Diary

Aspirational. I’m not there yet, but hear the whispers.

In my travels, I  missed several experiences I had hoped for. I had overnight flights that caused me to miss seeing the Andes and the Amazon Basin from the air.  “Sorry you can’t see Mount Everest at all today,” the captain said, when my friend Susan and I flew from Bhutan to Kolkata over the Himalayas, with the jagged tops  of a few peaks (shown here)  the only differentiation from the clouds socking in most of the landscape.

Fog or rain kept me from seeing the picture-postcard versions of some places on my dream list.  The giant Buddha looming over Lantau Island in Hong Kong was so fogged in I could see only its outline from the Po Lin monastery below.  A mountaintop in Bhutan, where on a clear day we could have seen the Himalayas in the distance, was socked in so utterly we could see only a few meters in front of our noses. The day I wanted to show my friend Linda some of my favorite spots in Riga, Latvia, we ended up sheltering (sort of) in a relentless downpour that changed our day into something utterly different than I had hoped for.

A few of these missed experiences led to something more mystical than what I had hoped for.  The Alps or the Sahara  Desert have lain below me as I flew, calling me through the darkness without revealing themselves, tantalizing me with an experience they would not let me have.

In the summer of 2000  I was at a very fragile point in my life, having lost my son Adriano to suicide at age 22 less than a year before.  In the letter he left behind, he talked about how he hoped death would liberate him to go surf the universe.  I took some of his ashes with me when I took the Norwegian coastal steamer on a research trip from Bergen to Kirkenes on the Russian border at the top of Scandinavia. My plan was to scatter the ashes at Nordkapp, the symbolic, if not actual, northernmost inhabited place in the world.   I had read that the glow of the Aurora Borealis is caused by light reflecting off dust in the atmosphere, and I thought it would be fitting if his ashes were part of the northern lights.  My eternal cosmic surfer—I would do that for him, and for me.

I had a vision of a clear day, where I would look out over the water toward the Arctic Circle and throw his dust skyward, but there were a lot of things that turned out not to be in keeping with my fantasy version of this moment.

Let’s start with the comical and then move to the sublime.  Nordkapp  was utterly socked in, visibility close to zero.  Not to be deterred, I went to the cliff edge  and started scattering his ashes anyway.  Well, if you remember a similar scene from The Great Lebowski, the updraft sent much of my first attempt back onto my jacket, my shoes and my face.  Not at all the way I pictured it! I figured out a better angle and threw the rest, which mostly plummeted down the cliff face in the heavy, still air.

Oh well! After wiping down as best I could, I went to the bar, which had a massive glass window designed to awe visitors with the spectacular view.  Nothing but a solid gray curtain of fog clung to the glass that day, Undaunted, I bought a glass of champagne and sat in the empty bar next to the window and said my son’s name out loud several times as a toast to hIs life and to my love for hIm. I cried. I cried a lot back then.

And I thought while i sat there that although I had pictured it differently, this  experience was a perfect representation  of where I was in my life. I knew the Arctic was out there. I knew the Aurora Borealis was out there. I  knew I had a future.  Another day, another time, I might see further and more clearly. I just couldn’t see anything right then beyond my own fog.

Memories of how things have come out differently than I envisioned  come to mind as I sit here in my condo in the fourth week of sheltering in place from Covid 19.  It’s a lot like sitting in that bar, knowing there is a reality out there, a future I am just not able to see.  But that’s okay.  I can be at peace with uncertainty and just let today be what it is.

On that day in Nordkapp, I committed the act of delinquency i am most pleased with in my life. I  finished the champagne and stole the glass to give to my son Ivan, along with the story that went with it.

All of life, I guess, is practice for what comes next, and memories  offer value in unexpected ways. And yes, I do believe that somehow my beautiful boy has found his way into the Aurora Borealis and that its light creates a path for him as I continue on earth to seek my own illumination.

I have had a complicated relationship with Should my whole life. It’s a story that, rather weirdly, involves punctuation  

When I was young, I rebelled against Should. I think doing so is healthy and necessary to become an adult with a strong individual identity. I’m talking about  Should with a question mark. “Should?” comes as we move from docile acceptance of authority when very young,  to wanting to overthrow everything, before coming back to something more resembling a balance. “Should?” challenges.  “Should?” shapes the adult we become.

