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After This?

After This?

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Sometimes I try to envision what our lives will be like coming out of this. I believe that eventually, once there’s a vaccine and treatment, they will be somewhat the same. More chastened, more grateful, I hope, but similar to what we used to have. People are social creatures, after all. We want to be together.

But until we feel safe doing that, we will wear masks and stay mostly to ourselves. This is a poverty. It’s a shrinking of our lives rather than an expansion of them. It’s hard to stay aware of all the possibilities the world holds while we’re in this cloistered state.


The life we had is a world I miss every day; we all do. A world we lost so quickly, almost with the hair-trigger quickness of a bomb exploding. All it took was a wily, tenacious pathogen.

What I hope most of all is that this pathogen, like so much else, doesn’t succeed in pushing us farther apart, but instead pulls us together. All evidence suggests that it will split us up. But I’m an optimist; I like to believe that common sense and human kindness will prevail.

Indigenous

Indigenous

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As various news stories are reporting, there is no Columbus Day in the District of Columbia this year. Instead, there is Indigenous People’s Day.  Rather than weighing in on either side of the matter, I thought I would riff on the word indigenous itself.

It comes from the Latin “indigena,” meaning native, and I like thinking of it that way. That which is original, that which is true. Which can mean the plants that grow or the people who plant and tend them. Indigenous speaks of a connection to the land.

If we think of indigenous as native, though, then are we not all indigenous peoples? Every single one of us?  We may hail from the mountains or the prairies, the cities or the small towns. We may have grown up in a house or an apartment or a far-off yurt.

But each of us belongs somewhere. And belonging can unite rather than divide us.

Reaching Out

Reaching Out

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Last night at a neighborhood gathering I learned about the tragic death of a young father whom I’d met on a walk about a year ago. I only spoke once with him and his wife. They’d just bought a house whose former occupants I knew, and had just found a little snake when I happened by.

I assured them the snake wasn’t poisonous and that these things happen around here. (I’ve found snakes in our house a few times.) The couple was friendly, and for once I wasn’t hurrying so we could talk. We chatted about the neighborhood, I met their darling 6-year-old twins, and I’d think of the family often when I walked past their house.

Over the summer things didn’t seem right there. The house and yard looked abandoned, with tall grass and unkempt hedges. The couple was from India, so I thought maybe they’d taken an extended vacation to visit family.

But last night I learned the truth. The husband died suddenly months ago. The wife is staying here with her children, with various relatives coming over to help. Life has changed radically for this family.

Once I took in the news with its sadness, its revelation of that which we understand though seldom acknowledge — that life can change in an instant — what I was left with was the inadequacy of superficial knowledge.

We walkers in the suburbs think we’re keeping an eye on things, but really we see just the barest outline of it all.  To be fully plugged in means more than just walking through; it means staying put, listening, talking — reaching out.

Planking Alone

Planking Alone

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A crowd of people in my office have begun a 30-day planking program — holding ourselves up in a “plank” position, either on elbows or hands. We began at 30 seconds and are working our way up to three minutes.

At 11 a.m. every day we gather in the hallway near the elevators to chat and hold. Thirty seconds of planking isn’t much. Three minutes is quite a lot. Adding seconds in small increments attempts to blunt the difference between these two.

This works best when done in company. Someone plays music on their phone, or we share recent celebrity sightings. Someone saw Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the Philadelphia train station. Someone else bumped into the heir to the British throne — that is, literally bumped into Prince William. Twice!

When I’m not in the office, I plank on my own.  I set my phone to two minutes 10 seconds or whatever the time might be, get down on the floor, suck in my gut and hold … and hold …. and hold.

I try not to watch the seconds tick down on my phone timer, but I can’t help myself. Alone in my living room, I’m ready to collapse, to pause briefly, anything to end the pain. As I watch, the seconds seem to move in slow motion, a painfully stilted procession that will never, ever finish.

Want to make time pass more slowly? Just plank alone.

Design Revolutionary

Design Revolutionary

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Today I read an obituary of the woman who, among other things, revolutionized the display of fabric swatches by stapling them on cardboard so they could be fanned out for clients to touch and compare. Such a small innovation, but one that touches any of us who’ve dealt with paint chips or carpet samples.

Florence Knoll Bassett, who died a few days ago at the age of 101, did far more than this. She opened up offices and honed their interiors down into a simple, spare style. An architecture critic said she “did more than another other single figure to create the modern, sleek, postwar American office.” That would be any office from Mad Men till now.

