Oh, what the heck.

Let's start the half hour a day writing challenge here, on this little blogspot I started three years ago at exactly this time of year, and then abandoned so quickly.  There must be something about October that inspires me to write.  It's October 18--just about exactly three years since the last post.  And what a three years.  Of course.  Apocalyptic and also not. Does Los Angeles simply absorb and digest outsize events, perhaps because of the already dystopian nature of the place?  We dream of small towns.  We live in a warren of small places that together are large, that themselves seem always to be on the brink of dissolving and disappearing, on a good day..  

2018.  Well, I barely remember that, but I'd like to try for a few minutes.  Working and commuting as usual, obviously.  Two years into a presidency that seemed to be causing a collective insanity.   Other than that, though, the usual round of a life.  The middle child's senior year unfolding, college choices being made, plans for the future.  Then 2019; a quieter house with the youngest looking at what promised to be an exciting last year of elementary school, albeit with the emerging family troubles of anxiety and depression lurking, but noted, and treated.  And then of course March of 2020 and the great closing.  Events that seemed both utterly strange and completely familiar.  

To call it chaotic does not seem quite right.  In a way, for many who work the sectors our family does, it was an imposition of orderliness far more than chaos.  Create a schedule and stick to it.  Try to find the bright spots.  Dinner for five again, unexpectedly, every day.  Careful lists and shopping so that you can avoid the grocery store for weeks.  None of the parties, graduations, plays, outings, that decorate the round of existence and distinguish one week from the next. Jokes about vacationing in the living room that become less funny as the weeks wear on.  Cancellations: of vacations; of people.

The Great Paring Down.

It's surprising what you miss: I missed my commute, of all things.  Getting into a car, with somewhere to go, a place awaiting.  I also missed, as we all did, the events that mark time and ritualize it for us.  I've been stunned by the passings of people that have gone un-memorialized, neither funeral meat nor wedding feast to mark it, all of us Hamlet without even the broken ritual to sustain us.  So strange.

But also the revelations.  Seeing what life is really like, here in this city, at this time.  People sleeping on sidewalks in suburban neighborhoods, the lucky ones parked in RVs or parks that are now campgrounds. Campgrounds themselves closed.There is work, and there is dinner.  There is news but it is always the same news.  There is perhaps too much wine. An undecorated life, plain and suburban. It's not bad, actually. It's the core of what always was, but more visible, the fog cleared.

And then the Slow Reentry. Excitement tempered early on by concerns about control--why aren't you wearing your mask? Why are you wearing a mask outside? Why won't you get a vaccine? Why would you get a vaccine? Something we haven't lost is our taste for argument, and I'm reminded, uncomfortably, of the citizens of Hell quibbling in the midst of Heaven.

For surely this world is beautiful, always.  The eternal shows up, and the quotidian has, one hopes, been relegated to its rightful place.  And here I am, waxing poetic in a first bit of a writing habit I hope to establish here on this little blog, on a beautiful morning with the pines through the high window framed by clouds--the big white kinds, and a blue October sky, after the delight of an unexpected light rain this morning.  Dogs asleep, autumn jazz on the playlist, all the beautiful F
all.