ON BEING THE MORNING PEOPLE, GENERATING OUR OWN MOMENTUM, AND GRAPPLING WITH PATRIOTISM
Friday July 3 2020
Dear Sarah,
This is an out-of-the-ordinary and yet more-ordinary-than-usual Friday, a holiday Friday during a time when we’re not able to celebrate (read: travel) in the usual ways, first day of a long weekend, and with the leisurely pleasure of a letter to write!
As I re-read your letter of last week, I was thinking about your words on the importance of moving our bodies. I agree that it makes all the difference! I’ve been continuing to go for morning runs, perhaps even more frequently now than when work and free time were more distinguished from each other. On a regular weekday or weekend pre-pandemic, sometimes the bed would beckon; the idea of sleeping in or going back to sleep would hold a certain thrill. Now the days are mostly smooth and endless, back to back, all with a similar sheen, and sleeping in rather than going for a run seems unnecessary, as if it would only make a difference if I could just sleep in forever, sleep away a whole day or week. What are twenty or thirty or ninety extra minutes on a day like any other, spent mostly at home, not interacting with many people? (Ok, a confession: a lie-in on the weekend is still highly desirable.) I have a daydream now and then of spending a whole day in bed with a book, but this daydream is also less compelling these days; perhaps it is a dream better realized in the winter than the summer. In any case, the morning runs feel good but are over quickly, relatively speaking, and as the weather has gotten warmer I’ve been less inclined to take afternoon walks, which means that the movement portion of my day happens early and then I sit for hours and hours, punctuated by snack walks to the kitchen. Long sits hunched in front of computer screens are a bad habit!
In the mornings while M and I are running, when we are on our usual schedule, we regularly see two women in the neighborhood, walking a dog. There is something very satisfying about seeing these same women almost every day. Perhaps these days in particular, our fleeting exchange of Morning! and Have a good one! and other tidbits replaces the regularity of all the other relationships we would each have in our lives outside our homes: friends, work colleagues, chats with shop owners. We and the two women are each others’ regulars now. One day M and I were on an evening walk after the work day had wrapped and we saw one of the women alone, walking her dog, and she saw us and said ‘Morning! And then she realized what she’d said and we all laughed and for some reason it really tickled me. We had been burned into her memory as the people she sees in the morning — she revealed her cards, showed us a piece of evidence: she remembers us, we continue to exist in her mind, and we are the morning people. We were all wearing different clothes and we may even have been walking on a different street than where we’d usually be on our running path. I savored it. Our moments of human connection are few and far between these days!
I read an article in the New York Times today, Colleges Face Rising Revolt by Professors, about how universities have been making their plans for whether students would come back in the fall in person or not, and this article talked with and about faculty members who did not want to return to campus, who were quite reasonably worried about their health and their families’ health, and the dangers of putting themselves in contact with throngs of college students who — let’s be honest! — might not be consistently making the best and safest decisions for their health and the health of others during a public health crisis. I had been thinking of the universities as sort of administrative decision-making machines — will they or won’t they? — and thinking of the college students as the primarily impacted individuals in this scenario; I was also thinking about the administrative jobs that I imagine have become more fragile as the machines have slowed during this time. Somehow I had not thought as much about professors and faculty as people who would also be deciding whether they were comfortable or not with the idea of going back to work. My thinking had been weighted on the machine side of the equation: at what point will the machines start running again? The “reopening of the economy” in all its facets is not about thinking first of the health of the people who make the many machines of the economy keep pumping. People need some source of income to live in this world, and people need human connection, but people do not inherently need to be back at their varied jobs right now, in varied settings that offer varying degrees of danger or safety in relation to the pandemic.
I keep mentally coming back to the fact of how strange this time is, how the strangeness is compounded by the crapshoot of how young or old you happen to be and where you are in your life at this time. I was thinking back to a letter I wrote to you in early November, when I had recently moved out of a full-time position into freelance work, and I had said I have the feeling lately of having stepping out of a river that is still rushing by, carrying many if not most people and things I know. But the feeling I have is not a feeling of missing out — it’s a feeling of having removed myself from the crush, and I am now able to observe it from a quiet post where the water is still but pleasant. I suppose that means I am in something like a tide pool, or an adjacent dip in a boulder, or the land near a river where water can collect and things can grow, undisturbed by the rushing, moving water. It’s simply a different area of the land to be living on, and in. Who’s to say that the rushing river is better than the quiet pool? I am unsettled these days by the feeling that the river is still — that we are all either on the shore or in the unmoving water, waiting, though time continues on. I might previously have thought that the rushing river itself was time, but now I think it is not. I think the river is time bound up with something else, with energy and momentum and speed. Perhaps this seems obvious, but time itself is not inherently energy and momentum and speed, I see now. Time exists even if the river is still. We all have to create our own momentum these days, in the absence of any river into which we can jump and expect to be swept along toward some adventure ahead. It’s difficult to have to generate all one’s own momentum, to shift into a higher gear when you’re responsible for the cold start day after day. Some of us can better afford to bob in the still water for a period of time, and all of us need the momentum of the rushing river to some degree. If there is no rushing river, what is the stillness?
