The essay for this month’s issue of Plume by Denise Duhamel and Katie Marie Wade titled “Update: Five Days In The Pandemic”” witnesses to both the emotional and physcal the traumas of Covid’s contagion in a collaborative flow of voices that witness compassionately, eloquently, and courageously to the ravages of the disease. One speaker picks up where the other leaves off with complementary details, grace, engaging narrative, and poignant conclusions in seamless voices that witness to the mortal experience of Covid’s ravages and its toll. Their transpersonal acumen for what Czelaw Milosz invoked as essential for enduring literature in his poem “Capri,” namely “immense particlars” resounds throughout.
–Chard deNiord
Update: Five Days in the Pandemic
from In Lieu of Flowers:
A Quarantine Collaboration
By Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade
Monday, April 6, 2020
Yesterday afternoon, while we were giving our Zoom reading for O, Miami, the social worker from the nursing home called my sister to say my mother would be tested today for coronavirus. All the patients, all the workers. They were able to get enough test kits from the state. It was exactly what I wanted to happen, but rather than feeling relieved, I spun into more worry. What if she has it? What if everyone at Mount St. Rita has it? I went down the Google rabbit hole of false positives, ventilator shortages, and makeshift morgues until I met with my New York friends on Zoom at 6:30 p.m.
Sharyn in the city. Page in Brooklyn. Both hunkered down for the long haul. Sharyn’s friend, a trumpet player, only 59, now gone. A trumpet player! Talk about strong lungs. Kathy, our third friend, couldn’t figure out how to join us—she probably had a bad connection. I heard clapping for the medical workers at 7 p.m. Page rose from her screen to join in. They both tell me subways are packed as the MTA has reduced service. The fewer people riding are all squished in together. How many riders are infected, asymptomatic? How many riders work in hospitals? Page’s neighbor, employed by the MTA, says they aren’t allowed to wear masks, as they may scare those in transit. We all agree, it’s way beyond that now.
After Page exits the call, I tell Sharyn I have a fantasy in which Bob comes from Ohio to pick me up in Florida, and we drive to Rhode Island to save my mother. (Sharyn is a therapist, already helping people through a charity called COVIDCARES. She did the same kind of work after 9/11. She did the same after Katrina, even inviting a displaced couple from the 9th Ward to live in her home.) OK, then what? she asks.
We are young in this fantasy, and we don’t need sleep. We power through, from Florida to Rhode Island, taking turns at the wheel, even though I am terrified in real life to drive on highways. We don’t even really get hungry—we are on a rescue mission. We discharge my mother from the nursing home, take her back to her ranch house, get her cable and phone turned back on. We collect the furniture she’s given away. Together we nurse her, bathe her, feed her, give her medicines until the end of the pandemic. Bob helps me lift her. In my fantasy we all get along, never losing our tempers. All of us have tested negative, and we stay that way.
While you’re at it, Sharon says, why don’t you just sprinkle your mother with water from the Fountain of Youth? And we both laugh.
Then last night I dreamt of my mother—the one with long hair twirled in a bun, the one with big high breasts, the one in her own nurse’s uniform getting ready for work. She doesn’t need diapers or her walker anymore. I watch her getting ready, but I’m confused, looking down at my sneakers, my teenage body. My mother is telling me something I can’t make out, then yells, Snap out of it, get your head out of the clouds. It’s time to grow up!
When we speak this morning, I wonder if the social worker has told my mother about the test. I don’t mention the virus, wanting her to have as many hours as possible of not worrying about it. But then my mother says matter-of-factly, I’m being tested today. They’ll stick a swab up my nose, and I’ll let you know how it goes.
*
Angie’s father was tested for the virus at his doctor’s office in rural Tennessee 11 days ago. They still don’t have his test results—either that, or Angie’s mother is withholding information. I don’t really blame her if she is. Who needs more reasons to worry when most of us are already maxed out with practical and existential dread?
Yesterday Angie’s mother did send a series of texts and included a picture of Pierre—her father’s nickname since he was a child—sitting up on the couch and smiling. She said he is feeling much, much better after those 11 days in bed, but his fever has still never dropped below 100, even with regular doses of Tylenol. It’s good news, but I can’t stop thinking about his fever that rages on and on, immune even to the full effects of fever reducers. How strong must the virus be if his body has to fight so vigilantly for so long?
