Here Comes the Sun (Covid Week 2)

At 5:25am today Reeve turned 13.  He wanted to wake up for the occasion, but he's still asleep now at 7:35am, evidence enough that our early riser is officially a teenager.  Thirteen years ago we were in Brooklyn.  It had been a long cold lonely winter, as the song says.  We'd left California abruptly eight months earlier.  I knew no one in Brooklyn.  We moved houses twice.  Pregnant with a two-year old, I remember chronic exhaustion.  Reeve was born quickly, the first two contractions were already four minutes apart, earning him the nickname Rocket Reeve.  We barely made it to the hospital, and I had to stop more than once in the cold darkness between the parking lot and the entrance to contract.  By sunrise he was in my arms, enjoying a lengthy breakfast Chez Mommy as we watched the sun glint off the orange Staten Island ferry and the Statue of Liberty.  Two days later, Duncan and Jordy welcomed us home.  In those drifty dreamy first days with a newborn, we often played "Here Comes the Sun."  Holding his new baby on the couch, two-year old Duncan loved to dance his fingers above Reeve's searching face to the song's "Dah-Dah-Dah, Dah-Dah-Dah, Dah-Dah-Dah, Dah-Dah-Dah-Dah!" bridge.  Little Darlings indeed.  When the tulips rose and the cherry blossoms exploded that April for Reeve's first spring, it felt like my first too.

In June we plan to recognize Reeve as a bar mitzvah. Reeve's been diligently preparing, practicing his trope daily, weekly tutoring with Dartmouth Hillel student Ariel, thinking about his interpretation of his portion (Korah) and what charitable project he will choose.  We plan to host his party up at Salinger's barn; the tent is reserved, the menu under consideration.  With each day, though, the vision fades.  Like every aspect of life now, the vision needs re-vision.  Family will probably not be able to travel; even local family may need to keep distant.  It will be OK, just different.  Maybe even holier, helping us differentiate the essence from the window dressing.  Maybe Salinger's hill will give us just the space we need to worship together with six feet of separation between us all.   The Torah itself has never felt more relevant, a survival how-to for the soul and a people under oppression or near obliteration.

The horror in New York is closing in.  The daily stories of lonely deaths and brave frontline fighters are heartbreaking.  I'm worried sick about our friend Micki in the Maimonides ER.  It's unfathomable.  The scientific mind searches frantically to understand the transmission patterns, the risk factors, the interventions that work.  The political mind searches frantically for stimulus efforts to slow the economic free fall.  The justice mind searches frantically for how to protect the most vulnerable.  The moral mind searches frantically for answers to the impossible question of who should live, who die, as even ambulance drivers are forced to make such choices usually restricted to war time.  Not only New York, of course, it's just hitting extra close to home there.

Last night a bunch of my whacky actor friends and I tried an experiment in remote live storytelling using Facebook.  We read from Day the First of Boccaccio's 14th-century Decameron, ten stories told over ten nights in the countryside outside Florence, Italy by seven young ladies and three gents waiting out the plague.  Our country seclusion mirrors theirs, for now.  Fresh air, the songs of birds returning for spring, celestial bodies shining usward nonetheless.  We found merriment in each other's company, distraction in the saucy tales of lusty monks, old men on the prowl, and wily women who refuse to surrender their wit and wits despite the confines of their lives.  When it was over, we "met" in the Zoom Green Room for a "cast party" and learned that that afternoon one of our own actor's had lost her mother-in-law and her MIL's brother to covid-19 in Maine.

Worst of times.  Best of times.  All five of us Green Beans on the trampoline before Shabbat dinner, the waxing new moon and Venus radiant in the western sky.  Duncan wandering the house playing John Lennon's Imagine on Tucker's ukulele.  The local distillery turned hand sanitizer manufacturer.  Seeds selling out across the country.  Greenhouse gases dropping.  House, Senate, President, Republicans, Democrats actually working together.  Families pulled apart by the pace of the old life reclaiming lost time together.  National Guard enforcing stay-at-home orders.  State lines becoming enforced border crossings.  Leaning into neglected projects, playing music together, arrival in the present moment.  Time unwinds, like a rubber band twisted up by a pencil, our lives wound too tight like a child's distracted pastime, released and reclaimed.  When will this end and life get back to "normal"?  Do we want it to? ... as Jordy pondered at sunset atop the Burling fields, dogs chasing each other amidst last year's corn stalks.

What have we been running to?  From?  What has our collective and exceedingly effective denial of death cost us?  How are we changed when we stare it in the face, at closer than six feet?  Might we make our peace with it?

It seems like years since it's been clear.  It's all right.  It's all right.

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A search for the text we say on Yom Kippur to include in this blog brought up this wise writing, A Dress Rehearsal for Our Deaths.