I haven’t posted a blog entry in a century, maybe. I’ve been absorbed with work, practicing the fiddle like crazy, trying to finish a batshit little novel about tracking down my sister in heaven, and, oh yeah, COVID. But today, scrolling around Twitter, I found myself SHOUTING AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH and NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO and CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP and (almost) throwing my phone across the living room when I saw a tweet from some lady spewing hate and scripture at LGBTQI+ people. I am not going to link to it because it’s horrible, horrible, horrible, and I don’t want to give her any more attention than she deserves, which is zero.

But rest assured, I replied with scripture of my own — you know, all that Super-Jesusy stuff about loving one another, not judging one another, being non-divisive children of God together. Then I thought: Hey! I know! I’ll dig up that old blog post I wrote about this sign-holding evangelical dude I tried to talk sense into at the Women’s March back in January 2017! That’s on sort of kind of almost exactly the same topic! Jesus! Love! Sunshine and flowers! All of us being implored not to judge! Yay! Yes! Excellent!

And then, opening up the post, I scrolled down and found a comment — a heinous, holier-than-thou, scripture-spewing piece of garbage that I’d somehow missed. The writer was there to inform me that, ooopsies!, gays are actually “unnatural”! And saying otherwise means I’m actually not a Christian! It means I’m actually a Leftist with a capital “L”! What’s more, he said: “I’m here to suggest you actually hate Jesus and what he stands for.”

And once again I found myself SHOUTING AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH and CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP and NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO and (almost) throwing my phone across the living room.

Not because the guy accused me of being a Leftist. I certainly am, my friends. AND BREAKING NEWS: SO WAS JESUS. If if he were to sign into Twitter right now, he’d be tweeting out his dismay at his so-called “followers” who are so obsessed with judgement, so in love with hate, that that they fail to realize THEY’RE MISSING THE WHOLE POINT OF BEING ALIVE.

He’d be telling them they fail to comprehend that hate and judgement and exclusion and silencing and oppression of any kind — against gay people, trans people, nonbinary people, Black people, people of color, Indigenous people, people who follow another religion, people who follow no religion, disabled people, incarcerated people, poor people, homeless people, refugees and immigrant people, people who suffer emotionally and mentally, people who don’t “fit in,” people who don’t want to “fit in,” oddball people, people who read books in bars or mutter on street corners, people who are only trying to make it through the day and figure out who they are and whom they love and what brings them joy — THAT ISN’T WHAT JESUS WANTS.

He’d be tweeting loudly:

PIPE DOWN, HATERS.

He’d also be tweeting:

LISTEN TO ME.

And then he’d tweet:

WHEN I TELL YOU TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER, I DON’T MEAN YOU SHOULD BE ATTACKING AND DIMINISHING AND DEMONIZING AND DAMNING EACH OTHER TO HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY.

And then:

WHAT GOSPELS ARE YOU READING, ANYWAY?!?

And then:

DIDN’T YOU NOTICE THOSE BITS WHERE I HUNG OUT WITH THE OPPRESSED?

And finally:
THIS ISN’T ACTUALLY THAT HARD, FOLKS. 

And it isn’t. He wants us to love each other. Period. Recognize that all of us are flawed. Period. Recognize that we’re all here in the same circle of life, walking toward the same beaming flame of love and giving and goodness at the center — whether we call it “decency” or call it “God.” (I wrote about that a while back, too.) We do our best. We stumble, get up, keep going, keep loving. We laugh, we cry, we try. We look across and see others who stumble and cry and try, not judging them in their journey but seeing them for who they are. Loving them. Carrying them, when needed. Knowing we’re hear to learn from our fumbles and give with all our hearts.

Sounds idealistic, right? Corny as hell? Yet more sunshine and flowers? Smiley-face emojis and ice-cream sundaes and shiny happy people holding hands (thank you, R.E.M.)? Acceptance, compassion, generosity, warmth?

Yes. That’s what Jesus wants. IN ALL CAPS.

Love.

 

 

 

 

 

Once upon a time, Mama had an absolute beast of a violin bow.

A French one. An Ouchard, a name revered in bowmaking circles. How she could afford it, I don’t know. Possibly the chipped ivory on its tip. Possibly some other quirk. Possibly the dear friends who helped fund her career as a concert violinist.

