Diary

My life was nearly upended twice by fire.

Many years ago I lived with my family on the edge of a canyon full of the low, dry brush we in the West call chaparral.  One day, when my two sons were still pre-schoolers in day care, a fire came up our canyon. That afternoon, as I was driving home from teaching at San Diego State, I saw a plume of dark smoke rising in the distance in the direction of my home. As I made the twists and turns in the road as I got closer, it became clear the fire was very, very close to our canyon. “Oh shit! Oh shit!” I kept repeating aloud as I drove.  I knew my boys were not home and were not in danger, but it seemed harder and harder to believe I would not arrive to see everything in ruins.

The smoke had already begun to dissipate as I turned up our little road but the smell told me what to fear.   I came over the rise and saw a blackened canyon, but my house intact.  The fire had burned partially beyond it, and neighbors were still standing in my yard, holding garden hoses they had used to spray our roof.  The fire department had been there briefly, sprayed a little and left when the last encroaching flames were doused.

While the ground still smoldered, I invited our neighbors to come in for a beer to thank them, and they told me I had missed the news reporter who arrived on our street and gushed at the miracle that a house nearly surrounded by blackened vegetation had been saved.

“Miracle?” They said. “We hosed down your roof! It was no miracle.” And they were right to be angry that their courage and effort was so blithely dismissed.  Lesson one in “miracles.”

My next near brush with fire happened when I was nine time zones away, teaching in Florence. I had recently moved from San Diego  to Lake Arrowhead, about two hours away, in the San Bernardino Mountains. That house, shown in photo, was not only my emotional refuge at the lowest point in my life, but the place where every last thing I owned, from papers, to furniture, to photos, to memorabilia, to clothing, was waiting in my little nest for my return.

This was back in the time when if you wanted to check your email you had to go to an Internet cafe.  In Florence one afternoon I had a message from my sister in Northern California, telling me she was tracking a fire that was heading in the direction of Lake Arrowhead.  I went onto the website that reports on California fires and my heart sank at how close it looked and how quickly it was spreading.

For two days, I lived in a nightmare duality of idyllic Florence and the image on that fire map, showing the fire less than twenty miles away, then ten, then five.  My mental anguish was exacerbated by the nine-hour time difference and the fact that the Internet cafe was not open very late or very early, meaning that I could not get updates in anywhere near real time.

And still I had to teach. I showed the fire map to the program supervisor, who shut her eyes and directed a few pleas to the powers above and then asked, “Are you going to go home?”  It was just October, two months to go before the semester ended, and since I was one of only two professors in our program, that would have been disastrous.  I pictured my collapsed and blackened house and burnt-out car, and said I would stay, regardless. What was there to go home to that couldn’t wait?

And so I waited. What would turn out to be the final day of this anguish began after a sleepless night and an interminable wait for the Internet cafe to open.  There was no hope, based on the last fire map, and I just expected confirmation that everything was gone.  Instead I saw an email from my sister, subject in all caps: IT’S SNOWING!!!”  In October. In the Southern California mountains, where it rarely snows before December.

The fire was out. It had not reached my house. Months later, when I finally returned, I drove to a neighborhood just two miles away, where houses lay in ruins.  One flying ember could have lit a treetop in my yard, but it didn’t. Everything was just as I left it.

So yes, it’s okay to pray for unexpectedly positive outcomes when fires are raging, but better to pray for those brave enough not to count on miracles, those who do what they can.  The snow felt more out of the blue than water from garden hoses, but what really saved my house both times was people who fought the fire long enough for something beyond their power to defeat it. People beat fires down as best they can for as long as they can,  and that is enough sometimes but not always. The snow fell on smoking ruins in Lake Arrowhead as well. A most unfair miracle, if that’s what you want to call it. I squirm at the word, and am grateful for all the lessons, like these, that I have not had to learn the hard way.

As my little boys stood in their Underoos looking at a canyon that was nothing but ashes, I examined the underside  of our deck, so blackened and crumbled it seems clear the house was actually briefly on fire. I was flooded by the kinds of insights one has to be emotionally vulnerable enough to let in through the distractions of the ordinary.  The loves of my life were down there, healthy, curious, and resilient. We had a home, and an affirmation of community. That night, we went to the drive in, and as the boys dozed off in the back seat, I realized that I could drive away and never look back because all I really cared about was right there in that car.

