Cracked but not Shattered

There I was, driving down the road minding my own business, and – BAM! Suddenly a huge turkey was right in front of me, on my windshield.  I’m not kidding.  It was gone almost as quickly as it arrived, perhaps surviving the crash.  But the glass in front of me was transformed, and not in a good way.   I could barely see through it, and some small shards were now scattered in the car.  And yet, the windshield held together, no doubt by sheer force of will.

After calling to share the joy of the experience with my husband and anticipate insurance claims (isn’t that partly what marriage is for?) I continued on, slowly, to fetch my son for his orthodontist’s appointment.  Although at first it seemed crazy to try to drive anywhere with the car in this condition, soon enough it seemed like the best, or maybe just the only, option.  If the glass didn’t have any plans to shatter in a million pieces, then the least I could do was to keep going…and make sure my son sat in the back.  From the outside, I later discovered, the windshield didn’t even look so bad at all.  From the inside, however, it might as well have had the word “VIOLENCE” spelled out in big letters.

This happened in my particular life last Tuesday, the day after the tragedy in Boston.  Reverberations, maybe?

The strange thing is, I had already been dealing with another kind of crack  — also a real one you can see – in a valuable family possession.   About eight years ago, we decided to buy a cello.  Our older son had been playing the instrument since first grade and was sticking with it through high school orchestra; it seemed a good bet that he would go into the great beyond (college and after, I mean) still interested in making music.  So we took the plunge, bringing home a beautiful and sonorous  European creature, made of fine wood. After the baby grand piano — such joy in that purchase! –and not counting the mundane cars in the driveway, this would now become about our most valuable item in the house.

As it turned out, the cello did not accompany the first son to campus but waited patiently in our living room for the next son to take it up, after he too went through a series of rentals and graduated to the full size instrument.  Then, just last fall, it went with that son to his school, where it mysteriously developed a long, visible crack sometime over the winter months.  The music teacher noticed it first, being accustomed — no doubt — to these unfortunate developments.  The culprit?  Not a boy being careless in his carrying (this time, anyway) but most likely just excessively dry air in a closet.  Apparently, it can be perilous just sitting around if you’re a cello.  When we think about it, though, isn’t it true that sometimes damage happens not with a BAM! or a WHACK! but with a surreptitious creeping up?

The trusted proprietor of our local instrument shop, from whom we bought the cello originally, took it in compassionately – as if it were an injured bird – and did a splendid repair job.  He had to remove the whole top, glue the crack, and then install “cleats”  (small spruce strips fitting along the length of the crack, going cross grain) before doing various other things, like making a whole new bridge, to reset the top back on the body properly.  Now, you’d never know the wood had been anything other than smooth and perfect in its rich, coffee-colored terrain.  It stands ready to produce beautiful measures of Bach, at the hands of whichever son takes it up again.

As for the windshield, that’s all fixed too – or rather, replaced.  After making a call to the appropriate company, I enjoyed the convenience of a cheerful guy coming right to my driveway to do a kind of “abracadabra” with cracked glass:  now you see it, now you don’t.  He even said it was OK for the dog to be outside while he worked.  I didn’t watch the whole procedure, but I know it must have involved some serious vacuuming.  Later that day, I was off to Maine, with a completely clear view of the road ahead.  The brochure that the guy left me has this thought-provoking company slogan on it:  “Because there’s a lot more behind your windshield than you think.”

My own “double crack” week was happening, as I said, in the aftermath of the Boylston Street bombing.  There, lives were cracked as well as shattered.  For those of us who weren’t there, it’s hard to know the full extent of the damage; on the other hand, we all felt some of it.  And we also were astounded and moved by the immediate, instinctive kindness and courage, not to mention degree of skill, of so many people who acted to save lives.  Now, we imagine the resilience of those who will be in a long process of recovery.

I suspect that cracks of one kind or another will keep appearing – in household items, in relationships, in the wider world.  Each time there is healing instead of complete succumbing or crumbling into pieces, I will be grateful.