I don’t know.

What I know is this: When she played with it on her violin, the world screeched to a halt on its axis. Time stopped. The heavens cracked open. The beast in her hands joined forces with her fiddle, a beast of another sort that was made for her in the sixties by a Swiss-American luthier named Karl August Berger. In Mama’s hands these twin beasts made music that hit the bottom depths and reached the loftiest heights and bounced the surface of the earth, oceans and lava and rose petals all splashing in their wake.

I never felt good enough, musical enough, to master either of these small wooden objects, two exquisite products of the hope and vision that fuel every act of creation in this world and (I believe) the next. We humans are makers at our core. But some are better at making than others. Some are fueled by clearer visions, greater hope, more honed abilities.

That was my mother. She was an astonishing concert violinist. But she heard some music in me (flawed me, amateur me) and made me promise that I would keep playing her violin after she died, that I wouldn’t let it sit idle and decline with neglect. I gave her my word. And I’ve been playing it consistently since her death in 1994 — never with perfection,  always with passion and joy.

But the mighty Ouchard: That was too much for me. I played with it, yes. I tried to get a grip on its power and complexities. But I wielded it with fear, never able to master its weight and find its balance, never able to draw from it the warmth, nuance and muscular, singing tone that I heard in Mama’s playing. As decades passed and osteoarthritis kicked in, I also felt increasing pain in my right thumb. With no small regret, I decided I needed to sell the Ouchard and find a lighter bow. I made a few calls, asked a few people, got nowhere.

Then, two summers ago, I was chatting with Jason Anick at Django in June.

You ask: Who’s Jason Anick? One of the best goddamned violinists you’ll ever hear in any genre. He can do anything on the fiddle. I’m not exaggerating. Any. Effing. Thing.

You ask: What’s Django in June? A band camp for nerds (I’ve been one since 2016) obsessed with the swinging Paris jazz of Django Reinhardt. It’s held at Smith College each year — well, except for 2020 and 2021 — and its instructors are mind-boggling musical virtuosi from all over the world.

Jason had just wrapped one of his afternoon violin workshops when he mentioned, hey, he had a few instrumental goodies for sale from his own collection. Come take a look, he told us.

So I did. I tried out a couple bows. One was a sweet, light stick that sat perfectly in my hand and pulled lovely tones from the fiddle.

“Oooooh,” I said, “that feels good. I like that. And I need a new bow, ’cause I’ve got one now that’s way too heavy for me. It was my mother’s. I’m thinking I should sell it, but I don’t know where to go. It’s an Ouchard. Do you know any violin shops that might be interested?”

He looked up

An Ouchard? 

“Yep.”

Emile Ouchard? 

“Yep.”

Do you have it here? 

“Yep.”

Can I see it?

“Yep. It’s not perfect. Got a chip on its tip, see? But Mama played everything with that thing. Kreisler. Bach. The Chaconne! I remember her playing the Chaconne!”

I handed it to him. He hefted the bow. Hefted his fiddle. Started in on the Chaconne. The sound, the force, the beauty of that soaring, searing, thundering Bach — I hadn’t heard that music, not that way, since I last heard Mama play it. My God, I thought. My God. My God. My God. It took all my self-control not to collapse into a blubbering mess in a sunny corner of Smith.

He stopped playing. Put the bow down. Looked at it. Looked at it again. Nodded.

Clearly, it had to be his. Mama would want it to be his. The universe would want it to be his. It was his.

We agreed to a trade — his light, dancing bow for my mighty but chipped Ouchard. He’d take it into his luthier for a look, he said. See how much the repair would cost. Then weigh that against its value and see if we’re even.

We were. After a couple emails and phone calls, we finalized the trade. I told Jason I could feel Mama smiling, and I meant it. I meant it.

I felt her smiling again — and I told him again — after hearing him perform on the Ouchard with his killer trio last month at a “Django by the Sea” concert in Kittery, Maine. It was some of the best goddamned music I’d ever heard in any genre. They did everything on those instruments. I’m not exaggerating. Every. Effing. Thing. 

