Sunday, April 07, 2024

Interruptions

(The first half of this essay is from 2021; the second half is from 2020.)

(Illustration:  Chaos Theory, or a butterfly -- wiki commons)

Have you ever had the feeling your life has been placed into a holding pattern, like you are vectoring round and round over a distant city, waiting for a chance to land?

That is what the pandemic has felt like for me and (I bet) millions of other people. It all depends on your circumstances, of course. For those with steady jobs, stable places to live, and good health the Covid period perhaps has been a minor deviation in the course of life.

For the rest of us, all assumptions were off and a new path had to be found. Of those in this category I recognize that I am one of the lucky ones. As my possessions were reduced to a couple boxes of files and bags of clothes, and my apartments vacated, I started feeling hopeless but I had family that (literally) rescued me from myself.

Over a year later, my files and I remain separated (see below), so I've been writing this faux memoir strictly from memory, corrected from time to time by some old document or photo that turns up courtesy of readers, friends, or Google.

In the process, this daily ritual of sorting through the news has become sort of like a comfort blanket for me. No one asks me to do it and I'm not quite sure how it got started, but rifling through 20-25 news sources each morning is definitely a habit I don’t want to break.

Maybe I'm like a character in Charlie Chaplain's great 1936 film, "Modern Times," where the workers can't help performing every task away from the assembly line with the same repetitive motions at home that they use at work.

Having been paid to gather and interpret the news for years, I guess I now feel responsible for telling people what is going on, what matters, regardless of employment status. Maybe you can take the boy out of journalism but you can't take the journalism out of the boy. 

***

(And now from 2020.)

"Life Happens to You"

Today is when my boxes of papers and files are to be moved from the assisted living facility in Millbrae to a storage locker closer by. One of my sons is driving down there from the city to claim the stuff.

Work on my memoir has been effectively stalled since March 20 when I left that facility, my journals strewn on the floor next to the chair where I wrote, watched the news, ate meals, and admired the view, which stretched northward.

My whole life story then ringed that one chair. Now I sit in a different chair.

It's confusing to think back to what I imagined being retired and writing that book would be like, because all assumptions basically ended with the arrival of the pandemic. But I know the prospect held a dream-like appeal for me in the years I was wrapping up my career.

One of life's illusions that some of us hold onto longer than others is that we control our own destiny; that we make life happen, when in reality, the opposite is true. Life happens to us.

We are in control of so little it would be comical if the cost weren't so high. One of life's impossible lessons for those of us with a certain kind of nature is that while we can control many little things in this world, we really don't control anything significant.

And we have to know the difference.

It is one thing for me to write about that lesson but quite another to have learned it for myself. When it comes to my report card on that subject it's at best a D-.

My daughter was telling her kids recently 'You don't learn things the first time you hear them. You have to hear them over and over."

She could have been talking about me.

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