The Ghost Trees of Spring

One thing about being without a permanent address over the last couple of years: I’ve gotten to know other parts of town that I didn’t know well before and probably wouldn’t have gotten to know at all in other circumstances. My opinion about which parts of town are desirable and which aren’t has changed several times; I’ve driven through entire neighborhoods I had never explored before; I’ve found out which streets really have the best holiday decorations; and I’ve gotten used to the gigantic Kroger stores that dwarf the smaller neighborhood store I used to frequent, which now seems small and cramped to me.

Driving west one winter morning over a year ago, I experienced a sunrise that turned the trees ahead of me into a molten gold, a particular shade of intense light I’d never seen before. I wasn’t used to traveling in that direction at that time of the morning and had never caught the sun at quite that angle before: a revelation. I discovered suburban neighborhoods that looked much older than they are because of the way in which mature trees had been incorporated into their development; I was surprised at how quickly they had assumed a mature appearance, because I remembered when they were brand-new.

I found out that the crabapple trees on a certain stretch of road look like ghost trees at night, something you would only know if you traveled that particular street after dark during a very brief period in spring when the trees are flowering. I discovered that downtown no longer seems like the center of things. If there is a center, it is one that seems to travel with me, like the Self, whose “center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” I’ve experienced the magic of autumn nights in streets swirling with leaves and rain. I’ve noted how much nocturnal life there is, even within city limits; a fox here, a pair of coyotes there, rabbits dashing across the roads on unknown errands. I passed a house with a horse in the front yard. I craned my neck, just this morning, to see if what appeared to be gigantic birds on a suburban roof were actually real birds or merely chimney pots or something equally mundane.

I’ve looked with longing at cozy windows, lighted at night; imagined what kind of tiny home I would design and where I would put it if I were building my own home; visited the Jot ’Em Down Store twice while driving out in the country; and photographed public art that has popped up in unexpected places all over town. I’ve passed a street sign that brings up a memory of someone who once lived there, long ago, a street that I had never seen until now, the person who lived there long since moved on. I’ve discovered that the achingly beautiful phenomenon that is spring is equally achingly beautiful all over town. I’ve found out what it’s like to have Starbucks as your living room and the public library as your drawing room. Not quite as cozy and private as I’d like, but there you have it.

Little by little, I’ve come across people that I hadn’t seen in a long time and discovered that the past is still present, that there is a sense of continuity between earlier periods of my life and where I am now. I’ve realized just how much living in one particular spot gives you a certain outlook, certain paths to trod, and particular points of view, and how not being tied to one spot expands your outlook. I’m still processing what this has all meant to me and probably will do so for a long time to come, but I will say that I’ve probably gained something from floating free, as it were, through my adopted hometown. I have a perspective on it that could never be matched by someone living settled at home, viewing the world through their front window. Some of it has to do with the strangeness but persistence of life, mixed with a fondness for this corner of the earth and its natural beauty, unfiltered through all the seasons.

Social Distancing for Extroverts

Hand washing and social distancing: the watchwords of the hour. I’ve been practicing both to the best of my ability, but I can’t help thinking that the latter, while probably necessary, is rather a tragic result of the current situation. I’m naturally an introvert, so spending time alone isn’t nearly as difficult for me as it is for the extroverted majority—and yet even I recognize that humans are social creatures and need other people. Most people can’t even seem to make it at home for more than two or three days during the holidays before they’re ready to bust out of the house, so I’m sure the quarantines are going to be very trying psychologically for many folks.

Of course, there also lessons to be learned on the ways in which trying to take care of each other can be accomplished in unfamiliar ways. I was going through the drive-through at Starbucks today when it occurred to me how many germs were probably on my Starbucks card, which I was getting ready to hand to the barista, so I wiped it off front and back with hand sanitizer. Apparently, that does not keep the card from working, though there might be a limit to how many times you could do that. (It’s too bad you can’t do the same thing to money.) Trying to give people extra personal space at the grocery store and not touching any more surfaces than necessary also requires thinking about things in a new way.

