A Modicum of Effort

Essays

Jul 23

There’s only so much time in a day. I say this, knowing that I will review a fake baseball team and several fantasy sports teams for at least thirty minutes this morning. But that’s what I like. I used to keep stats for created Strat-O-Matic seasons with paper and pencil while lounging in solitude in my room in the red barn, entrails of smoke just outside my door.

In relationships, especially now, I think people expect a modicum of effort. I’m not sure I have it in me. I am staring down the rest of my life as the light gets progressively darker each day, and I have to decide where to spend the most precious thing I own: time. I just don’t know how much of it I still own.

It would be nice if you did this. I understand the sentiment, but I politely decline. I don’t go to parties. I don’t dance. I don’t know how to ride a bike. I don’t show up unannounced. These particles of preference are the atoms of my fleshy knapsack. My effort is a sidecar to that.

My grandmother crashed her car long after she should have still been driving, and it was the fire that lit the fuse. She also had cancer. She was older. I was far away, relishing the sun of Fort Lauderdale while attending law school. Every Saturday, after my flag football game, I would call her on the way home from my first cell phone: a Motorola with that skinny antenna that pulled up from inside of its body.

I knew she was getting worse, and I started to hide from it. I remembered from years of my mom being in and out of the hospital that hospital switchboards were a sunken treasure with one small clam at the bottom, no pearl. A cacophony of mixed signals and despair, and me on the line waiting to see if they could find her.

She was alone. Her daughter had died six years earlier, and they didn’t have a good relationship. My dad checked in on her. Her nephew did. Her great-niece did. She had support, but no one was there. I wish I had been there more, but my grief meter was weighing on my back like a hiker’s pack with a 1972 kitchen television in it. If you’ve read Kiese Laymon’s memoir, you get it. Heavy.

Effort is conditional. Sometimes you have more bandwidth to support more; sometimes you don’t. Sometimes just getting out of bed seems like backflipping over a pit of lava with a flak jacket on. At this age, I have a good idea of what I have in the tank at all times. I can sense when I need to refuel, or when I just need a quick tire check.

The world is selfish though. It doesn’t wait for you to feel better before there is a work emergency. The universe has its own designs, and they are much more Jackson Pollock than Mark Rothko. Splattery is reminiscent of most of our days.

I don’t vow to give more than a modicum of effort because I don’t want to. I know exactly what I have to give, and when. But I also know that there is a return for that lack. I am the designer of my exertion.