The following spring, I noticed sprouts coming from a tree I assumed been killed by the fire.  I thought of one of my favorite poets, Theodore Roethke, and the closing stanza of his poem  “The Light Comes Brighter”:

And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene

The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled,

Will turn its private substance into green,

And young shoots spread upon our inner world.

Yes.  Hidden within the tree, and within my own mind, was the potential for growth, ready to burst out.  The road to Lake Arrowhead, which had been like driving through an ashtray at first,  was soon green again with the outpouring of life energy from scorched roots. Maybe my desire to break free of self-imposed boundaries was shaped by these two experiences that gave me a glimpse of another way to live, the way of “less is more.” It was a vision I would not act upon for decades, a way of thinking it would take many more losses to embrace.    Maybe my life has been a story of furling and unfurling, of retreating, regathering, and spending energy in a world that always has the potential to burst into green, even from the darkest of places.

 

 

I’ve been gone for three days getting to know Vancouver Island a little better.  The way I dragged myself into the motel the first two nights, I assumed this morning in Ucluelet (about halfway up the west coast of the island), I was facing a loooong day getting back to Victoria.

To my surprise, even with a stop for about 45 minutes to walk along a lake,  it  still took a little under five hours to drive the roughly 180-mile distance. Maybe that sounds like a lot, but to someone born and raised within a few miles of a California freeway, five hours is just not that long a drive.  The thing that is so strange is that in my first two days, the ones that wiped me out, I only traveled half that distance each day.

Well, I did take a few detours, and I did make a few stops to hike trails each day ( including today on my return).  I tried to see as much as I could of what is on the short list of must-dos for this part of the island, so I saw a half-dozen lakes, a grove of redwoods, waterfalls, rivers, rugged sea coast, beaches, and a couple of lively little towns.

Yesterday was frustrating because several parks were closed due to concerns for social distancing during Covid. I didn’t find either of the well-known west coast towns of Tofino and Ucluelet particularly interesting, and concluded that the problem was my expectations. I thought of myself as driving to Tofino, as if it were the destination, when in fact it just happens to be the town at the end of a remarkable drive.  One of those times when the adage “it’s the journey, not the destination” rings particularly true. Fortunately, I had been practicing gratitude all day for the beauty of the island, so as long as Tofino had ice cream (it did) it was okay by me.

For all the frustrations of yesterday, the other two days were one knockout after another.  I picnicked at a beautiful lake and walked the Kinsol Trestle (see photo below).

 

I had a great room with a killer view, and one of the best farm-to-table meals ever at a tiny restaurant  in  Qualicum Beach, followed by a twilight walk on the inlet.

I added Qualicum Beach to the growing list of places I might want to live for a month or two, then set off the next morning for the west coast ( here, to go very far up the west coast you have to drive up the east coast, then across the island). I stopped for about an hour to walk to the Little Qualicum Falls

 

then at Crawford Lake for a break from seeing the beauty only as I hurtled past in my car.

 

The frustrations began at that point, with an old-growth forest trail with a stand of massive redwoods (closed) and a beach and tide pools (closed).  This morning, refreshed, I decided to try again at about 7am to see this fabled stretch of coast,  and I found a trail I walked for about an hour before hitting the road for home.  The sound of the waves, the seals, and the old lighthouse horn was just what I needed to turn my attitude from disappointment to glory hallelujah.

Sometimes a little voice tells me, “here’s a good place to stop,” so I pulled off the road into Sproat Lake Provincial Park.  Wow!  It turns out, totally unknown to me, the best preserved petroglyphs in British Columbia are there, so I walked the half-mile or so to see them on a rock wall at the water’s edge.

They are so  beautiful and conveyed so vividly the former world of the First Nations people who had lived by this lake that I almost expected to turn around and see  their canoes gliding on the water.

Oh, and one more thing.  As I was walking back I heard loud bird noises and looked around for what was going on in the treetops  then I realized the sound was overhead, and I saw my first-ever migrating geese.  Okay, okay, I can hear some of my friends laughing, but with rare exception, in the waterfowl category,  I have been stuck with seagulls and the occasional heron most of my life.

So back to what I started with—how unburdensome the drive back was.  It always seems as if the first time you go somewhere it feels so much longer than coming back  I suppose mostly it’s the removal of the unknown on the return trip.  I found myself thinking, though, about how I would feel if I drove this route all the time.  It’s hard to imagine familiarity ever breeding contempt, as the expression goes, when it comes to natural beauty,  but I wonder if after a while one notices less, or if the opposite occurs, that there are so many things to love, so many things to sink into one’s heart and soul that every turn in the road is like a little homecoming.