When I was thinking earlier in the week about what I’d write in my letter to you today, I thought I would have things to say about this particular Independence Day weekend at a time when America is looking and acting pretty low in many ways. Instead, that wasn’t where my mind was today! Perhaps next week I will have reflected further on the holiday. I hope you have a pleasant long weekend filled with food, family, and fun! Chicago-style hot dogs with homemade buns and potato salad are currently on tomorrow’s menu here, to be followed by strawberry shortcake biscuits later in the weekend. Enjoy your days and talk soon!
Your friend,
Eva
July 3, 2020
Dear Eva,
Hello, and happy almost-Fourth of July. This national holiday has a particularly different ring to it this year, as it feels like perhaps a healthy portion of the population is finally using the holiday for what it should be used for—as an opportunity to reflect on what kind of country we live in, and what kind of country we want to live in. This is a stark contrast to the garish celebration that so often marks this time in July—fireworks, flags, and a largely fictional view of our national history and culture. I am guessing my group of high school friends would remember my statement long ago: “I hate patriotism,” said in passing to some friends one Fourth of July when as a teenager. At the time, it drew a stirring rebuke and became an infamous quote that was repeated many times over the years to tease me. I sympathize with my teenage self; I can understand the sentiment that drew me to say it. I am happy to say that I have a more nuanced approach to the subject 25ish years later. It is not the patriotism that I hate; it is the mythology, the uncritical righteousness. We do have so much to be thankful for living in the United States of America, but we also have so much to reckon with, so much work yet to do to make this a society that we can actually be wholeheartedly proud of.
We are marking the start of this holiday weekend with a Hamilton watch party. Jonah hand-printed tickets for my parents and several members of my sister’s family, and he made a chart documenting everyone’s orders for homemade pizza, popcorn, and malts. The festivities begin at 5:30 tonight, and it is possible I am just as excited (maybe more?) than the kids. (Simon is excited for the party aspects, but he is not excited for Hamilton. He has taken to trolling us with “Hamilton is dumb!” all week and plans to watch both Frozen 1 and Frozen 2 on the iPad. Probably for the best!) For all of us, it is bound to be an extra special family movie night.
Your letter last week was, in fact, full of more differences between the two of us, and this time I have no instinct to try to find any commonalities. I am astounded by the fact that you would have saved the shoebox-turned-foosball table permanently! The funny part is, I actually felt like I kept it an usually long time, which is to say I didn’t throw it out the night we made it after the kids went to bed. I definitely had not even the slightest inkling to save it, though I should have captured a photo. It is interesting to try to explore what that is about, my tendency to toss and your tendency to save. It is engrained enough in me that I physically feel stress when there are large piles of clutter in our house. I should add that this does not mean there are never any piles! It just means they make me unhappy, and periodically they get unruly enough that I go on a binge of sorting and organizing and mostly tossing. Both kids are now old enough that when they can’t find something, they immediately start speculating that I probably threw it out. Simon is young enough that he still finds my irreverence for objects (including their artistic creations, though I do keep some) to be quite an injustice, while Jonah is unfazed.
Though I don’t share it, I appreciate your love of ephemera, and I can definitely see how things that seem mundane and throw away-able now could easily take on new significance with time and in new contexts. In that sense, I guess they are a kind of material from which to create new somethings. I think I could enjoy making a something out of a collection of ephemera if given the opportunity, but I am not committed enough to the idea to go through the effort to preserve and store in order to do it. I remember a few years ago my dad brought over two boxes full of worksheets, drawings, and other papers from my third grade year in school. At first, it was a treat to sift through them, but I found that I quickly started to resent it. Now that the materials are relics they seem somehow harder to throw away, but clearly I do not need or even want 100+ examples of my 8 year old handwriting and artwork. As I recall, I went through one box and found a few items to save, and threw the rest of that box away. The other box remains on a shelf in a mostly unused closet. Like you wrote in your letter, this is why it is good to get rid of things on the front end! I try to hold to this now that I am a parent, taking time to curate a reasonable number of things the kids make each year and put them into a scrapbook. This helps rid me of the guilt I used to feel (and sometimes still feel) if I am not taking time to preserve, as well as the stress I used to feel (and sometimes still feel) if I am just letting it all pile up somewhere. Whether I toss without thinking or preserve without thinking, the result is the same—they are not accessible or particularly valuable from the standpoint of memory preservation. Maybe that is the crux of all of this for me—unsorted boxes feel to me like long-ignored projects waiting for attention. Like clutter, they, too, cause me some physical stress if I think about them. (This is the beauty, I suppose, of putting them out of sight.)
Humans are weird! I also think that sometimes I try to ascribe some psychological significance to things when really, they may just be. There are plenty of things we humans find satisfying—like putting together a puzzle—that we do not feel compelled to psychoanalyze. Or maybe we should?
On that note, I will wrap this letter so I can go ready myself and the house for our guests. It hasn’t occurred to me until right now that this is the first time we have had more people than my parents in our house since the pandemic began! If only Marlowe spoke English, so I could warn him he needs to take an extra nap to make up for the sleep he will miss tonight. An exciting family movie night for even our dog!
Have a wonderful long weekend, my friend!
Cheers to Independence Day—here’s hoping for a more just and beautiful America someday in our future.
Yours,
Sarah