Tolstoy said it best, that times can simultaneously be the best and the worst. And as discussed earlier, one of the best features of these times involve the stripping bare of social reality. But interestingly, there’s a lot going on with interior reality. Is it just my imagination that Jane and I are closer these days? No. Our mutual vulnerabilities are on fuller than usual display. And we have been through a thing or two.
This week my spasming lower back occasioned some close neuromuscular calls. Mornings were particularly scary. I couldn’t go about normal activities without fear of a sudden cramping that would make me fall. And a fall would be a bad idea. Breaking one’s hip is, as the doctors say, contraindicated. And what happened? Simply put, I got by with a little help from my friends. Ricky made it here, finally. His had been quite a saga. But in the end, he had tires and a facemask. And Dennis, my morning helper, even got the city of San Francisco Health Department to give him a test for the dreaded virus. Dammed if life wasn’t good this week.
Ricky dealt with my lower back the way an experienced cook flips a pancake. Dennis got me on the road to normal range of motion. Then we went outside. Outside is very important. Outside is where things photosynthesize, including weeds which compete in ways that are utterly unfair, unprincipled, and probably Republican. We got the diseased fava beans out. We put the seed potatoes in. We harvested the garlic and the shallots. We stared in utter disbelief at the lettuce, going faster than the entire Salinas Valley. Urban agriculture is back on track.
And Dennis helped me clean out my bookcase. The libraries are shut. So I buy books, including used ones. And they do accumulate. We did a judicious culling and suddenly my home library came into focus. Plenty to read.
Including “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” Why this? Ours is not to reason. Ours is to trust our intuition, particularly in these heightened times. The soul knows what it’s doing.
The book arrived from the shop down the street. And, yes, the bookshop down the street has never quite shut down. I do give San Francisco high marks in this category. Booksellers were even at the height of the lockdown, and we are still more or less there, classified as “essential services.” Indeed. They were allowed to remain open in restricted fashion. Ours, Bird & Beckett, was at one stage passing books through a grill. Then they began making home deliveries. Now I think they’re open for two or three people in the shop at a time. Whatever. They never shut.
Back to the book. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn drew me in some way. I know that it is an American classic, a book of tenement life and squashed hopes. And hope. I just knew that something in it would speak to today’s America. I didn’t know much else. Such as, for example, that the book is quite a tome, 500 pages. Slightly daunting. But it isn’t as though I have a pressing schedule these days, is it? I am journeying with a novel, it with me, and a full report will follow.
Without quite realizing it, the crisis of my back, pulled three people out of isolation. Neither Ricky nor Dennis nor, of course, I[PB1] [PB2] had seen a single human being for the last two months…except spouses or employers. We all wore masks. We were all relieved. Has one of us given the other a virus load? Probably not. And now it’s too late to worry. My hip isn’t broken. My back is healing. And onward