I have loved a place that much—the only place in my adult life that ever really felt totally like my home, in any deep sense of the word.  Those of you who have known me a long time know I am referring to my house in Lake Arrowhead,  in the San Bernardino Mountains.  For years, every time I drove up the mountain road, my grin  got too big for my face, and my heart sang at the sight of every familiar landmark.  It never got old, not even a little.  Perhaps I will have another chapter like that, perhaps not.  But for now, I can say that I have felt very much at peace already on this beautiful island, helped along by the knowledge that peace starts with being at home wherever you are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s not exactly a war.  It’s not even a battle.  It’s more competing whispers, one in each ear.  One says “I am perfectly happy by myself, making decisions based only on what works for me in the moment.” Skip lunch and have dinner at 4:30? Have ice cream or a bakery treat at 4 and nothing resembling a real dinner at all?  Go out for the morning at 9? 10? 1?  Come back at 11:30?  3? 5? No one to call, no one else to consider.  Walks are solitary, at my pace, for exactly my duration.  I have spent many years of my adult life on my own in this fashion, and it’s been good for me, then and now.

The bliss factor of solitude is hard to beat, but it does have its down side. The voice in the other ear reminds me how nice it would be to share these experiences with someone, and I briefly think “what have I done?” This is exacerbated by the fact that no one can hop on a plane or get in their car and come visit.  Not that they would, necessarily, but it’s different when they can’t.

I’ve had a noteworthy reaction to these moments when I realize how cut off I am from the important people in my life.  Whereas I used to try to pinpoint what I was feeling—Lonely? Isolated? Melancholic?—I find now I just “sit with it,” as my friend Jane calls this state. Acknowledge without judgment, accept, let it play through and then move on. Though the writer in me doesn’t like wordlessness, I am understanding for the first time this aspect of mindfulness, and I like it.

I have spent close to zero time contemplating the fact that I pulled up roots so utterly.  It feels comfortable, as if my life is now so filled with potential rather than matter.  Even my meager remaining possessions need more winnowing, as I learn more about the person I am now rather than continue to carry around the remnants of someone I used to be, on the assumption I may go back to being her some day.

I’m starting to understand that the most lasting legacy of the years I spent cruising, in addition to the phenomenal experiences I’ve had around the world, may be that it shook me loose from the feeling that I need a base.  Do I need to surround myself with  my belongings? To have  routines provide structure for my life? To know where everything is within a fifty-mile radius? Apparently not.

I got so used to living out of a suitcase over my cruising years that I began to see my stateroom as an equally comfortable home base.  Now it looks as if that was just practice. What do I have now that keeps me from floating away? A car, some books, some supplies. Even my beloved jewelry is starting to seem like relics from another time, another me.

It’s interesting that people seem to think I must be looking around for a place to settle here.  I am not interested in that at all.  I think I would like to spend a month or two here and there, not just on Vancouver Island, but elsewhere in Canada and the world.  I’m “porous with travel fever,” as Joni Mitchell once beautifully put it.  Cruise Director Vicki van Tassel says her home is a storage locker in New Jersey.  I guess mine is now a little unit on Quadra Street in Victoria.

Will I get tired of this?  Probably.  I’ve outgrown pretty much everything in my life.  But you know what? I don’t give a damn what I might feel next year. I‘ll find out when I get there.  For now, I am not settling, in any sense of the word.  Let it be.  Let it all be.

In keeping with my vow I posted about yesterday, to be more the person I want to be than the person I usually am, this morning I set off again for another hike, this time around Thetis Lake, near Victoria (see photo below)

It was such a radically different experience in my head than yesterday.  When I got to a short but steep downward stretch of the path, the little fun buster in my head reminded me I would have to go back up if I went down, but it didn’t work, even for a second.  “So what?” I said, and plunged down the path.  When I got to an equally steep upward stretch, all I thought was “I can do this!”

Amazing how much experience matters.  In this case I have both one day of experience (yesterday) and seventy years of it to go on, and both of them tell me I’ve got this—whatever “this” is.

I noticed the turnoff for Elk Lake on my way this morning and thought maybe I would stop there on the way back.  The me I usually  am nixed the idea, saying one lake was enough and there was always another day.  The me I want to be chimed in as I was driving back, asking why I was in such a rush to get back.  “What are you going to do, go back to your room and sit on your bed?”