As I matured I began to see Should differently. I began to understand what a privilege it is to have the life I have been granted. I have a base of security, comfort, and belonging, plus brains and abilities, that allow me to be effective in this world.  Should with an exclamation point  says that I don’t get to waste those gifts.  If I can write well, I have an obligation to do so. If I can lead, I need to lead. If I can contribute, I need to contribute. Much given, much asked in return.

“Should!” guided my career. I wanted to use my gifts to make as much of a difference as I possibly could to the cause of educational equity, the guiding passion of every teaching and administrative position I held. Because I turned out to be good at each job, “Should!” guided me to jobs of increasing importance, to the extent that is measurable by responsibilities and pay raises.

“Should!” played a big role in my career as an author as well.  I do love to write, and I don’t want this to sound as if I was dragged kicking and screaming into publishing five books in six years, but once it was clear that I could spin a good story that publishers wanted to buy and people wanted to read, “Should!” set in.  People told me they wanted me to write another book because they wanted to read it.  My agent wanted me to write another book because she wanted to sell it.  There were so many forgotten women whose stories were crying out to be told.

Most of my adult life I have been guided by “Should!”  I took on what was demanded of me, or that I demanded of myself, because I could. If I was good at something I felt obligated to do it, from career, to publishing, to volunteering, to running 10Ks or swimming laps.

“Should?” began poking its head back in my life more often as I moved into my sixties.  I became less interested in self-reinventions others thought I should make.  I didn’t want to learn how to do the latest, greatest thing, whether it was a new teaching strategy or learning how to work the bells and whistles on my phone.  I wanted to keep growing, but I wanted to choose how.  I guess you could say “Should!” was being countered more often  with “Do I really need to?” and the latter was proving more persuasive.

I chose to return to teaching rather than pursuing administrative advancement, then eventually I walked away from that into retirement.  I decided I didn’t owe anybody any more books. I didn’t owe unnamed  future students my knowledge.  I resigned from boards that weren’t providing me opportunities to feel I was growing in ways that mattered to me. I went into cruise lecturing with no sense of purpose other than to have fun sharing my knowledge and seeing the world.

Now in this age of Covid, I find myself in a new phase of my lifelong relationship  with Should.   In the past, when I was facing long stretches of unstructured time, I remained productive by establishing different categories of time and made myself spend at least an hour a day on each. It worked brilliantly as a self-imposed Should.

I blogged confidently about it here just a few weeks ago. In all honesty, it’s not working all that well now. I have my categories of time prominently displayed in my home, and I do use them as a reference point when I get antsy, but I just can’t make myself do anything I don’t feel like doing.

What’s so different?  I think it’s because until this point I was projecting into the future, seeing all those Shoulds (and the “Do I Really Need To’s”) as leading somewhere.  The goal might have been no more than a misty sense of well being in the future for having chosen a certain path, but that was enough.

Now I don’t know.  I don’t know how to believe in the future the way I used to. Certainly not with a fervor that will drive me today to do a little research on a potential writing project, or get down on the floor and do crunches. Should’s punctuation is now a trail of dots.

Good things might lie ahead, influenced by my efforts now, if I have the good luck to survive in good health.  That’s a big if.  What would I do today, if I were pretty sure I would survive this?   All I know  is that the answer is different than if I were pretty sure I wouldn’t.  The second, I  should confess, involves at the very least  far more ice cream and far fewer plank poses.

The background hum of Should is so different  now, precisely because I don’t know which of those questions will be the one I should have listened to. But don’t  get the idea I am despondent.  Actually I am pretty content these days. Maybe letting go of Shoulds is a natural part of the aging process, launched forward on steroids by this pandemic. What  seems clear now is that in this complicated, evolving new reality, when I can answer  “Yes!” to the question  “Do I Really Need To?” I can affirm life in this  moment in ways I might not ever find while listening too much  to Should.

Having lived through the cancer that took the life of my husband Jim eight years ago, I was thinking today about how similar some of my emotions are in this pandemic to those we faced  in the aftermath of his diagnosis.  Although then we knew how his story would eventually end, we had a lot of hope at the beginning that effective treatment could keep him around for a few more years.

