Sixty days in quarantine

I had my birthday in quarantine last week. 

It's often a difficult day for me. It's hard not to lament the passage of time, to consider all tha has not been done or achieved by now. I was out on my own early and went to college late, and I always feel like I just got started. Meanwhile, time keeps nibbling at the edge of my life. Not taking big bites yet, but I can feel it growing bolder. 

Being in quarantine has been maddening, because without all the noise of traveling and working and reveling and singing along with the jukebox in a bar, the nibbling gets louder. When it's quiet like this, it's all I can hear. I'm getting older, the jukebox is playing Happy Birthday and the crocodile is chasing me because it liked the taste of my hand and you can never-never go back. Only light another candle on the cake and wish to go forward. 

I launched a book in quarantine last week. 

It's funny to say that any day is really a book's launch under the best of circumstances. My last book had several "launches," at readings and events and various online platforms. Books don't launch like rockets. They go up slowly, like the balloons in the Thanksgiving day parade. It takes a team of people to keep them flying, keep them moving down block after block. Sometimes they snag and sometimes they pop, but if your luck and your team are good, they stay up all the way down Central Park West. And every time someone sees it, it's new. I got tagged in Instagram stories this week by people for whom my first book is new: written seven years ago and published six years ago and translated two years ago and always new. Always coming around the corner, flying and brand new. 

I've lost and found myself in these sixty days. I've forgotten how to read and learned it again. I've forgotten how to write and learned that, too. I've had to coax myself away from the feeling that staring at Twitter is work, or that worrying about the news is work, or that fretting and whining will get a book written. Writing is the only thing that gets it done. And writing makes it harder to hear the sound of time taking those nibbly bites. 

I've worked for East Bay FeedER for much of these sixty days, turning donations into restaurant meals for medical workers all over our community and telling the story while we do it. It's been gratifying and difficult and uplifting and educational all at once, and I am glad to look over it and see what good it has produced. 

We're coming to the end of this section of tunnel, and there's light in the distance. I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I want most when the world turns its lights back on, but I know enough now to be afraid of the things I wanted. I wanted crowds, I wanted noise. I don't want to get sick, and I don't want to pass it around if I get it. 

There are more quarantined days ahead. Whether they're officially mandated or not, I know that I'll be spending much of this year at home. I can say I've gotten the hang of it now. I hope you have, too. 

An old friend of mine died of Covid-19. He was someone I hadn't seen in years, who worked with me in a shitty food service job a lifetime ago. He was loud, abrasive, a racist river-rat who who made up angry little songs throughout the day just to get time to pass. He was tall, broad, bullish. Completely healthy. He told me he had gotten busted in high school in the pre-Columbine days for building a pipe bomb and had to serve a suspension. He had never gone back. 

He's dead at thirty-three. His family posted the story on Facebook, numb with shock and outraged that they couldn't even gather to mourn him. I tried to remember the good in him, the funny things. The day he tipped the industrial cornbread batter machine and poured it all over me, the runny yellow cake pooling in the cuffs of my black Dickies. I hope he was a good dad. I hope life softened his heart. I hope death found him alive. 

I hope it doesn't find any more of us. Not the young, not the old. I hope we all get to stay home and stay safe, and take good care of those who can't. I hope this is over soon. 

But until then, sixty days is long enough to build a habit and make peace with all the things I would like to be doing, but cannot do. It is too long to miss some of the people I miss, but I'd rather know they are safe than be a moving vector. 

I'd rather have my birthday in quarantine every year than have to attend a wake on Zoom ever again. 

Tango with the crocodile, 

Meg