I want the new, improved me to win these showdowns, so I went to Elk Lake.  Turns out it is the home of the Canadian rowing team and a popular getaway for people in the area. There was a trail around that lake as well, but the legs were in open revolt at the idea of a second hike, so that will have to wait. Only so much self-reinvention can fit in one day!

Besides, it was time for lunch.  I went to one of the most popular restaurants on the waterfront in Sidney, and sat outside surrounded by potted flowers and dappled sun.  I ordered vegan tacos (yams, avocado, corn, and lots of other little goodies) and when a plate of three enormous tacos arrived, the server said, “you know, if you can’t eat all that, we can wrap it to go.”

“I think I’ll need that,”  said diet-conscious  me. As I dug in,  some other creature who is also me said “Wow! These are delicious!” and I polished off all three.  I don’t know who that new voice is, but the me I want to be has little room to spare in these shorts, so I’d better talk back pretty forcefully at least most of the time. But as lunch dates go, that voice was just the one I needed today.

 

 

 

I got out of quarantine one week ago and I have been too preoccupied to think about much of anything except getting a driver’s license, registering and insuring my car, signing up for medical care and a SIN (the Canadian SSN), getting a small storage unit for when I am between rentals, setting up a bank account, applying for a Canadian credit card to start building a credit rating (my stellar numbers in the US don’t count here).  I also got a haircut and a brow wax!  All that remains now is gas and a car wash before I head into Victoria on Monday to start my two-month stay there. Quite a lot for one week, but the pace I set has now put me in a position to be on vacation for the next few days.

Today I began the real  transition into residency here,  now that the work is done.  This morning I went up to a regional park and hiked along this trail leading to a viewpoint overlooking the ocean.

Almost instantly the clutter in my head began to clear.  The silence reminded me of how long it had been since I had not been surrounded by noise.  The occasional bird song and the rustle of bushes caused by an unseen animal was all that broke into the barely perceptible hum that was my ears adjusting to hearing nothing.

One of my first thoughts was, “here I am, walking in a forest.” Metacognition of this sort is often the preamble to insight  for me, and today my thoughts went something like this. “I want to be the kind of person who walks in forests.  Most of the time I am a person who thinks about walking in forests, but doesn’t actually do it. But here I am, doing it.”  At the moment I was the person I want to be, rather than the person I very often am.

There is no reason, I thought, that I can’t  be more of the person I want to be.  It is entirely up to me. I can look at pictures of beautiful places and imagine myself there, or I can get up and go.  I have absolutely no excuse, now that I have set out on this new chapter in my life.  I am going to call myself out on all my old excuses—no time, no money, no transportation, nobody to go with.

As I hiked, the me I usually am tried to defeat the me I want to be.  The hike was farther and steeper than I expected, and I saw clearly the toll that  a closed gym, curtailed life, and quarantine have taken on my stamina and strength.  The complainer in the back of my mind said I could just turn around, but the me I want to be pressed on.

As viewpoints go, this one was relatively unspectacular, being more a peek through the trees than a wide-open panorama (see photo below), but really for me the larger point was the walk in the woods, and the bonus  of a walk through my own head. And so, there I was, a bit breathless, as I looked out on the reward I had earned by being the better version of myself. It is going to be so worth it to let her loose!

 

It’s 6:30 AM. I have rinsed out my coffee cup and am posting this just before I open the door of my hotel quarters and step into the hallway as a free woman. After I pack up my car (no easy feat), I will head for the ferry to take me to Sidney, where I will spend a few days looking around that part of Vancouver Island, and then take up residence for two months in Victoria before moving on to whatever seems good at that point. I can imagine the sea breeze on my face  as I cross the water, although the glorious weather I have only been able to observe through my window for most of the last two weeks will have turned to rain by mid-morning. Sun or rain— I don’t care. It will mean life for real, not on hold.

Quarantine has certainly not been my favorite experience, but a Canadian friend put it in perspective when she pointed out that when Covid broke out, Canadians stepped up and did what needed to be done. Their willingness  to sacrifice as a nation by quarantining  for several months and practicing universal social distancing  is what made Canada a safer place for me to come to.  Despite the fact that I took a similar level of care back in San Diego, overall my country did not, and like it or not, that reflects on me.