The immediate period after his diagnosis of metastatic prostate cancer was surprisingly unchanged, once we both got used to the small puncture in his back and the tube connecting to a urine collection bag that was always tucked under his clothes. Soon we were back to playing tennis, and going along in our lives more or less as usual.  We went a spur-of-the-moment trip to Hawaii over Thanksgiving rather than waiting for Spring Break, as we had planned. We laughed, we teased, we kept the bounce in our step.

The drone in the background was louder in my head than his. He was still denying the reality behind his PSA numbers. Treatment wasn’t working. He wouldn’t have the luxury many luckier prostate cancer patients have in their 70s, of being able to slow a 100% fatal cancer down so long they were liable to die of something else first.

He couldn’t go in the water in Hawaii because of his bag, so it wasn’t the same splashy-grinny trip we took the year before to Lake Okanagan in British Columbia, when we were blissfully unaware of the cancer already taking root. But we were there, together in Maui, and that was what mattered.  We went because of the unsaid message running through my head that made me insist on taking the trip then rather than waiting. I knew we were making our last memories. I knew this was about the quality of the rest of his life.  He died a few weeks before Spring Break.  We had made a wonderful memory while we still could. It made him smile for a few months  I am still smiling

It was always there, that drone in the background, brought forward occasionally by a jolt of awareness that something had changed.  We still played tennis but for a shorter periods, then less often.  Then we changed the rules so Jim didn’t have to run more than one step.  Then we stopped playing. Jim ate and drank with the same gusto, then, slowly, he didn’t.

And then he fell off a cliff. That is what dying of cancer is like. You are okay, all things considered, then suddenly you’re not. We played very abbreviated tennis up to six weeks before he died. He was still making his own lunch three weeks before he hit that cliff. Just as the doctor predicted, he stayed in bed more and more until he was there all day.

Jim went to hospice when the cancer, or the medication—I’m not sure which— affected his brain and he was behaving erratically in ways I was afraid I could not physically control.  He died three days later.

Why does this feel so similar?  It’s that drone in the background.  Maybe the virus is digging into my cells right now.  Maybe it’s already too late. Maybe this is it and I just don’t know the details. Maybe this is something I will survive and end up dying years down the road of something else.  Maybe this story is happening right now not to me, but to someone I love.

Life today is also similar because it is so disrupted. Our old lives aren’t on temporary hold.  In some respects they are already over. By the time Jim died, our beautiful condo had been ripped apart because I insisted that his two East Coast children not leave it to me to communicate with them after his death about what of his they wanted. We packed up and mailed things while they were here to say goodbye, despite how horrible we felt because he was sleeping in the back bedroom while we went through his things.

Life became a slow, incremental process of losing a little, then a little more. Then losing everything, except what can’t be lost, and that is the spirit in the living that enables us to go on, and the dead to transition whatever, if anything, might be beyond.

When you acknowledge the possibility of a fatal process already underway in your body, it changes your relationship to the material things in your life. I look around and wonder what it might be like for my son to confront what I leave behind.  This virus also makes us confront our non-material legacy— the story of what we have done with our lives.  To come bang-up against what it may be too late to do.

Maybe I have this malignancy  now, maybe I don’t. Maybe I will get it later, maybe not. But for now, I am going to navigate this changed world with the best, most hopeful spirit I can bring to it.  I am still planning my future. I am trying to learn all I can from this. The drone isn’t entirely bad. It alerts us to what is really important, and to the value of things— like love— that no disease can take away.

I think this next stretch will be harder. Novelty is wearing out. Resolutions may not be kept. Isolation may take a toll on the many ways others contribute to our well being. Things like going grocery shopping may turn into ordeals. We may hear more about loved ones and friends caught up in this. We may treat minor vagaries in our bodies as signs of impending Armageddon. We may get bored out of our skulls. We may be stuck inside with people who are driving us crazy. We may be frazzled from trying to be everything to everybody. Everyone has their own response to all this, and it may be fraying at the edges. And we have no idea about when this will end. We don’t know how to plan, how to pace our lives and how to interpret where we are and what’s going on,

Few born in this country have lived through anything like this.  Remembering the privations of World War II is rare, and the Great Depression even rarer. The  pundits are right that this feels like war, although except for hospital workers there are no front lines, and for most of us, this war  is still a privileged first-world sort.  Our reality at the moment is still something people in much of the world would see as luxury. Bombs aren’t falling, there’s no wreckage to sift through. We aren’t being terrorized by civil war.  Our grocery shelves are empty right now but they will fill. Our roads are still passable.  The trucks will get through from warehouses that still teem, and fields and farms that are happier than ever with less of our pollution to contend with.  We are hunkered down with a fair degree of security. We simply are going to need to adjust our sense of entitlement.

