Hi!
Newsletter #7. Pandemic lockdown 2.0 is not an improvement.
As we move deeper into this LA winter, it's gotten really dry and a bit colder. With so little moisture in the air, my hair is a fizz that sticks to my face. My hands are dry and cracked. I wake up in the morning with dry eyes and a headache from the heater kicking on during the night. It's not so much that I don’t like the cold. It’s the change of seasons that makes me uneasy. (Yes, LA has seasons.) I prefer consistency. I’m from San Francisco. I like waking up knowing it's gonna be grey. Similarly, I hate it when the winters turn into the postcard beach days this city is known for. Some people love that first really hot day that lets you know it's summer, but I find it disorienting. I just want stability. I want everything to stay the same. I want something I can depend on. LA winters start with a few colds days smattered in between days where you can still get in the ocean. The last time I hopped in was October. By November, the quality of midday sunlight changes from blinding to a slight dull in its glare. The patch of sun where the cats like to sleep gets longer and stretched out. Still by December, there are days when it’s 75 degrees and I regret leaving the house in a turtleneck. But this week it’s not so much like that. It's turned cold.
Usually the celebration of the New Year brings with it the tradition of looking back at the last twelve months, but this year it's our second lockdown that does this. I pulled out my jacket for the first time and I realized that the last time I wore it was when I took walks almost every single day because that was the only activity we were allowed to do. We’ve returned to the season when this all started. Instead of looking back on a year of accomplishments and reflecting on good times, I find myself looking back at what I was doing in the first lockdown. I’m thinking about how we were hurled into change without a moment to process it. Shit, I don’t even like it when the weather turns slightly cold! With only a few hours notice, the building where I work shut down and I was hauling the entire contents of my office into my apartment. I’m remembering walking through the park on a cold day in March knowing that some kind of order to stay inside was coming. Those were the times when the grocery lines were long and I woke up early on Friday mornings to shop somewhere further out where I knew the shelves were fully stocked. It was when I used to wear surgical gloves to do the groceries and my mask was a makeshift bandana with hair ties because PPE was in short supply. Now in our second lockdown, we are a little more used to this. There is still toilet paper. We know better what to do because we’ve spent almost a whole year doing it. There is a sameness about all our days, but there is no comfort in this. This isn’t the kind of consistency I’m looking for.
A friend working in the nonprofit arts sector interviewed me this week as a requirement for one of her funders. The questions were about how I was surviving these times and the role art was playing in coping with the pandemic. The final questions were: What was I looking forward to doing when all this was over? What do I plan on getting back to? While I thought about the answer, I thought about the people who don’t have any semblance of their old lives to which they can return. I thought about the people who lost their livelihoods. The people who lost their parents or their partners. I thought about the people who don’t get to say, “when all this is over.” And so I tell her, I have no plans. And it's not that I’m a pessimist. I just know it's going to be a long while before normal resumes. And what we accepted as normal in our society wasn’t even that great. I feel a pressure to make the best of things, to embrace optimism. To think instead about what I’ve learned, how I’ve grown, and what I’ve produced during these times. I want to end every newsletter on a good note. But what if there aren’t any silver linings? Do I have to make it out of these times with a net positive? Is it ok to say that I feel like I’ve lost more than I’ve gained?
I’m doing an exercise now where I’m taking novels down from my shelf and reading the first thirty pages. This all to get a better idea of how novel beginnings are structured and paced. I came across Overstoy by Richard Powers. I started this book before the pandemic, but never finished it. For many months, I found myself unable to concentrate on reading. My attention instead was sucked up by the ever changing circumstances of those (still) chaotic times. I was watching Italy closely. I was waiting for the National Guard to show up. I was worried food was going to run out. I wondered if I should get a gun. I kept checking the coronavirus dashboard and watched those numbers rise across the globe. There wasn’t room for novels. I opened the book to the page my bookmark held for the past nine months. I wondered if I could continue reading on without going back and re-reading. But the material wasn’t familiar. I flipped back one chapter to see if I could remember. I didn’t. I was a different person when I last picked up this book. So I started at the beginning. What I found in that opening was a story about the blight of the American chestnut tree in the early 20th century when a parasitic fungus from Asian was introduced into North America. Despite efforts to save those trees, as they sustained the lumber industry, one in four trees were infected and died. The human characters in the story are merely a backdrop in this generations-long saga about a lone surviving Chestnut tree in Iowa. Told in the time perspective of a hundreds year old tree, the story of an entire generation of one family is only several pages long, one character’s whole existence covered in only a few passages. Instead the reader is drawn into the drama of the chestnuts, how the disease spread through towns, cities, and crossed state lines. How the limbs turned grey, the leaves yellowed too soon, and how orange spots on its bark meant it was too late. That all the efforts made to save them only spread the disease further. How one seed carried in a pocket from Brooklyn to Iowa, where chestnut trees normally don’t grow, survived the blight and became one of the only surviving American chestnuts. Through this novel, I’m reminded that human history isn’t the only story to be told. Maybe we are not the most important thing. This is the perspective I need this week.
In the wee hours of this Monday morning, I got a news notification that the first vaccine has been administered in the US. The title of the article contained the word, hope. I swiped away at the banner and didn’t bother to read. It's a long winter ahead. We are still so far apart from one another and I’m not ready to be hopeful.
Here are some photos from Lockdown 1.0 in March:
We did a little comedy.
It’s a Bee Gees week and this song makes me a comfortable kind of sad.
See you next week!
~j9