I kept to the letter of the quarantine, except for a quick, masked and socially distanced run to the closest pharmacy for a prescription—acceptable under the rules of the quarantine. I needed to prove something—not just that I wasn’t infected, but that I care about Canada, and that I want to do my part to keep it safe.

Now I can enjoy things my friends back in the US wonder how long they will have to wait to experience again, starting with a celebratory dinner in one of Sidney’s top restaurants tonight.  Covid has taught me new habits, though, about masks, distanciong, and sanitizing, and I plan to be cautious even beyond what is expected here.  I am sure I will go with the flow when I figure out what that is ( I haven’t been outside to know), but I guess I have been affected psychologically by the months of living in fear in San Diego, and I can’t quite believe that I am safer now and that others are safer from me.

Just because I have a birthright doesn’t mean I should expect everyone to welcome me with open arms during a pandemic. I don’t blame people who don’t. I want Canada to be better by one good citizen because I’m here.

Thank you, Canada, for taking me in.

I stand on guard for thee.

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow is my last full day in quarantine.  It is also my mother’s 101st birthday.  She didn’t live to see it, dying in 1986, three years younger than I am today.

My mother, Jean, is the reason I am here in Canada. She was the firstborn child of my English grandmother and her husband, my grandfather, an American chemist working for Miner Rubber Company in Granby, Quebec.

Jean and her younger sister Catherine, or Kitchie, as she was always known, spent their early childhood in 1920s Granby, where traveling in winter was done by sleigh, rivers were crossed by boat, and any further travel was done  by train.  No cars.  They rode their ponies to go get the mail in town.  They went to a small school where many of their classmates were First Nations children.

Jean is in back row, next to taller student standing to the right of the teacher. Her sister Kitchie is in front row, third from left.

When Jean was seven or eight, the family left Canada for Wausau, Wisconsin, where she graduated at the top of her high school class and went on to the University of Wisconsin to study Chemistry.  She ended up completing a Master’s degree in Chemistry, quite an accomplishment for a woman of her era.  She got a job at the Mayo Clinic working in the new field of electroencephalograms.

My mother at work in the Mayo Clinic

In college she met my father, Ivan Weeks, and they eventually married.  By the time I was born they were living with my two-year-old sister in Altadena, California, in the San Fernando Valley, where there were more orange and walnut trees than houses in an area that is now packed with suburbs and “Val Gals.”

Shortly after I was born she was diagnosed with ankyloid spondylitis, an inflammatory disease that, over time, can cause vertebrae to fuse. It is possible that her pregnancies may have triggered the disease, a fact I only learned recently and I don’t know if she ever knew. This fusing made her spine less flexible and she slowly froze in place from her waist to her skull, with her head and neck slightly askew. Her ribs were affected as well, making it necessary for her to breathe using muscles of her diaphragm because her ribs could not expand properly. This was aggravated in her case by asthma, which my aunt recalled began after a bout of whooping cough as a child.

Once she became a mother, and once she began dealing with the permanent double disability of the spinal fusion and impaired breathing, that was the end of any hope for a career.  Actually, even if she were in robust health, that just wasn’t in the cards for women with professional husbands  and young families in that era. I have written about this aspect of my mother before, and I encourage you to read my 2019 blog post, “Anniversaries,” here to learn more about growing up with this remarkable woman.

What amazes me most about my mother is that I never  for a moment saw her as disabled. I don’t think she saw herself that way either. There wasn’t much she couldn’t or didn’t do, although often in her own way.    She drove, but with the addition of big mirrors that stuck out from both sides of our car because she couldn’t look over her shoulder to see what was behind her. One thing she couldn’t do was ski.  While we were on the slopes, she sat in the lodge and read and knit all day because she couldn’t turn to catch a chair lift or see what was coming down the hill.  She was the best Girl Scout  leader in town, and I was always jealous because it was for my sister’s troop and I hated mine.  She became  skilled at many crafts, including mosaic and wood carving, and we feasted on vegetables and berries from her garden and fruit from our  small orchard in season, and on jams and canned fruit she made herself.

My mother did not become an American citizen until she was around forty,  I remember going to San Francisco for her to sign the naturalization papers, mostly because we went for sukiyaki on Fisherman’s Wharf afterwards, a family treat.  Apparently her main rationale for this change was that she had gotten tired of not being able to vote.

