I wrote here last a year ago. I’d been “safer at home” for about a month, not imagining that it would be a year until I’d face the transition to “unsafer not at home.” We’re told that we will return to school April 26 and continue to conduct classes on Zoom while sitting alone in a classroom. There is some talk of “hybrid” with a handful of students in the classroom sometimes so I can teach the English language with a mask over my face. No vaccines are required. Classrooms are bedecked with crime scene-like “DO NOT SIT HERE” tape splayed over every other desk. The computers are antiquated, the firewall is impenetrable and the WIFI is unreliable. Most of our students prefer to study from home and have no desire to return to campus. My colleagues are apoplectic about the imminent forced return to deserted classrooms where we can teach less effectively than we have from our homes.
During my year of seclusion, I have devoted many hours to running my business and to a number of teaching assignments. There have been times that I’ve felt overworked and stressed and experienced the usual frustrations of bureaucratic idiocy. There are certain disadvantages to working where you live and living where you work. That said, I haven’t spent any time commuting and my grooming routine is radically abridged. I’ve started a little garden in the front yard, done a ton of baking, stopped smoking, gained weight despite walking about four miles each morning, read dozens of novels and for the first time in years, eaten dinner with Himself every night. I’ve lost count of the TV series we’ve binged on together but The Borgias, Vikings, The Americans and Poldark are among the most memorable.
For nearly twenty years I’d written almost every week. Now I’ve had a year in quarantine to think thoughts and ponder the universe, yet I find myself bereft of much observation that’s worth sharing. I grope for descriptors of my time at home. Fear. Contentment. Malaise. Relief that the presidential equivalent of a 24 hour a day jackhammer is no more. Sad at the polarity left in his wake. Self-righteous for eschewing tobacco. Self-loathing for putting on pounds. Worried that the dog will have a psychotic break when we return to school. Bemused that, despite spending so much time inside my head, so little now is flowing from it.
The feeling of not really knowing how I feel is so constant that I don’t even bother allowing it into the forefront of my consciousness. Weirdly, during this year, every so often I am tormented by a flash of bad ancient memory. Folly. Embarrassments. Slights. A jolt of shame or regret at a childhood humiliation and then I’m back to kneading the bread or walking the dog. I suppose that my psyche is exacting punishment for being so unscathed at a time of such immense suffering.
Vaccinated now my first expedition, at the behest of Number 1 son’s partner, is for a mani-pedi in Silver Lake. The strangeness of driving on streets that I’ve driven for years, negotiating a parking meter, choosing nail polish, is physically palpable. A foray to eat outdoors at restaurant I’ve eaten at many times is surreal. Choosing from a menu and eating food that I haven’t made myself in a place that’s not my home is strange and novel.
After the manicure we venture farther afield with both sons and the elder’s partner. We schlep out to Riverside to visit the California Citrus Historic Park. We receive a private tour from a genial guide through acres of citrus groves. We gorge on heirloom oranges and tangerines, oozing juice soaking our masks. We fill a huge bag with tangelos, blood oranges and yellow Mexican limes. Himself has sentimental memories of citrus groves from his childhood in the San Gabriel Valley and when I attended school in Redlands, the aroma wafting from groves surrounding the campus, now long gone, were antidote to the stale beer and bong water reek of the dorm. My college years are not remembered as the happiest in my life, but the scent of citrus blossoms reminds me that all of the mixed experiences that I’ve had co-mingle to result in an ultimately satisfying life.
After the orange extravaganza, the Murphy children require beer and find a brewery in Chino Hills with outdoor seating. There is a taco truck in the parking lot. Even pre-pandemic, having both kids together is at best a bi-annual event but somehow, socially distanced at a neighborhood joint with a car full of oranges, beer in plastic cups and foil wrapped tacos feels like a spectacularly special event.
There is an airline credit for a pandemic cancelled trip to Portland. I exchange this for two tickets to Bozeman Montana during Spring Break. We stay at a restored stone house in Big Timber. The house is lovely but except for a charming old hotel, the town isn’t much of a destination, no bigness, no timber. The Grand Hotel does provide an old school restaurant meal that includes soup and salad and baked potato and reminds me of earlier decades when everything wasn’t ala carte and my parents’ irritation at an entrée that wasn’t accompanied by a refillable basket of bread and a salad and at least some lousy Jello for dessert. There are many Trump signs and a billboard that says “Don’t turn Montana into Portland. Vote Republican.” Two thirds of the Big Timber convenience store where I shop for groceries is relegated to guns and I am smirked at for my mask. In bigger towns like Billings and Butte most concerns still require masks although there is no longer a state mandate.
Most of Yellowstone is still closed due to snow but we are able to drive about seventy miles into the park. No geysers for us but snow-capped mountains, frozen lakes and bison. We explore some gravel backroads with no signs of humanity for as far as you can see, keeping alive the unpeopled theme of the last year. We listen to Ivan Doig’s Montana memoir The House of Sky, about a 1940s rural childhood, while we explore. Even now, life in this rugged country requires an extraordinary amount of exertion and, despite the Trump yard signs, my respect is more than grudging.
A trancelike year leaves me rusty with the words. Perhaps hindsight will be rich with meaning. One day I suppose there will be no more masks or news of COVID. Manicures and restaurants will return to the regular grind. The strangeness of the ordinary will fade but the new ordinary won’t be the same. Who could have anticipated a year in seclusion? I’ve had the quiet of my thoughts. But now it’s impossible to predict how the world will have changed when the noise begins again. The thought of plunging into this unknown leaves me anxious and wistful and maybe not completely adverse to an eternal safer at home.
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