Day 7: no more going outside

Seth persuaded me to stop going out for walks and groceries. When he was a teenager, wheedling for more time with the car, I told him I wasn’t worried about his driving but about the carelessness of others. He says he’s confident I’m keeping social distance, but he doesn’t trust the others out there, and every time I leave the building I could return infected.

All over the globe, each of us decides how to be wise, how to protect others and spare our loved ones anxiety. Margie, also confined to her apartment, tells me her son vacationing in Ethiopia has returned to work. He has a private practice, a hospital practice, and an old age home to care for in Manhattan, and he was miserable on vacation, worrying about his patients and colleagues. 

In FaceTime school, our topics were words and stones. I introduced Bella to one of my favorite writers with a poem that works on multiple layers of understanding. I'm moving it to the end of this piece because when I finish it, I don't want anything else right away.

I asked Evan for a story about something green that eats something red and got a friendly swamp monster who mistook a red sports car for a bag of apples and broke his teeth. Priceless.

I was spun silly with joy by a video call from poets Kevin Maryland and Demarish Wyllie. Hadn’t heard from them in thirteen years. Demarish is finishing up a Master’s degree in counseling, and Kevin is “almost famous,” working in construction and performing spoken word poetry, writing hiphop and R&B lyrics. They wanted to be sure their old teacher is diggity. I said I am. Reconnecting with two of my all-time favorite students, I’m diggity big-time.

I can have too much connectivity, so thank you, bless you all, bows and blown kisses for the comments et cetera, but comments off so I can write something maybe.

Daddy Longlegs

Here, on fine long legs springy as steel, 
a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill
that skims along over the basement floor
wrapped up in a simple obsession. 
Eight legs reach out like the master ribs
of a web in which some thought is caught
dead center in its own small world,
a thought so far from the touch of things
that we can only guess at it. If mine,
it would be the secret dream
of walking alone across the floor of my life
with an easy grace, and with love enough
to live on at the center of myself.
—Ted Kooser.