Reentry
My friend Anne down in Broward County said something that stuck with me about our experiences of the end of the pandemic being different. In South Florida people have been behaving as though the pandemic were already over since just about it first began. So what’s different now doesn’t feel, to her, like it’s all that different. Only that she leaves her house and sees people more.
Here in DC, it does feel different. Everyone was wearing masks outdoors and now almost everyone is not. What else is different: the sounds of laughing drunks outside our windows has come back. The sound of laughing has come back. The sound of loud guys in the basketball court was never gone, because even here, in square DC, where the cultural mood has sometimes made me think of a self-imposed sort of Singapore, no gum-spitting on the sidewalks (where gum is “largely legally chewable” these days)—even here there have been people who did not socially distance, especially at the basketball court. But the sounds of revelry are back.
I am glad about the noisy drunks. On Tuesday night a group of them—I heard them laughing—tipped over an electric scooter and left it so that it made periodic awful noises. This is funny to some people, engaging in light mischief. The noises went on for more than an hour, until Matt decided it was up to him to be the change that he wanted to see, and went downstairs and picked the scooter up and hauled it to another corner. (He also went at it with a bolt cutter, and returned home with pieces of what looked like brake cables. What he needed, he said, was a ball peen hammer. For some of us light mischief is not enough.)
What I am saying is that I am not sure I am ready to be back. I work remotely. I’m still inside this apartment. Mostly what I listen to are the noises coming from outside.
Read, read, read
Padgett Powell has two articles in Book Post called “Eff the Classics.” In the first he shares some advice from Flannery O’Connor about writing that might be some of the best advice I’ve ever heard—advice I’ve known for a long time but have never seen anyone else share. Read good books for the pleasure of it. Read less-good books to show yourself that you can do this too.
If you want to hang around in more worlds like the one that Powell writes in the link above, only with some crime, New Orleans, and a murder in it, try Black Wings Has My Angel, by Elliott Chaze. The ending sort of peters out, which seems to be what’s wrong with a few of the NYRB Classics that I’ve read, but that’s OK because the rest of the book is seedy fun. (Or just read Flannery O’Connor.)
Updates
I found someone to drive my mother’s car. She was theoretically OK with this arrangement when I proposed it, then immediately started avoiding her new driver by driving to her bookstore by herself before he planned on showing up. She did this a little earlier each day. (So she’s not quite as forgetful as she seems.) But I’ve had three phone calls now from people who have said to me that she is really unsafe as a driver; I’ve seen the things that she’s done to her car. So I responded by authorizing this driver to take her car key, which caused her to tell me that she’d like to keep it. He called me and put her on. She didn’t plan on actually driving the car, she said. She just wanted to have the key. Why? I asked. She told me she felt safer with it. Safer how? She said she needed the car for something. She couldn’t remember what. Then she did remember: she needed the car to get the mail.
The mail comes to her house. She might be thinking of a drive down to a mailbox that one of her parents used to take. Or one of her grandparents. She grew up on a strawberry farm. Her grandmother—this was in South Miami in the early ’40s—farmed flowers. Maybe one of them had to drive to get the mail.
Here is something more uplifting from The New Yorker about older people, loneliness, and robot pets.
Seasonal fruit
It’s lychee season! Yesterday I brought some home for our toddler, who announced that they tasted like avocados (and not like eyeballs). Lychee season is short, so go out and enjoy them. Thanks to Anne for sharing some with me when we hung out.
Speaking of our toddler, the other day he drew a picture that he said was of Mommy and himself. It looks kind of like he’s sitting in my lap, which made me happy. The thing in the top left is a truck.