A pandemic benefit has been reconnecting online with old friends, and even as we’re cautiously out and about, some of those connections have happily held.

So it was that I took up the challenge a few weeks ago to “Name Your Superpower.” This came courtesy of classmates from the little women’s college I attended in Central Georgia. To focus our one hour a month, we usually agree on a topic.  It was easier when we simply had to come with the title of a favorite book.

Superpower? “Good Lord!” I thought, already intimidated by the classmate who would be traveling at the appointed hour and had e-mailed in her superpower ahead.  It involved an impressive list of “making things happen” that I cannot even imagine tackling. For one, organizing a program at a historic farm teaching students how to bake in a 1700s oven without burning your eyelashes.

There would be other astounding feats, I knew from a previous call about hobbies. One had not only learned to ride a horse but ridden in a rodeo. Another had mastered an art form called intarsia, and another had woven masterpieces on a rigid heddle pedal loom. Still another had mastered hula dancing.

So my superpower?  I thought hard. First, I thought it was efficient errand-running.  I  can pack in more errands on the way to another errand than anyone I know. But after a couple of days, two more things came to mind:  figuring out how to assemble a peony stand solo and training a vine to grow over the top of an arbor without climbing on a ladder.

The more I thought about it, these feats of mine loomed larger and larger. First, the peony stand. Who has not sunk into despair learning that an online order advertised as requiring “some assembly,” recommended “assembly by two adults” when the product and actual instruction sheet arrived?  Sure, I have friends and neighbors who later said “You should have called me,” but I try to reserve emergency calls for true emergencies, and the peony stand did not seem to rise to that level.

Still, pulling all the rings and struts out of the box, I could see where a second person and possibly a third could have come in handy. They could hold the struts steady while I – oh so carefully – snapped the rings into their little holders.  But string!  Why not lash all the parts together and prop the whole affair up against a shrub?  I did!  And it worked.  At this moment, the assembled stand is holding my false indigo plant upright, preventing it from falling under the blades of the lawn mower.

And on the very same afternoon, terrified of ladders which seem to send friends into rehab facilities for weeks on end, I figured out how to train my autumn clematis to climb over an 8-foot arbor without ever climbing on one

String again!  I’d just get the vine to inch its way up on its own by tying string to the top of the arbor and letting it climb.  How to attach the string? you might ask.  Simply tie a heavy metal washer to the end and throw it over the top.  Voila!

“My superpower is Ingenuity!” is proclaimed to no one but me. By the time I arrived at the call, I was absolutely full of my superpowered self.

I was inspired – but not intimidated – even by the classmate who had analyzed legislative bills and written testimony for a Women’s Prison Project.

But I was not prepared for the quiet one, recovering for months from a broken femur, who confessed to “a little whining” but mostly had immersed herself in dozens of books, and reported that her superpower was Equanimity.

I looked it up: “mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.”

And it described her.  It really did and always has. No wonder, even at 19, I wanted to borrow her superpower. Maybe there’s still time.

Copyright 2022 Pat Snyder