Walking Towards What We Miss

Today, my youngest son completed his Zoom meeting and everyone left. He tried to restart the Zoom on his computer. He texted on his machine, all his teachers and classmates names and home car Mom go. Explaining that he'd see them tomorrow, I went about the business of cleaning up from breakfast.

We heard the door shut and realized, Paul left the house. He'd packed a bag with his pull ups, a change of clothes, an apple and his stuffed monkeys. He sat at the tree where we always wait for his school bus, and all I could see on his face was the howl of a heart so lonely, it no longer could stay still.

I can say "You'll see them tomorrow," but I can't say when they'll be back together. It's his last year at the school. I can't even say when he'll enter a school building again.

I know this shut down has made me wary of everywhere. Getting gasoline for the first time in a month felt risky, even wearing gloves and a mask. The pump's controls were broken and I had to go inside, where there were at least five people working to upgrade the store, but there were five people moving around, within six feet of me, all of whom I did not know and thus I felt fearful of being exposed. I didn't want to catch Corona or bring it to my family for what amounted to twenty-five dollars and a tank of gasoline.

Back in the car, I sat there thinking, how much seven weeks of quarantine changed my sensibilities, and how much more might they change as this extends. I do not want the country to open up prematurely, and at the same time, we weren't made for living in isolation, even when we're with most of the people we love.

Walking with my oldest son that evening, we prayed the rosary and joked about how this pandemic is making everyone a little British. We're drinking tea in the afternoon, because it is different and warming, and communal. We go for walks. We're noticing all the different birds and talking about it. We feel robbed when the fluffy grey cat isn't sitting at the front door of the yellow house staring out at the world and judging us.

Equally dismaying is the absence of the black angora sewer stray that used to hiss as we'd walk by. Guess we're no longer invaders but shrug your shoulders kind of neighbors to it. We eagerly await the mail for some contact from somewhere.

"My God, we're becoming a Jane Austen novel with none of the money or romance." I said. "Still have the humor though." my son said. "If we switch from tea to alcohol, we could be Irish." "I am Irish." "Yeah, but it's diluted by all the other genetic stock. We don't fight nearly enough. To really commit, we'd need to be composing poetry." "Too late. Did already yesterday." My son laughed. "I'm on the next step of Anglophile assimilation. I ate a digestive and yesterday, I asked if the post arrived!" "That's nothing. I just stopped myself from enrolling in an online course to learn caligraphy."

My son spoke the rest of the walk in a faux English accent. "Day fourty-seven. We spotted two hawks and several brilliant cardinals. We've taken our state authorized constitutional and mum seems in better spirits. We're on our way home from our expected journey, and plan to cook some boiled meat and potatoes with turnips and wilted greens for dinner because, we're the country that scoured the world for spices and use none of them."

Somehow, the stupidness of it all made the ache a little less, and we ordered pizza for dinner. 

Friday Writing...

It's day 42 of being at home, where sitting in a parking lot waiting for someone wearing a mask to bring out groceries feels like a risky maneuver. We've become regular walkers, regular chefs, and frankly, I don't care about my kids' academic career anymore. I'm calling this semester a wash. They can read books, play cards, play baseball with me and sleep in, they can eat ice cream for dinner for all I care, not because I don't care, but because right now, the landscape of life is surviving the long seige as we wait to re-open, and hope it isn't too soon, but that it's soon. I'm worried because I'm starting to hear stories, almost one a day; from my doctor, her brother-in-law died, from my student, his grandfather, from a facebook friend, her mom. I wonder, when the degrees of separation will shift and come closer. I worry, they will. We wear masks. We wear gloves. We hunker down, yet life kept going on.

I wonder if one day, when all of this lifts, if we will feel comfortable going into stores, going out into the world, or if every place from this point forward, will feel like a potential threat to all we love. My daughter picked her college (with five days to go). Another child turned thirteen. Five of my kids graduate this year, and one finished her thesis but it won't be reviewed, it won't be vetted, and it won't be noticed. She struggled as the degree itself starts to feel less valuable, with the price tag remaining just as high as it was before the Corona Virus struck, but the benefits now seem transitory at best. How do I help her enjoy and celebrate her accomplishment when what is valuable and what is not, keeps shifting? The losses they have, I can't fix, not the lost prom, the lost track season, the lost confirmation, picnics, field trips, all the extras that make April and May and June so crowded, all of it's gone.

