laughed him out of the room for being too obvious. Twitter trolls let me have it for comparing the two situations. They said I’m race-baiting. I take another sip of coffee and look out over the faux Endorian landscape and wonder what world they’re living in?
I hear a “Nastame” in that cheerful accent letting me know yoga’s likely over. He’s asking for Elmo now. First, we color for a while and play a few games. He’s made it well past nine. Elmo is discussing the word of the day as I take another precious moment to myself in the restroom. I glance in the mirror. Forty years crept up without me realizing it, but now I’m staring it in the face. With no barber or beard trim my age feels more pronounced, more uncomfortable. In the past, I rarely felt like an adult. My parents and their siblings were the adults. The gray of my beard and evolving hair halo hovering above my head tell me otherwise. Not deployments in war, not paying taxes, not marriage or fatherhood or home ownership did that. It’s the vanity condensed in my white and thinning hair accompanied by crows’ feet and bags under my eyes. That’s how I arrived at adulthood at forty. As a goof, a friend bought me cheap Wilson knee-highs and Adidas slides for my birthday. She joked that it’s a standard look for old black fathers, pairing well with arguing over what makes for good barbecue and how good Jordan would still be in today’s NBA. I have argued both points multiple times in the last year. Apparently, I’ve been leaning in all this time without realizing it. There’s an absurd beauty in that, a splendor, I have difficulty describing in that moment, but it’s there. I try to remember that as I return to the news, sitting at my computer in those socks and flip flops.
A lo-fi hip-hop channel on YouTube plays in the background. I hope it will ease me back into current events. The worst job report since record-keeping began in 1948 is the first thing to greet me. 14.7% of Americans are out of work, the highest rate since the Great Depression. Next, store workers are having to enforce safety standards. “They’re all behaving worse,” a customer-service rep says in the Associated Press quote. “Everyone’s on edge.” The day before in a Family Dollar in Michigan, a security guard told a customer to put their protective facemask on. An argument ensued. The customers left and returned with a friend who later shot the guard. He died. He was only three years older than I am now. I rub the bald spot a little. The boy is watching a Disney Junior show now. He took it upon himself to change apps. He looks up at me with a toothy grin, then goes back to “Sheriff Callie’s Wild West.” Back on my screen the news tells me a polar vortex could rip through the East Coast and create rare May snow. Some parts of the country could see record lows. In late spring. During a pandemic. With 33.3 million out of work, and new regulations on evictions not quite catching up yet, some are concerned we’re very likely to see a homelessness crisis soon. Now that vulnerable population will have a historic winter to contend with as well. There’s a certain touch of David Lynch absurdism to it all. The eccentricity of Twin Peaks with the utter confusion of the Mulholland Falls ending or every second of Eraserhead. It’s as though someone playing some joke or prank, and we’re all unaware. I decide that’s enough news for one morning. I see neighbors out of the window walking their dog, and we exchange waves.
We haven’t had a true opportunity to meet any of them beyond a shout at a distance. They all seem very welcoming. When I take the boy out for a walk, my next-door neighbor shouts out to me, and we talk at a distance. She tells me about our street and the history of the area. My son is interested to see a new face for a bit but quickly loses the thread and asks to see the neighbor’s dog. After commenting on how cute the boy is, she adds that we should watch out for birds of prey in this area. She had a shih tzu once, but it disappeared. She and her husband suspect an owl or hawk hauled it off. I look back to the shadowy branches of Endor swaying in the breeze. Yeah, that tracks. Five seconds later he cries for bubbles and won’t stop hitting my leg. I thank her for the conversation, and we return home. He’s already forgotten about both requests. The evening is quiet now, and the sounds of Faux Endor have settled. There is a silence around our house that I give thanks for. The Cardinals in the Eastern Redbuds across the street have ended their performances. They are replaced by someone is playing karaoke on the hill behind the trees where only glimpses of brick homes and wooden decks can be seen through the greenery. They’re singing an ‘80s hair band rock ballad I can’t identify, but there is a pleasantness to it all. It feels as close as I’ll get to any type of live performance for a while. I think about the word “splendor.” We don’t use words like that enough anymore, or maybe I’m just not reading the right material. Or maybe there just isn’t enough splendor. It feels as though this moment creates a barrier to grandeur. The exhaustion drains me. And I’m tired of being angry and frustrated with the world. I need the stillness. My mind demands the moments of silence even if they never last long.
I think we’ll maybe get this right after all? Flynn’s being hailed by his compatriots as “Trump’s Mandela.” Somehow, everything is simultaneously crystal clear and utterly clumsy. I take another sip of coffee. The trees of Faux Endor rustle in a strong breeze. The song in the background is in transition. The beat fades, new track plays, but the music is still back there. It’s always back there. Horns keep blowing.
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