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 the bottom falls away and 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 23 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 feeling in my gut that ‘the jig was up’. I just did not know what the ‘jig’ was. I wish I had looked around more carefully. Now I’m in another place, but only through the computer lens. I’m not really there. It’s slippery like that. I’ve had orange cloth masks and blue medical masks and now I am wearing black masks. Probably three or four times a week, my husband looks out the window at the neighborhood loop and says, ‘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 finally saw a neighbor wrestling his garbage bins into the garage. I yelled loudly, startling myself with the sound up against the silence of the street. ‘Hey! Hey, Frank! Hey there!’ He looks over at our house. ‘Oh, there you are!’ he bellows. ‘I was wondering where the voice was coming from’. I wave and I turn around and go back into the house.
‘Why are you yelling?’ he asks me. ‘I’m talking to Frank. It’s too silent’. He returns to his phone where someone, desperate to change the trajectory of his life speaks rapidly in Spanish through the wires of the cell into my husband’s ear. There is addiction. Now there is Covid and isolation. It’s all just too slippery.
There was no beginning, no platform from which we jumped. We just jumped wildly into the air…and everything was changed by the time we landed.
I exited a local candy store this evening and noted the line of people waiting to be let in; only five at a time. Five people at a time. This store is small. ‘Could I please just step into the foyer and wait inside because it is so cold?’ asks an older woman who has been waiting outside for a while. The young woman answers, ‘I’m sorry, I am so sorry…it’s the social distancing requirements…’ Her voice fades as I head back across the street to the car.
It’s really slippery when an elderly customer can’t go inside and shelter from the cold…
690 Saint Paul 