a moment in the day: half

Writing group night. We're meeting on Zoom again. We met on Zoom starting all the way back in March of 2020 and through until the last of us was fully vaccinated this past June. Then it was a lovely two months of meeting in person, sitting together, talking, hugging, laughing. But now Delta is surging, young kids still cannot be vaccinated, and there's new understanding that even those fully vaxxed can spread it. So I and my friends are back to growing our proverbial victory gardens: masking, zooming. Doing what we can.

As our Zoom squares start to fill up my laptop screen, mine looks wrong. Stretched out like when you try to watch a movie with the wrong aspect radio on your TV. The stretching pulls everything thin like my face and the wall behind me are vertical lines with tiny lines of space in between.

"Do I look weird to you guys?"

They say I don't. But on my screen I'm stretched thin, and I find I have to shift all the way to the right side of my computer in order to see my whole head and shoulders centered in my square.

"Gigi," Doug says, "you're half out of the frame."

I'm stretched so thin that half of what they can see I can't see and half of what I can see... Oh, I don't even know, but I shift back over to where the tiny dot of camera at the top middle of my laptop can catch me full on. Now everyone can see all of me but I can only see half of me, one eye, one shoulder, half a head.

As my friends catch up on the week, I peck around Zoom trying to figure out how to fix it. If I'm stretched so wide am I also stretched some top to bottom? Like, if I see my head are they just seeing my neck or something? I hunker down a bit. I click over to Google and try to look up the problem.

"Gigi," Doug says, "now I can only see the top of your head."

I abandon Google, straighten up. What I look like on here isn't for me. It's for my friends to see me and for me to be engaged with them. So I relax into my half self and join the conversation. 

Are we being stretched thin by covid restrictions? Are we feeling like we live half lives? And in a way: why not? What are we willing to sacrifice? In order to come out of this whole thing someday not only with our health and the health of our loved ones, but knowing that we did our best, our actual best to be the ones who didn't spread this virus around?

a moment in the day: enough

Birthdays in the social media era. Stephen is downstairs whipping cream (I can hear that scraping buzz of beaters against bowl) and I'm sitting at the computer going through my newsfeed, thanking people for their sweet greetings. 

There's a lot you can say about the negatives of social media, but on your birthday, it's a lovely parade of people. You scroll and like, scroll and comment, and it's a little like getting birthday cards but moremoremore, and all I can think is, look at all of these people I've been privileged to know. It's kind of like when they say your life flashes in front of your eyes, but it's all your people flashing in front of your eyes. And you don't have to die. 

When I was a kid, when I was a young adult, all I felt like was a loser. I wonder how I would have felt about myself had I had the chance to sit and watch this parade of people each stop by to say hello.

Hello.

I keep thinking about that thing President Biden said in his inauguration speech. It's funny. The pomp and excitement of that day is a blur now, but I always remember three words he said. Enough of us. 

I can't even remember exactly what he was talking about, now, but I remember how that phrase made me stop. And think. And write it down.

Alright, I'm looking it up now. He said, "In each of these moments, enough of us came together to carry all of us forward."

He was talking about the Civil War, the Great Depression, World Wars, 9/11. He was talking about racism and nationalism and maybe the pandemic too. With all the negativity in the country, with all the negativity in all the people in the country, there's always been enough of us who strive to do the right thing. Just those three words made me feel better about the country I was living in. And now, sitting here scrolling through, watching this parade of lovely people, I think, yeah, you all are the enough of us.

a moment in the day: group

Steve and I walk down the hall to Liz' loft just like old times, just like before the pandemic, heading to writing group together. 

Everything in this corridor looks crisp and new. The bright raspberry-painted wall at the end by her door: is that the same color as it used to be? Every step of this familiar walk, that Steve and I have taken once a month for years, seems both beautifully old-hat and utterly new somehow.

