It’s still getting light outside my window. I went outside to get my notebook from my car and the air was chill, clean, and worth waking up to. Teddy danced in the lawn. We didn’t usually go outside together in the morning. He was wearing his furry white coat. I was cold, but it was worth looking up into the sky at the silhouette of my Western red cedars, Western Hemlocks, and Douglas firs. It was worth pretending I could still play with the happy dog, just for a moment.
At night, I’ve been falling asleep to Netflix and Amazon Prime because my mind runs so much at night. If I keep the sound down, I can pull the covers over my face and listen for a while, and just drift off into a fantasy world. There’s a movie I wish I could put on repeat: About Time with Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams. It is a love story, but it’s about what we do with our time. If you could go back in time, which days would you go to?
I suspect that in a few months, I might come back to these days, any of these days, the time during Christmas, the summer, or weekends that I might have believed to be boring when I first lived them.
I would go back to a summer day in Seward Park sometime around 2005.
Nick was still small enough for Mike to swing him in circles, but when I did it, Nick and I were more like twin planets. I wobbled in the orbit almost as much as he did. Pearl Django played on a stage. When we first got there, Nick ran up to a family with small children and made instant friends with them. We had to ask them not to feed him anything in case they’d made their banana bread with nuts. In 2004, Nick’s allergy kicked in. That made him about four or five. Nick’s adopted family were sweet people. We trusted them. Then, when Nick returned to us, the French plaza music playing as background, Nick asked Mike to spin him in circles. He asked me first, but after a few times wobbling and trying to heft him higher into the air, I let Mike take over.
Then I spent the next minutes trying to time my camera’s shutter to go off just as Nick’s feel swung out to the side. If I followed my instinct, he was always a quarter turn from that, the two lined up so Nick was eclipsed. I took more than half of the pictures with him blocked from view. It was funny and we all got to laughing together until we couldn’t stop and we lolled about on the ground.
The violin, stringed bass, guitar, and accordion played. Pearl Django. That music will forever remain in my mind as the sound track to the perfect day.
Last fall, Mike and I had gone to Salmon Days and were about to head back to the high school parking lot when I heard music drifting down a lane we were going to skip.
“That sounds like Pearl Django,” I said to Mike. Nick was at college so it was only the two of us. The music was Pearl Django, so we wandered down the lane and stood to listen to them. We stood there for a long time, both of us thinking of that day so many years ago at Seward Park. I got weepy and just couldn’t stop crying. I missed my boy. He’d only been gone for five weeks and he said he was happy, but I missed him. I stood there in Mike’s arms, my face buried. I hoped the band members didn’t notice, or at least that they understood the power their music had on me, that they played the sound track to the best ordinary day of my life.
Mike, Nick, and I are in a semi-quarantine. I say semi because Mike thinks it’s okay for me to be out and about at places where the coronavirus has been confirmed if I am careful with my space and hands. I have to remember not to touch my face. It’s hard to remember all I’ve touched and all I want is to do is finish what I’m doing and get back home to them.
They are not good at self-quarantining. Yesterday, they asked me to bring home Chinese food. Really? We go three days and already they’re done with their quarantine? Someone is going to prepare our food, possibly someone sick? When I brought the bag home, I opened it carefully and threw away the bag. Then, I made up plates and microwaved the hell out of them. My kitchen smells like a pool from all the bleach I’m using. The skin of my hands hurts because I’m washing them so often. And my nose itches just because I know I’m not supposed to touch it.
Ultimately, we’re all going to get this virus, but not all of us are going to survive it. I have a one in ten chance of losing somebody. That means that if you put ten people in a room, and you shouldn’t these days, and I am there with my family, the odds are that one of those people won’t walk out. I’m working so hard when I’m out to keep from bringing those odds into my house.
Last night, I read a grim account on Twitter by an Italian doctor at one of the hospitals there. I won’t make it worse for you by repeating what he said, but when the disease really hits this area, hospitals are going to be overwhelmed and more people are going to die. I had begun to believe that I could relax a little. Denial is strong with this slow process. But luck is going to favor people who aren’t in denial, people who wash their hands, people who don’t eat out, people who stay home, people who don’t need the hospitals just at the time when they are most overwhelmed with the infected.
And it helps me to think about this day. This could very well be the next best day of my life, stuck at home with the people I love the most.
What about you?
Make yourself a cup of tea, put on good music, pull out a lovely book you’ve always wanted to read, pet your cat, plan to walk the dog later in the clean air, look at the people across the room from you, and think about what you’re going to do with this next best day.
Thank you for listening, jules