On Things I Won't Forget

What I Already Miss

• Lazy Saturdays at coffee shops

• Dining in at restaurants

• Window shopping

• Hugs. Won’t it be wild when we can touch each other again?

• Dropping by… anything

• Concerts and live shows

• Dinner parties

• Strong federal leadership

What I Don’t Miss

• Traffic

• Long lines

• Indecision

• Arrogance

What I Won’t Miss

• Panic buying

• Hoarding

• Uncertainty

• Hysteria

• Misinformation

• Over-scheduling

• The worst of humanity

• Greed

• The jarring sensation of seeing a tightly packed group of people in pre-C19 photos, movies, and shows

What I Won’t Forget

• Always having a little extra on hand: toilet paper, home cooked meals, a kind word, patience

• How quickly people stepped up in the absence of leadership

• Medical professionals becoming soldiers in wartime

• Small kindnesses — a small wave from a neighbor, a socially distant smile in the grocery store aisle

• Washing hands for 20 seconds, paying extra attention to fingertips, nooks and crannies, and the backs of hands.

• The simple power of soap

• Cuddling with my dog isn’t just a luxury — it’s downright essential

• Gratitude. Today, it’s perfectly-cooked-can-see-every-grain rice; new orders from customers; hot water dispensers; bananas; Snoh Aalegra’s “I want you around”

• Lulls and downtime

• The joy of reading

• Humility

Inspired by MR: “What I won’t forget: That New York is New Yorkers and nothing else.”

We’re always in need of a little perspective. Pause to have a little cry.

“How are you doing?” “Maintaining” Running out of ways to respond to “How are you”? I’ve got you.

Lazy dinner ideas. Just because you’re doing a lot of home cooking doesn’t mean every meal has to be James Beard-worthy. Some of my go-tos: kimchi fried rice; tamago scrambled eggs; ANY KIND OF TOAST; cheese and crackers a la Lunchables; cacio e pepe pasta, tinned sardines with a little mayo and diced pickles; omelets

Just learned that Dalgona coffee is a thing.

You can color the NYTimes now.

Reminder that Netflix Party is a Chrome extension that lets you watch Netflix and chat with your friends.

“Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would have never begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal.” - C.S. Lewis, in a speech to Oxford students in 1939.

Nothing to see here.

Jenny Rosentrach’s Project, Pantry, Purpose series is wonderful.

Despite there being so many cancelled events, there’s still a lot to do. The world continues to be our oyster.

Don’t forget to complete the US Census. Everyone deserves to be counted.

On Grief

That discomfort you’re feeling is grief. David Kessler is the world’s foremost expert on grief and I found his thoughts on discomfort comforting: “Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain […] To calm yourself, you want to come into the present.” An easy way to do that, he suggests, is noticing 5 different things in your environment and focusing on their attributes. When asked what to say to someone who’s read all this and is still feeling overwhelmed with grief:

“One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, “I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse.” We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. “I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad.” Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims.

And this part resonated with me the most: “This is a temporary state. It helps to say it. This is survivable. We will survive.”

Pro tips on how to live in confined spaces by a NASA astronaut and a formerly imprisoned journalist.

The folks at “Death, Sex & Money” podcast put together a pandemic tool kit with resources to distract you, calm you, and galvanize you.

Monterey Bay Aquarium Live Cams. Watching sea otters frolic is always a good idea.

Some of these links are from Laura Olin’s excellent weekly newsletter. If you haven’t already, you MUST subscribe.

I always like signing off on my emails and letters. Lately they’ve been C19-related:

• Social distantly yours

• Yours from afar

• Waving to you from 6ft and beyond

• Best (but things could be better)

• Take care (no, seriously)

And speaking of valedictions, Louis Armstrong did it best.

After all these years, we finally find out where the name Triscuit comes from (PLOT TWIST: “Tri” does not mean 3"). Confirmed by Triscuit IRL.

This footage of NBC reporter Deion Broxton backing away from a herd of bison walking his direction made me laugh so hard, I spit up some coffee.