I push open Liz' door and we walk through. Voices inside. My breath swells against my ribcage. This is our first non-Zoom meeting and my first unmasked, undistanced gathering since the before times. I hurry my step down the short front hall and then here we are—Steve, Liz, Kathleen, me—all fully-vaxxed, all crowded together at the edge of the kitchen doing something we haven't done in so long. Hugging. 

Liz' black curls tickle my face. Kathleen holds too tight and too long and too wonderful. I don't want to let go. 

When I do, she tells us she and her son hugged so hard once that it started to cut off the circulation in her neck and, still mid-clasp, she told him, "I think I'm going to pass out." And did.

Stories bounce back and forth between us as we move into the living room where Robert is waiting remotely on Zoom from his home out of town. "Robert!" I say. His face so small on the little laptop screen.

I drop my bags and take the plastic container of appetizers back across the room for warming in the kitchen nook where Liz and Kathleen have returned, chatting as they try to work the top off a bottle of pink wine. I come around behind them at the counter. Their backs to me. 

"No, we used to do it all the time when I was a kid," Liz is saying. "For fun. Like all the time."

"And there's that thing," Kathleen says, "where people do it for a sexual high."

I pull the top off my tupperware container just enjoying listening to snippets of their conversation. I realize they're still on the ways in which cutting off the circulation can make someone pass out.

"There's a name for that."

"Autoerotic... asphyxiation."

I dip my head in between them. "So, here I am, my very first unmasked, undistanced get-together, and what are we talking about? Autoerotic asphyxiation."

And this might be—not sure but might be—even better than the hugs. Laughing together in person again.

a moment in the day: crown

Stephen and I are just back from getting our second covid shots. We have a few moments before I need to be off upstairs to get on Zoom for my writing group. He's going to head out into the studio to get to work, but I make him wait and I run from the room, coming back with two Christmas crackers, one gold foil paper, one silver. I hand them both out to him and he laughs. I tell him to take his pick.

It will be two weeks before we're fully vaccinated, but I feel like we should celebrate, just a little. With as precious as these shots are, with as difficult as it has been for many to get appointments—and more so in other places in the world—I've tried to think of the vaccination wait as one, long, rolling Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever big holiday people would wait for, all year, when they were kids. Something to try to anticipate with excitement rather than impatience. I used to think about erecting a tree in the house with lights and putting names underneath it, a new name each time someone I loved got vaccinated.

But who puts up a Christmas tree in the spring? So these will have to do.

We each take the ends of our Christmas crackers in our hands. These ones are the kind that don't make a pop sound when you open them, but still, Nicholas runs from the room. We count one, two, three. Yank our crackers open. The loot falls on the floor. The paper crown, the slip of paper with a joke on it, and for each of us, a little prize like from a Crackerjack box. Wait. Is that why they call them Crackerjacks?

My prize is a weird, little keychain with a bottle opener shaped like a dead fish.

We put the paper crowns on our heads. Shiny gold foil. We ask each other Christmas jokes. 

What do you call Santa Claus when he goes down the chimney and the fire is lit?

Krisp Kringle.

"That's kind of violent," I say when Stephen reads me the answer.

When I turn to go off to writing group, my paper crown falls off my head and floats to the floor. I pick it up. Put it back on. Head upstairs.

a moment in the day: ready

I head to our front door, to go out into the world, to pick up something for work. Stephen follows to say goodbye.

"Got what you need?" he asks.

These weird days, when we go out so seldom. When every simple excursion feels like an event. Something you've got to plan for, dress up for, think about. It's been so long since going out into the world was a regular thing. 

I pat my pocket to make it jingle.

"Got my keys."

Raise the crumpled bit of cloth in my hand.

"Got my mask."

Look down. 

Look at my sock feet.

"Don't got my shoes."

a moment in the day: 365

It's been a whole year.

According to the tally I've been keeping of our particular days of social distancing, it is day three-hundred and sixty-five.

Night, actually, Saturday night. We're doing one of the most exciting things we do these days. We ordered a pizza.

