Linnetontheleaf

When the NY/NJ lock-down went into effect back in mid-March, I began an evening ritual inspired by the videos I’d seen of home-bound Italians singing together from their windows and balconies. I have long loved the Woody Guthrie song THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND, and decided to make it my nightly anthem. So every evening at about 7:30PM, I go out with my Bluetooth speaker and play THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND a couple of times, walking up and down my suburban block.

What a pointless gesture, right? Who even notices, much less cares? A couple of neighbors have mentioned that they hear my music in the evenings, and occasionally a dog-walker gives me a fist-pump as s/he passes by, but what is really the point?

I suppose it’s mostly for ME. I never tire of this wholesomely subversive song, which always gives me hope in the dark hours of our public life. I also hope that while my neighbors may not tune in consciously, they are hearing and responding on a subatomic level. When all this is over, Woody’s lyrics may touch them in a newly profound way. They may not even know why — though I fantasize that perhaps a vague memory will surface, associating this song with the coronavirus lock-down, and maybe with a new hope that was born, as hopes often are, during dark days.

I don’t understand patriotism — how can you take pride in a mere accident of fate? — so I am not celebrating my country with my nightly broadcast. If anything, I’m shaming it, just as Woody was, demanding that it become the ideal aspired to by its founders. So although I’m not patriotic, Woody’s plain, rugged Anglo-Saxon words still thrill me — his roaming and rambling, his waving wheat fields, rolling dust clouds and chanting voices.  Hear these words and you are no longer alone in your house with your nervous little family. Rather, you’re at the side of an optimistic, questing troubadour.  I may go on playing THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND every evening for the rest of my life!

Not really. These prickly wire appliances in my mouth? They barely even attract my attention. The only thing worth reading, hearing and knowing about now is Covid-19. But I’m glad that my accident made me re-start this blog, because it’s caused me to reflect more deeply on the worldwide crisis which followed my own little personal emergency. I’m sure I’m not alone in this — a neighbor told me last week that he was now keeping a journal for the first time in his life. I suppose we all feel that we are living in a profound historical moment which we need to process in the present, and wish to remember in the future.

I adore the books which came out of the WWII Mass Observation Project, which invited British civilians to record their wartime experiences. I’ve read a number of these compilations, but the best were written by a Lancashire housewife named Nella Last. How I adore Nella!  You would too — she is so brave, so quick and funny, and so full of pungent, prickly analysis of the humans around her, including her rather unsatisfactory husband! I appreciate that her typically flawed human nature comes through, as it makes everything else she says ring even more true.

If anyone were to ever read these pages in a day to come, and think ‘my, that’s what it was like,’ as I did with Nella’s words, it would be a great honor!

I woke to brilliantly blue skies this morning, after hours of gloomy, icy rain yesterday, so set out on an early walk to enjoy the forsythia and cherry blossoms. A block from home, I ‘came to’ and realized that I was heedlessly walking along the length of sidewalk where I fell two months ago today. I have superstitiously avoided the spot ever since, but forgot all about it this morning — for, like most humans currently alive on the planet, my fears are now focused on the coronavirus.

Analyzing my mental landscape, I suppose I’m not actively anxious, not often anyway, and indeed why would I be? I am blessedly, unjustly insulated from the worst threats the pandemic is dishing out. It seems unlikely I will get sick (if I escaped the virus while commuting on mass transit and working in a crowded office), and nor do my friends and relations seem in danger medically. It’s likely I’ll be able to continue working and drawing my salary, though I am concerned for my financially vulnerable family and friends. I do wonder how long I’ll have to postpone retirement in the wake of an inevitable worldwide recession, but that’s a mild, theoretical issue in comparison to nearly every other one the world currently faces.

But even the luckiest among us now operate against a backdrop of uncertainty, which exposes our fragility and the unknowability of the future. Of course, the fact is that we were always fragile, and our futures are always hidden, but the pandemic has distilled and concentrated these phenomena into palpable and inescapable reality.

Honestly I am heartily sick of the lessons the universe seems to need to teach me in 2020!

Life returned to normal so quickly that I never got the retirement rehearsal I contemplated when I broke my jaw, but the universe is now offering me another chance,  thanks to Covid-19. No social activities allowed, of course, so if I thought I was going to volunteer at a school or retirement home, that’s not happening. But how else might I spend my days? (Technically I am still working, ‘but not so’s you’d know,’ as it’s very quiet.)

I’m grateful that the corona virus has arrived at just the right moment when my garden needs it annual spring clean-up. Spring is so busy for gardeners, I usually do a very slipshod job of this, but thanks to Covid-19, I can now actually devote considerable time to it, clearing out old fall leaves and dead top growth, thoughtfully pruning roses, reseeding the lawn patches where the skunks and possums searched for grubs, and seeding early crops such as lettuce. Maybe I’ll enter the growing season with no spring onions flourishing in my beds for once!