For most of us, our worst fears will not be realized.  We may remember most strongly the anxiety of the open-endedness of this time.  We may not like the comeuppance we get in our views of ourselves  that were shattered by behavior we’re not proud of.  Yes, everyone is in this together, and yet I suspect many of us feel more alone than before.

This next stretch will be harder because we are still adjusting.  We are more aware we are just settling in rather than soon to be liberated. We are learning to live with more questions than answers  But we can adjust, we can make the most of it, we can choose to see the opportunities in having less to distract us.  Today I am ordering some flowering bulbs that can grow in water in a window of my condo.  I may get a bird feeder for my balcony.  Neither of these would have occurred to me a week ago.  Life will go on in abundance, and it’s up to me to go with it.

I have been worrying a lot about the bad and deteriorating home lives many people will face sequestered with toxic people. This came out of that thinking this morning:

You cower under the covers because someone at home has been drinking all day
Or someone has thrown the remote at the television, yelling because there are no sports to watch
Or someone needs sex they can’t go get elsewhere
Or you whined one too many times about having nothing to do
Or you asked too many questions no one has answers to
Or you used the last of something it won’t be easy to replace
Or broke something
Or laughed at something
Or cried about something
Or just breathed too loud.
You cower because you used to be able to get away to school
Or the senior center
To a friend’s house
To the baseball diamond
To the park
To the after school job
The broken dishes and shrieks

The steps in the hallway
The creak on the stairs
The shrieks and broken glass.
“Where are you hiding?” The voice comes. It always comes.
You cower because there used to be a chance the doorbell might ring.
You have symptoms. The sweat, the shakes of fear.
They will last as long as this does, or as long as you do, whichever is less.
Because no one, no hiding place can save you.

In the years between 2008 and 2014 I published five full-length books (four novels and one work of narrative nonfiction).  That’s five books in six years, all from major publishers, with all the editing and other work that entails. When people ask me how I did it, I honestly can’t figure it out, since I was also a full-time professor during those years.

 When I was teaching, I actually looked forward to going back in the fall, not just because I loved that part of my life, but because I recognized how much I benefited from the  structure it provided.

My biggest problem during breaks was not procrastination or idleness but the opposite. When I am writing a book, I am a house afire. I simply cannot type as fast as the story and the dialogue is rushing through my mind. I cannot wait to see what is going to happen next, and who is going to say what.The characters and their stories become richer the deeper I go into the world of my book.  I begin to understand nuances and meanings I did not see at the outset.

It is such an exhilarating ride that  I will not get up for hours. I start around 6AM and look up and realize it’s 11.  I tell myself to get up, get dressed, eat something, but then I get sucked in again for just one more scene, until by 2PM I am wobbling and lightheaded when I finally stand up.

To keep writing a novel from making a train wreck of the rest of my life during summer and semester breaks, I developed what I called Categories of Time.  Now, as I sit in my condo waiting out the period of self-isolation from this virus I have good reason not to want to name, I am once again looking to my Categories of Time to provide some guidance.  I offer the concept here in the hope that it will be helpful to others wondering how to get through this without bringing out the worst tendencies in themselves.

The idea is to identify the the activities  that help you achieve a balanced, healthy life and stay on track towards your goals.  You then make a commitment to spend one hour a day on each.  Back then, I established these five categories: writing, promoting my success as an author, exercise, life maintenance and recreation.  Life maintenance included everything from taking a shower, to paying bills, to doing laundry, to buying groceries, to preparing a meal.   Recreation meant that I had to spend one hour doing something I might otherwise call a waste of time—playing Scrabble, watching television, surfing the net for nothing in particular.

This last was, to my surprise, the hardest to stick to when I was writing.  Some were easy or necessary to spend far more than  an hour on at least some days, but the whole point, really is to make yourself fit in the whole variety over the course of your waking hours.

