Happy Enough

Back in 2016, as part of whirlwind world tour, my dear friend Lisa and I visited the Taj Mahal.  We’d left Kathmandu the day before, and we’d soon be headed for the Serengeti.  In Agra, home to the Taj Mahal, the air was thick, hot and heavily polluted, but for our short exposure it offered no more threat than a scratchy throat.


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Now, four years later, I’ve just spent SO many hours on a 1000 piece Taj Mahal puzzle, spread out across one end of our dining room table.  It’s almost finished.  It’s been a diversion and an exercise in focusing, at this time when the very air we breathe here at home can be dangerous.

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No plane rides now, around the world or otherwise.  So many changes, big and small:  We don't ride the bus now, though it was our go-to mode of getting around the city.  No comfortable meals inside restaurants.  Seattle restaurants are following the state guidelines and offering only outdoor dining.  Consider what this means in a city where this month’s temperatures are predominantly in the low 40’s.  Even with the restaurant’s outdoor heaters pumping away, and Chuck and I huddled in our coats, hats and gloves, it’s COLD!  We stay at home as much as possible, venturing out for groceries and for long, long walks.  Really long walks.  I promise I’m not whining:  We know we’re incredibly lucky:  We have adequate housing, and we have enough food.  So far, we've managed to stay healthy.  We do have generalized anxiety about the craziness of current politics in our country, and we worry about so many whose jobs and very lives have been put in jeopardy, but personally we are okay.  We have nothing important to complain about.  Maybe we’re not delighted with the circumstances of our own lives, but we can be…happy enough.


At the beginning of this crisis, I was shell-shocked.  Every time we went outside, the sight of everyone in masks was surreal, as if we had been dropped into some dark sci-fi movie.  Now, months later, we’ve adapted, as people inevitably do.  Now I only notice when I see someone in a crowd without a mask.


Masks are a big deal.  I think we must have more than 30 of them, in a variety of styles.  Early in the days of the pandemic, I wildly ordered masks through the Internet.  It was an expensive exercise.  Did we need filters, did we need nose wires, what fabrics worked the best?  My current conclusion is that they are all hot and annoying, but of course we wear them.  The leaving-the-house checklist has been modified:  wallet, glasses, keys, phone and now—mask.

​Even the shoes we choose—for the past few months it's been running shoes and slippers, with an occasional foray into rain boots.  All the fancy shoes (and all the fancy clothes, for that matter) rest comfortably in the closet.  There’s no reason to dress up, no place to go.  And though there really isn’t a great need to order anything other than food, online ordering is both an outlet and an addiction.  It’s pretty exciting when those boxes get dropped on our doorstep…
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Zoom has become an essential part of our lives.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  It works well for yoga class, when everyone is moving slowly, but not so well for my attempt at line dancing class—too easy to lose the pattern as you sway away from the computer screen.  The Zoom classes offered by the University of Washington have helped to save our sanity.  We just finished a six hour course on immunology.  (Viruses are wily and fascinating, it turns out.) On-screen visits with friends and family have helped too, but of course they’re a poor substitute for the presence of living, breathing humans offering up hugs. 



Even my relationship with my dog is affected.  Rusty has always been attached to me, but I’ve been around the house so much lately that I’m pretty sure he’s going to have some separation anxiety once we’re all released from house arrest, and I go out into the world without him.
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And then there’s sleep. I sleep a little bit longer every day.  Of course the days are getting darker, and we all slow down naturally during the dark months, but it’s more than that.  There is no reason to spring out of bed.  This day will likely be very much like the last.  

So, this would be a perfect time to write, wouldn’t you think?  Wouldn’t you think that these long unstructured periods of time at home would spawn vast quantities of new material?  It doesn’t seem to work that way for me, and I think for many other writers.  The creative process hasn’t been nourished by this interlude, this time of waiting, hoping for the vaccine to come and save us.  I spend too much time cradling a coffee cup and staring into space. 

​ I’ll keep trying.