And We're Back

Los Angeles, California

It rolls around every year and I get a rush of excitement. It is the start of MLB baseball season, a blessedly l-o-n-g season that keeps baseball fans like me from wondering what is on TV most nights of the week for over six months. Baseball is one of the things that add balance and ballast to my life.

Is balance/ballast important? Well, where are we now? Post-Covid? For the time being anyway, I am in that place where I can go anywhere and everywhere without a mask. I am fully vaccinated and carrying immunity from my recent bout. But the pandemic and my own experience with Covid gave me a lot of food for thought, especially on top of current events which has given many of us the sense that life as we have known it is circling the drain. So we turn to the tools we need for hope, stability, and distraction. And one of my tools is meditation.

I started meditating during the lockdown, encouraged by Cathy, my friend and Chinese medicine guru. It was weeks before I noticed a barely perceptible shift in consciousness. When you start a program of fitness, you feel some effects immediately, even if that is only in the form of sore muscles. But meditation is so subtle that I am certain that is why people give up on it. The process of meditation is not about keeping your mind in a neutral space. But the bringing back of your mind from the thoughts that have entered that space. While not feeding those thoughts, you are still marking them as you leave them to return to the breath. And that is the practice. Like workouts, dance nights, and, for me, attending Mass, there will be times when you think you have nailed it. As can happen in workouts, it has been easy; or stellar like those special salsa nights when everything comes together with the music and the movement; or especially impactful as when the pastor's homily has provided an epiphany. Or, if you're really lucky, all three. But, as with all of the things listed above, it isn't about nailing it. It's about practicing it.

If I threw myself only into the practice of meditation, I would miss the balance. My belief is that you need to approach life through some assortment of conduits. I was fortunate to have gone through the process of therapy with a skilled therapist. What I internalized through that time provided me with a mental manual which helps me understand my fellow humans and their actions, as well as my own. In addition to that, I find a journaling practice is valuable. Prayer is invaluable. I find the quote by William Temple: When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don't, they don't inspirational. Temple was the Archbishop of Canterbury during WWII, but of course the practice of prayer crosses all faiths and I am a strong believer in ecumenicalism. But, for me, when I attend Mass, the homily's digestion of a scripture passage to present contemporary significance, can provide a lightbulb-over-my-head experience. And I find the practice of repetition and recitation in Mass very meditative. It supports my connection to God as well as a softening of my attitudes towards humanity. It doesn't always work as after all, scripture is a collection of texts representing the varying values and viewpoints of different communities over centuries. But that makes it all the more valuable when it does. When I see the small, independent films I love, or read a novel which is on-point, I am given further insight into human life and its universal issues. Spending time with my friends and hearing their stories enriches that understanding. These are tools in my toolbox. In my life all of these things are of more or less equal importance, and when I begin to tip too much towards one of them, (Danger, Will Robinson!) I right myself back into the center, lest I see the world too much through one scrim only. Or, I attempt to right myself. Balance is also a practice.

So what does this all have to do with baseball? Well, when you watch sports you often hear the phrase And we're back, after commercial breaks. For me, that phrase resonates in all of the ways I try to keep myself straight. My mind strays then returns during meditation. And we're back. I return to working out after my bout of Covid. And we're back. I attend Mass after the long hit-and-miss during the pandemic. And we're back. Back to journaling, back to salsa dancing, back to the importance of balance in my life. That's the practice. Always.

Haunted by Waters

Los Angeles, California

For years, actually for decades, I never thought of myself as a writer. Being a writer was unlike being a runner or a knitter or a reader. I didn't think it was something you could simply declare that you were because you engaged in the activity. I thought you couldn't say you were a writer if it was a pastime. It had to be a profession. But when I started dancing salsa and began to meet people in that community, it was easier to say that I was a writer than to say I was a small business owner of outdoor leisure products. It was simple. And it felt good  to present myself in that way, for the first time.

I still am not a writer by profession. I have only submitted two pieces of writing for publication in my lifetime and both were published. Still, I cannot say that I am a professional writer. But I do now think of myself as a writer because I write.

