100 Words: Masked and anonymous

Masked and anonymous in the Trader Joe’s parking lot, moved nearly to tears by the speech of the worker who advises us on how to behave once admitted: “All of us have someone we love at home, someone we want to protect.” It’s a ritual akin to baptism to wait, to be handed to a freshly sanitized cart, to be admitted into the confines of the deliberately underpopulated store in which sweet-and-sour 80s pop tunes reverberate as we maneuver our carts up and down the aisles, picking up our frozen pizzas and coffee and pasta. Don’t you forget about me.

100 Words: Drawing

Drawing is a new form of meditation, something the three of us can do together, a way of changing the scale of our apartment as I lavish attention on household objects, the flora and fauna of our diminished world. I never believed I could draw but every decade or so I give it a try: this morning’s orchid isn’t art but a memory, a watercolor monument to a moment snatched away from the timelessness of quarantine. Sun today after a spasm of snow finds me drowsing by the fire like a Parisian decadent: a journey around my room, au rebours

100 Words: I’d forgotten the hammock

I’d forgotten the hammock in our living room—put it up and float with windows on three sides and the gentle insistent march of the Große Fuge from the fourth, very nearly at peace, or rather with the anxiety guided along the splintering lines of melody, the procession from a young man’s vigor to an old man’s noble wrath in the face of deafness, indifference, and betrayal. I am lifted, succored, removed, and for once alone while wife and daughter go to Target. Yesterday we sketched each other, reducing ourselves: I’m a beard, a T-shirt, a pair of glasses without eyes. 

100 Words: Short of words

Short of words, ninety-seven to go. Up from the well of our building’s back yard a yet-bare tree spines to the sky; out on the street the masked citizens parade in disquieting numbers of ones and twos, delayed carnival. I’ve gotten too used to the emptiness. Find my way to the beach to sit in the lifeguard’s empty chair watching gulls squabble, earbuds in, working through Beethoven’s changes to his Große Fuge, that unaccountable music. Following string quartets with a piano played four-handed, twenty fingers finding form for outlines of the void. How late things become: farewell to the flesh.

100 Words: A preponderance of little enigmas

A preponderance of little enigmas, masked faces on the street, couples arm in arm, joggers, a bicyclist trailed by children, teddy bears in the windows peeking out, ready to be seen. Each step back I take into a room of my apartment brings you the viewer further, casts me farther out. Loneliness without solitude predominates. Robins puff their chests and hop from lawn to lawn: E.D.: I dreaded that first Robin, so, / But He is mastered, now, / I’m some accustomed to Him grown, / He hurts a little, though - The spring is too big to be held back. Go forth.

100 Words: A cat’s understanding

A cat’s understanding of social distancing is entirely innate: our cat approaches and disposes of the people with whom he shares a space in lordly fashion, keeping his distance until he intuits by whisker’s touch that it’s time to wrap his tail around your leg or sprawl on the dining room table in reach of the arms of the sun. We are all indoor cats now. Like our cat I can sit by a window for hours watching the world go by, except it has nowhere to go; I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as I would anyone else.

100 Words: Empty streets

Empty streets streak toward the horizon where the sun hovers like any ordinary star, patiently waiting us out. I tilted at windmills all day long: the giants were named Getting Up, Fixing Meals, Yelling and Staring, Sitting and Fidgeting. Work is a memory, a stopgap, an unsuccessful sneeze. Came home with Chipotle and my kid threw a fit because I wouldn’t let her handle the container the food comes in like usual because there is no more usual. “It is a good thing war is so terrible,” a general supposedly said, “or else we should grow too fond of it.” 

100 Words: First night of Passover

First night of Passover preceded by a day of mist climbing out of the lake, zombie leftovers from yesterday’s unseasonable heat. Why is this night unlike all other nights? Chicken soup and matzoh balls and our friends toasting l’chaim on Zoom, computer parked at one end of the table keeping the spot warm for Elijah, who didn’t show. I push the words and they push me. There’s a space between the days that cracks wider and wider, a space in the weather, Plato’s chora, space invader, creeping up on us as in Beethoven’s late quartets, as passion takes form, away.

100 Words: Uncanny day

Uncanny day of summer-like sunshine—if the uncanny, the unhomelike, which Freud taught us to be inseparable from its opposite, can be said to still exist on a planet being systematically stripped of its hospitality. Followed, as the night follows the day, by an evening of severe storms, “golf-ball-sized hailstones” as the meteorologists like to say, a-babbling like all of us of green fields. Cops chased my daughter and me from our old picnic ground by the lake today, so we sat on our building’s front lawn instead and watched the hours drift gently by. Life goes on past all expecting.

100 Words: By night the lights inside

By night the lights inside shine brighter than those without: every room blazes with a mirror whose inhabitants pace like Rilke’s panther, the more solitary for the other people trapped with them. Dann geht ein Bild hinein, an image penetrates the muscles and nerves, takes flight like a tunnel through the body, hollowed out by time, und hört im Herzen auf zu sein, and halts being in the heart. False mirror of my own eyes confronts me at every turn until my fingers find the lightswitch and the opposite buildings glow again, ranging yellow windows over the street like bars. 

