From a Distance

 In connection with the movie Beaches, starring Barbara Hershey and Bette Midler, Miss Midler released a song that got a lot of airplay on the radio in late 1989 and took on a second life being sung at weddings, funerals, and family reunions. The song is "The Wind Beneath My Wings."[1]

"Thank you, thank you, thank God for you, the wind beneath my wings," the character sings. Mirroring the plot of the movie, a popular and famous woman tells her dying friend, who was always in the star's shadow, that it was in fact their friendship that sustained the celebrity.

Miss Midler followed that song with another hit, "From a Distance," written by Julie Gold and first recorded by Nanci Griffith. "God is watching us," Miss Midler sings, "from a distance."[2] The songwriter says that she believes in the immanence of God and that her thoughts were more about the difference between how things appear and how they are.

Because of a pandemic, the SARS-Cov2-19, also known as a novel coronavirus or simply COVID, we're doing a lot of our loving from a distance these days, most painfully with the people in our lives who have always been the wind beneath our wings. The ones who have sustained us, helped launch us (sometimes more than once), given us lift, and run along the beach as we soared.

I was reminded of this just this past weekend. My parents have been married 58 years, uniting in matrimony on August 24, 1962, my dad's 28th birthday. The hubs and I packed a cooler with freshly cut fruit; turkey, lettuce, and bread; and a package of miniature cupcakes, and we drove east for a sort of a visit. 

Our family is famous, or maybe infamous, among ourselves for the frequency and quality of our hugs. Not in the last five months. 

On Saturday, we sat - my dad at one end of the dining table, the hubs at the other end, and me perched on the kitchen step stool, so that we were six or seven feet apart, and ate the simple supper I put together and talked, about baseball and marriage and birthdays. Even so, we were taking a chance, one I pray does not have health consequences.

Before we left, I phoned my mother, who for two years has been residing in an assisted-living facility some ten minutes from the family home, and we had a good conversation.

The hubs and I waved to my dad when we arrived, and we waved when we left. 

We didn't touch, not even when I handed over the cards and a small wrapped package. 

Dad's just turned 86. I know how blessed I am that I still get to enjoy my parents' company on this planet. They've been the wind beneath my wings for a long time. Maybe now I get to be the wind beneath theirs, a little, sometimes. 

But - along with everyone else - I'm wretched at this love from a distance thing. 

Rereading Job (as one does) recently helped put things in perspective. Job, a narrative folk tale that was being passed along orally more than a thousand years before the birth of Jesus, tells of a bet between God and Satan that raises questions about the whys and wherefores of evil but does not attempt to answer them.

In the end, Carl Sagan wrote (at the conclusion to his novel Contact), such vastness as the universe is bearable to such small creatures as we only with the promise of love, and the promise of presence.[3]

From a distance, or not - we are never alone.

[1] "The Wind Beneath My Wings." (c) 1989, Larry Henley and Jeff Silbar.
[2] "From a Distance." (c) 1987, Julie Gold. Miss Gold's interpretation of the meaning (c) 2005, "Here on Earth," Radio Without Borders, Wisconsin Public Radio on February 19, 2005.
[3]Contact (c) 1985. New York: Simon and Schuster.