Category — Uncategorized

Thus begins my staycation. For those playing along at home:

March: Surely we’ll be able to go to Ireland in July. COVID-19 will be under control by then.

April: We may not be able to fly this summer. Maybe we should drive to Montreal.

May: The Canadian border is closed. We need to stay close to home. Maybe we can do a week at the beach.

June: We are going nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere ever. We are stuck at home foreeeeeeever.

I was at peace with this in July. I was thankful that Josh cleared weeds out of the backyard and set up a high velocity fan to blow while we’re reading (chemical-free mosquito solution). There were benefits of staying home. Easy access to the bathroom = drink all the seltzer you want. No long drives or waiting in line or mask wearing for hours on end.

But last week, I realized that it had been over eight months since I had seen running water. Eight months. I couldn’t stop thinking about the opening to Spalding Gray’s Impossible Vacation (has there ever been a more perfect time to understand that book?) and his mother’s feelings about being able to see Narragansett Bay. Not that I am going to fall apart mentally from being unable to see the ocean but… I related. The longest I usually go without seeing the ocean is the four months between December and April.

Going to the river (or the ocean) means (1) bringing all food and water, (2) avoiding all inhabited areas—being willing to walk far to get to a spot without humans, (3) figuring out how to not use a public restroom at any point. Entering and exiting like ghosts.

I will be around this week. Reading a lot of books. Maybe working our way through the new Umbrella Academy.

Along with the paint-your-own-pottery place, I learned about a second closure last week: My college coffeehouse. On one hand, it feels really far away—the last time I was there was about 19 years ago—and on the other, it is the setting of some of my favourite college memories. I loved this coffeehouse so much that I chose apartments near it so I could be close all four years.

I called it my home away from home because back in the days before cell phones, if someone wanted to find you, they needed to know where you hung out. I was either at home, in the literary magazine office, in the etching lab, at Hillel (the Jewish student union), or—more often than not—studying at Espresso Royale. I found it on the first week of school. In warm months, I got an iced decaf raspberry mocha. In the cold months, I got a hot almond milk.

So I have a lot of happy memories of studying with friends at this coffeehouse in the evening, but one of my favourite memories is meeting my conversation partner there weekly. In my first month at college, I saw an advertisement on a kiosk looking for native English speakers to serve as conversation partners. I filled out a form, asking to be placed with a woman, preferably one who spoke French or Spanish. My match was with a man who spoke Indonesian.

Okay.

But I gave it a try, and we met for years at the coffeehouse to talk. He would bring photo albums and use the pictures to practice descriptions. Or I would ask him questions about Indonesia. And we’d just talk… over coffee… or doodle objects when we couldn’t use circumlocution to get around an unknown word.

In the very beginning, he would leave me an answering machine message on Wednesdays to make sure I remembered that we were meeting the next day, and the messages always began: “1. PM. Thuuuuuuuuursday. Espresso Royale.” To this day, I cannot take down my Espresso Royale mug without hearing his voice in my head, reminding me of our upcoming meeting.

That’s what I thought about when I heard that Espresso Royale had not survived coronavirus, another business succumbing to the economic downturn and long term closure. My conversation partner and studying with friends and iced decaf raspberry mochas. (And also the people who would have sex in the single-room bathrooms at the back of the store. I gave them a few seconds of nostalgia time.)

It’s not just a business. It’s someone else’s receptacle for their memories. And it makes me so sad every time I hear about another placed closed forever.

At least once a year (though usually many more times), the twins and I went to the local paint-your-own-pottery place and made a plate. I split the plate in half, and they would each paint one side of the plate. And then I would write the year at the bottom, the store would fire the plate, and we’d pick it up the next week. We did it every spring, and the idea was that we’d use the plates for dessert at their graduation dinner. People could share stories about them from the year on their plate.

The store sent out an email last week that they were closing. While it wasn’t stated outright, the assumption is that it’s another casualty of the virus, like so many restaurants and businesses. People haven’t been able to go in and paint pottery in five months. There is only so long that a store can pay their rent without having any customers.