My categories are different now, though they still add up to five, which seems a workable number, though yours might differ.  They may evolve, but how I see mine now is as follows, in no particular order:

Creative Time:  I have been thinking about a writing project of a new sort altogether, and will be exploring that.  Keeping it close to the vest for now

Life maintenance:  see above

Reaching Out to Others in Isolation:  phone, text, email, Zoom, FaceTime, etc

Recreation:  see above

Exercise:  daily walk, plus find some hotel exercise and/or stretching routines, since these could be more easily adapted for my condo

The rest of the day, encompassing all hours you are awake,  can be divided daily however you want among these categories, but you must do each one for a minimum of one hour.  How this helped me when I was writing maniacally is that around 2PM, I would say to myself “Yikes!  I have four more categories to fit in today!”   It simply wasn’t appropriate or even possible to work any more, and understanding this, I was able to stop.  It worked then, and I think it will work now.

Well, now I have the Reaching Out category nailed for today with this blog post.  Hope it is of some benefit to you.

Last night, as I unexpectedly tucked into my own bed after not boarding a plane to Buenos Aires, I had a funny thought. Instead  of telling Dan my trip was canceled, what if I had just rung his doorbell, suitcases in tow, and when he opened the door, said, “I forgot my toothbrush.”

I’m not sure why that struck me as so funny, except for maybe the contrast between the unimportant an*d important, the solvable and unsolvable problem.

It got me to thinking about what I was really looking forward to on this trip, and I realized that even though I can’t have exactly that, I have some reasonable facsimiles.  I really love the girly-girl aspects of the cruising life.  I like dressing better than I normally do at home.  I like taking more time with my grooming.  I like the lovely bedding.  I like the nice ambiance of the restaurants. I like setting out in the morning into a new adventure.

Of course what I most like is having someone take care of me, but if that really matters, I can start taking a little better care of myself.

When I unpack today I am going to put everything except the dressiest stuff in the front of my closet, and I am going to wear it. Even though I am going to go as all-in as possible with self-isolation to do my part for my community, there isn’t any reason I need to  wear my baggies while I do it.

If I decide a luxury bed experience is all that important, I can use my best sheets, make the bed more carefully, and fluff the pillows.  I can put a piece of chocolate on my own pillow just as well as they can, if it matters.  Nothing stopping me except how silly it sounds.

I can set a nicer table and spend more than the bare minimum of time putting a meal together.  If I tidy up as I go, it just takes a minute to finish the cleanup for one person.

I can go out in the morning and have an adventure here.

The operative thing here is “if it really matters.”  Well, actually it doesn’t.  Maybe for the next few days,  I will  try dressing up a notch, and maybe I will go outside a bit more like a tourist in my own town, but really, life is so good that the chocolate on the pillow is just, well, frosting on the cake

And you know what?  I think I may actually have forgotten my toothbrush. Doesn’t matter now. Some things are just plain easier when you’re home.

If you read my post from earlier today, you know I had left on the first leg of a journey to Buenos Aires to finish my circumnavigation of South America. Before I had gotten halfway to LA by train to catch my plane out of LAX, I was engrossed in a flurry of phone calls with Geoff, the Seabourn lecturer booker, to determine whether I should get on the plane. It became obvious over the next hour that I would be facing quarantine in Argentina, if I even got that far, because Colombia was likely not to allow me to set foot there even to change planes.

I am on my way back from LA now (I couldn’t get off the train because I had checked my suitcases) and I will now have a period of mental adjustment to not being where I had hoped to be and missing out on some things I had looked forward to doing, but also because I now have a loooong stretch of time with no travel plans.  If I am  not able to fly  to Lisbon in a few weeks to do the Canaries cruise, I will be in San Diego  seven months without any travel adventures, and only one for three weeks until the end of the year

I am worried about me!  I’m going to need to have a long conversation with myself about how to go from lemons to lemonade on this one. But one thing I am not going to do is wallow in self-pity. I have a great life and I will figure out how to make the next months an adventure.

it’s hard to imagine how anybody is going to avoid having their life altered negatively by this virus. It’s not just whether you get sick. It’s all the other kinds of losses it can bring. Maybe this will be the wake up call for enough people who have bought the fantasy that our president is doing the best job ever done.  If  I come down with this virus because I caught it in San Diego when I could have been somewhere else where people were doing a better job managing it, I am going to be even more blisteringly upset with that person in power who even today insists we don’t have very many cases and is too much of a coward to get the test himself even though he has been exposed. There, I’ve gone political. But my tush is sore from being on trains all day and I think I’ve earned the right to grouse a little!