“Hi! What is the white cat’s name?”

I loved Manrepeller Leandra Medine’s reply to a reader’s comment: “One time I told my dad that I was bored at the onset of a two-week break from school and he said what I was feeling wasn’t boredom — it was the lull that occurs in order to make an adjustment. Last night, when I expressed my anxiety much the same way I did my boredom all those years ago, he told me that when you’re a kid, it’s a lull that makes way for an adjustment but that as an adult, it’s usually more intense. Sometimes so much so that it’s crippling. Which it has been! I took a lot of solace in this sentiment, starting to believe in [the] fact that maybe I’m not anxious — just adjusting?”

I have been doing a lot of retail therapy lately but maybe I should get one of these house robes before putting a moratorium on my AMEX. UPDATE: Everything in my size is sold out, so whew.

If you’re local in Atlanta and able to, volunteer as a driver to deliver meals to housebound individuals. One of my friends did it today and said it was incredibly easy. Staff members load up while you remain in your car and you just drop off, knock, and leave. She said the whole thing took about 2 hrs of her day.

A reminder that physical distance (and even time!) doesn’t diminish the bond you have with people in your life. IT MAKES ME CRY EVERY TIME.

“Just something to look at and leave.”

If you’ve made it this far, wow! Thank you. I’ll leave you with Japanese artist Yoshihiro Suda’s hyper-realistic sculptures of plants and flowers in the tradition of Japanese woodcarving and National Geographic photographer Eliza Scidmore’s photos of everyday life in Japan from over 100 years ago.

This is a temporary state. This is survivable. We will survive.

On the End of the World

On Opposites

The Opposites Game for Patricia Maisch

By Brendan Constantine

This day my students and I play the Opposites Game
with a line from Emily Dickinson. My life had stood
a loaded gun, it goes and I write it on the board,
pausing so they can call out the antonyms —

My Your
Life Death
Had stood? Will sit
A Many
Loaded Empty
Gun?

Gun.

For a moment, very much like the one between
lightning and its sound, the children just stare at me,
and then it comes, a flurry, a hail storm of answers —

Flower, says one. No, Book, says another. That’s stupid,
cries a third, the opposite of a gun is a pillow. Or maybe
a hug, but not a book, no way is it a book. With this,
the others gather their thoughts

and suddenly it’s a shouting match. No one can agree,
for every student there’s a final answer. It’s a song,
a prayer, I mean a promise, like a wedding ring, and
later a baby. Or what’s that person who delivers babies?

A midwife? Yes a midwife. No that’s wrong. You’re so
wrong you’ll never be right again. It’s a whisper, a star,
it’s saying I love you into your hand and then touching
someone’s ear. Are you crazy? Are you the president

of Stupid-land? You should be, When’s the election?
It’s a teddy bear, a sword, a perfect, perfect peach.
Go back to the first one, it’s a flower, a white rose.
When the bell rings, I reach for an eraser but a girl

snatches it from my hand. Nothing’s decided, she says,
We’re not done here. I leave all the answers
on the board. The next day some of them have
stopped talking to each other, they’ve taken sides.

There’s a Flower club. And a Kitten club. And two boys
calling themselves The Snowballs. The rest have stuck
with the original game, which was to try to write
something like poetry.

It’s a diamond, it’s a dance,
the opposite of a gun is a museum in France.
It’s the moon, it’s a mirror,
it’s the sound of a bell and the hearer.

The arguing starts again, more shouting, and finally
a new club. For the first time I dare to push them.
Maybe all of you are right, I say.

Well, maybe. Maybe it’s everything we said. Maybe it’s
everything we didn’t say. It’s words and the spaces for words.
They’re looking at each other now. It’s everything in this room
and outside this room and down the street and in the sky.

It’s everyone on campus and at the mall, and all the people
waiting at the hospital. And the post office. And, yeah,
it’s a flower, too. All the flowers. The whole garden.
The opposite of a gun is wherever you point it.

Don’t write that on the board, they say. Just say poem.
Your death will sit through many empty poems.