Right now one of Angie’s and my favorite forms of escapism is the TV show Schitt’s Creek. It stars Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, old friends and long-time collaborators whose humor we’ve always enjoyed. In this series, they play a wealthy, Hollywood couple, Johnny and Moira Rose, who lose all their money and end up destitute in a tiny Midwestern town called—you guessed it—Schitt’s Creek. Their two grown children, David and Alexis, accompany them to this place, and over the years, a lot of endearing hijinks ensue. The show somehow balances a genuine sweetness with an undercurrent of acerbic wit. Tomorrow night is the series finale.
Recently, I’ve found myself dreaming a lot about the town of Schitt’s Creek and the Rosebud Motel. I think this is one way my unconscious is rejecting real life but also a way I’m seeking to cast myself in the story of a wacky but ultimately happy family. David Rose, Johnny’s son, is played by his real-life son, Dan Levy, with whom he co-created the show. Dan is gay in real life, and his character on the show is pansexual. Tomorrow night David is going to marry his beloved, Patrick. Besides my own wedding, I don’t think I have looked forward to any wedding more.
It’s true that David and Patrick make an adorable couple, but what I love most is the way David’s/Dan’s real family and his TV family support who he really is and who he really loves. Just imagine writing a sitcom with your father who accepts you as you are, who agrees your identity as a queer person should be channeled into your character on the show! No embarrassment, no flinching or side-stepping, no trying to love you around or beyond that fact.
I want to have noble dreams of driving to my parents’ rescue. Instead, I have selfish dreams where my parents throw me a bridal shower, welcome Angie into their lives the way the Roses welcomed Patrick on the show. I have more selfish dreams where Angie’s parents do the same.
This past Valentine’s Day, before we knew the tragic course ahead, I splurged on fancy goat milk soap and whipped body cream for Angie from a pop-up shop called Rose Apothecary. It was an online tribute to the Rose Apothecary that David and Patrick opened on Schitt’s Creek. Now that the skin on our hands is coarse and peeling from washing them so many times a day, this whipped body cream feels even more decadent than before.
Last week, on the penultimate episode, mother Moira Rose said this: “Worry is but undernourished enthusiasm.” Her words reminded me of something Pearl S. Buck wrote 70 years ago in her novel, The Child Who Never Grew: “There is an alchemy in sorrow; it can be transmuted into wisdom.” I love these sentiments, but I don’t understand how they work. How can we nourish worry into enthusiasm? (This is not rhetorical! I want to know!) How can we turn our sorrow (which carries our sorries with it—all our wish I coulds but I can’ts and all our wish you coulds but you can’t eithers) into wisdom?
Tuesday, April 7, 2020
The first two people in my building complex have died of the virus—a couple in their seventies. I look online to see if I can find their obituaries, find their pictures to see if I recognize them. Did I ever sit next to them at the pool? Wait with them by valet as friends came to visit? Ride with them in the elevator?
Even before receiving the notice of their deaths, I decided to stop using the elevator here, with its awkward three-person limit, which has limits to what it can protect us from anyway. When I Zoomed and Skyped with my friends in New York, they told me of people who had died in their buildings, but I failed to imagine my neighbors dying just yet. Worry, enthusiasm, sorrow, and wisdom—my imagination stuck between floors in an elevator of swirling cough clouds.
Beverly and Fred, the couple who passed, had different last names. I wonder if they were progressive, together for years, or if they were more recent loves who decided not to get married. I wonder if either or both had children or stepchildren. I wonder who will clean out their condo now that visitors are severely restricted from entering. Beverly and Fred are just two of the 253 fatalities so far in Florida. It’s too soon to find any information online about their lives, but there is a lot of information about how to express sympathy in the time of Covid-19.
Florida’s peak is now projected for April 21 (not May 3) because DeSantis didn’t do enough to flatten the curve. We may be fourth in the nation when it comes to lives lost. I keep thinking of that doctor on CNN who weeks ago called the U.S. a “Fourth World Nation.” Trump keeps touting hydroxychloroquine—and (drum roll) of course he and his cronies have personal financial interests in getting it approved. When I talked to my mother this morning, she said she wasn’t swabbed yesterday after all. She said the nurses were upset as they wanted the test, too.
