How to Pass Time
Days are all middle now. No part of the week feels different from any other, any instant could be any part of any day. In the 120+ days of quarantine, we’ve collapsed so many load-bearing distinctions — work/life, school/home, weekday/weekend, spring/summer. This pandemic has been insatiable. It gnawed at the spring, slowly at first, until it consumed the last portions of the school year, including its habits and rituals of transition and completion. It ate Q’s birthday back in late April, which had to be celebrated via a surprise Zoom party with her friends who each set their virtual backgrounds to a favorite pic of her and them. It ate the meat of M’s birthday but left the bones of adulthood wet in his lap. It ate Mother’s and Father’s Day. It ate my wife’s birthday and has its jaw unhinged for mine. It swallowed the summer whole — no camps, no travel, no real non-virtual summer plans — and it’s licking its lips at the fall.
We have been fortunate all in all. Suddenly online high school wasn’t ideal, but M&Q’s teachers handled the pivot reasonably well until everyone could stagger over the finish line. My wife and I still have jobs, at least for the moment, and work that we can negotiate remotely even as demands intensified. New York was hit extremely hard early on, and we did our part to help Flatten the Curve. And we haven't gotten sick. The city is beginning to come out of its crouch, and we feel more comfortable being out in the masks that Q made for us. But when we’re out, we still can’t manage to see the end of this time.
We’ve had so much time to pass despite everything, despite the nothing. Even as we don't feel like we're moving, milestones keep coming to us. M has continued with the college process, forced to think about himself in the near and far future when even next week seems nebulous. He was supposed to be on stage performing with his band throughout this summer, letting out his whole self so that audiences can become their bodies. I still want him to have that experience, as often as he can, to see for himself the kind of joy he can give others that few others can, but it’s hard to see when such performances could happen again and how performance spaces can survive. Q was supposed to be among her people at performing arts camp, away from the city and screens, but she is home and surrounded by both yelling at her. She has responded by trying to make her way through this time, literally, by sewing shirts, drawing, sending letters to friends, and doing daily collages in a book (or junk journaling, as it’s apparently called). Collage perfectly suits these times — assembling meaning from found bits, stories stitched together out of what chance gives.
Myself, I pass time by trying not to be angry, and only occasionally succeeding. We’ve spent so long doing as we were told, contracting our lives as we needed to, letting everything somehow stop but keep going. And during that time, our incompetent government did nothing, made no plan, cleared no path back out. This time has been stolen from us. The government stole, in all likelihood, the next two years from M&Q and so many other kids. Adulthood is coming for them, and now it will arrive hungry. They have stolen freedom from my parents and family embrace from my 99 year-old grandmother. They will have stolen thousands and thousands and thousands of lives, along with the ability and space to grieve properly for them. And they have congratulated themselves shamelessly for doing it all. Racial justice, health care, income equality — so many ragged and ripped seams have been revealed in our country over the past few months like never before, and those in power are incapable of meeting the moment in any way.
Rarely succeeding with the anger thing, I suppose. I find myself wanting to work with my hands. I dream of walking out into a field and digging, of losing myself in my body at work, burying “knowing that” (as the philosophers say) in a pile of “knowing how.” I spend the week of Father’s Day shopping for tools that I don’t need and don’t have the storage space for anyway. I think about when I was young and would go out to my father’s shop to look at the tools hung on the peg rack, all that embodied purpose, and wonder at their functions. Dad had a vise bolted to the end of the workbench, and I would secure all manner of things in its jaws while playing at fixing. I loved to take unworking toys or an old radio that didn’t respond to its switch, and teach myself how to open it well. The insides usually remained a puzzle, especially the radios and walkie talkies with their magical mechanisms, but every now and then I managed to reset a slipped belt or realign a gear and give a toy back its use.
The shop seemed old and powerful, a place of purpose and practical knowledge. The oldest shop resident had to be my dad’s anvil, impossibly heavy and seated on a hardwood stump. (Trying to move it made me understand why anvils featured so often as heavy things in Looney Toons.) Dad grew up on a farm, and the anvil was, I think, his grandfather’s, used to fit shoes for the Belgian draft horses. One end was pointed (the “horn”) and the other rectangular, and the top or “face” was flat and smooth. I never saw my father use it, but it meant and still means enough to him that it now sits in his city basement. For me the anvil was a thing from another time to hit other things against. Sitting at the workbench with it near made me feel like an interlocutor in the long conversation of work that I so wanted to join.
Even though I’ve dedicated my life to prying open ideas and to creating and fixing things that can’t be set in a vise, the shop draws me back now for obvious reasons. These inside days have left my body quiet, and my brain busies itself filling the silence with its noise. We will emerge from this endless moment at some point, ideally with a different appreciation of human dignity and awareness of suffering and with a will to work toward something better. Perhaps we will finally leave New York now that we assign so much risk to its crowds and subways and museums and restaurants, the very marrow of it, and anyway we can send in most of our work selves over the internet. Somewhere upstate Q could stake out a garden, make the ground into a living collage. M could finally turn the volume on his guitar amp up past 2. And we might be able to find a place with a shop and a wall of pegs where I could take down tools and hang up my mind for a while.
For now we hope and wait for this time to end, for some other time to begin. The anvil teaches the first lesson of fixing — to open or shape a hard thing, you need a harder thing. This time is hard; I hope that I am too.