100 Words: Night again

Night again, a few scotches under my belt, ranging from one end of the apartment to the other: at the north end something close to privacy, the small comforts of the den and TV; the south end gives out to windows on three sides, the familiar view of street and corner and the facing buildings made only slightly strange by the hovering dark and the traffic light’s traffickless wink from red to green and back again. Books stand mutely on their shelves and various devices charge against the day to come. We live in expectation: one more day, no more.

100 Words: We wander the ghostly streets

We wander the ghostly streets of our emptied town, town not really empty or ghostly but full of hiding bodies, each with its possessing spirit, its pair of eyes, watching behind curtains but not watching us, watching the screens, the phones, the tablets, the TVs, the computers, waving to relatives, undressing for lovers, delivering whatever comfort or company the face and voice can provide without touch, without even the touch of the vocal cords resonating in shared air, colliding with the skin, the tympanum, reverberating maybe with skin, a hand touching an arm, a shoulder, a cheek, lips, the teeth.

100 Words: One morning Gregor Samsa

One morning Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams to discover that time as he had understood it had disappeared. He hid in his bed as long as he could, hiding from the inevitable confrontation with his family, whose well-being and ontology derived entirely from the iron regularity of Gregor’s habits: the dailiness of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the commute to and from the office, the cross of days upon which his body had been nailed. The sun was stuck in the branches of the tree outside his window; Gregor coughed and closed his eyes against its senseless taps and ticks.

100 Words: The terror outside

The terror outside and the terror within like mirrors facing each other in a hallway, through which fragmentary bodies, all mouths and hair and eyes, pass one another with fearful glances. But the sky is pure as the bricks. I pick up books, put them down again, phone holstered in my pocket like I’m the new sheriff of a ghost town called Anxiety—a town in which all the world’s population has been contained, peeping from rooftops and windows and from behind swinging saloon doors. You feel their eyes but they stay out of sight, as robins hunt implacably for worms.

100 Words: Lift my head

Lift my head to find a blue-sky afternoon and sunlight picking out the shriveled red leaves on trees just about ready to bud. April. Life in confinement has these momentary breaks, gusts of air and light in which to walk or run, with the brimming platter of Lake Michigan offering a sense of wholly convincing, wholly illusory freedom. All day from behind closed doors the muted treble of mediated voices. My daughter pounds out tunes from Hamilton; I steer in circles like water around a drain, every day. The city mantled in fog, mirage of who we used to be.

100 Words: Fighting a losing battle

Fighting a losing battle against domestic entropy—we wash dishes and make beds, while clothes and shoes and papers and other detritus accumulate in every corner, studiously ignored. Zooming with students is a bit of a balm—seeing other faces, offering and receiving the simple comfort of contact, though we no longer breathe the same air. A long walk yesterday, riding the jagged peaks of Beethoven’s “Serioso,” String Quartet #11, working out a rage. Sky, lake, and skyline in leveling shades of gray-blue, like being trapped in a Rothko. Gray skies again today but also the cheerful filament of a robin’s song.

100 Words: A variation on Hemingway

A variation on Hemingway: in the spring the world was still there, but we did not go to it any more. Sun plays peekaboo as I stand in the Trader Joe’s parking lot waiting my turn to go inside and do the week’s shopping. Strangely mellow and cheerful inside with so few shoppers, each steering their cart like boats in a harbor avoiding any chance of collision. Chatted with a friend six feet away, knee-deep in the new normal. The world is too little with us; neither getting nor spending we lay waste our powers. Everyone buys daffodils, everyone waits.

100 Words: Lingering in pajamas

Lingering in pajamas. Rain overnight, then this morning the sun made a break for it but the clouds roped it in and we are sunk again in the universal gray. Frenetic Zoom meeting with the extended family; my 99-year-old grandfather just a pair of eyes bobbing at the bottom of the screen while assorted aunts and cousins shriek and wave. Faces, faces. On a card table in the living room a jigsaw puzzle of assorted cats slowly assumes its shape: the York chocolate, the calico, and Pixie Bob, a cat named after a haircut. Outside is a mirage we ignore.

100 Words: Boxing in the basement

Boxing in the basement keeps me as sane as I’m able to be: working the heavy bag with the bike racks and the asbestos. Rain overnight tapped its fingers on the windowpanes. Daffodils trumpet mutely from their vase. Cobbled together a strange shabbat yesterday evening with a livecast from a local progressive synagogue (guitars, mandolins, lesbians, babies) followed by pizza and Emma. (2020) on our TV, misplaced period and all. We handed out medals to each other for our weeks of endurance: my daughter was Best New Bedtime Negotiator, my wife was Beacon of Sanity, and I? Full of worms.

100 Words: Chicago's mayor

Chicago’s mayor shut down the lakefront and I wonder if Evanston will follow, intensifying the sense of confinement: walking there each day has been a solace, earbuds in, working my way through Beethoven’s string quartets one by one: today if given the chance I’ll listen to Quartet in E flat major, Opus 74, “Of the harps.” My wife works the harp of intimate ties on phone and Facetime; our daughter sings Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” encountered as danse macabre on her Nintendo Switch. Fog today. Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true.