So begins the long slog—I had prepared myself for false positives, multiple testings. I hadn’t prepared myself for no tests after the governor said yes. Trump is the worst father/father-figure in the world, and yet so many people still yearn for him to become what he can’t be.
*
In the wet season in Florida—late summer and fall—it’s the streets that flood, as you well know: standing water everywhere, storm drains overfilling, backing up. Now, for the most part, the streets are empty and bone-dry—few people and fewer cars, though the garbage trucks still careen through alleys at dawn.
In the dry season, it’s our hospitals that have started flooding. Too many people, too few beds. We hear about it on the news, but we don’t witness first-hand because the nearest hospital is several miles away on the mainland. Memorial. They have a strong trauma unit there that saved our friend Kelly a few years back when she was knocked off her Vespa by a car that didn’t stop, that drove over her body and just kept going. Pronounced dead at the scene, the team at Memorial re-started her heart, performed emergency surgery on her spine, and eventually, she made a full recovery.
Today I read the refrigerated trailers of semi-trucks are being converted into makeshift morgues outside many ICUs. There isn’t just a shortage of beds; there’s also a shortage of places to store the mounting bodies. Memorial becomes a more apt and ominous name every single time I type it.
So many people missing from the landscape now. What story do we tell ourselves about their absence? I try to tell myself they’re staying safe and sound inside. Their dogs are playing in their yards, so they don’t have to walk them anymore. They have a treadmill or recumbent bike in their living room, their bedroom, their den. They’re not sedentary, you see; they’re getting a good workout after all, tending to their hearts and lungs.
But of course, it can’t be true, not all of it. I know some of these missing people are in the hospital. I know some of these missing people are not safe, not sound. Some of these people will not be seen or heard from ever again.
So far our building hasn’t announced any deaths, but I guess I should prepare for morbid correspondence in the days ahead. Although the state has ordered a cessation of all non-essential work, the contractors still report for work each day. I watch them from our balcony: their familiar procession through the parking lot, hard hats on their heads, coolers swinging by their sides. Then, the drilling resumes for the day. I can’t see the men on scaffolds, but I can hear them. Management says this project will take two years, but I’ve lived in Florida long enough to know that everything is exponential. Two years really means four and maybe more.
Contractors upstairs, contractors outside—I dread the noise, and yet I fear the silence even more. “At least they’re still getting a paycheck,” Angie says. “I bet if they didn’t work, they wouldn’t get paid, even though their employers should pay them to stay home.”
I try to think of the drilling as “proof of life,” a sign that those who have been here are still here after all. From our balcony, I watch valets scurrying across the street. Most are wearing masks and gloves. But then a FedEx truck pulls over to the curb, flashers on. A woman leaps out, her blond feathered hair reminiscent of another time. She grabs boxes barehanded from the back of her truck and strides toward our building with an uncovered face. I want to call out, want to warn her, but I know it’s futile: my voice would be lost in the din.
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
At the beginning of this crisis, I found a plastic Ziploc bag of blue latex gloves from March 2019 when Bob was finally released from Hollywood Memorial and visiting nurses came here to my apartment to give him high-dose antibiotic IVs. I never felt afraid to touch him, though I didn’t deal with needles or blood. The bags were hooked up to a rolling stand the nurse said the hospital didn’t want back, a stand I could keep and use as a coatrack or plant hanger. Bob thought it was a good idea, but I couldn’t get rid of that IV stand quickly enough. I pushed it into the trash room the day of the nurse’s last visit. So far I’ve used the gloves sparingly—only at Walgreens and Publix, before you and Angie started grocery shopping for me.
Today our condo complex received news that one of the maintenance men here has tested positive and is in the hospital. Now all the workers have to be tested. I hope they can be tested, as all the testing sites I see online say you need to show symptoms to qualify. The maintenance workers were usually laughing together, using the service elevator together, eating together in the maintenance room on the first floor. All wearing masks and gloves, but starting when? I look through my emails but can’t find any such announcement. Maybe there never was such an announcement. Three weeks ago would have been March 18, and I know that is sometimes touted as the incubation period. I voted on March 17 with my blue gloves from Memorial. I honestly can’t remember if I wore a mask to the polls, though the poll workers I saw there did.