I’m fascinated to learn about people who’ve had an outsize impact on how we live and work, and Florence Knoll Bassett fills that bill. But Knoll Bassett’s work was hardly unknown to others. When her parents died, she was taken in by the architect Eliel Saarinen (father of Eero, chief designer of the Dulles Airport and the St. Louis Gateway Arch) and she trained under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Knoll Bassett once called her furniture designs “meat and potatoes.” But it was plainly much more. It was the vast array of a modern palate.

(Photo: Knoll) 

Mary Oliver: An Appreciation

Mary Oliver: An Appreciation

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The poet Mary Oliver died on January 17. She won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry. But it was her prose that I found most marvelous. I discovered it a few years ago, and her book Upstream is beside me now — with such a flurry of Post-it tabs that it looks as if I’ve bookmarked every page.

Oliver writes of the natural world, of shaggy dunes and the blue-black of pond water; of fields and woods “and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit.” We should teach our children the names of hepatica and sassafras and wintergreen, she says. Why? Because “attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Oliver acknowledges her debts to those who came before, the “immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground — and inseparably from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently.”

Now Oliver is gone. And yet she is with me now more than ever. I read her often because she is a writer’s writer who whispers — no, shouts — do it, do it now, because if you don’t, you will always be sorry. “The most regretful people on earth,” she writes, “are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Ursula Le Guin 1929-2018

Ursula Le Guin 1929-2018

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Ever since I heard the news this morning of Ursula Le Guin’s passing on January 22, I’ve been searching for a book of her essays. Having not yet found it, with the day ticking away, I’ll do the best I can without the hard copy.

I came to Le Guin’s work not through her science fiction but through her essays. One in particular sticks with me, “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” which is about women writing.

“Where does a woman write? What does she look like writing?” is the question Le Guin poses, after beginning with an image from Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Strangely enough, it was through a Google Doodle of Virginia Woolf (in honor of her 136th birthday), that I happened upon Le Guin’s obituary.

Woolf, of course, famously said that a woman needs a room of her own to be a writer. But Le Guin, a mother of three, writes here of women who produce great works of art without so much as a broom closet to call their own. One of them was Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote her husband a letter saying, “If I am to write, I must have a room of my own,” but who then went on to write most of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from her kitchen table.

There is much more to say here, but I’m sitting at my kitchen table — and, though I no longer have young children clamoring for attention, have a paying job that does just the same.

To be continued …

Place without People

Place without People

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It’s been 14 months since I visited Lexington. I’ve never been away longer. To the other bewilderments of these days I add this one: that I’ve been gone so long from my hometown.

There’s much to recommend the trip I’m making there this weekend: It’s summertime and it’s with my sister. But I approach it tentatively, much as a dental patient probes the tender spot where a tooth has been.

What’s missing from Lexington now is why I ever was in Lexington in the first place — and why I returned so often through the years. What kind of place is Lexington without Mom and Dad?

When people are gone, place remains. But what is place without the people who created it?

Leaving “Black Care” Behind

Leaving “Black Care” Behind

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“Black care seldom sits behind the rider whose pace is fast
enough.”

                                                      — Theodore Roosevelt   
So the man I met last night in Ken Burns’ new film “The Roosevelts” is in many ways the man I knew:
the man of action, man of privilege, man of tragedy and loss. His
father died when he was in college; his mother and wife died a few years later on the same
day.  In an agony of grief Roosevelt headed west, to the Badlands, where the limitless
sky and active life helped him heal. 

Hearing all this last night — especially the quotation — makes me think about walking. How many suburban amblers stroll just fast enough to make their worries go away. I know I do. Sometimes I can outrun my troubles, sometimes I can’t. But I usually return in better spirits than I left. “Black care” is almost always left behind.
Invisible Community

Invisible Community

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It was the hour before dusk on a day that felt more like summer than fall — prime walking time.  I drove past fast-walkers, slow-joggers, stray commuters like me, just heading home. I thought about the community of walkers, one that’s often invisible to the amblers themselves but, ironically, quite obvious to the drivers.

The car-bound cover more ground. Their range lets them see the patterns in the strolls, the commonality of purpose. In one block is a lone faithful runner. In another, an old couple strolling slowly. They may not run into each other, but they are all there.

Since almost anyone who walks in the suburbs drives in the suburbs, we have many chances to see beyond our routes, to know that even if we feel alone, we are not. There are others hitting the pavement too. And in some strange sort of way, we are one.