I also study writing in the form of reading. I have noted before that you can learn more from bad writing (not to put too fine a point on it, but Fifty Shades of Crap) than from good. Really good writing can send you into a spiral of despair. I can never write like that so what is the point? But then you don't write to be the best. You write because you have something to say. Something to record. Something to explore.

I was recently watching Robert Redford's film of Norman Maclean's short memoir, A River Runs Through It. I saw the movie when it first was released and read the book afterwards. It's a stunning prose description of life and loss told through the voice of an über-literate fly-fisherman. Writing like that is transcendent.

When I first encountered Wallace Stegner's writing, it was in the novelized memoir Crossing to Safety. Books like these can inspire you to write and to write better. They have the ability to put you into a different time and place, transporting you to the world the writer is representing. And this magic is accomplished by each choice of word, each construct of sentence, built on top of each other to the whole.

Last, but not least, is E.L. Doctorow. A writer friend once stated that Doctorow was the only writer who made her envious. His later work is his lesser, which seems to occur with a lot of literary lions. But his Ragtime is stellar. The best writing may make you envious because it speaks to you in the way you wish to speak. The connection we have to good art is visceral. And for me, good art is at its greatest in fine literature. 

I could never, in any stretch of my imagination or a drug-induced hallucination, hope to write in a way that compares to these literary geniuses. But, as I was watching the last scene, and hearing the last line, of A River Runs Through It, I was struck again by the impact of it. I am haunted by waters. We are all haunted by the people and by the events in our lives. I walked away with that line and thought about it throughout my day. I am haunted by waters.

I realize I have told this story here before, but Sandra once told me about a man who arrived at The Bora Bora Bar (where I first met Sandra) at the old Kona Village Resort holding a funeral urn. He set it on the barstool alongside him and ordered two martinis. His wife's ashes were to be dispersed in the bay the following morning. I thought it was a really lovely gesture, to bring her back to a place they had shared together, putting that poignant closure on what I assumed to be happy memories.

Sandra is buried up in the foothills of the Sierras, but everyone else closest to me has gone out to sea. Whenever I am at near the Pacific Ocean, I think of them. That ocean is important to me on so many levels, after growing up in Los Angeles and spending so much time in Hawaii with people I loved. I am someone who turns to water whenever I am despairing. At a particularly hard time in my life, I could hardly get out of water. I took baths and long showers. I sat in the spa and swam laps in my pool. I escaped to Kona where I found some solace and began to spend more time in Carmel. And as I reflect on the memory of that time, as well as the memory of those I have lost, I realize that I too am haunted by waters. But I am luckily also buoyed by writing and, at this time, by Maclean's writing of that evocative and incredibly perfect line: I am haunted by waters.

And Then...

Los Angeles, California

Joel and I did return to salsa. The Covid count in LA County had dropped to low, and we were dancing once again, after so many starts and stops throughout our pandemic time. We danced on Valentine's Day, then celebrated the following night, sharing a bottle of Veuve Cliquot Brut Rose. I woke up the next day with familiar sinus allergy symptoms, a bit early for seasonal allergies but, with all the rain we have had in California, the whole allergy ecosystem has gone sideways. We attended a play that evening, stopping for a drink at a kiosk before entering the theater. Champagne? They didn't have it. Scotch? No. I don't suppose you have tequila. The bartender shook his head. I guess I'll have a bourbon. I don't drink bourbon, and this reminded me of why. Joel and I sat next to each other, holding hands, not wearing masks.

The following morning my sinus issues were worse and a lightbulb went off over my head. I used a home test to test for Covid. Negative. I took my temperature. Normal. I took Sudafed and did my usual round of home upkeep that day. But I wasn't feeling great. The test I took the following morning indicated I was positive for Covid. And that was Day Zero. By evening I had developed the worst broken-glass sore throat I have ever experienced in my life. Way worse than the mononucleosis-generated one that I had the first week of school in my senior year of high school, which had previously held the record. I could barely even get water down.

