My sister was in a Kaiser hospital in Oakland navigating a sea of numbers. Low oxygen levels, low red blood cell count, high white blood cell count. At the same time, The Clown was in Walter Reed trying to make sense of his own mathematical matrix. High fever, rapid heartbeat, antibody levels, total amount of taxes unpaid, possible no votes in the Senate. All this was taking place while the scent of Yom Kippur was still lingering in the air with its Leonard Cohen "who by fire" actuarial table clinging to my consciousness. I was furious at Trump, not only for the usual reasons of being entitled, mendacious and criminal, but also now for distracting me from my sister's medical situation. I wanted all my attention to be focused on her wellbeing. But he occupies my awareness like a ghoul on Halloween trying to frighten me with his spectral duplicity, the constant fog of suspicion surrounding him and his motives. He is stalking me in his familiar costume, his head a jack-o-lantern. Is he just saying he has the virus to distract from his dismal debate performance? Is he looking for an excuse to withdraw from a race he appears to be losing? Is he trying to cancel the election? How much more obfuscation can we tolerate?
I remember October as a time of exquisite clarity. The gold and red maples stood in the foreground against the wedgwood sky. The apples were crisp, the cider cold and tart. The arithmetic of that time cloaked in innocence involved batting averages, on-base percentages. Day after day, the great postseason dramas unfolded in places like Cincinnati and the Bronx. Now in the Time of Covid, baseball is a ghost of its former self, played without fans, without context, without the ritual of following the stats in the sports pages.
Numbers themselves have become inflated into something called metadata, ripped out of reality, as if they are bloodless straight and curved lines appearing on the screen with no beating hearts in them. We bat them around like whiffle balls. Part of our necessary work in this time of moral crisis is to re-animate the statistics so that we maintain an awareness of the real lives extinguished in the past months. Think of the 20,000 folding chairs set out in the shadow of the Washington Monument, each one representing more than ten people lost to Covid. This man from Honduras struggled to learn English working on the line in a meatpacking plant in Texas. That woman left her three kids behind in Rockaway every night to wash floors in a hospital in Flatbush. My friend and spiritual companion, Virginia, shared her faith with countless seekers before she carried it with her into the nursing home in New Jersey where the virus hunted her down.
So many lives erased, so many stories buried in the landfill. We know that Tom Seaver, who graced the field in Octobers past, died of Covid. But so did thousands of sandlot ball players, some of whom voted for The Clown in 2016 and look where that got them. It got them a front row seat at a circus where the cult of personality plays in a continuous loop day and night. Banana republic balcony speeches are televised but stimulus packages lie dormant. Doctors have become indistinguishable from used car salesmen. Terrorists plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. We are all spectators at this pageant, witnesses to grand larceny, national identity theft, and all this while the ordinary sadnesses of life continue on as before.
My sister is home now, but it takes three people to transfer her from her bed to the recliner. Her passion for food has faded with the challenge of getting the enchilada from the plate to her mouth. She sleeps all the time and dreams about autumn days back-to-school on West End Avenue in the forties when Roosevelt's guests slept in the Lincoln bedroom. I set aside some hours, some minutes to remember her as she has been. An advocate for justice who brought refugees from El Salvador into her home. A natural musician with all of Tin Pan Alley in her fingers. A savvy storekeeper with a big presence in the East Bay antique business. The author of All Grown Up, a book about getting along with your adult children. Mother of three, grandmother of six and my sister, with or without Donald Trump. In the quiet center of the constant clamor of numbers, electoral demographics and rates of infection, she is there. My sister. I only have one.
Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com. I will also reply to comments posted on this blog, so check back if you choose to carry on the conversation here.