Pandemic Time

Another month, thousands more Covid-19 cases and deaths. This morning, in a movie review, Mick LaSalle said, “That is, we’re finding out firsthand that we can feel completely different—content and cozy or fearful and and frustrated—on days that are otherwise identical.” So true. I am depending on yoga, and practicing the piano, and Duolingo Italian to focus me when reading and walking and knitting and gardening are not strong enough to overcome the pervasive dread. Writing can be especially hard, because opening to feeling is tricky.

Last weekend was actually different. My daughter, the ER doc, came to visit for the first time in seven months. She’s fine, thank you, recently engaged, moving on with her life, like my other children. It was amazing to be in the same room with her and her fiancé, which probably violated the CDC guidelines, although they both tested negative. They are around many more people than I am, not always masked and six feet apart. I held her friend’s baby, born at the beginning of the epidemic. Simple pleasures.

I’ve been reading John Lawton mysteries, recently Friends and Traitors, where the friend and traitor is John Burgess. Lawton does a super job of weaving history into the Inspector Troy series, and music, always music. I am also racing through Marilyn Abildskov’s exquisite memoir of her time in Japan, The Men in My Country. She teaches writing at St. Mary’s College in Moraga and I met her in a Zoom workshop. It is somewhat painful, to read about travel, when we are stuck at home but I have to believe this won’t last forever. I started Wendy Lesser’s Scandinavian Noir, whose serious analysis has inspired me to try that genre again. ( I never finished Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, my first attempt.) Finally, I started Bleak House, a Dickens novel I missed along the way. OMG. It feels so comfortable, and funny.

I don’t feel any special need to read books by black authors this summer, given that I have a sixty year head start on my white peers. I did just finish The Street by Ann Petry, a novel written in 1946, which I wish I had discovered decades earlier. And I highly recommend Along this Way, James Weldon Johnson’s actual autobiography. Musician, author (The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which is a novel) activist, ambassador—what a guy.