The sore throat lasted for almost three days. Accompanying it was an onslaught of congestion, mostly in my chest. I had already canceled a birthday lunch with Holly and a dinner invitation at Todd and Christopher's. I canceled Ana coming to clean for me. I slept at least ten hours each night and mostly ate soup from cans or homemade soup from my freezer. I was so grateful that the agony of the sore throat had passed, that I didn't really mind the mind-numbing fatigue and continuing congestion. About a week later, I felt I turned a corner and felt elated at feeling some better and, I thought, certainly on the road to recovery. And I stayed at that point on the road to recovery for another two and a-half-weeks. I canceled plans to meet Lynnette in Phoenix, for the triumphant resumption of our MLB Spring Training Games trips. I didn't even feel up to packing for that trip, much less navigating the flight to even get there. A friend who had had Covid around the holidays texted that her recovery had not been linear, and she was so right: One day better, the next even worse than the day before that. I more or less zigzagged in a straight line. And today, going on five weeks, I feel I am at about 90%.

Did I get Covid at our dance club? I don't know. I could have gotten it at our neighborhood market, although I always wore a mask there as well as when I went to Costco or any retail space. But another salsera was also felled during the same time as I. I had talked to her when we were at the salsa club, and talking requires close talking because of the excessive volume of the music. She presented with nausea, chills, and body aches but, besides our fatigue, none of our symptoms lined up. But a month later she is still dragging, as am I. Again, did I get Covid that night? I don't know. But Joel, who was with me that night and for the next two, never got it. He did do Covid duty, bringing me food and OTC meds, after testing negative three times over the next ten days. In addition to Joel's help, friends kindly offered to drop things off. But, when you can barely stand long enough to heat soup, you just don't want to see anyone when you are in that state.

I opted not to take Paxlovid. I knew and also had heard of people who had rebounded after taking it. I am fit. I am healthy. I told myself I would muddle through it and would be fine. What's a week out of fifty-two, I asked myself. I can catch up on paperwork. But I couldn't. I needed to work on my taxes, but there was no way I could focus on that work. I got up every single day. I made my bed. I got dressed. I took a blissfully scalding shower. And then I lied down on the sofa or on the bed all day. I depleted my DVR library and wondered what had possessed me to record some of these movies. Oh! I watched Everything, Everywhere, All at Once and became the only person I know who liked it. A lot. I watched it again, this time so Joel could see it, last week before it won its Oscar. I could explain what I liked about it here, but what's the point? I am sure that everyone who hated it isn't interested in what I liked about it. Moving on...

This could be the paragraph where I write about the partisan take on the Covid pandemic. But what would be the point of that? Everyone who thinks it is no worse than a cold isn't interested in my experience with it. Nor in science, evidently. But I do want to comment on all of the armchair criticism of the shifting advisories we got from the medical community at the beginning of the pandemic and throughout these Covid years. My dad was an engineer and a believer in science and technology. It didn't take my four years in college to understand that all science is developing, not static. It is on a spectrum, not a point. The medical community worked hard to understand this virus which, as a reminder, was novel. Overreach, under reach, whatever, they gave us the best knowledge they had at the time. And following protocols kept me Covid-free for three years.

The possibility of returning to dancing hovers on the horizon as I begin to feel better. But I know it will take a long time for me to get back to my pre-Covid self. I will resume pilates and working out, perhaps starting with walking. I lost six pounds during the ordeal. The thought of lifting weights again sends me to the challenge of lifting cereal boxes out of my cupboard. But life is returning to quasi-normal. I had lunch with a friend yesterday. I spent the evening with Joel. And I returned to WWSD to write this cautionary tale. Cautionary, in that if I had it to do over again, I would have taken the Paxlovid. Two rounds of mild Covid could not be as bad as the four weeks I lost to this virus. But, as everyone I know has pointed out to me, there are different strains and each hits everyone differently. And as I move out of this really dreadful experience, it is time to be grateful for my returning health, the approach of Spring, and my one-day reprieve from the alcohol-abstinence of Lent (though, to be honest, I had no taste for it through the entire ordeal, so it was a bit of a cheat choosing it as my give-up). It is St. Patrick's Day and tonight Red Breast Single Pot Still Irish Whiskey will, hopefully, remove the taste of that pre-Covid bourbon, and set me straight on my road to life as I previously knew it. Or, at any rate, to paraphrase Sam from Casablanca: It oughta take the sting out of being occupied. My drinking toast for decades has been Here's to us. But tonight, as I lift a glass of whiskey from Ireland, I drink to the heritage and the luck of the Irish, and most fervently: To our health!!