Today Bernie dropped out of the race. I read the long email he sent to his supporters and teared up. America, I love you—but what the hell? If you don’t see now that we need Medicare for all and a livable minimum wage, I don’t know when you will.
Bob was in Hollywood Memorial’s busy ER a year ago for 12 hours before he was even admitted to a room. I fed him Tylenol from my own purse because no one would help with his fever. This was 12 hours before a specialist finally used the word “sepsis.” Then 10 days of infectious disease specialists and ICU. His right arm was twice its normal size, and I called him Popeye to cheer him up. Once admitted, each day brought a new test. Had the infection traveled to his heart? (Specialist one.) To his bone? Would he lose his arm? (Specialist two.) To his liver, his pancreas, his kidneys? Well, you get the idea.
Hollywood Memorial has some of the best infectious doctors in the world. How lucky we were to have those doctors. I suppose, to a point, how lucky we are—though if the hospital was overwhelmed then, what is it like now?
I remember rolling that IV stand to the trash room where I told the maintenance crew what the nurse had told me—maybe one of them would like to repurpose it as a plant hanger? My wife loves plants! one man said. Gracias! And he rolled it to his car. Maybe he is the man who is in the hospital now, his wife unable to visit him, watering her string of nickels and button orchids.
*
Our building hasn’t mentioned any cases of the virus here, whether among the residents or members of the staff. But would they know? And if they did, how transparent would they be?
Last night Management sent an email with the subject line “Construction update,” which I misread (of course) as “Coronavirus update.” When I clicked, the message began this way: “The concrete restoration project is moving very well. Our project management team, LTM Group, is very pleased with the performance, cooperation and responsiveness from Restore Construction…”
I closed the message without clicking on any pictures of our building’s ongoing beautification. Isn’t this the equivalent of people getting makeovers during a pandemic, meeting their stylists in covert locations or asking them to come to their homes? This morning I saw a dog-grooming van driving up A1A and wondered what poodle’s shearing and requisite pink bow was worth putting everyone’s health at risk.
People everywhere are getting sick. People everywhere are dying. Healthy people everywhere are working from home or simply stranded at home, and for those who live here, their days are spent in a surround-sound percussion chamber.
But imagine if someone in this building is sick. There are 500 apartments spread out over 15 floors. The odds don’t favor an all-clear here, and this construction would be the backdrop to every ailing person’s fever dreams.
This morning I ran the building stairs and smelled cigarette smoke on the fifteenth floor. Then, I saw a lone cigarette stubbed out on the concrete, the landing pungent with a mix of smoke and mold. Of course people shouldn’t be smoking, especially in the time of Covid-19, but if people are already addicted, is the time of Covid-19 a reasonable time to wean their way off a drug? (Only ever a social smoker myself, and not for many years, I don’t mind telling you that part of me wanted to tug open the fire door with my Clorox Wipe and bum a cigarette from that stranger.)
At lunchtime, I Zoomed to a class in New Mexico, where students were reading a book I wrote more than a decade ago. It’s called Small Fires. Where are the small fires now? I found myself wondering. When did every fire become a dumpster fire—and when did “dumpster fire” become a thing I say, a thing I actually mean?
In talking with the class, I shared that Small Fires wasn’t my working title for the book. We discussed the way things change between writing and publishing a project—the way we change, too, during that time, and how our relationship with our own work continues to change, even after it enters the world. Small Fires was accepted for publication as In Lieu of Flowers.
“Why did they make you change the title?” one student wanted to know.
“The editors felt In Lieu of Flowers was too funereal.” Their faces watching me so intently from their Brady Bunch boxes. “They thought the title would only make people think of death.”
Which of course is what I’m thinking of now—all day, every day. The death of Bernie’s campaign (and Warren’s campaign, still warm in its grave). The death of every kind of certainty. The death of basic freedoms, too. (News flash: Paris banned daytime outdoor exercise, which may be necessary but still frightens me—well—to death.)
