When I was thirteen, we moved to a rural neighborhood where the front yards were small forests and the driveways a mile long. If I went for a walk, I always had a posse of friendly dogs following me. They didn’t know where I was going; they just wanted to share the adventure. We’d wind our way through tick and snake filled woods and explore the Cahaba River, watching water ripple over rocks. At one point, I even had a horse and could ride there. It was quiet–a great place to practice poetry recitations or oral book reports.
I’d always read a lot. I’d read the fairy tales, the girl books and the horse books, but when I arrived at adolescence, I started reading fantasy and science fiction books by the library cartful. It was then I discovered H.G. Wells and his Invisible Man. What a cool concept! If I could turn invisible, I’d simply disappear at recess when teams were being chosen! The fact that Well’s main character, Griffin, ended up being beaten to death by the townspeople should have given me a clue that invisibility wasn’t all that desirable.
I’m not sure exactly when I became invisible. One day, I was out there fighting the good fight, raising my kids with the rest of my generation, and then I disappeared. I was as unseen as Caspar the friendly ghost or Harry beneath his invisibility cloak. Sales people quit making eye contact. Church leaders stopped asking me to serve. Professionals pushed on without listening to what I said.
In reality, I could still be seen (sometimes limping) and heard (although I might have to ask you to repeat your reply) but it required an effort quite a few were unwilling to make. After a while, an unbidden adapted adage seeped into my awareness: “With great age comes great uselessness.” Suddenly, there arose a real and eerie danger that I would give in and be sucked into this vortex of imposed invisibility. But something happened. A friend needed help.
She wanted to go to the therapy pool to rehab her knee, but she couldn’t drive. “I’ll take you,” I naively promised, never imagining that rehab hours were from 6-7 a.m. when it was still pitch dark and arctic cold (one of God’s little jokes on me). At-any-rate, I squeezed myself into a swimsuit and we kept going, pushing through warm water, lap after lap. And we weren’t alone; there were people who’d worked out there for decades, and it showed. If they limped, they limped with panache.
I don’t know much about them; most of the folks who come early come to avoid crowds. But I do know this: they show up. They might look kind of lumpy and bumpy in those swimsuits, but they’re there to work, not to impress people. They are determined to keep moving as much as they can for as long as they can. And they have formed an odd little club, these early morning splashers. They know each others’ names and say, “Good morning!” When they need to take a breath, they socialize:
“How was your weekend?”
“It was great. We had two hundred people at our farm for a wedding.”
“On Saturday, I fitted disabled veterans with golf clubs.”
“It was good, but I won’t be here for a while. I’m getting a tattoo.”
And then,
“He won’t be coming today; his daughter died.”
Suddenly, we are comrades. There is silence; movement suspended, grief respected.
The apostle Paul wrote about love. Among other things, he reminded Roman believers to “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep,” a thing which is impossible to do without coming in contact with people. There are all kinds of ways to do this; getting up early to meet with senior splashers is only one. But that spur-of-the-moment offer to help a friend helped me more than her. It connected me to a new group of people. A very good thing.
After all, God never gave me permission to become invisible.
