Who's Zoomin' Who?

Visiting Dan in 2014

I feel stunned most of the time. Loved ones on the front lines. Me here, sometimes feeling I'm barely earning my right to breathe our virus tinged air.

I am, without a doubt, an introvert. I was never so exhausted as when I was teaching English. I was in my 30s then, and the constant talking, explaining, teaching destroyed every ounce of energy every single day. This is my way of saying that, in some ways, my life is unchanged, that I'm fine with lock-down. I could tell you too, that my life has been turned upside down. Both are true.

I have made a schedule for my self, a routine, a checklist. It's a lifeboat. An anchor.

Here's a photo of my old neighborhood in California with a cloud shaped like an exclamation point

I read the news, do a t'ai chi chih practice, yoga (unless it's a day off to rest my wrists.) I write, read, practice drawing with the lessons in "Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain." There are bookbinding projects. I do Duolingo French lessons. Yesterday I found the juggling balls and added juggling. I could juggle well enough in the summer of 1975 that I did it day after day in a commedia dell'arte. 

I sit in my big chair by the window in my bedroom and let memories roll by like clouds.
Memories of hospital rooms, being masked and gowned, visiting Dan whose white count and platelet numbers were all wrong time after time in the months before he died.
Visiting my mother from the hallway when I was 18, and she was in the hospital recovering/not recovering from surgery with pneumonia and a staph infection.
I remember my own bleary hospital time, her at my bedside every day during a long Minnesota January. I remember the sirens the day the poet John Berryman jumped off the Washington Avenue Bridge. Something's going on out there she said, standing by the window in her high heels, me flat on my back. lashed to the bed, in traction.
The thing is, everything is worse than all that now.

But my god, there are ridiculously funny things on the internet. I was laughing almost unable to stop at midnight last night. There's amazing writing and art. I'm talking to friends almost every day. Zooming them. Remember that Aretha Franklin song from the 80's? Who's Zoomin' Who? I just might zoom everyone I know.