I also took into my head to refinish our dining table, the sort of project which always turns out to be much more labor-intensive than you anticipate when you plunge in with all your energy and high hopes. The stripper wasn’t as potent as it claimed to be, and I’ve spent untold hours scraping, but maybe I am finally turning a corner. Novel to have the time to devote to a big project like this!

Although I used an environmentally-friendly ‘safer stripper,’ hours of contact (I cannot seem to work wearing gloves) and constant anti-corona hand-washing have damaged my hands, which crack and bleed at the slightest provocation.  Thus I have not practiced my ukulele. (I have also not practiced my ukulele because it is really hard!)

Stuck mostly at home, I may also have kept up better with friends and my community than I do under normal circumstances. Everyone seems to have a little extra time to chat from the sidewalk or post or email something thoughtful and kind.

I recently read that Margaret Mead, asked for the first ‘sign of civilization’ she’d found in the fossil record, answered: an ancient human skeleton with a fractured, healed femur. Why? Because, she explained, this indicated that humans had become ‘civilized’ enough to care for one another, perhaps at considerable risk to themselves. Grievously injured animals don’t stand much of a chance, with no one to protect or feed them. But this fortunate paleolithic human had a devoted friend or parent or offspring to care for them. Let’s all be that parent, child or friend to our neighbors. Wouldn’t that be a silver lining?

A week ago, my jaw blessedly freed from its wires, I naively thought that my life was about to get back to normal after a six-week disruption. How impossible it was to foresee how very much more disrupted life was going to become! If you had told me last week that New Jersey would have an 8PM curfew in a matter of days, I would probably have called you a loony alarmist. But here we are.

The restrictions and regulations have escalated so rapidly, to such heights — life is now pretty strange; how much stranger will it get? At this rate, it will soon be almost unrecognizable — at least to spoiled suburbanites who think that they should be able to drive, shop, drink, socialize, work out and high-five at all times, and that there must always be raspberries in the supermarket (not to mention toilet paper). Did I feel that my accident undermined my confidence in what I could expect from existence? How QUAINT.  Now we all know for sure what really undermines one’s peace of mind — a worldwide pandemic.

Lately I’ve taken to telling people to ‘stay safe and sane,’ but does that sound a little smug? Like I’m a paragon of rationality but suspect everyone else is probably hysterical?I may need to come up with a new sign-off. Until then, stay safe and sane!

The main wires holding my jaw closed were finally removed the day before yesterday, six weeks after they installed. The surgeon wasn’t terribly reassuring — flatly stating ‘I’m not in love with your x-ray’ — but I suspect it’s never guaranteed how a union will hold up without conducting a little experiment. He cautioned me to really baby it — only the softest of foods, scarcely more solid than the liquids I’ve been consuming for the last month and a half — and to rush right back to him if anything hurts or feels weird.

It does feel weird actually! But not in an alarming way, I hope. I think my whole mouth is just out of practice! Immobile for weeks, those joints are dreadfully rusty, and both sides hurt when I try to open my mouth, which I can only partially do. The muscles are weak as well — chewing even a scrambled egg is taxing. My mouth still contains a lot of hardware (in case it needs re-wiring), which catches every shred of food that I eat, disgustingly. But after drinking my every ‘bite’ for weeks, what a joy it is to place a tiny sliver of food on a fork and conduct it into my mouth, between upper and lower teeth which actually separate! (though not fully yet.)

Being unable to eat really cramped my style socially. I did go out to eat with friends a bit, and hung around for family meals, but since our species mostly socializes around food, I have not enjoyed my usual quota of human interaction during this period. Naturally, I have longed to prepare and enjoy meals with friends and family again.

But suddenly, that isn’t possible: the authorities advise us to observe ‘social distancing’ to slow the spread of Covid-19.  What a disappointment! But this situation, a slight grief for me, inflicts utter catastrophe on many others. Practically every hour, we hear of another industry forced to close down, another profession unable to earn money during the crisis.

Yes I’m forlorn that it’s now hard to reconnect socially, as I have yearned to do. But these pangs are so minor compared to the threat faced in this crisis by our most disadvantaged, vulnerable fellow humans, I don’t know how I even have the nerve to mention them. I hereby pledge to stop feeling sorry for myself, and to try to find ways to help those most injured by the repercussions of  this emergency.  If you are among the fortunate ones who probably won’t suffer too much, I hope you’ll join me!