Maybe death always surrounds us, even as metaphor, but now we find ourselves without our buffers, overexposed and raw.
Just now, a text message pings my phone: Julie, AssociatesMD is currently offering Telemedicine visits covered by insurance during normal office hours. For after-hours medicine, enroll in our 100% free, zero insurance, UNLIMITED after-hours care program for $1/day (a great service at a great price while the discount lasts.)
It’s free, but it’s $1 a day? And the $1 a day is a discount subject to change? I can read a shady, rhetorical situation from quite a distance: profiteering wrapped in fear-mongering wrapped in savings passed onto the customer! Because health is a commodity now like everything else. Because access to basic services can be turned into (has been already) a quick-buck, concierge scheme?
In lieu of flowers, Bernie. In lieu of flowers, Warren. In lieu of flowers, a flatter curve, a quiet afternoon, peace for people suffering together (domestic abuse on the rise, I read), peace for people suffering alone (depression, anxiety, on the rise, too). In lieu of flowers, a time machine back to 2016.
In lieu of flowers, that line from the poem called “Love” by Paul Eluard that I read in college in a perfume ad: All those deaths I’ve crossed on straw. I clipped it out of the magazine. I didn’t quite understand it then. I’m getting closer, I think, to understanding it now.
In lieu of flowers, more flowers maybe. A Guinness Book of World Records epic bouquet. (Think of the global memorial we’re going to need…) In lieu of flowers, fire—to cauterize our wounds. It’s actually the title a friend of mine suggested for my book. “In lieu of flowers, what?” he asked. I shook my head. “Fire,” he said. “In Lieu of Flowers, Fire.”
Tonight, in lieu of flowers, I’d settle for a single cigarette: a lone corsage, a sad boutonnière. I’d sit on the balcony and watch it in the dark: red at the rose-tip, smoldering.
Thursday, April 9, 2020
Esther Perel calls it “anticipatory grief,” the way we know loss is coming, the way we are powerless to stop it. My mother and her roommate tested negative, as did the caretakers on her floor. My sister and I celebrate, grateful that the nursing home is doing so much to protect those inside. But it doesn’t take long for us to shift gears to fear the next case, the next round of tests, the false negatives we hear about on the news. In Riverside, CA, nursing home patients were evacuated after workers refused to come in—too many Covid-19 patients and employees with the virus.
I watch an animated video about what happens to human lungs once infected droplets spread from the nasal cavity through the bronchioles. I have known the word “bronchioles” since I was little, when Dr. Boyd used grown-up vocabulary to explain my asthma symptoms. He had a pink 3-D model of lungs on his desk.
I’d been under the assumption that a patient of Covid-19 would die trying to catch her breath. But the doctor on the New York Times video explains that, for many patients, it’s “acute respiratory distress syndrome” that stops oxygen from reaching the heart, the rest of the organs. The air sacs at the bottom of the bronchioles start to fill up, creating a wall so thick, air can’t flow through the epithelium.
Epithelium—this is a word I do not know, but it sounds like “epithalamion,” a poem blessing a couple on their wedding day. I try to find out how these two words could possibly be related, and the only connection I can come up with is that the original poem was in praise of Hymen (the Greek god of marriage).
Feminist theory aside, I suppose a hymen is also a barrier to get through. Epi from the Classical Greek epi-, upon; nipple: see female. What? I think of breast-feeding, milk coming through, then my EpiPen stabbing into my leg. Upon, through, hymen, nipple. My EpiPen won’t do me (or anyone else) any good in the case of “acute respiratory distress syndrome.”
The doctor on the video says it’s the organs which begin to suffocate.
My mother’s doctor sends a monitor for her to wear for a week so he can check her heart failure from atrial fibrillation. A nurse will put it on her, then send it back to the doctor for the results. My mother says she was looking forward to the fresh air, a ride in the van to her cardiologist, but understands it’s safer this way. Then, out of the blue, she says, I wish there was something I could do to help.
In retirement, my mom became a talented quilter. She made me a quilt for my wedding, which I can’t bear to throw away, even though it has pictures of my ex-husband sewn on it. She was still working full-time as a nurse during the worst of the AIDS pandemic. Otherwise, I know she would have quilted a square for one of my friends. And now that my mother’s hands no longer sew, the country is calling on quilters to make face masks.