Stephen put in the call, and now, masks on, we're walking down together to pick it up.

And music is playing. Weirdly. The streets are full of it. Jazz, something that sounds a little noir, keyboards and saxophone, I think. A drum kit.  It has that distinct timbre of music amplified by a microphone. 

How utterly strange to hear live music.

We reach the end of the block, and the little business district opens up around us, coffee shops, restaurants. The shut-up movie theater with its marquee declaring, "Intermission continues." As we cross the street we can see that the music is coming from the little wine bar a few doors down. Their outdoor seating area, built out into the street where a couple cars normally would be parked, is a structure of wooden slats and a roof, plastic sheeting making walls on three sides. 

The plastic is for holding off rain but it also holds in the air. Keeps it pocketed there. 

Through the oily sheen of the half-transparent plastic those shapes of color are people sitting at tables. Masks off, eating and drinking. The jazz combo playing at one end. Breath blasting through a horn.

Here across the street, the pizza place is windows framed with Christmas-colored twinkle lights, and two different doors, one for going in, one for coming out. Stephen goes through the in door to pay for the pizza, and I wait on the sidewalk. Listen to dangerous music.

It sounds pretty good.

Glance to my right and now, approaching under the marquee overhang of the shut-up theater is a group of four people. Chatting happy. Unmasked. 

I step backward into the recess of the out door. The dangerous music follows me in. It sounds slightly different in my pocket of air. A little less alive, or is that my imagination?

The group doesn't seem to notice me, laughing as they walk by.

a moment a year ago today: marquee

It's weird and tense in the office. I'm sitting at my desk, answering emails, trying to keep focused on the work. There's been talk here and there across the wide room: will they have us work from home, will things shut down, will we lose our jobs. Yesterday the World Health Organization officially declared this virus a pandemic. It's been just two days since Multnomah County announced our very first case.

Right now the office is quiet, just the brattle of typing around me.

Clean hands on the keys. We're all washing our hands constantly. They say that's the best thing you can do to keep safe.

As I was heading in to work a couple hours ago, I drove past our downtown store, and there was Ramiza's name up on the marquee.

Ramiza Shamoun Koya
SUN 3/15

Three days from now, her big book launch event, which was originally set for May but got moved up to March when it became obvious there was a good chance her cancer would take her before she could get up and stand behind that sacred pedestal. 

An author event in Powell's City of Books. A Portland writer's dream.

When I drove by and saw her up there all big on the marquee, I pulled over, elated, shot pictures with my phone. Then I got to work and there was an email from Laura, Ramiza's publisher, telling me Ramiza is having second thoughts.

It is so, so understandable. And in light of the circumstances Powells' Events Coordinator has sent a request to management that we shut down our events for the next four weeks at least, and we should, we should, but part of me selfishly grips Ramiza's dream with my fists and doesn't want to let it go.

I click another email. Save a sales report into a folder. 

It's only three days from now. There's only one case that I know of in all of Portland right now. Maybe she can make it just under the wire.

Now another note hits my inbox. Laura again. It's a forward of the one she just now sent out, cancelling Ramiza's event. 

My heart hangs heavy in my ribcage.

A dozen feet away from me, sitting at his computer, the Events Coordinator says aloud, "Another cancellation."

He's been announcing them as they come. One after another. It's been a long day. It's only 9:40.

a moment in the day: golden

Middle of the work day, me at my desk at home, typing away on my laptop. Checking my Outlook calendar for Zoom meetings. I click the "remote desktop" icon in my tray and my screen blinks to another cyber environment, remoting into my office computer so I can use a program there. This strange world of work-from-home.

Over the top of my laptop screen, across the little room, Nicholas snoozes in a pile of blankets on the futon bed. His eyes blink open and he's looking at me.

Those eyes are a tractor beam, pulling me up from my chair. I cross to him. A brief moment to slip my hand under his covers and scratch his warm fur.

