Word reached me yesterday that Covid-19 has broken out at the assisted living facility where I was staying up until a month ago, and they have told me I am not to return under any circumstances, not even to retrieve my belongings.
Earlier, on March 1st, I'd given notice on my rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco, so that is no longer an option for me either.
The brutal truth is I am now a man without a home. I'm a Corona-V refugee. Of course, I am also very lucky because I have family willing to take me in for now, but neither they nor I ever intended for me to be the guest who comes but never leaves.
My independence has been stolen by a virus and I have nowhere to escape that reality, not even in my imagination.
***
My six-year-old granddaughter created a new holiday yesterday. It is known as "Star Day." She said the idea "just came into my mind" and so soon her mother was baking star-shaped cookies and planning festivities. We were all to go out in the front yard after dark, eat the cookies, and look at the sky. The kids would be doing this under blankets.
So we did that very thing, and we all saw the sliver of the moon in the Western sky, as well as Venus, a few bright stars and a satellite crawling across the darkness on its loop around the earth.
The others could make out some of the constellations. I saw an airplane far overhead, silent as it progressed on its route.
Inside, my granddaughter pointed out that on the coaster under my water glass was the drawing of a star. It was of a starfish, just like the ones I used to collect on Florida's white beaches decades ago.
***
I really miss watching sports. One of the benefits of retirement was going to be an unlimited ability to watch baseball, football, basketball, soccer, hockey and other competitions on TV. I would be trading commentary with my friends and managing my fantasy sports teams.
The joy of fantasy sports for someone like me is two-fold. One, the pure statistical poetry of the experience. Sports generate stats; stats generate stories. This is true in many realms other than sports, of course (economics, health and politics are examples) so the journalist in me appreciates that aspect. But fantasy sports is also a way to immerse yourself in a broader swath of the athletic spectacle beyond rooting for your own favorite team.
Every player is potentially on your fantasy team, even if in reality he plays for your actual favorite team's rival. This equalizes things and deepens your appreciation of talent free from passion.
***
The problem with reality is that it has limits. There are parameters that confine the contours of experience.
Whereas in fantasy, in dreams, in your imagination there are no limits. You can get lost in possibilities that are as vast as the universe. This was running through my mind as I was squinting at the sky on Star Night, trying to make out the shapes of distant worlds.
My father, who loved to brag about his only son, used to tell people I had remarkable eyesight. I could see things other people couldn't see, he claimed, and he ascribed this supposed skill to my favorite food -- carrots.
I guess I was similar to a rabbit in that way and, given how many times I reproduced children (six) perhaps in other ways as well. Though I've never been able to hop.
But my loving father was indulging in fantastic thinking about my eyesight. He often did this in other ways, exaggerating my athletic skills or my academic achievements.
He seemed to overlook the fact that I was mainly a lonely, sickly boy who identified more with Robert Louis Stevenson than Babe Ruth.
I lost my Dad when he was 82. I was 52. By that point I'd long since grown accepting of his admiring comments and I'd also accepted that he would never really know me as I thought myself to be. But I also loved him just the way he was and it was very difficult to kiss him goodbye. It turns out that it's hard to lose someone who considered you their hero.
***
So much is on my mind this night that I can't sleep. What is to become of me? Where will I go? Will I ever get my personal journals back? Will this unfinished memoir remain suspended in time, never to find an audience?
Will all of this story-telling even have mattered?
Given my profession and my nature, I soak myself in the news like other people soak themselves in a bath. Other people's soaks are healthier than mine. But if I were to write a headline for the current Corona-V news cycle, it would be "Let Them Eat Bleach."
Or mumble to my television, "Its okay, sir, you can go back to watching Fox & Friends now."
My daughter and grandson were watching a PBS documentary late last night on the debate over whether we are descended from a race that visited this planet in ancient times. This is not a crackpot theory; virtually every ancient human culture preserved stories and depictions suggesting that aliens seeded life here during their visits from outer space.
Even the Old Testament gets into the act.
In the 1960s, there was a revival of sorts on this celestial question ignited by the Russian author Immanuel Velikovsky and his 1950 book "Worlds in Collision." His theories have largely been discounted by scholars, but of course conventional thinking in the academy is one of its persistent faults.
I'm in no position to endorse Velikovsky's thinking but I think I'll order his book for my grandson anyway.
Somewhere among my formerly vast collection of books was an tattered copy of "Worlds in Collision." But all of those books (save for a box or so) have been recycled out among the community of people who still love to read.
That's something I miss -- reading. It was always going to be a big part of my retirement and I had more than a several books lined up for that purpose. But I can read only with great difficulty now. until my "non-essential" surgeries get rescheduled.
One thing about aging that young people rarely perceive is that there is an awareness that ultimately comes to dominate your consciousness in your later years. You can feel it in your joints, in your muscles (should any be left) and way down in your bones
And that awareness is that you can never go back.
-30-
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