As she grew older her lung capacity decreased, and in her last years, it was at about 20 percent.  Catching a cold was potentially fatal because any congestion would make getting enough oxygen impossible.  Still, she went out and about with a breathing contraption in her car, and I rarely heard her turn down a chance to go do something fun because it would be too strenuous. We camped with my little boys, and visited the wonderful Native American sites around Los Alamos, where she moved with my father in the 1970s.  A doctor once told me he was astonished that someone with her lung condition wasn’t in a wheelchair. My mother never even used a walker.

With my son Ivan channeling the Lone Ranger in Los Alamos, New Mexico

She celebrated her  67th birthday with her sister, my Aunt Kitchie, on August 20, 1986, and apparently was not feeling well.  She had to take her temperature several times every day, because any rise could signal the onset of a cold, and she needed to get to a hospital immediately to save her life.  Kitchie found her the following morning dead at the breathing machine she kept in her bedroom.  She must have felt short of breath and gotten up to use it.  She took her temperature too—it was noted in her log.  One degree above what it had been that morning.

My mother died thirty-four years ago this Friday, the same day I leave quarantine. On that day,  I will receive from her a final  precious gift, the chance to start my new life in Canada as a citizen by descent.  I think she would be astonished and pleased that the little girl grinning in the school photo was already carrying that gift for me.

 

 

 

 

 

We can’t  begin to understand the concept of a billion—a billion miles, a billion years, or a billion dollars. The mind simply shuts down.  I have been told we can’t see more than five of any object before we have to start grouping to arrive at how many there are. So much for the crowning achievement of evolution—the human brain!

One of my favorite writers, Loren Eiseley, in “The Flow of the River” ( a strong candidate for the best essay I have every read,  in The Immense Journey, one of my all-time favorite books) speaks about the vastness of the universe, in which a billion is a small number,  and how that affects religious thought.  If we can’t comprehend the universe, how could we begin to comprehend a God capable of creating it?

The answer is, we can’t. I am not arguing that there is or isn’t such a God, just that our brains couldn’t grasp it anyway.  The Quiche Maya creation story has it that their deities created humans with perfect insight, but then took it away, so we would see and understand less.  Why?  So they would remain superior to us.

All of this adds up to one big question for believers, regardless of what they believe: How can deity make itself known to beings incapable of knowing it?  Some cultures believe it does this through natural phenomena like thunder or fire, and others see its hand in rewards or punishments.  No matter, really because either way (or another way altogether), these are all ways in which religious apologists would, in Eiseley’s words,  “bring God into the compass of a shopkeeper’s understanding.”

Painfully elitist in phrasing as it is (the book was published in 1946), Eiseley’s point is powerful. To think of God, should we choose to, we have to use the brains we have, and these are inherently too feeble not just for the shopkeepers but the Einsteins among us.  So what do we do?  We bring God down to a size we can relate to.  We can see divinity in a spring blossom, or a bronze statue glowing where thousands of hands have touched it, or in a baby’s first cry. We think for a moment, “Ahah! I’ve glimpsed it!” and that may be enough to make believers of some.

I used to teach World Religions and when we got to Christianity, I would bring Eiseley’s idea into the way I framed it. What if there really is a God like the biblical one, omnipresent and omnipotent beyond our comprehension?  How would that God speak to us?  We see an evolving answer in the Hebrew Bible. God speaks intimately to Abraham in a garden, directly to Moses but in a scary, distant way on Mount Sinai, then often in fiery anger through the prophets, then not at all, at least in words, anymore.

Get the picture?  God tried to convey what human responsibility is, by a few basic laws of behavior told verbally to Noah, then by carving a few more in stone, then by giving voice to the prophets, then—and here is where Judaism parts ways with both Christianity and Islam—God retreats into silence, as if to say, “I’ve had it with trying to get through to these knuckleheads,” leaving humans to sort through messages in the scriptures they already have.

And what follows is the means  by which both Christianity and Islam have derived their power in the human story. In these faiths, God indeed does bring it down to a shopkeeper’s understanding by sending an exemplar to walk among us.  “Here,” God seems to be saying, giving up on stone tablets and brimstone.  “I want you to act more like him.”

The light dawns.  Be loving, be just.  Every day.  That’s enough. That’s really what all the biblical words are about anyway. Even if you don’t believe either of them were sent by God, Jesus and Mohammad (may peace be upon them) remain model lives for millions.  The saints continue this tradition of human exemplars, their power deriving from the fact they they were people just like us, who put the will of God first.