One thing about this pandemic. It's a golden age for dogs.

"Do you even remember," I ask him out loud, "when I used to leave the house for nine hours almost every day?"

Nicholas makes a soft sleepy snorty sound and closes his eyes.

a moment a year ago today: butterfly

I head out of the office after a day of work. Step along the pavement, one foot and then the other. Forward is a scary direction these days. Dad going in for tests. That virus. No cases in Oregon yet. It will be here any day.

How many deaths, now? This morning on NPR there was a quote from Trump saying that it might actually be good for the economy, because look at the Japanese economy, and I swear he used the word Jap. I can’t remember the quote. I just remember saying aloud, twice, as I listened: “Did he just say Jap?”

A butterfly flits around me as I walk. It's so tiny, a fleck of ash from a campfire. I feel uncomfortable to go to the theater tonight but I guess we’ll go ahead and go? I thought of suggesting we not, but am I just being paranoid? Overreacting? I’ll bet the theater will be pretty empty. I don’t know.

It will be here any day. How can we really know if it's not already here?

Take another step and that butterfly shoots right under my shoe.

I see this as my heel hits the pavement. And the moment slows down. Heel on pavement, the ball of my foot suspended, stopped, the muscles in the top of my foot clenched to hold it just above the sidewalk.

My body is carried forward into the next step. My foot pulls up. In a tiny white flash, the butterfly flies away.

a moment in the day: rain

Sitting at my computer, 2:30 in the afternoon, working, and my phone makes a blink of sound. One of those alerts. I look over at the thing sitting face up on the tabletop.

It says:

The U.S. has surpassed 500,000 COVID-19 deaths.

An unfathomable number. 

I take a moment of silence. Weirdly, I feel like maybe other people, maybe picking up their phones, are doing this too.

A sparse rain is making a patter on the roof. Sparse enough that you can hear almost every drop, tick, tick.

I wonder how long it would take to hear half a million raindrops.

a moment in the day: one

Quiet, I bend down and lift Nicholas out of his self-heating doggy bed and carry him through the dark morning house. Past the Christmas tree whose lights, with their automatic shut-off, turned themselves off somewhere in the night. The whirr up from the heating vent. Through the kitchen to take him out for a first pee.

As I go to step down the back stairs I remind myself that my Christmas doggy socks with Nicholas' face all over them are a little slick on the bottom. I remind myself it's still 2020. 

Be extra careful. You can make it one more day.

Silly to lay so much significance on a number, to pretend a curse can be contained inside a year.

Still, my brain has always been fond of games and if I'm to play a game on this last morning of double twos and double zeroes, let that game be that what's to come, when that last zero turns to a one, will be better.

I step slowly down, push open the back door. Coming in with the cold is the keening rise and fall of an emergency truck siren.

a moment in the day: ghost

Christmas Day, and I'm taking a break between bouts of fabulous food to sit at the computer and scroll social media and give likes and hearts to friends' holiday greetings. Their photos of bedecked trees, of special breakfasts, of happy children.

Here's a photo of a family party, obviously too many people to live in one house. Big grins, no masks.

I scroll past. 

A photo of a snowy backyard. Like.

A photo of a little girl making a beautifully sloppy gingerbread house. Heart.

A photo of a cat curled up under a Christmas tree. Heart.

Another Christmas Eve party, this one a series of photos, people at a front door, grins, hugs. The caption says we sure surprised them, how wonderful to see them, we hadn't seen them in so long.

I scroll past. 

It hurts a little to refuse to give happy kudos to this post and others like it. It feels a little rude. A little too Ebenezer Scrooge.

No.

Bah.

Humbug.

Not reacting favorably to posts about gatherings that go against the constant pleas for public safety that our governors, our mayors, our media, our citizens have been making as our hospitals fill up, as we hear reports of ambulances parked and waiting outside California emergency rooms for hours, that's not about Scrooge. It's about the Ghost of Christmas Future.

a moment in the day: in the airplane

We're in middle seats waiting for takeoff. I try to remind myself not to be afraid of flying. I'm thirsty. I have to pee.

