Day 346…
I don’t remember my pre-pandemic life.
Of course, I remember what I did, I just don’t remember what it felt like.
Yesterday, walking through Times Square it hit me that I couldn’t recall how it felt to be anxiously rushing through the crowds on my way to a day of auditions or a rehearsal and being annoyed because of the wide-eyed throngs of tourists blocking my way. I could remember THAT I felt that way, but what that actually felt like…? Gone.
These days there are always small clumps of younger people or individual families taking selfies on the traffic islands in midtown, but for the most part, they all seem to be from here. They aren’t in a rush to get anywhere else. There really isn’t anywhere else to go. Most times, I easily walk through them on my way to wherever my walk takes me that day.
In the past year I have never gotten anywhere close enough to another person that I have physically bumped into them or they into me. What did it feel like, actually pushing through a crowd? I can picture it, but I can’t really bring up the sensation.
Offhand, I would say that the worst pain I can ever remember experiencing was when a nurse yanked out the catheter that I had had to have in for about two weeks following my prostate surgery. She told me she was going to do it on 3 and, of course, tore it out on 2.
The searing pain blanked out my vision. Everything went white. I vividly remember every single detail about that moment except for the actual pain itself. That, mercifully, I can’t feel at all.
I’m fine with that. Experiencing it once was plenty. About a year after that I had a much less serious follow up procedure and again needed a catheter during it.
The first time, the catheter had been put in while I was out cold on the operating table, so I didn’t have to experience it. This time, though, I was wide awake. While every fiber of my being tensed against what I was sure was coming, it was at worst unpleasantly uncomfortable. It wasn’t expressly painful going in or subsequently coming back out.
I would say that on any given day that I walk between 6 and 10 miles.
From here where we live down to Battery Park at the lower tip of Manhattan is about 6 ½ miles. It is just under an 8 mile walk from here to St. Anne’s Warehouse in Dumbo across the Brooklyn Bridge.
Rarely do I walk in a straight line. I wander. When I get to an intersection and the light is against me, I will change course and head off in a new direction. After I get diverted a few times and see generally where I am being taken, I will then sometimes set a final destination and try to make my way there more directly. Or I won’t. I will just go wherever the traffic lights take me.
If it’s snowing or if I think I’m going into the park I’ll wear my ancient and well-broken in Timberlands, otherwise I will just wear sneakers. After it has snowed, sneakers keep me from being able to cross certain streets or walk down some un-shoveled sidewalks, so that can further alter my daily trek.
I used to love occasionally having the time to be able to take a walk like that. It didn’t happen very often. Just for the exercise, if I was working in midtown that day, I would leave enough time to be able to walk there. Leaving home an hour and 15 minutes before I was due ensured that I could get to work and pick up a coffee and a breakfast sandwich without being late. Anything less than that meant I had to rush. Less than an hour then I needed to take a train.
If I had a few hours off, I’d just go to the gym and walk on the elliptical. My gym has (had?) many branches, so I’d pick the one closest to where I ultimately needed to be and exercise there.
Having the time to take long wandering walks was so rare that I can almost count the number of times that I was able to do it.
Knowing that I had a couple of days coming up where the work that I had could be done from home at no particular time, I would sometimes plan on maybe taking a long walk down to the village just to do it. The joke, of course, was that almost every blank space on my calendar would eventually not only fill up but new work would overlap with what had been previously scheduled. Vague walking plans often had to be abandoned when I suddenly needed to fly overseas. I then had to do my homework at 35,000 feet.
Mind you, wherever I ended up, I walked. Being in a new city, however, it’s not so much walking as it is exploring.
New York City’s streets are familiar to me. These days I am not exploring as much as I am simply walking.
Every so often, I find myself on a street that I can’t recall ever having been on before, but after a whole year of taking a long walk almost every single day, those are few and far between.
Admittedly I walk south far more often than I walk north. There are far more subway options downtown to get me home at the end of a long walk than there are, uptown.
A map of the train system in the city looks a bit like a tree. Walking downtown is like heading down into the tree’s roots. Most of the train lines either pass through or terminate in lower Manhattan so a couple of blocks in any direction of the island and you can find a station. Walking uptown, however, is like venturing out onto its branches. The farther out you venture on a given line, the further away you are from any other line.
I am thankful that during this extremely strange year that we are living in a big city. If we weren’t here, I would want to be out in the wilderness somewhere. I wouldn’t want to be somewhere that was neither urban nor wild.
My relationship to walking and exploring has changed this year. Covering the same ground day after day has forced me to look more at the details than at the place as a whole. Now I walk through the city trying to be alert to what looks different.
So much changed so quickly last spring that it was easy to see what was new. After months of the same thing day in and day out, it’s not nearly as easy.
These days, what I notice, more than anything else is the move towards making the changes to our daily lives more permanent. Hastily made signs about social distancing and mask wearing have been replaced with those that some thought has gone into. Large stores have designed theirs to fit in with their decors.
The other day I was walking through a shopping complex looking for a restroom and I passed a sign near the entrance that said, “Please observe respiratory etiquette.” We’ve been doing this for so long that it is understood that anyone reading that sign would know what that means.
It feels to me that we are on the brink of things changing again.
A year ago, everything changed overnight. It was sudden, shocking and disorienting. This time, I think, the change is going to be much more protracted and incremental. It might take a couple of years.
For the first time, some of the work projects being talked about around me feel like they could actually happen. Some are developmental and some are aimed towards virtual presentation so they could be done because at least for now the issue of an audience wouldn’t need to be faced.
When does Broadway reopen? When do cruise ships start sailing again? Those are questions that still don’t have anything close to a firm answer that I can see. I take whatever dates that I hear or am told in regard to them with a grain of salt. There are still too many obstacles ahead of us to keep them from happening on a firm schedule.
Finally, though, some of these other peripheral projects seem like they could actually be done given our current restrictions. I still won’t count on anything until I start doing it, but some of these potential gigs feel possible.
I had truly forgotten what that feeling was like.
Once some of that work actually starts back up again, all of this will start to become hard to remember.
I think that I can now see how almost everybody was able to forget all about the Spanish flu pandemic. It was too much of the same thing for too long a period of time.
This endless stream of unbroken days seems like just one thing. I can’t really differentiate one of my daily walks from another. At the end of the week when I am dating the pictures that I’ve taken I don’t even try to recall on what day I took them - I rely on my iPhone to tell me. I couldn’t tell you where I walked the day before yesterday without looking it up.
I know that so far there have been 346 separate days since we closed down. Having written these posts, I can personally account for each and every one of them. Each of them, though, is stored in one folder on my desktop. Together they are all just a single file.
I think that we are all going to look back on this year as a singularity, not as 365 separate events. That is what is going to make it easy to forget.
My guess is that the truly shocking things like the death of a loved one or even the January 6th insurrection are going to be remembered on their own. I don’t think that we will remember them in the context of this incredibly strange year.
Looking back on my life, I remember the jobs, and the adventures, not the gaps in between them. However long this lasts when it’s done, this period of time will still just be a gap. Honestly, I don’t think that we will be able to remember the tedium and repetition of this endless string of somewhat empty days. It will just fade. We will be too busy with whatever it is that we will be doing.
Some of what we used to do may never come back.
Maybe after work one night, we will gather together and become a bit nostalgic about it. Whatever is new, though, will be awaiting us the following morning so maybe we will decide that we should call it a night and go home and get some sleep.
After all, tomorrow is coming.
It always does.
❤️Ode to a year passing
...and on going poem this post was to me, beautiful