I Wish It Too

We’ve been having outdoor “summer school” gatherings (masked, distanced, and with care) for a few of the local children twice a week. Yesterday, the group consisted of four little girls, and I told them that I started writing out my feelings and memories in a journal long ago, and then we distributed blank notebooks for them to decorate and keep as diaries of their own. There was great exuberance about decorating them, with paint and collage papers and all sorts of ingenious adornments, and not many words yet written within. But with Jim strumming guitar music, Jo bringing forth treasures, and everything dappled in sunlight, a feeling arose that was both festive and intimate. And then a five-year-old girl paused from gluing seashells and layering thick blotches of acrylic paint onto her journal book, looked up at me, her eyes wide and honest and surprisingly sad, and said what we’ve all been feeling: “I wish this sickness wasn’t happening.”

It brought home to me a sudden awareness of how much this pandemic is affecting the children, even those most sheltered and indulged. It touched my heart, and I felt a surge of maternal protectiveness, and I tried to be reassuring. I admitted that we all feel that way, and it’s hard, but that people have gone through periods like this before, and things eventually got better, and we’re helping by being extra careful and considerate, and look, even right now, nestled inside of this difficult time, there are happy things happening, like this. I told her too, that I respected the way she expressed her feelings, and I tried to slip in a pitch for the journal as a place in which to record such thoughts. She’s only five, but she turned and immersed herself in her journal in her own way, decorating not the cover, but the inside of it, and doing so with free-wheeling creativity and sustained concentration.

I don’t know what the children will remember of these summer school sessions, or of the year 2020. Little pilgrims, traveling through time. I hope it gets better.

My dreams have been so vivid. Last night, I was in Italy, staying in my uncle's house near Naples. A younger version of my daughter was also traveling with me, but she was in a separate room on a lower floor, and I could see her through a window in the middle of the night, struggling to sleep. Her light was on, and she was tossing and turning, and seemed troubled. I wanted to help in some way, but I was at a distance, observing through glass, and in any case, my attempts to assist might be viewed as intrusive. At one point, she got up, went outside, and went to sleep in her parked car. But the car was the '73 Buick in which I drove to California. And the girl in the car was suddenly me.

There’s plenty of room for interpretation in a dream like that. Blurring of time frames, morphing of identities, a sense of disorientation and helplessness…these all seem characteristic of this strange era of shifting sands. And of course there is the frustration of only seeing my daughter these days through a computer screen, and watching her being a mother to a newborn, a beautiful kind of blossoming to behold, even from a distance, and she doesn’t seem to need my help. Maybe I’m the one who is troubled now, on a tightrope between identities, dreaming in the car that got me here.

But as I told that little girl, there are happy things happening too in this weird pandemic time. In fact, the other day, I had a moment of pure enchantment. I was standing out on the deck, and the pungent scent of a geranium wafted towards me, and I felt the warmth of the stucco and the dry grassy hills, and a door creaked, and my mother-in-law stepped outside into the garden, and everything was bright and stark, and totally sufficient, and I was spellbound, suspended in vivid nowness.

Then, yesterday, in the aftermath of our journal decorating, Jo noticed that my hands were sparkling with glitter, and I held them up and saw silvery flecks shining, and I told Jo it was evidence of enlightenment. I even believed it.

I wish this sickness wasn’t happening. But let’s help each other through.