The plane is full. Why haven't they distanced the passengers? Why is no one wearing a mask?

Why are we not wearing masks?

I turn to Stephen: "We forgot our masks! We didn't bring one mask for this entire trip!"

What are we doing traveling in the middle of a pandemic? What are all of these people doing traveling in the middle of a pandemic?

The man sitting behind me is trying to get me to read his short stories, which are stashed in a box under my seat. The flight attendant drops by to accuse Stephen of forging the painting he had put in the overhead compartment. In the opposite aisle, another flight attendant helps a passenger by stowing his gun in a closet.

I get up to find the bathroom. The back of the plane is a rummage sale filled with items people are pawing over. White crockery. Scented candles. There are long lines waiting at the checkouts. People packed in. And in the corner, a bar. Everyone is having a lovely time.

I wake up in a panic. It was a dream. Sun runs across the quiet bedroom. But the panic doesn't really subside. That airplane. That is what being in America right now feels like.

a moment in the day: mary

Just back from a run to the store that was presumably for general essentials but was more accurately for enough comfort food and drink to get us through the election, I cart bags down to the basement where we quarantine/store certain items routinely because: pandemic/apocalypse. Deposit my stock of bread, noodles, the many bags of Too Many Chips.

I pull wine out of the bottle bag. Each different bottle rings a different quiet note as it touches the concrete basement floor. I put them down, pick them up, rearrange. The Dark Horse rosé on the right, the Cocoban red on the left. The Immortal Zin moves from far left to directly in between them. Yes, that works.

Pick up the cava, put it down. It's not right. Move it away. Try the Dark Horse sauvignon blanc. It's not right either. Overhead the ceiling squeaks just slightly as Stephen moves through the kitchen, washing things down and putting them away. I reach, pick up the other red. Set it down in front of the rosé. Ah, perfect.

For a moment, I pick up the bottles and set them back down, pick them up, set them down. Quiet tink, tink of glass against the rough concrete.

I feel very proud of myself.

Taking the bottle bag back up the stairs to the kitchen, I tell Stephen I just taught myself to play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on wine bottles. He's less impressed than I would expect.

 

a moment in the day: glass

Early morning black and Stephen is snoring, quietly, but enough that it wakes me. I try to pretend for a while that I can ignore the rhythm of it, but I finally give up and rise. Take my ear plugs out and put them in the drawer in the bedside table. Ease out from the covers.

I reach down and gently lift Nicholas from his pillow on the floor where he's been sleeping ever since the injury. It hurts my heart that he may never be able to sleep in the bed with us again.

Hip dysplasia. Thank you, 2020, for bestowing so many gifts upon us. We give him his medicine. We rest him. We keep him from jumping up or down from things, going up and down the stairs. Hoping treatment will avoid surgery, I don't want him to have to go through yet another surgery.

I carry him quiet through the dark house. Up the stairs. Maybe, maybe I can put him down on his pillow on the floor. Put the baby gate at the top of the stairwell. Go back to sleep on the little daybed.

Through the dark of the room, there's a tick-tick-tick against the skylights. It's raining. Of course it's raining. Nicholas is afraid of the rain. Even with the baby gate up to keep him from going back down, he'll pace. He'll be agitated and afraid. If I put him back downstairs will he stay if I'm not there? Will he try to find me?

For a moment we stand here, suspended, Nicholas in my arms, his little silhouette turned toward the tick-tick-ticking against the glass. 