Once more it took all my self-control not to collapse into a blubbering mess. I’d made it about two-thirds of the way through the concert when, stepping up to the mic, Jason mentioned someone in the audience named Amy. He gave a little shout-out to my mother and her fine beast of an Ouchard, holding it up for the audience to see. Then he lifted to his fiddle and played a gorgeous Latin tune with warmth. With nuance. With a muscular, singing tone.

Did time stop? Did the heavens crack open? Did a halo blaze around him, the Ouchard bathed in celestial light? No. I mean, not that I recall. But I I did, in fact, burst into tears, and I can also report that I’m shedding a few right now.

That, my friends, is the Tale of the Bow — and it’s quite an arc, is it not?

In cased you missed it, that was a pun.

And I can still feel Mama smiling.

This past Saturday morning, I rode my bike around Washington Park, basking in the sunshine and the tulips. I bumped into a friend, and we chatted and laughed and hugged — yay, vaccines! Then I pedaled away, feeling such freedom, such joy, such relief, such a sense of renewal and gratitude for life.

Back home, I took a shower in the upstairs bathroom. After toweling off I figured I’d clean up the sink a bit, so I started scrubbing away and fluttering around absent-mindedly, paying no attention to the slippery floor. 

I put my bare heel down on a wet spot, and boom. 

I fell. Slammed the back of my head bloody hard against the tub. I felt and heard the smack in slow motion, almost, recognizing and regretting the stupidity and seriousness of what just happened.

I thought, Fuck. Fuck. Stupid Amy. Fuck. I just did that. I might die. I can’t do that to the kids. I can’t. They already lost their dad. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Mama died after a fall. I watched her eyes fade before me. I should have known better. I should have slowed down. I should have remembered. Stupid. Fuck. Stupid. 

My son Mitchell came in, sweet and wise and calm. He called his sister Jeanne, also sweet and wise and calm, who’s had wilderness first-aid training and knows concussions. I told her I hadn’t blacked out. She asked me a few questions, then sweetly, wisely, calmly told me to go to urgent care just to be safe. 

My boyfriend Dave arrived just then, emitting yet more sweetness and wisdom and calm. He drove me off to urgent care, and I filled out forms. What’s the reason for your visit? one asked. I wanted to write: Because I’m stupid stupid stupid. When a sweet, wise, calm woman walked in and asked me questions, I told her how scared I was. I told her about Mama’s subdural hematoma. But Mama was on blood thinners, I said. And I’m not. Thank God. And no, I didn’t lose consciousness. And yes, I remember what happened. No headache so far. No vomiting. That ringing in my ears? Tinnitus. Nothing new. Same old screech as always.

She had me stand with my eyes closed. Stand with my arms out. Walk heel to toe in a straight line. Puff out my cheeks. Raise my eyebrows. Follow her finger around my face, touching my nose then her fingertip then my nose again. All sorts of weird is-your-brain-broken shit that I was happy to do because I passed every test, passed, passed, passed, and she sent me home telling me to take it easy and go to the E.R. if things suddenly turned worse.

But they didn’t turn worse. I never got a headache, never puked, never even got much of a bruise on the back of my head. And I can’t comprehend why. I. Just. Don’t. Get it. I fell and smacked my head so damned hard against the tub, I still can’t believe I didn’t wind up with a concussion at least. I must have the world’s thickest skull. Or I must have broken the fall with my arm on the sink and my butt on the wall, because if I hadn’t, I might not be here to write this. 

The fact that I still have a mind to blow? That blows my mind. It feels miraculous. Like an affirmation, a new lease on life, a blast of angling sun at dawn. I thought of my bike ride around Washington Park that morning — that sense of renewal and rebirth. Here it was again, minus the tulips.

A friend of mine, hearing the saga of my blow to the head, remarked: “You have more to do.”

And I thought: Hmmm, okay. What is it? Clearly I am being instructed to add no-slip mats and stickers to the upstairs bathroom (done). But what else? If indeed I’ve been given a fresh start, what’s my purpose? What mission am I on? Is this some message from On High telling me to give more, to write more, to listen more, to do more for people in need, to meet them where they are each day? To live in the present, to be kind and open, to see the gifts of the world around me? To finish that batshit and probably unpublishable little novel I’ve been working on, the one about my sister’s first attempt and suicide and my quest to retrieve her from heaven? (There. I just said something publicly about it. Now I have to.)