Whether it’s good news or bad news, I don’t know, but the fact is I’m so used to surreal conditions that this crisis is mostly just more of the same for me. I won’t be able to frequent cafes for a while, and the libraries are also closed. I had to scramble to find things I didn’t want to run out of once I realized people were starting to buy things up; I’m living with uncertainty and wondering how long current conditions will hold, just like you are. And yet, it’s exactly the type of thing I’m familiar with, how life can be turned upside down in the blink of an eye. I’m not happy about any of it, and yet in some ways I personally feel less isolated than I did when my own surreal adventure, if you can call it that, began 10 years ago. Now I know other people also know what it feels like to be isolated, anxious, and to some degree helpless, to see things spinning beyond your control.

It may be ironic that I, one of the world’s champion introverts, am so transfixed by the prohibitions on getting close to other people, but it’s that aspect of our current reality that’s really captured my imagination. Entire novels will be written about our current predicament; the one I would write would deal with the tragic aspect of not being to touch other people. It seems like a metaphor for so much more, for some kind of malaise that has perhaps been hidden for a long time but takes its visible shape in the form of a virus. Am I saying we made ourselves sick? It’s not that exactly, but more that there’s a kind of symbolic truth in the virus. How strange that it would have made its appearance at a time when we’re already so divided politically.

We will probably learn a lot of things about ourselves by the time this situation is over. One of the most interesting questions to me is how people will handle this unprecedented opportunity to practice introspection. Whether any profound changes come out of it is anyone’s guess, but the chance to get in dialogue with the Self (in Jungian terms) has never been better.

Don’t Sneeze On Me

I’m currently fighting a cold, and all that hand-washing and hand-wringing over “Are my hands clean enough?” and “Will I catch coronavirus on top of this?” is a bit tiring, I must admit. I am a model hand-washer, but I’ve been hit with an obscure feeling of guilt over having a cold, as if the very sight of me sneezing might be enough to send the populace into a panic and the stock markets tumbling. On top of that, I’m having to stay hydrated to keep a mild cold from turning into a bad one, my hands are dry from all the washing, and my nose is turning a becoming shade of red. Good times!

The coronavirus situation was borne in on me the other night when I went in search of sanitizing wipes. There were none to be had in any of the stores I went to; a Walmart employee told me that when the store does get a shipment, they sell out immediately. In the grocery store this morning, the toilet paper aisle was nearly decimated. When I heard about the strict quarantine taking place in Italy, I was amazed: if Italy is making people stay home, things are getting serious. Officials had been telling people in the beginning that there was little to worry about here in the U.S., and technically I suppose that was true—until the first cases appeared.

It all reminds me a little of a disaster movie in which the global threat of a pandemic starts to unravel the underpinnings of civilization and send the world back to the Dark Ages. No big deal not to be able to find Purell at the grocery store, you say. Oh, that’s just what you think. It starts with Purell and then progresses to milk, bread, antiperspirant, and beer. Then they’ll run out of toothbrushes and clean underwear. People start rioting in the streets, and the thin veneer of modernity gets ripped off like a dirty bandage. It’ll be up to a straggly band of hardy survivors to escape the pestilential cities, where people are fighting over stray boxes of Kleenex and tubes of toothpaste, to set up a new coronavirus-free zone in some Edenic setting that resembles Isla Nublar but hopefully contains no dinosaurs.

Well, I hope our structures, institutions, and resolve to hang onto our hard-won evolutionary gains will keep the coronavirus from spinning us all out of control. We’ve been through it before with the flu and other infectious diseases, and there seems to be little to be done other than following reasonable precautions. I haven’t noticed people behaving much differently here. I won’t be going to any large-scale events in the foreseeable future, but I wasn’t planning to anyway. I’ll be nursing my cold, trying to remember not to touch my face, and hoping the shortage of sanitizing wipes doesn’t last much longer (they are handy things to have, but I wouldn’t fight someone to the death over them). I have no large-scale mythological advice to offer beyond “Wash your hands,” and you already knew that anyway.