I remember grousing about how busy we'd be, and now, it's all wiped clear. I have a daughter graduating from college, another from high school, another from eigth grade. Will they wear the robes? Will their degrees carry the weight of their work, or only the stamp and stigma of being 2020? I don't know. If there's a lesson from 2020, it's that. We don't know when will end. We don't know if next week, we'll have jobs. We don't know if when we order groceries, if they'll come. We don't know if the degrees will count. We don't know if colleges will be open in the fall. So my daughter has chosen her school, but the reality is, we do not know, we do not know, we do not know. What I do know is, we just have to live with this uncertainty as a constant, and that will change how we respond to everything.

On Reopening for Business, the Corona Virus and Ignorance

Let's not play this game. Right now, the world is worried about the vision of an ongoing perpetual pandemic and we've got people in California, in Michigan, in Minnesota and other places protesting in a complaint that amounts to, "But Mommmm....all the other kids get to watch that show." I know Tiger King ended, but now isn't the time to audition for what could be the next Train Wreck Reality show smash hit.

Every place that understands we all hang together or we all hang seperately, is knuckling down for the long haul, knowing this will be hard on business, on education, on families, but not as hard as bodies stacked and burried in a mass grave. We need to counter the contagion of ignorance, which is more deadly to society than even this disease.

All of us are writers. All of us know how to use words to cut through something of the crud of life to reveal truth, and move hearts to feel something beyond what they'd planned before they read our work. The world right now, needs the gifts this room has to offer, in your local papers, to your local newscasts. Write Op-eds to whatever news source you watch/consume and let's start providing a counter to all the missinformation that people defend to the point (in this case) of potentially causing other people's deaths.

As to the reality of businesses being also a casualty of this pandemic, it is true. Right now, we have begun to overload the system with new claims of job losses, so we need to be equally creative in finding ways to work and provide means to work. Work has within it, a basic dignity beyond the pay check, and for most of us, is a necessity not only for finacial reasons, but as part of who we are. We've chosen professions for a reason, because they satisfy something in us that isn't found even in familial relationships.

The reality of this pandemic sets into sharp relief the difference between being a consumer who wishes to go on consuming, and a citizen who understands, our whole world depends upon us sublimating our desires to do what we want when we want it. Write to the states that keep opening up beaches and places and thus allow for a restart of the infection process. Write to your representatives and senators and urge them to find creative ways to let small businesses stay alive.

Call your small business friends and ask, what can I do? Call your friends who work for places that were furloughed and say, "What do you need?" Ask the local restaurants to give to the local shelters, or to make all their waitstaff delivery people, and give them the same wage, so they can go on. Create a national, let's support our local restaurants night a week, to help sustain them. Do the same with the other businesses out there.

As writers, we know, the most creative, resourceful, inventive weapon/machine/resource in the world, is the mind. If all of our minds push on the problem, the small minds that aren't seeing it, will be washed away by the tsuami of imaginative problem solving and civic strength from all of us. Call on all you know, via words, via phone, Zoom, and what have you, so that we who are trying both for those we love, and all around us who have loved ones, including the misguided, uninformed and self focused, can help save everyone from the primary threat (Disease and death) and the secondary one (economic ruin and ignorance).

I'm going to get off my soap box now and go write some letters.

At the Catholic Standard Today

Talking about Missing Jesus in the Eucharist. 

"Feel the presence of God in the midst of our fears and anxieties" --Fr. Tony in today's mass. 

It occurrs to me, the reason the disciples and the women did not know Jesus on first sight, was like we are now, when we are steeped in worry, and thus do not always see what is persent before us.

Some basic advice for Weathering the Storm in Place

How to avoid this unknown number of weeks becoming an ordeal and a trauma rather than a memory of simply a hard time.

1) Get up and get dressed. Make a list of things to do. Brainstorm with your family as to what they are.

2) Cook meals. Plan the meals.

3) Declare screen free time and reading time and outside time. and game time. Variety is key.

4) Tackle a project you've put off --like cleaning out a closet.

5) Exercise.

6) Group prayer, and private prayer.

7) Make sure everyone showers every night.

8) Have nail polish, face masks, etc. stuff you haven't used? Time to break them out.

9) Practice musical instruments/hobbies you've ignored.

10) Remember, the goal is not to either be exposed or expose others to the disease, so weeks without is a gift to your neighbors and your family.

Final rule? Stay clean, stay calm, be kind.

At the Standard Today Proving Yet again,

I am not good at clearing my own spiritual debris. 

God Alone Suffices.

Over at the Register

Keep calm and Catholic on.