I don’t know. For all I know, I could die tomorrow. I’ve always known I could die tomorrow: If you spend much of your adulthood losing people you love, many of them suddenly, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion. We’re only here for a wee spell, any of us. That wee spell could be 98 years or an hour. It could be filled with love and laughter or isolation and pain. For most of us who live long enough, we get a combo of all four. But what’s “long enough,” anyway? Not up to me to determine. Not in the end. Which is coming.

And yes, this is an extremely morbid post. 

After getting home from urgent care Saturday afternoon, I ticked off my blessings: three wonderful grown kids, plus a wonderful bonus kid; a wonderful man; wonderful relatives and friends; a meaningful job; health; a home; the joy of music; the joy of laughter; coffee. 

That evening, playing Scrabble with Dave, I looked down at my letters and gasped. Six of them had something to say: 

I ALIVE. 

And I am. I am. I am. Today. For now. For some reason I may never understand. But that’s okay. I’m grateful to be here, and while I am, I’ll do my best to live in the moment. To give in the moment.To love in the moment. To take nothing for granted in the moment.

Because the moment is all we have — and that’s enough.

My father’s first language was Neapolitan, the gorgeous, singing dialect of Naples. If you’ve heard it, you know that it’s music — its syllables rising and falling like pitch, swelling and shrinking like rhythm. As a kid I heard it and loved it but never understood it, never knew its meaning beyond the emotional plane. Okay, I knew a few things: some of the more blasphemous swears he blurted that I continue to blurt to this day (MADONN’ -eh SANT’-eh GIUSEPP’-eh!). I also know how to say “You are a hard turd that someone had a difficult time voiding from their ass,” or something along those lines, though it’s much more concise in Neapolitan. 

Daddy spoke that and nothing else for the first five years of his life, growing up in a tenement in Manhattan’s Little Italy with his kid brother Freddy and their immigrant parents. He was born in 1907, before World War I, before World War II, before all the madness we know as the 20th century rolled in and filled the city with fumes. Fifty-six years later, I entered the world. Twenty-eight years after that, he left it, and I found myself filled with regret for all the conversations we never had, all the questions I failed to ask. 

I wish, in my own childhood, I’d asked him about his. I wish I’d asked him about his pals, about their trips to the rooftops to look for German U-boats, about the people he knew who died of the Spanish flu. I wish I’d asked about the “Goof Club” cohort he grew up and boxed with, and I wish I’d asked about his love for Tin Pan Alley — all those bright and bouncy tunes he banged out on the piano and squawked out on the squeezebox.

If only I’d thought to ask him about them. If only I’d asked him to teach me one. If only I had sung with him. 

I’m thinking of one in particular, only because I couldn’t possibly forget it: “My Melancholy Baby,” Ernie Burnett’s cute, catchy, corny-beyond-belief 1912 ditty, which implores its adorably weepy listener to cheer up and give the singer a hug: 

Come to me my melancholy baby
Cuddle up and don’t be blue
All your fears are foolish fancy, maybe
You know, dear, that I’m in love with you.

Daddy loved that song. HE LOVED IT. He sang it in Neapolitan, which somehow made it even cornier, throwing his arms in a wide embrace and belting that sucker out for literally anyone who’d listen. He sang it to me, my sister Lucy, our mama Jeanne. He sang it to visitors. He sang it to neighbors he encountered on walks. Check out the photo above, snapped by a fellow who lived up the hill from us; when I saw it I knew without asking that Daddy was singing, and I knew which song in which language. 

Keep in mind, this was a classical music critic who’d authored or edited more than a dozen books, interviewed Pablo Casals and worshiped Beethoven as his one true god. But “Melancholy Baby”? In the final years of life, when his memory failed him in so many ways, that offered the apex of joy for him. Nothing made him happier.

So here I am, 29 years since his death, plumbing my own joy where I can find it. Obsessed as I am with Hot Club jazz, I decided to fiddle around with the tune — on Mama’s violin, no less — and I promptly fell in love with it. I noodled around with different tempi and phrasings, different bowings and licks, and as I did I walked around my bedroom and glanced at Daddy’s photo on the wall. He was there. With me. In the music. I could feel it. 