I try to believe it will be OK, that his hip will get stronger and we can manage things. But this year. I've lost so much. We've all lost so much. This raging pandemic, this president downplaying and lying even as he gets pumped full of special and experimental drugs behind the scenes for his own case of the virus that his administration mismanaged, telling people this thing is not a big deal so they'll go out and keep catching it and keep spreading it, keep dying. Less than a month away from the election, and no, I don't have hope that it'll turn out OK, because this year and these four years have taught us otherwise. Sometimes I think my brain has been permanently changed to be unable to ever have hope again that things could be OK.

Don't think about it. Don't wake yourself up. Take Nicholas back down. Maybe you can go back to sleep. At least that's something, right? A few more hours of sleep?

I turn and take a step, and my foot kicks a water glass on the floor. It cracks into pieces.

a moment in the day: waking up

The alarm is going off. Chiming bells. I reach for the phone and make it go quiet. Shift away from the dog pressed against me under the covers, crawl gently over him to step out of bed.

The scratch in my throat reminds me where I am in place and time.

Check the online evacuation maps. Still in the clear for now. Check the air index on various sites where the numbers are all different but all labeled "hazardous."

I open the back of my little upright air conditioner and take the filter out. Take it with me into the kitchen where a huge pot on the stove sits half full of water and herbes de Provence. I turn the stove on to start it simmering. To be honest, I have no idea if this thing is helping, but at least the house takes on an herby scent over the stink of wildfire smoke.

Using an old toothbrush to clean the soot from the air conditioner filter, it occurs to me that my lungs probably look like those of a nineteenth century chimney sweep.

We're closing in on a week of this.

Through the kitchen window, the sky is a low, thick, unfathomable gray. A bit of dream comes to me. Yes. I dreamed I saw blue sky.

a moment in the day: after the party

The little Zoom squares on our screen, with happy faces and waving hands, blink out, one by one. I hit the button to exit. On the dining room table around Stephen's laptop are cake plates and champagne glasses. The lottery tickets our hosts sent over in advance in a "do not open" sealed envelope: prizes for the anniversary bingo game that they carefully crafted so that everyone at the party would win.

As at the end of every Zoom gathering, I'm surprised by how quiet it suddenly is. Stephen starts clearing the plates away as I get up to take Nicholas out. Past the blown-up balloons and the hanging garland of paper stars. The plastic noise-makers. Thinking about our clever hosts and all that went into bringing such a large group of people together for an hour or so of laughter and nostalgia and, a weird thing these days, joy. 

Nicholas follows me through the kitchen, down the back stairs, through the door and into the yard.

The night sky is that strange washed-out apricot.

The world is still on fire.

a moment in the day: forty acres

Walking Nicholas a couple blocks from the house, my eyes ahead and all around, always ready to make a street cross when someone approaches, I hear the man coming up behind me. He's talking as he comes. Nicholas is stopped, sniffing. There's a family with a stroller directly across the street from me. 

"I just want my forty acres," the man says. 

I haven't turned around to see him, but I know who he is. At least I met him once before. Last November, just after Halloween. Our encounter then happened in the same way, me walking Nicholas, him coming up behind me, talking about wanting his forty acres. 

"I have rights. I'm tired of this. I'm sick of it. I should have rights." 

He's talking to no one and he's talking to anyone and he's talking to me. As I turn, our eyes connect. He stops on the sidewalk. 

"People think Black lives don't matter," he says. "I matter. I have rights." 

He's at least ten feet back from me. He's wearing his mask, too, but it's down around his chin. 

"I just want my forty acres like Lincoln promised." 

I know his reference: forty acres and a mule. A promise the Union made during the Civil War, that every family unit, including people freed from slavery, had a right to redistributed land. 

He keeps talking in a mostly uninterrupted stream, as he did the last time I encountered him. "Why they want to live together? I don't want to live together until white people can answer me this question: why should we live together if white people got no honor?" 

My body all up and down wants to flee, pull on the leash and walk the other way like I usually do if someone unmasked gets too close, but I don't. I'm not sure he'd understand why I was distancing myself, and I don't want to disrespect him. It feels more important to stay and listen. 

