When I walked on a sidewalk in another country
Somebody's hope
Floated by on the river's edge
Smelling like sewage and fish markets.
The river, not their hope.
It left me breathless (their hope, not the river).
It felt like that when I saw Neowise, that comet. My stomach twisted around itself, settled only by the hot cocoa and small paper bags of popcorn we brought with us to Berry Summit. Sixty-eight hundred years from now it will come by again.
My children swear like sailors, though if I am honest I have never actually met a sailor who swears. I sit down in front of my piano and try to learn music. I stand six feet apart from my neighbors at the farmer's Market on Saturdays. I shave my hair short. I do a three thousand piece puzzle my brother sent, like he is continuing the tradition of torturing his little sister. My dog ate some pieces of the puzzle. I post on Facebook about fake vacations. I can't remember how my mother sounded or her smell. I get a weekly swab for SARS-COV2. The skin on my hands is rough from so much hand-washing.
When I walked in another country, I flashed on the collective burden of humanity on this Earth, which made me shift my bag of souvenirs, suddenly awkward in my grasp. We stopped at a villager's home, where an elder weaved on her dirt floor. The sewage draining by path reminded me that civil engineers outclass doctors every time, when it comes to the health of communities. When I walked my daughters through the red light district in the still light, almost-midnight sky, it was not on purpose, we just ended up there. Women in windows, like so much merchandise.
A professor of history, a mother, a specialist in the rise of fascism, was gassed and shot by the feds in Portland. Rubber bullets bounce off skulls there as an experiment in what we will tolerate. I am indignant, then spend my day gardening and listening to my book on Audible.com.
When I walked in another country, I marveled at how the women gathered around my child who lost their kite in the Yangtze River. I had lost my child, in a city of some millions, and it just turned out to be they were in the middle of a circle of cooing mother-types. Later the Maoist driver untangled the kite string, silently. He was always silent except that time he guffawed at my child saying in perfect Mandarin, "who farted?"
If everyone wore a mask, we could venture out more safely. If we could venture out more safely, less people would die. If less people die, it would be less sad and frightening.
When I sit next to my husband of almost twenty-eight years, I understand why people insist on going to the intensive care unit even when it makes no physiological sense.
There is something reassuring about leaning against someone you have known for so long, who sees the beauty and funny in the same instant you do, and who can sit through the same piece of piano music countless times without batting an eyelash.
Though often this ends in snoring on the couch. I mean I look over like "did you hear that sublime thing I just did with that passage of Bach?" and he is open-mouthed sleeping. If you play Bach to the open mouth of a sleeping person, do the notes float down their windpipes and come out later as a musical eructation? Can you burp a fugue?
As I walk down the sidewalk in another country, I eat up the antiquities with my reluctantly American eyeballs. They taste like fresh fruit that might have ancestors in the Garden of Eden.
They smell like some ancient army pounding drums on a dusty road. They look like bones, all catacombed yet humming with stories of all the shitty empires of yore. They feel like music written in modes I never dreamed existed.
The antiquities, not my eyeballs.
Fresh bread and a Miyazaki flick. The dog leaning against you, all trust and fluffiness. The sudden realization you have to do more before it is too late. And by doing more I mean to say loving more.
A small bird whispered in my ear that of all the places it ever flew, straight into the heart of compassion was the absolute fucking bomb.