If I thought that this experience had enhanced my ability to coexist with uncertainty, that’s nothing compared to the spanner Covid-19 is throwing into the works for everyone. Every day, practically every hour, seems to bring new anxieties.

As I’ve mentioned, we’d planned to go to New Orleans next week — it was among my primary concerns when I first broke my jaw, as I wrestled with the prospect of being unable to eat solid foods in the city of gumbo, po’ boys and the finest fried chicken. Eventually I convinced myself that I could handle it — I’d be unhappy, but could cope somehow, as long as I could hear my music, walk my second line and see my Mardi Gras Indians on St. Joseph’s Day.

But then came the corona virus — slowly and quietly at first, spreading like a stain in China, boarding cruise ships, invading the very northern Italian cities we visited last fall, landing on our shores, racing through a Seattle nursing home and a neighborhood in Westchester County, drawing closer and closer with increasing speed.

As a complacent first-world westerner who smugly assumes that my nationality and privilege will protect me, I’m rarely alarmist about such things. Don’t these threats always burn themselves out in more vulnerable populations far from our borders? But that doesn’t seem to be happening this time. Even if the virus itself isn’t a major threat to Americans, the social disruption most definitely is.

Needless to say, New Orleans is off. It was necessary to cancel by tomorrow to get a refund on the Airbnb, and it seems likelier that conditions will deteriorate rather than improve. Maybe we’d have lucked out and found the clubs and restaurants open, but if not? My liquid diet in New Orleans would have been pretty depressing, but to be unable to enjoy its unique music and social arts would have been heart-breaking.

Now I don’t have to confront either eventuality. And in all honesty, after worrying about the trip ever since my accident, eliminating that large complication is a massive relief. My broken jaw, and Covid-19, and the attendant disruptions of both, are all the uncertainty I can manage!

I’ve always been awful at living with uncertainty. I have never been able to be at peace with question marks — whenever my future looked unpredictable,  my brain would race helplessly, trying to map out every eventuality that might occur. I have lain awake at night for hours (roused just as soon as my physical weariness was sufficiently relieved), working out my strategies if the sellers didn’t accept our offer, if the biopsy was bad news, if the college’s financial package wasn’t sufficient. Perhaps I only exhausted myself pointlessly, but having a plan felt like a comforting measure of control, whatever events might unfold.

But my current situation doesn’t seem particularly responsive to this sort of preparation. What good would it do me today to know that I’ll still be in wires a month or more from now? Quite to the contrary, it would be very discouraging! So, perhaps self-defensively, I’ve quit dwelling upon such distressing outcomes, and gratefully embrace uncertainty instead.

It occurs to me that I’m also dismissing positive outcomes (getting out of wires faster) — wouldn’t it be healthier to permit myself to hope? Not for me, not in this case. Yearning to end my current state arouses discontent. My hard-won, in-the-moment acceptance is undermined.

In most other life arenas, I’m fiercely results-oriented. I plan everything, from using up leftovers in the fridge to strategizing where to live in retirement. So it’s a great novelty to me to dwell calmly in this hazy, undefined frontier, without compulsively marching off to explore surrounding territories. It may be an unreproducible phenomenon, so I’ll enjoy this life-lesson while it lasts.

I recall a 30 ROCK episode in which Liz Lemon gets trapped for hours aboard a plane stuck on the tarmac. The pilot (her current BF Matt Damon) keeps announcing they’ll leave soon, but instead they sit for hours, and are not allowed to deboard. Finally the claustrophobic Liz stages a revolt, protesting that ‘out there in the terminal’ (among other things), ‘people are CROSSING THEIR LEGS!’ Like so much about the show, this was very clever and funny, but it also exemplified an attitude I’ve sincerely tried to adopt — of remembering to be grateful for the smallest things, of which we’re often practically unconscious.

Currently for me, that small thing is opening my mouth, placing food inside, and CHEWING. How often was I even aware of the beautiful simplicity of this act? Practically never, I’m sure. Maybe eating and swallowing was a bit hard after I had my tonsils out or my wisdom teeth removed, or after a recent gum surgery — but at least my jaw worked, and I could open it! It’s been 35 days now since I could do that. I’m pretty resigned — I suppose because there’s no choice, no way to ‘cheat’ with these wires in my mouth. But yesterday I looked around the table during a family meal, and yearned to re-enact that simple, beautiful, eternal human ritual. As soon as my mouth returns to normal, I’ll probably forget all about how much it is possible to miss this ubiquitous miracle of biology and pleasure — but I wish I would remember. Doing so would make a wonderful celebration of every day, every meal, every. These acts, so mundane and quotidian until we lose them, would become a permanent, reliable source of daily joy. Wouldn’t that be amazing?