Language & Literacy A Writing Life

Where I Am, Virtually Speaking

I was speaking with an old friend who called out of the blue yesterday, and she spoke to my soul about how the thing we all need the most right now, in this time of pandemic and uncertainty and confinement, are words. Written words, reflective words, words that move us beyond the veneer into a meaning that re-centers us. And she is right.

Dammit, brethren, I haven't written a post on this blog since October 1, 2018! A lot has changed for me since that time of the mouse in that apartment in that neighborhood, and a lot has most certainly changed in the world.

Let me bring it back to first principles. What this blog was meant to be, in its original instantiation, was the haphazard gyrations of a mind struggling to come back to terms with each moment in which it was confronted with a blank screen. This sort of writing has been what has kept me alive for a good portion of my young adult life. I needed it, like I needed the used CDs at Rhino Records and live music every week.

I don't see live music anymore, either. I've become a dad of two, a bureaucrat, a co-op owner. People, I write and read education blogs and tweets on the outskirts of my waking time. That's the kind of person I've become.

But I still get excited about a glass of Chartreuse, increasingly rare.

But you want me to say something about this moment of global trepidation we're in, don't you. You don't care about my middle aged haze of contentment. You want soulful depths of edgy reflectiveness that will take you past my own navel.

Let's give this a shot. The moon hovers pastel and solemn over the balcony railing. Its mountains and valleys I squint to hold in my mind's eye but can't. Over the horizon of an earth too big for me to know. Because there's the next day, and its weather, to consider. An allotment of meetings and things I should do that I don't really want to do, and some things I'm excited about that I don't feel I have my own permission to embark on, and there's always the holes that were ripped in the walls where the children pulled the drapes down and the lights that we need to measure and decide and mull over where to place. Wait.

Wait. There I go again. It's caught me up. My life. My small life with all its immediate small tasks undone that keep me limited, uncaring and ungrateful for the fragile and beautiful existence I share within this world. The fact that I exist at all, that we exist at all, on this planet, in this time, with the space and means to know it if we so choose, which we don't.

But that's not right, either. My life isn't uncaring or ungrateful—I think nearly every second how full my heart is as I touch my son's face or stroke my daughter's hair, how much I love the sound of their laughter, the joy they take in each other, in the presence of their mother and father, in the presence of being awake and alive, so painful at times and fraught with temporary anger but full with feeling.

Deep breath. It's that I don't stop to really say it, to myself, to you. I say it in my mind, in my heart. I really do. I love being alive. I love my family, I love looking at the treetops from my balcony, catching a glimpse of the changing light into sunset from my bedroom window, the color of the paints I've chosen and applied to the walls and the way they change with the light. Catching my son or daughter's eye and making them smile. Reading books to them. It makes my heart full, each and every day. In the midst of all the panic, and the exhaustion, and the news.

So yes, the world is fraught right now, and part of me is terrified and angry about the frailness of our world and nation, that we are so easily dominated by greed. And part of me is in awe of how we have been brought to our knees by a tiny spiked virus. But another part of me is in love with the time I have with my family, in this coop in the Bronx where we've hammered down our stakes.

Our world has become smaller in this time of the coronavirus pandemic. I will never make light of the loved ones lost, nor of the fear that we have for our loved ones most at risk. But this smallness can help us see the beauty that we have before us, however small, however fleeting, however unimportant to anyone but ourselves and each other.

I don't think I've said it. But I'm rusty, friends. Forgive me. And please write down some words to share with yourself with me.