Some of us see a dark future or no future, a lunar wasteland replacing the paradise we have only recently come to notice. Some of us see a renaissance, a flowering of art and justice replicating itself in all directions and dimensions like a hall of mirrors. And some of us can't make up our minds. We have good days when we inhale in common with the Chinese their freshly laundered air. And we have bad days when we're no longer certain where good retreats and bad advances. We have days that unfold in the paradigm of science - what little we understand - and days that unfold in the paradigm of metaphor, a more familiar territory. These are not points of view so much as personality types that come and go, even within the consciousness of one person. I can wake up a virologist and go to bed a metaphysician. In between, I scavenge for disinfectant. Some days, I vacillate wildly between thinking it's all random and knowing for an undeniable fact that it's my fault. I have eaten my fair share of BLTs.
Of all the words written since the beginning of the pandemic or, to be more honest, since the scourge, in a Marco Polo u-turn, reached St. Mark's square and the Campo de Fiori in Rome, the remarks of the Pope have given me the most comfort. Francis says, anticipating an end to the crisis..."Tonight before falling asleep think about when we will return to the street....Every second will be precious. Swims at sea, the sun until late, sunsets, toasts, laughter. We will go back to laughing together." I appreciate especially "return to the street." Francis, despite his clerical costume, has a novelist's love for the world.
Every day that the virus claimed more lives, new flowers appeared in Berkeley. I was there making my annual March pilgrimage to celebrate the birthdays of my niece and my sister, this year turning 85. There were California poppies the color of tangerines. Enormous bushes of rosemary smelling like leg of lamb and bursting with purple blossoms. Jasmine and camellias. My sister sat in her recliner and took it all in. On St. Patrick's Day, she and I performed our own arrangement of "Danny Boy," until we were undone by the Irish tenor high notes. We fortified ourselves with cashews. We did our trademark imaginary tour of upper Broadway, seeing if we could remember all the stores and all the shopkeepers from the fifties. Every morning, my sister read the dire headlines in the Chronicle. We explained that there was a virus like a wildfire in the Sierras spreading out of control all over the world and she nodded. You couldn't tell if it registered, if it meant anything. But then again what did it mean to us? No more Thai food? No more browsing and people-watching at the bookstore? It's not like a terrorist attack. It dawns on you slowly, this new day.
At first, I kissed her forehead each time I entered her room and each time I left, marking the coming and going as if my sister were a mezuzah holding a sacred text. And maybe she is and maybe I am and maybe you are. But in the last days of the trip, I was no longer kissing my people. We were communicating our love for one another virtually, sometimes in words, but more often in chaste adoring glances like shy Victorians. I put my hand to my heart and she put her hand to her heart. When I sat opposite her on the final day before heading to the airport in Sacramento with my N95 mask and my supply of blue plastic gloves, she was leaning back in her chair under a wool blanket. She reached out from under the weight of it and grabbed my pinky finger with her pinky finger. We made a pinky promise, the way schoolgirls do, and despite the potential contagion of her skin touching my skin, we promised to love one another no matter the wreckage of this broken world.
Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by commenting here or writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com