The maintenance of lost days
Life has a rhythm to it, a beat that punctuates the passage of time. We marked our normal days by the events we shared with others — the concerts, the ballgames, the dinner parties, the reunions. Our old calendars are full of this rhythm.
When the drummer left the stage in mid-March, the band’s tight unity began to unravel and the sound frittered off to a few lonely notes, then silence.
These months have felt as empty as all the places we cannot go anymore. I live my days now almost solely at home with a ghost drummer giving me faint direction, sometimes no direction at all, and marking a spare schedule of events.
In late March, my neighbors came out on their stoops and we sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
In early April, we came out on our stoops and applauded the front-line workers in hospitals and other essential places.
In May, I planted my vegetables.
In June, I finally got a haircut.
In July, I sweltered. And now, as my favorite season approaches its end, I listen fitfully to the games that my hapless Pirates are largely frittering away in a season that is not real.
I know that the past five months happened, but they have seemed empty of meaning. COVID-19 has made us look
inward, and yet our time on earth right now is fraught with meaning, laden with the need for purposeful action.
I plug away at doing the things that need to be done, but unlike the purposeful maintenance of life in normal times, maintenance now feels like filling time, obligation.
As I suffer existential angst over the future of humanity, I have relegated some tasks to the “why bother?” category. This is so unlike me that it has caused another layer of alienation and dismay.
I do things I need to do, things I’m supposed to do, because that’s how I was brought up. Take care of things. Stay on top of things. Do what you must and what you can. And do more.
In much of my free time, though, I sink into my reading chair and seek reality, and refuge, in literature. It is the one thing that helps me make sense of the world.
I reach for reality and it is over there somewhere, in the parallel universe. I take ridiculously long walks on streets that are familiar, past buildings that I know, and sometimes I see friends. We wave, smiling behind our masks. But it doesn’t feel like a real time. In the spring, the daffodils and tulips were beautiful, but I felt as though I was looking at them from behind a glass wall.
Now I have gotten used to this otherness of time, so it is passing for real. I admonish myself that this time is real time. Everything that is and isn’t happening is real. It may be the reality we have from now on.
At home, I have been pulling ivy off the side of an alley house that borders part of my garden. I am doing it for my neighbor’s benefit, but this task benefits me, too. I don’t want the ivy, either, and this strange time has reminded me that the best way to feel better is to do something for someone else.
And so I pull at the ivy, unsticking the little feet that have taken hold of the bricks, and down come ribbons of foliage. Clearing the house of this creeping, tenacious organism is clearing my mind of its clutter, giving me some respite from angst.
I saw a sign once that read, “What controls your mind controls your life.” I thought, “Oh, that’s good, that’s rich.” So much of my life is in my mind.
As I try to shake myself out of this funk and curb all these reveries, I vow to make the rest of my life one of more action, with others as beneficiaries. And I will. I will.
I will do more to help. I resolve to pay more attention to what other people may need from me. That will be easier when I feel safe sticking my nose out.
The one action I look forward to taking most is voting on Nov. 3. We may have to live for many more months with the scourge of COVID-19, but we don’t have to wait that long to usher out COVID-45.
In the meantime, I will open another book, I will keep puling ivy and taking long walks to calm my mind, and I will fantasize about the day when the drummer comes back onto the stage.