30 Notes from April

Somewhere among us a Virus is taking notes

My attention is focused inward again; on the creak of the floor in just that one spot between the dining room and the kitchen

I find myself spinning through the five stages of grief like I’m eighteen and at a Dead show, a whirling dervish, the ebb and flow of the pandemic following no discernible pattern

But then, at any given time, I become conscious merely of my hands: when did I wash them last?

At the same time, I’ve been amazed and moved by how people have cooperated, sacrificed, and adapted to this change in their life patterns

The track where I thought I’d take up running again is becoming a tent hospital. The tent overlooks the marsh where, every summer evening, a seal poses on the bank of the Harlem River

Still, in the grocery store eyeing the rainbow Swiss chard

I think of you and the songs you’d play/ On your guitar

The couch is renamed the station. Meet you at the station. Dinner tonight is at the station

Tonight, during dinner, as he shoveled down spoonfuls of Spanish rice and ground beef, he turned to me and said, “What else can I eat?

I should have hoarded when it was fashionable

Our old Dutch Colonial on a tree-lined street used to be in Shaker Heights but now sits on the outer rim of a black hole, where these changes are to be expected

Every day now, I am either myself, hurting others in fear, or the girl being pushed down, or my father, walking away

 

My mother leaves voicemails for me. They congregate in my phone’s blocked messages folder

My daughter needed better protection and a covering that made her less likely to be taken for a bank robber

I started the journal because I needed a way to sort out the time soup we all find ourselves floating in now

Every Covid morning I pick up the newly fallen day

As if he is a weapon

The pan is about the only thing that’s still in our control. If it’s unseasoned, but it’s all you’ve got, you have to use it just the same

I have worked side gigs. I have gone without prescriptions. I have filed for bankruptcy. I have robbed Peter to pay Paul

Two facts snap with an irresistible force and pop out of my mouth   

Back then a man and a woman sat thigh to thigh/ facing forward in a desperate pact     

This cluster of mournful songs spoke to the terrible uncertainty of life back then, in the olden days, before we had figured out so many ways to avoid death

I live in an apartment building in New York, so that meant washing my hands, taking the elevator down to the basement (being careful to press the buttons with my knuckle)

I stumble outdoors to look at the budding trees and listen to the calling birds and feel beneath my feet the greening earth, steadfastly going about its business of renewing, of becoming (please) new again

It is time to be a family in the same space again, the stretching out of our bonds snapped together, so that it is just the same as it was when we three lived in the same house, when our bedrooms were feet apart instead of miles

Human memory is frail, I hear myself say. Write it all down

We’ve taken a sentence or two or some lines from each blog post in April to create a quilt, a cento, a mini-collage, a fringe of  whose story is this? We hope it’s ours, in the same way that holding hands can help (although we can’t do that now).