Is this happening to me, or was it always like this? That is the question I am asking about my 75 years of consciousness. We are talking ¾ of a century. We are talking me. I am particularly aware of this because Jane just turned 65 today, the spring of her chickenhood barely under way. Mine being well into the advanced stage. 

Anyway, what I notice is a tendency to a deep and spontaneous interiority. I mean, we will sit down to dinner, Jane and I, and if I have come from, say, a bout of writing, I can drift back there. Much of what I write involves a trip down memory lane. And I can easily get tripped up in journeying down that lane, so that something that happens at dinner may remind me of another dinner I had 50 years ago, complete with a full immersion in the interpersonal landscape, my own emotional state, and so on. Pass the salt, would be a more sane thing to say at such times. Pass the mind back to the present would be more useful.

So I struggle to stay present. The present is a present, after all, one that gives itself moment by moment. Do I not appreciate this? Honest, I do. But I also appreciate the insight, or the perspective, that comes with age. After all, when we remember things at this point in life, we recapture them. They were never there in their entirety. They were always filtered. Unhappiness does that, in particular. But so does the exigency of survival. Anyway, with the passage of time, time itself passes back into focus. Something like full reality takes over. Or a fuller reality. And often I can sense that something in the past is missing or being muted. Perhaps something taboo or simply too unpleasant to easily welcome back into my life. And that’s the work.

Anyway, I can easily see why Proust might bite into a tea cookie and find himself transported back to another time with another tea cookie. And what else but to plumb the depths and shallows of that memory? Can’t blame the guy, but I don’t want him over here for dinner. I’m trying to fight my way back into the present. And the present is good. Actually, the thought of a Madeleine reminds me that I have one downstairs. It is wrapped in cellophane and given to me, absolutely free of charge, by Sam, proprietor of Cup Café. I haven’t visited his establishment for a while. And I long to. More precisely, I long to return to a life that involved going out. Anywhere. We have stopped that sort of thing, Jane and I. So have lots of people. The latest version of COVID-19, the Ohmygod variant, is currently doing that to us all. The good news is that this may be short-lived. This may be one virus that burns itself out massively quickly.

Meanwhile, a person with a tendency to living inside, doesn’t do well when forced to be inside, literally, all the time. Nothing for it but to wait. We just canceled dinner plans for Sunday. This was a long anticipated gathering of friends who date back to university life. Jane had given me a gift certificate to the Hog Island Oyster Company, and I was planning a dinnertime shipment of shellfish. Which would place me very much in the present, not to mention in some amount of planning time in the future. But this was not to be.

For now I am stuck inside. Interior scenes only. And let us hope that the scene will shift. Soon. My physical therapist just returned from a holiday trip to New York with her family. Her attempts to see Hamilton tell an interesting tale. One night the show was canceled. The next night it was back. All depending on the availability of understudies, crew, and so on. To me this does represent a different stage of the pandemic. The show must go on. The show can go on. With testing, adequate inoculation, and some flexibility. I like that. And soon I will return to Cup.