So now here we are in 2020.  Is the next chapter in the story of God going to be that he gives up on the adequacy of even his best messengers?  The idea of loving one’s neighbor doesn’t seem to have critical mass today, and there seems to be little Jesus-like behavior among the loudest of the self-proclaimed faithful. There has always been a tension in America between the desire for personal liberty and the needs of the community, and while many—maybe even most Americans—are choosing community, right now advocates of personal liberty are on a rampage.

Is God going for a reboot? Is that what 2020 is all about? One last chance for us to pay attention?  If the perfect humans didn’t teach us anything, maybe a return to  fire and brimstone will—an Armageddon of disease, with climate disaster and rampant worldwide social injustice thrown in as well. Will this dawning horror teach us anything?  I wish I still thought so.

The will of the Biblical God is that love and justice prevail. Those of us who believe in that, whether or not we believe in that God, will have to stick it out until we win.  If we don’t, and if an omnipotent God does rule the universe, perhaps we will end not with a bang or a whimper, as T.S. Eliot suggests, but with a colossal shrug, and a new bit of clay in another Garden of Eden. 

 

Day Seven!  Halfway through my quarantine!

In some ways it hasn’t been been that different from the restrictive life I was already living in San Diego.  After all, on a typical day I did not go out, and I passed the time in much the same manner I do here.  Still, it does feel different in some significant ways.

In San Diego I was inside as a means of staying well. Here the presumption seems to be that I am  one step ahead of my first symptoms.  The staff here at the hotel has been really nice about checking in on me, but the way we interact is based on the premise that I absolutely must not come out of my room for any reason whatsoever because I might be poisonous. 

When I was home and while en route to Canada I used to remind myself that there is no danger at all in interacting with anyone who is not infected. Since most people aren’t carrying the virus, exercising reasonable caution has kept me safe to this point.  Still, I think we all tend to see everyone as walking clouds of virus, like the Peanuts character Pig Pen, who shed dirt in little squiggles and dots everywhere  he went.

 

I feel a bit like the stereotypical spy. When I open the door in the hotel to put out my garbage (housekeeping will not come in, so I call the desk to send someone to get it) I stare up and down the hall to see if it is safe. I debated going down late at night to check on my car but haven’t done it yet.  Maybe a load of stealth laundry late at night?  Probably not.

This is very different from life in San Diego, where the decisions around going out were always mine to make. I could go out, but I almost always chose not to.  Here I had better not cross the threshold  because the Canadian government has made very clear how much potential ruin they are prepared to inflict upon my plans for my life if I do.  And I promised Canada I wouldn’t.  I want to get off to the best possible start here, and this is how to do it.

It is is a weird juxtaposition between this healthy person in room 404 and the apparent perception that there is a grave risk posed by my being here.   I exist only as a potential miasma swirling out from under the door. And here I am inside, listening to music, reading, researching things to do on Vancouver Island, fixing meals, doing sit-ups and stretches, having a glass of  wine or a cup of tea, writing this blog.  Not so much as a sniffle and yet a threat still does lurk..

I left home on August 1, and since it is now August 14, I think we can safely assume I did not bring Covid with me.  Every day I stay symptom free I can tick off another place on the road where I did not get infected.  By the time I get to the end,  only that cute border crossing guard who might have breathed on me through his mask could have given it to me, and he would have gotten it from another Canadian.

But no matter.  Canada is right to exact this price on anyone who wants to walk freely here.  I’m fine.  Eager to get out, but way more than okay. I’m doin’ it, and that’s all I have to say.

 

As I pass the 25% mark in my two-week quarantine in Vancouver, I thought it might be good to count a few blessings:

1. I haven’t lost my room key or had to ask the desk for my room number once.  This is historic.
2. I haven’t had to check the weather forecast when getting dressed
3. I don’t need to use the hair dryer, and my hair appreciates that
4. When I look up and see I have frittered away a few hours, my response is “Great!” rather than “Oh, geez, I’d better get something done!”
5. I haven’t brought  home any impulse purchases
6. I’ve stuck faithfully to a healthy diet because I bought nothing but veggies and protein and can’t go out to buy any junk food.  A good thing, since I would have torn through all of it by now
7. I have gotten some tedious tasks done, like clearing out old emails and clipping my toenails
8. I don’t have to wash my hands a million times a day, or wear a mask
9. And best of all— drum roll, please— I know I haven’t contracted Covid in the last few days