*
Today we found out that Angie’s father tested negative for the coronavirus, despite his many persistent symptoms—the cough, the fever, the crippling fatigue. The doctor expressed doubt about the test results, suggested it was “probably a false negative.” So what was the point of the test then? we wonder, if even the doctor wasn’t surprised.
Today we found out that my sister-in-law, a surrogate who gave birth in Kentucky on March 12th in a hospital already segregating into “COVID” and “NONCOVID” floors, was back in the hospital again last night with dangerously high blood pressure. She is only 39 and had never struggled with high blood pressure before. During the pregnancy, her blood pressure soared, and she was ultimately induced three weeks early because preeclampsia had put her life at risk.
Kim told Angie she felt relieved to see how prepared and efficient the hospital was during this time of crisis. The staff were dressed in head-to-toe protective gear, including gloves, masks, and goggles, and a whole separate Covid-19 ward had been established. Some doctors and nurses now in the main hospital and some in the separate ward—no cross-overs.
Kentucky has recently elected a Democratic governor named Andy Beshear. We have a hunch that a visit to Memorial—or any Florida hospital—would not inspire feelings of relief. Ron DeSantis, our Republican governor, often referred to in liberal circles as Ron DeRacist, didn’t even have the guts to restrict religious gatherings and has left CDC-recommended face covering up to the discretion of individual cities and counties.
Today we found out that the City of Hollywood has ordered mandatory face-covering for all people when venturing outside their homes. The order is in effect, like everything else, “until further notice.” Angie and I couldn’t decide how early we needed to rise in order to run safely outside, and we also couldn’t decide how early was too early. Earlier means fewer people on the roads, true, but it also means more deserted places, the possibility that creepers could be lurking. Would fear of coronavirus really stop a would-be rapist or mugger?
In the end, we rose hours before first light and still saw people walking their dogs, people running and biking down A1A—and nobody was wearing a mask! Did they think that rising early would exempt them from contributing to the spread? Exasperated, we climbed back into bed for further, fitful sleep.
Today my screen flashed “Your internet is unstable,” then I lost my connection for a full five minutes in the middle of teaching my class. When I finally logged back on, all my students’ faces were there inside the little boxes, grinning at me, cheering “Welcome back!” and typing thumbs-up icons into the Zoom group chat.
“You waited for me!” I felt so fragile by then it was all I could do to hold back my tears.
Oliver, sweet as ever, but practical, too: “Well, where did you think we would go?”
Today, like every day in National Poetry Month, I posted a “heart poem” on my Facebook page. These are touchstone poems that have been formative for me in some way—poems that have helped me grow.
“Speaking of Loss by Lucille Clifton,” I typed. The first line, in her spare, resonant way: “i began with everything.: The last lines, in her spare, resonant way: “i am left with plain hands and/ nothing to give you but poems.”
Today I tried my best to believe that poems are enough—and when they are not enough, that they are not nothing.
Friday, April 10, 2020
How I need poetry! I am so happy you reminded me. A poet myself, how did I forget? I find myself busy in survival mode—making masks, reading about masks, searching for masks online, online, online. Though I start with a purpose, I careen from one news story to the next, even though I try my best not to watch TV.
For example, today I learned Iceland has tested more of its population than anywhere else in the world, a full 10 percent, picking people at random from a phonebook. (Apparently, Iceland still has phonebooks!) Half of the people who test positive for the virus are asymptomatic, which has my mind lurching back to the nursing home where the staff is so barebones.
We got a letter today saying the nurses just don’t have time to help patients with Facetime anymore. The staff hopes my sister and I understand, and we do understand. My mother never got her iPad to work anyway, and I talk to her twice a day on her TracFone. My mother’s drawers are still full of chocolates and cheese popcorn, though she is rationing them as my sister can’t drop off treats anymore, and I can’t send her care packages in the mail since the nursing home stopped accepting them.