When my kids (“kids”) asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I had one request: a Neapolitan translation of That One Song. I got it. I also got a voice memo to help me with the pronunciation. I scribbled down the lyrics phonetically, delighting in the tongue-rolling, sing-song flow, then practiced the whole thing with my marvelously understanding (and marvelously musical) boyfriend Dave on ukulele.

We tried it out in an online “jam,” then recorded it in my living room. 

In the spirit of Daddy, I flung out my arms and belted that sucker out — almost certainly butchering the lyrics. But I butchered them with love. I butchered them with joy. I butchered them in a manner worthy of the irrepressible paesan’ who sang them through my childhood and sang them again with me, I’m sure of it, in my humble Albany home the other night. And as I scratched away on Mama’s fiddle, I knew they were both beside me — smiling as widely as heaven allows.

I smiled, too. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today is a strange day, just as yesterday was a strange day, just as the day before it and the day before it and the day before that were strange days, too. I know that tomorrow will be strange, and the day after tomorrow will be strange, and too many days and weeks that follow — more than than I can know, or want to.

Shakespeare warned us about tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow : It creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time.

All I can say is: Ugh.

Living through a pandemic is bloody weird, is it not? Yes, yes, yes, people are getting vaccinated. Yes, yes, yes, something distantly approaching normal may return in a matter of months, though not for the far-too-many who’ve died and the far-too-many-more who grieve in their absence. But this fall, maybe maybe maybe, things could be a wee bit brighter for those of us who remain. So I’ve heard. As if anyone can know. As if fixing on some distant month will make the long march of days between now and then feel anything other than strange.

The strangeness comes from the sameness borne of COVID, from the inevitably reduced social interactions and the drastic dialing-down of events both anticipated and not. It comes from the timelessness inherent in the sameness. From the repetition, the predictability, the absence of the unexpected. I am not complaining, or trying not to — not too loudly. I can’t. I’m among the lucky ones. My strange days are good and healthy strange days, filled with love and laughter and music and rewarding work and plenty of sleep and a routine that doesn’t tax me. And I’ve had lovely getaways, all within driving distance, all of them restorative. But then, post-getaway, it’s back to the weirdly altered coronaviral routine for seeming perpetuity.

On weekdays I wake, I caffeinate, I eat a bowl of cereal. I check my email and read the news in my boyfriend’s kitchen or my own, with my batshit cats rubbing my legs and my son asleep upstairs. My daughters are distant in miles but near in spirit, texting and calling to make sure I’m okay.

I crack open my laptop and work. I drink herb tea. I eat chocolate and peanut butter and bananas, sometimes all at once. I go for a walk. I work more, drinking more herb tea and doubling up the used bags to get the most out of them. I practice the violin along to backing tracks. I eat things other than chocolate and peanut butter and bananas. I cook. I exercise by running up and down the stairs, then do sit-ups and push-ups. I shower. I text, email, talk on the phone, Zoom once a week with friends and bandmates. About every dozen days or so, I make a big run to the grocery store, mask snugly covering my mouth and schnozz. I order shit from Amazon: cornflakes, toilet paper, socks. On the weekends I play Scrabble with my beau. We watch virtual jazz shows with each other and sci-fi with my son. We go for walks. On Sundays I watch virtual Mass. I drink yet more herb tea.

I read. I fall asleep. I dream of having crazy fun at parties with maskless people, then freak the hell out when I realize it’s not safe, and the dream becomes a nightmare. Then I wake and start all over again.

The sameness of it all, the strangeness of it all, makes me wonder what Einstein might have said about this distended temporal state we’re in — timelessness, perhaps, or time reduced to a coma by the profoundly bland repetition of it all. On this train we’re riding the clocks aren’t slowed or stopped but pointless. Time isn’t relative but rendered moot, invisible, even, a haunting in the shadows. Which second, which minute, which hour, which day of the week is it? Which month? Wait — you mean, it’s nearly February? But but but but I’m only halfway through my bowl of cereal! And it’s the same bowl of cereal I’ve been eating since last March!

Sitting on my bed on this sunny, windy, chilly day, I’m realizing it’s been months since I last posted on this blog. I can’t say why, exactly. It’s not that I’ve had nothing to say. I’ve said plenty, whether the words have simply rattled around the space between my ears or reached someone else’s. It’s just that time passed at Macbeth’s petty pace, then more passed, then more — but I barely took notice of it.