The email came into my inbox right before bed, and I felt unreasonably sad. I put the emphasis on that word because it’s not my store. It’s not my livelihood. There are other places (hopefully) to paint pottery, and we’ll go to them. Or we won’t, and we’ll just be happy with the plates we have. Or we’ll make a few plates out of paper and display them on the table. I have options. The point is that the owner’s life changed. Their way of supporting their family changed. THEY have a right to be sad. I don’t have a right to be sad.

I curled up in bed, thinking about how we brought the twins to the store when they were four months old to paint the bottoms of their feet and press them to plates. How we stripped them down to their diapers once they could sit up on their own, and how the Wolvog would dip the brush and then immediately swipe it across his face, chest, and legs before we could wrestle the brush away. I thought about all the years of photos I have of them painting plates and cups and even tiny pet dishes to welcome Truman to the family. And I wanted to cry. I am crying now, writing this. I kept the email in my inbox so I would keep seeing it and thinking about it. It’s a digital scab I keep picking at, all the while feeling like I have no right to be anything more than disappointed.

But I’m not just disappointed. I’m sad. My brain can’t wrap itself around the enormous number of ill and dead, but I can mourn the tiny losses; the stores and restaurants. The people who move away. The events missed. The shows unseen.

I am sad because it was in our power to squash this virus, and we didn’t.

This statement made me pause:

“According to neuroscientists, there is not a single organ or system in the body responsible for timekeeping. In fact, psychologists have identified many factors that affect our sense of time, some of which explain our heightened awareness of it this year.”

We have eyes for measuring light, ears for measuring sound, tongues covered in buds for measuring taste, and noses for measuring smell. We have nerve endings that measure the hardness or softness of an object. But we have no body part that we use—even in conjunction with other body parts—for measuring time. We need to look outside ourselves to a clock to know the minute, even if we can guess the hour based on where the sun is in the sky. We allow time to rule our lives, even though it’s something that we can’t perceive without help.

Isn’t that such a weird thought?

There was such an interesting Longreads on the myth of Britain, which I would argue is not a myth insomuch as a facet. The author starts with two accounts of the country:

Britain, a small, soggy island whose power on the world stage is declining, where poverty, inequality, and disaster nationalism are rising, where the government has mangled its response to a global pandemic so badly that it’s making some of us nostalgic for the days when all we did was panic about Brexit. The other is “Britain!” — a magical land of round tables and boy wizards and enchanted swords and moral decency, where the sun never sets on an Empire run by gentlemen, where witty people wear frocks and top hats and decide the fate of nations over tea and biscuits.

The second Britain is our Britain; a place we love to visit and feel dreamy about. We talk a lot about taking a trip there every year during retirement, both because we suspect at least one of our children will end up living there and because it’s a storybook happy place.

We, of course, also know about the first Britain, mostly because we—like all of you—live in a place with two stories. We’re America, leading the world in COVID-19 cases and drowning in racism, and we’re also America!—the storybook land of Hollywood and Harvard and Hamilton.

The article is about Britain, but it also points out that “Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die.”

Other people believing your country’s myth—positive or negative—is uncomfortable because you exist in reality. And that reality is also a fantasy. The author admits:

I’m stuck in the States until the lockdowns end, but want to go back to the soggy, self-deprecating country I grew up in, the country of tolerance and diversity and kind people quietly getting on with things, the land of radio sketch comedy, jacket potatoes, decent bands, and basic decency. I know that that country, too, is imaginary; just as imaginary as any of the “Rule Britannia” flag-waggery.

Is reality the ugly truth or the beautiful lie or something in the middle, which is neither ugly nor beautiful but is a complex story that changes every single second. You can’t sell that, of course, which is what you need to do when you’re project a country’s narrative. You can’t say, “These are the things we’re proud of and these are the things we’re not proud of and the reality is that humans across the world all think they’re unique but are really more alike than we’ll admit.”

I love stories, and it’s easy to reduce things into stories. To tell ourselves and others stories. It is so much harder to not only love something complex but to explain to others why you love it, too, warts and all.