I dreamt badly last night. I have no idea why; only that a pattern of difficult dreaming tends to occur in the wintertime for me. This accelerated after the onset of Covid. I was unsettled when I awakened and in the early morning, I read back through my notes finding the following which was written two years ago after our initial lopsided adjustment to the world slipping slightly off of its axis.
‘I dream a lot these days. It’s an attempt to keep sorting out where we are, I suppose. A most tiring aspect of Covid…might be the slippery beginning to all of it. All grey and grasping and ‘what is happening?’ and no time. There was no time. Like a house on fire, we ran to get out, to re-group. We looked around and got to guessing, and we keep doing it. This is a long time for a house to be on fire. I line things up. I build. I set my jaw, my mind. I plan. Then it gets slippery all over again. The restaurants are open, now closed again. I drive by a local favorite and see that they are once again ‘take out only’. My Mother wants to go in the restaurant to sit and chat and eat. There was no time. I, we, all of us stepped off into air on a Friday afternoon. I wish I had known it was the last day. I exited a building where I worked for almost twenty-three years; the sound over the public announcement…’be sure to take home your laptops’…ringing in my ears. I remember what jacket I wore. I remember having a deep foreboding, a sense that ‘the jig was up!’ I wish I had looked around more carefully. I exited that building and bid immediate farewell to a way of life.
Now, I’m in another place, but only through the lens of the computer. I’m not really there. It’s slippery like that. I’ve worn orange masks and blue medical masks and now I’m wearing black cloth masks. Probably three or four times a week, Eli looks out the window at the neighborhood cul-del-sac and announces, ‘there isn’t a soul out there’.
Yesterday, I stepped out on the porch and walked to the edge and looked at the street. I noticed a neighbor wrestling his garbage bins into the garage. I yelled loudly, startling myself with the volume of sound after so much timid silence. ‘Hey, Frank! Hey!’ He turned away from the bins and looked over toward our house. ‘Oh, there you are!’ he bellowed. ‘I wondered where the voice was coming from!’ He waved briefly and turned back toward the garage entrance. I re-entered the house. ‘Why are you yelling?’ Eli asked. ‘I’m talking to Frank. It’s too silent’. He in turn returned to his phone where someone, a lonely soul on the other end of the line, desperate to change the trajectory of his life, spoke rapidly in Spanish; a lifeline through the cell wires into Eli’s ear.
It’s just all too slippery. There was no beginning, no platform from which we jumped. We just jumped wildly into air…and everything changed.
I exited a local candy store tonight and noted the line of people waiting to be allowed to enter. Five customers at a time, as the store is a tiny one. ‘Could I please just step into the foyer and wait inside because it’s so cold?’ asks an older woman who waits. ‘I’m so sorry, it’s social distancing…’ says the owner with a mournful face. The conversation fades as I head across the street to my car. It’s really slippery when an elderly customer can’t go inside…’
690 Saint Paul 