One of my batshit cats is at my feet right now, his paws twitching in a busy little dreamstate. Through the window I can see trees sway and sparrows streak across my neighbors’ roofs, and I’m reminded that each tiny movement of a branch or a wing is different from the last one, different from the next one, different from all the tiny movements piled up behind us or yet to come. I’m reminded again that change is, after all, the only constant.

At some point, I know, that change will bring us to a new phase in this country and this cosmos, and the strangeness will lift. The sense of sameness will abate, and our endlessly repetitive COVID routines will get upended by a rash of ass-kicking in-person commitments and travel plans. We will all run screaming from our homes, hug each other, high-five each other, cheer in each other’s faces and party like there’s no tomorrow, because tomorrow, as we’ve all learned, is just another twitch in time that we can’t see.

But we’ll get there. I swear on the holy relics of my many herbal tea bags, we’ll get there.

• 

Just now, as I was paying a bill online, my eyes fell on the date: 10/17/2020.

Lucy’s birthday. She would have turned 60 today. The force of this revelation smacked me suddenly and sideways, and I burst out in tears, then more tears, then more.

I’m still bursting. My beautiful older sister stopped aging at that unending moment in the spring of 1992 when she took her own life, downing bottles of psych meds before curling up in a fetal position on her bed in Cambridge, Mass.

She was 31. I was 28. When I turned 32 four years later, I felt a breach in the space-time continuum that’s never fully healed — just as I felt after turning 56, a year older than my late husband when he died by suicide in 2011.

This is the inexplicable, unavoidable truth of grief following suicide loss. It never truly ends. You’re never truly over it, because it never truly stops being an affront to all that you know and love — including the tidy forward pace of time itself.  You and your absent dear one were meant to travel it together, plodding side by side as you both age. You were meant to swap belly laughs, chit-chat, glances and insights en route. You understand that they were hurting; you accept that it wasn’t their fault; you do your best to comprehend their darkness and accept that they saw no escape.

But their departure from this universe rips yours to shreds, and the only way forward is straight through the chaos. There’s just no sidestepping, no dancing around it. This is true at the beginning — when you get that first, horrific phone call or answer the doorbell to find cops on your stoop, their faces gripped with empathy — and it’s true again and again and again and again and again, whenever the force of their death and your grief rears back and strikes you with bare-knuckle, out-of-the-blue force. You can’t duck it. You take it. You feel it. You give it its due. And, somehow, tripping over the shards of your past life, you move forward.

As the years pass, these blows to the heart occur less frequently, but that’s not to say they ever stop entirely. I was startled by this new reassertion of grief nearly 30 years after Lucy’s death, but I shouldn’t have been. She was, and I am not exaggerating, the most unfailingly good, indelibly beautiful and astonishingly gifted person I’ve ever known, a concert pianist whose whole soul expressed itself at the keyboard. She was hilarious, with a profound knack for the absurd. She was giving, always setting aside her own load of torment while her kid sister whined about some guy she had a crush on. And she was candid, always, about her unrequited love for a life that never loved her her back. She never took it for granted; she only wanted it to cause less pain. 

I miss her. I will always miss her. I can’t imagine reaching an age when I don’t miss her, when her death becomes so-what and I stop grieving entirely. As a person of faith I believe that I’ll see her again, laugh with her again, and maybe sit back with margaritas at some poolside somewhere in an eternal moment of light and joy that never slides into darkness.

But in the meantime, I’m here. And she’s there. So from my little kitchen in Albany, the tears still wet my cheeks, I declare to the heavens: Happy Birthday, Lucy.

I am so damn sick of 2020. Aren’t you? Don’t you just want to hop into your Tardis or Delorean or some other stylin’-ass time machine and zap yourself toot-sweet into the future? Short of that, aren’t you tempted to crawl into your comfy person-sized suspended-animation fridge, plug yourself in, program your nap time, fall asleep in a deliciously frozen haze and prepare to thaw out after this bizarre apocalyptic spasm in history has come to a halt?

When that might be, I can’t predict. Don’t put that onus on me, folks. I’d love to be able to say “Ooooh, just set your clocks for Wednesday, January 20, 2021! The Orange Menace will be gone by then! That’ll be the end of the end times! Aim for that! Milkshakes for everybody! Yay!” But I have no idea if that’s the case. We could all go the freeze-pop route only to wake into an even more dystopian era than the one plaguing us right now.