Another example: New Zealand is already flattening its curve, with only one death (total) from Covid-19. New Zealand is an island, and fewer people travel in and out. Still, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has taken the virus seriously since February. People arriving in the country are required to spend two weeks quarantined in an approved facility, not at home where they could infect those with whom they live. This has my mind lurching back to the massacre in a mosque in Christchurch. A year ago today—April 10, 2019—Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gave an impassioned speech to Parliament about the shooting victims, having put into effect a law banning most semiautomatic weapons. It took New Zealand only 26 days following the shooting to act on gun control.
And this has my mind lurching back to Sarah Silverman’s joke—“The USA is Number One [pause] in Type Two Diabetes.” Back to Sarah Silverman’s campaigning for Bernie. Back to Sarah Silverman’s hilarious song “The Great Schlep,” urging young Jewish people to get down to Florida to visit their grandparents while at the same time convincing them to vote for Obama. To the time I saw Sarah Silverman do stand up at The Hard Rock. Her father was in the audience, close to the front, and got up in the middle of her act and started to walk out.
“Where do you think you’re going, Dad?” she asked.
“To take a leak!” he answered as he passed my row. He got a big laugh.
Then Sarah said, “Well, make sure to wash your hands with soap for as long as it takes to sing ‘Happy Birthday to You.’”
And then I am here in the present. Washing my hands, foregoing my rings, which were getting full of soap scum. Me singing, which is not really like a poem. Me, heading toward my bookshelf.
*
Sometimes I wonder how we will think about the present in the future, when the present has become the past. What will we remember? What will we forget? And how much choice is involved in either of these?
Remember when Li-Young Lee wrote in his first collection, Rose: “Memory is sweet./ Even when it’s bitter, memory is sweet.” So much of the present, any present, is spent longing for the future, and so much of the present, any present, is spent longing for the past. What were we longing for in spring 2020 that we hadn’t received? What will we miss—something, surely—about spring 2020 once we’ve reached another summit in time?
I’ll be teaching Rose again, as I do each summer, in my six-week poetry intensive. The class has already been moved online, which saddens me in a way I can’t describe. I’ll still have a class, of course. We’ll still read poems together, write them, share them. But I’ll never know these students in a real-life way, a four-hours-in-the-same-room, laughing-about-the-thermostat-that-doesn’t-work-right way, pausing sometimes in reverence as a storm passes through. “The thunder’s caesura,” we called it last year. “The lightning’s caesura.” I may never even see some of my new students’ faces, as many do not have cameras on their computers. Others feel self-conscious showing their living space on screen, and I know it isn’t my place to force them.
All day I’ve been struggling with a migraine. It started when the fire alarm went off in our apartment half an hour before the wake-up alarm went off on my phone. That shrill, relentless sound that sent us leaping out of bed, scrambling to find the stepladder in the dark.
Later, we tried running in the overflow parking lot across the street, which is close to the Intracoastal at least, with its gentle currents and occasional paddle-boarders and canoes. In 40 minutes, only one person wandered into the lot—smoking a cigarette and reeking of bad cologne. Angie said, “If we can smell him, then we can breathe whatever he’s got,” a perpetually sobering thought.
The man wasn’t wearing a mask, as almost no one was on the sidewalk or the road. He sat in his car and smoked for a while, then drove away while we kept running the perimeter, desperate for fresh air and the sweet illusion that we were really free to come and go as we pleased.
This afternoon I laid in bed with my migraine, incurable it seemed with exercise or coffee or water or food or even my medicine, which I try to ration since the doctor only sends nine pills at a time. Both cats came and stretched out beside me, the way they do, so warm and reassuring. I stroked Tybee’s head, our elder-cat who sometimes has seizures now and will turn 16 in June. His kidney disease has weakened him, and every year he loses more weight despite his still-hearty appetite.
This, I think, is something I will miss about spring 2020. Someday, when this beautiful cat is gone, this cat we have loved since he was four months old—this cat who came before any of my books but not before my love of poems—I will remember this afternoon, his soft body resting against mine, his head on my pillow, his contented snores.
And then I think of the final lines of another poem I will teach this summer—to anime avatars and stock nature photos and blank screens and curious faces peering back from their boxes: Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do.” I stroke Tybee’s fur, reddened from all his sunbaths on our balcony. I kiss his plush black head and watch his whole body extend languorously with pleasure. “I am living; I remember you.”