"White people is why we have this horrible man in the White House. White people got no honor. I want to take Gay Pride back from the white people. I'm gay and they took my rights away. " 

He says it all with no real expression on his face. When he tells me white people have no honor, he doesn't sneer at me or spit the words out. It's more like we're companions and he's sharing a simple fact. 

"My boyfriend wasn't Black, he was white Afrikaner. He called them kak, which means shit in Afrikaner." He gets an impish little twinkle when he says this. A little bend of smile in his mouth. "I call them cock-casians. Because they're dicks." 

I nod my head. I want to tell him there's truth in everything he says. At my feet, Nicholas winds the leash around my legs, looking up at the man. 

"It's because of them we got Trump. We've got to get rid of him." 

"Yes," I say, "I agree." But the prospect feels heavy and impossible. I don't have much belief in the possibility of good things anymore. 

I want to say more. Back in November, I said I was sorry. As if I could possibly adequately apologize for everything my people have done and keep doing to his people. I don't remember quite what I said. I think that when he told me, that time, that white people had no honor, I just said something flimsy like, "Can I just tell you, I am so sorry." I wonder if there's any way to say it better, or if saying it is just a white person trying to make a white person feel better, but he doesn't leave an opening.  

"You deserve respect too. it's because of you that we found the guts to speak up about our rights. You should remember that. Black, gay, women, we all deserve rights. Dykes on bikes, man! Don't forget. I have faith in you." 

He starts to walk away. Just like that. And I haven't said anything to him but yes, I agree. He steps past me and down the sidewalk. Nicholas pulls the other way on his leash.

I call after the man, "I have faith in you too." 

"Thank you, thank you," he says to the sidewalk in front of him and he continues on his way.

a moment in the day: anxiety

I'm working upstairs when Stephen calls up from the foot of the steps. "Hey. I'm going to take a walk."

I get up to hear him better. Look down the stairwell. He's smiling but his eyebrows are tweaked at the center. "I'm just feeling," he says, but I already know. "Anxious," he says. 

"Because of something specific?" I ask, but I already know. "Or just things in general?" 

He says things in general, he says the world, but then he says Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

"I thought she got out yesterday," I say. Of the hospital. An infection. 

"She's got cancer again," he says. 

That same old sinking feeling. It hits me in my center. Just another sinking feeling among many these days. Anxiety upon anxiety. Until you never know what to be worried about, when. 

Stephen goes to take his walk and I go back to my desk to get back to work, but as I sit down, there's a sound like a gun shot. 

Eleven o'clock in the morning nearly two weeks after the Fourth of July, and someone's setting off firecrackers. God bless freaking America. 

Curled up on the little bed across the room, Nicholas jumps up, his eyes on me, frozen for a moment, then leaps down onto the floor and runs for the bathroom. I follow and turn on the ceiling fan, his safety sound. He pants and shakes. I sit down next to him on his pillow and pet him, trying to give him a little comfort. 

Anxiety upon anxiety and even a dog, who knows nothing about any of it, can't catch a break.

a moment in the day: baking

I'm baking Stephen a cake for his birthday. I'm done with the measuring, the combining, the stirring, the orange-zesting, the egg-cracking, the cake is in the (toaster) oven, and now I'm working on the frosting.

Combine butter and cream cheese and mix.

Add powdered sugar one cup at a time and mix.

Add orange juice and mix.

My hands hurt from all the effing zesting. I'll never be able to be on the British Baking Show because I just couldn't handle it if I had to do any zesting.

Also not British.

All of the sudden I start to smell it. Just a hint at first and then the whole kitchen starts to fill with it. It's the Everything-Will-Be-Alright smell. I never thought of it that way before, but that's what it is, isn't it?

It's warm and sweet and safety and childhood and Mom.

I wonder if this is why so many people are baking during this pandemic.

That, and I realize that for a good long time, all I've been thinking about is, will this cake come out right, and how in the world do they make powdered sugar?