I was waiting to do this post until I got my books and could write about how I felt when I opened the box and actually saw them—the real thing—not the copied pages, the ARC, the digital version—but they haven’t yet arrived.
As I was sitting outside for a brief respite from the computer, dreaming a bit in the sun, all the other things I was waiting for flooded my mind—the arrival of those books, a haircut appointment, word from Politics and Prose about a hoped-for Crowdcast video for I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, for the overgrown lawn to be mowed, for the grass seed in its bare spots to sprout, for my puppy Stella to finish her heat, for the time and energy to clean up my thousands of emails, to write a new poem, to put together another poetry collection.
I’m waiting for a day when I can feel better about what is happening in the world, when the news won’t spew one awful report after another, one more pile of lies and ugliness, another cancellation, venomous tweet or higher death tally. I’m marking time until I don’t feel like I’m locked in a room with a madman. November 3 can’t come soon enough for me—of course, only if Democrats displace that madman and the other ones in the Senate, the cronies and phonies who are doing what some call governing during this terrible time of COVID. I am not able to get my mind around what the further devastation to our world would be if the Democrats don’t win.
Sometimes I’ve felt like my life was a waiting room— that I’m just biding time until the work of living is done. As I do my yoga routine, I’m thinking of what to have for lunch—as I put away my winter sweaters and take out my tee shirts and tank tops, I’m already thinking of that new fall jacket I want to wear—as I take my daily walk I’m thinking of the glass of wine I’ll have when I get home. Always ahead of myself. At the end of the day, instead of feeling a sense of completion I agonize over all I did not get done.
This waiting, this catapulting from the present moment to whatever I imagine is coming next, keeps me from paying attention to the budding allium, peonies, the blooming lilacs and the daffodils—making them past history before their brief lives are even half over. I’m not fully present to my husband’s enthusiasm about the baby bluebirds nesting in his garden or the kale and lettuce that’s beginning to sprout. I’m not seeing the mustard springing up in the back field or the gorgeous color of the leaves on my new copper beech.
I know I’m doing it. I know. It’s so hard not to.
And like all of us, I’m waiting for this confusing period in our lives to move into some kind of transition——when my grandsons can have a college experience that resembles normalcy, when I can actually see and hug them, go out into the world and interact with others without the inevitable self-consciousness that comes with masks and social distancing.
Last night I dreamt, in vivid detail, though I cannot now remember much of it, that I’d gotten the virus and was in the very beginning of being ill with it. The feeling I most remember from the dream is relief. I found that fascinating. The dreaded enemy had arrived and I was face to face with it. No more waiting. It would do what it would do in my body, and I would recover, or not.
But that was a dream The wait now is to see if I’ll get it, or my husband will, and just get all this protecting from it and preparing for it over with, plumb the mystery of this dreaded virus. Otherwise the vaccine could be years away and life with masks, social distancing, virtual connections and the need for creative solutions to things we long took for granted would become the norm, as it is now. I’m healthy and active, with none of the compromising features that would make me susceptible-- except age. And that’s a big one, of course. I’ve only ventured out into the world twice so far, to a nursery for salvia, zinnias and impatiens for my pots and gardens, and to a farm stand for the delectable asparagus I look forward to every spring. Staying home is supposed to be a way to insure myself from contagion, but I don’t really believe that.
So I’ll just keep waiting, and at the same time, trying not to. That paradox, again. That life challenge, spelled in bold, capital letters by COVID--opening as fully as we can to living, and at the same time, waiting to die.
Here’s a poem for you, from my latest collection, Unhinged.
WHILE THERE IS STILL TIME
All our friends look so old, some a little
bent over, others bald, developing quavers,
cancers, cataracts. Taking daily naps. I
know we look nothing like them, we are
only the age we met at, believing everything,
unknowing of loss, distance, how one story
becomes another, how promises falter,
questions get noisier. We always knew
what to do next. Remember? Have a baby,
buy a house, plant a garden, get a dog, bury
a son. I’d thought you were proof against
drowning, you’d thought I was. Costumed
as adults, we continued our fictions, until
we couldn’t. Out here now on the fringes
of the end, I’m too tired to pretend. As our
deaths are trying on their suits and dresses,
let’s be kind, while there is still time.