Between the spiking infections and piling-up deaths from COVID-19, the partisan madness of those who refuse to wear masks, the attacks on protesters and the free speech they embody and employ, the anti-science, anti-democratic stances of those in power, the evidence past and present of systemic racism, and the singular, unrelenting abomination of a morally twisted baby-man in the White House who retweets videos with full-on KKK hate speech, I’m feeling like we’re all trapped inside a giant dump truck alongside mountainous piles of shit. It stinks in here. There’s no room. And we’re about to plunge head-first over a cliff.

And, you know, maybe we are. But the other night, my band and I played a small, socially distanced gig outdoors in Delanson. It was fun. Sunny. Joyful. The music of Django Reinhardt always is, and I smiled behind my mask as I scratched at my fiddle and sang. When a shower ended the gig prematurely, we packed up our gear and hauled it through the rain to our cars — and just then, the sun came out. And with it, a double rainbow.

A double rainbow. What did that mean? Was it a positive omen, or yet another sign of creation’s imminent destruction? On the drive back with my boyfriend, we followed it, observing changes in the sky and the shifting illumination of the arcs themselves. As the top rainbow faded, the bottom glowed. By the time we arrived, the clouds above us were a billowing pink and peach and purple, and the rainbow blazed downward into a mythic pot of gold. Its colors dazzled. It looked straight out of Oz.

I took photo after photo after photo, blurting holy shit after holy shit after holy shit before this unexpected spectacle at dusk. This wasn’t any omen. It was no augury of good or ill. It portended nothing but itself, and that was enough. Amid the self-imposed madness of this age we’re in, there above me soared a fleeting snatch of timeless beauty, a glimpse of the embracing sublime and a reminder that nature, now as ever, arcs higher than humankind. Higher than the Orange Menace. Higher than anything that happens between now and whenever this ends, however long it takes to get there. I have to believe we will.

In the meantime, I’ll take all the rainbows I can get.

Well, it’s taken me a while, but here it is: My first blog post in the midst of this incomprehensibly weird scourge. While I’ve written plenty of coronavirus stuff in my other life as a Times Union staffer, I’ve struggled to find the energy and insight to post something meaningful here. I need to weigh in, I kept telling myself. I have a platform. I should do something with it. But then: Something? What kind of something? And then: Oh, crap, it’ll have to be Profound. I’m too pooped to do Profound. And finally: I’ll figure it out tomorrow.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow crept in this petty pace until I realized, at long last, that I shouldn’t be thinking in terms of Profound, whether capitalized or not. I should be thinking about the everyday. The mundane that roots us, links us, makes us laugh in a time of isolation. The funny six-foot interactions we have with strangers, feeling kinship even as we veer into the street to avoid the plague. The ways each of us is trying to help — with a phone call to a friend, a gift to a pantry, a delivery to a family in need.

The little reminders of light in the darkness, assuring us that we’re still here. That we’re still human. That we are, despite everything, still connected.

Here’s a big one for me: going outside and finding community. An unexpected upside to COVID-19 has been the joy of walking in the early spring sunshine and seeing so many neighbors out there, stretching their legs. A lot of them are walking their dogs; a lot of them are taking a break from telecommuting to grab a blast of vitamin D; a lot of them are playing games with their children.

The other day I saw folks teaching a boy to ride a bike, and it filled me with gratitude — relief, even — to know that happy memories are still being amassed. That this one kid, at least, will grow up and look back on March 2020 with the remembered thrill of freedom and balance and force, of the wind against his face and the pedals beneath his feet and the loving hands that steady his ride and then, in an act of faith, let go.

And as I realized this, the moment become my happy memory, too. Parents love, children mount bicycles, and life prevails.

What are your own beautiful moments that turn into memories? Your own glimpses of light and causes for gratitude in the midst of COVID-19? Your own mundane, miraculous reminders of all that makes us human? Post them here as comments. As we move forward, I’ll do my best to amass them in subsequent posts.

The name of this blog is, after all, Figuring Shit Out. This is shit we need to figure out together. So let’s do it, my friends. Let’s stay connected, Coronavirus be damned.