Throatlump

I have often sung at funerals for members of my family. When my grief threatened to derail my singing voice, I soldiered on. I did a lot of acting, singing, and public speaking over the years, so I learned to set aside any pesky emotions like stage fright or grief while I was performing. That ability came in handy as various deaths and disruptions entered my life, but then it became a habit, and my emotions subsided into vague mysterious rumbles.

Sometimes I want to understand a vague emotion that has come to my attention. I consider what has been happening to me or what I have learned recently, and imagine how I would feel about that. Sometimes I have forgotten (or suppressed?) the underlying event, but the emotion reminds me that something problematic has recently come to my attention, and I reluctantly remember the problem.

I have various coping strategies for dealing with unpleasant emotions. Distracting myself with absorbing reading is my go-to default. Next up would be eating something sugary. Occasionally it might occur to me to get out for a walk, preferably in the sun. Once in a blue moon, I might try to do a little something to address the probable underlying problem by talking out or writing out how I feel about the situation.

For the last month or so, some negative emotions have hung around. They hover just out of my consciousness but close enough for me to sense them when I turn my attention in that direction. In short, whenever I attend to my throat, there’s a lump there.

I think it started when Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the race for President. My stunned sorrow at her departure has been perceptible whenever I attended to it. At the same time, the novel coronavirus was landing on our shores. As sickness and death mount, and the less-than-sublime federal response makes thing worse, and our lives are increasingly circumscribed, and returning to our prior lives becomes decreasingly likely, that lump in my throat has become basically permanent. I can feel it whenever I turn my attention that way.

So I try to slap some labels on the emotions causing my throatlump. I’m afraid that I’ll catch the virus, suffer, and die. I’m afraid that frightened people will act violently. I worry about the election in November and the survival of our democracy. I feel lucky to live where I do, and am very proud of our political leaders in the Bay Area and California. And I feel guilty about all my good luck, and challenged to somehow pay it forward.

I suspect that I’m not entirely alone in being so emotionally discombobulated. I wish whoever reads this all the clarity you can tolerate and all the comfort you need.

Physical Distancing and Social Solidarity

I've been at home since the first week of March. Already the rate of growth of Covid-19 cases is slowing here in the Bay Area, where the first stay-at-home orders were made. So we have hope that our inconveniences and sacrifices are bringing us closer to beating this virus.

My days aren't that different from what they used to be. The events I used to attend on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays have shifted to happening online. I didn't spend a lot of time outdoors before, and may even spend a little more time outdoors now. The limitations on my freedom of movement make me more appreciative of excursions that are still allowed - visits to my garden and walking in the neighborhood with a friend once or twice a week.

To express my gratitude for my blessings, I feel impelled to use some of my time at home for self-care. So I've been journaling and doing my little bit of Tai Chi for a couple of weeks now. More recently, I've added meditating and participating in Zoomed Always Active classes from my neighborhood senior center.  I'd been meaning to try a class for many months, but hadn't been willing to drag my body there. Now, with the class as close as my computer, I have attended four classes, and plan to continue attending thrice a week. As an obese and sedentary person, I inched my way into the aerobic part of the session as I gradually figured out what parts of the program not to do. Next week I will finally see what the strength-training part of the session is like.

I also feel impelled to build connections with others, to help me and my friends stay sane and well. I chat on the phone or Facebook Messenger several times a day, when I begin to feel isolated. Sometimes friends call or email me. Following a prompt on Next Door, I put a teddy bear in my window for neighborhood kids to find in their outdoor treasure hunts. I appreciate neighbors' recommendation of restaurants that are still open for takeout or delivery.

The sunshine has gone away for the weekend, and my solar-powered emotions are sinking. I'm already losing the impetus to reach out for videochats. Which means I should stop typing and just do it. Signing out.

A Prayer for Sheltering in Place

We are grateful for our homes, and we seek ways to help the homeless.

We are grateful that we have the means to keep ourselves fed, and we seek ways to help the hungry.

We are grateful that we can reach out to others by phone, email, and videochat, and we find ourselves reaching out to people from our past.

We are grateful for everyone who takes stay at home orders seriously, and we seek to help those who work in essential jobs for our sake.

We are especially grateful for first responders and health care providers who risk their lives to help save ours, and we try to get them all the protective equipment they need.

We are grateful that a flood of information about the plague is at our fingertips, and we evaluate extreme messages for validity before we share them with anyone else.

We are grateful for the beauties of nature, and we will try to maintain the healing that is coming to the environment because of our self-confinement.

We are grateful for our health, and we pray that our small sacrifice will help slow down the spread of this pestilence.

Notes from My Shelter

So I've been mostly confined to home by government edict and sensible self-preservation for a week or so. As a mildly agoraphobic introvert, I'm relieved to be encouraged to isolate rather than guilt-tripped for doing so.

That said, I'm spending lots of time online. I find that the internet is filled with every possible reaction to our situation: angry rants, snarky humor, and resources for the homebound, which include beautiful images and sounds, lists of what to buy, recipes, uplifting thoughts, free access to concerts, museums, live animal streams, you name it.

I've been sharing the memes I find cathartic or otherwise helpful, and am honored when my friends like them or share them to their friends.

One of the most helpful articles said that it helps with stress and anxiety if you find some creative outlet or other means of achievement. So that's why I got back into posting here. I also restarted writing in my journal; my thoughts are important to me, and if I can't share them with others in person, I can at least commit them to writing.

Another article suggested we replace the forms of contact currently forbidden with others still available: a handshake for a phone call, a hug for an email, a smile for a video chat. So I've been phoning and video phoning people I haven't talked to in months. I put together a Facebook Messenger group so members of the Tuesday morning Koffee Klatch can virtually check in via video chat. It is heartening and nourishing to see each others' lovely faces again, and hear each others' voices.

That's all I got for now. Stay safe out there.

The Plush Owl

It peered down at me from the top shelf of the convenience store in the lobby of my office building. I looked back at it many times before succumbing to its allure.

The white plush owl with sand-colored wings, nose, and toes drew my attention often. Which was very often indeed, because I shopped in the store most work days. Its dark eyes were framed by inverted “V”s, leavening its apparent wisdom with a soupҫon of sorrow or anxiety.

I was reading Harry Potter during some of the years I worked in that building, but I don’t remember thinking of the owl as Hedwig. Plush owls aren’t very good at delivering messages. I thought of the owl as an embodiment of wisdom and calm, which I hoped she would share with me. At the very least, she would be something soft to clutch when the world seemed too much.

I don’t remember what I said to the clerk when I bought the bird, but given my penchant for honesty, I can be fairly sure that I didn’t lie about it being a gift for some youngster. I may have juvenile tastes, but at least I own them fair and square.

Nowadays she peers down at me from the top of the entertainment unit in my living room. Except for right now, when I have placed her on the table where I’m writing, for inspiration.

If I were to give her a name, what would it be? I am sure that she is female. I am a devout female chauvinist, so I wouldn’t be attracted by a male entity. Minerva might work, since the owl is her symbol. Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom, medicine, the arts, poetry, and handicrafts. I could hardly choose a better patroness to preside over my retirement. I’ve been seeking to artfully write and publish whatever scraps of wisdom I’ve acquired in my life. As my body ages, medical wisdom and the willingness to apply it come in handy. Maybe I’ll call my owl Minerva.

I hug her and close my eyes. There is a lump in my throat and angry sorrow in my chest over the departure of Elizabeth Warren from the presidential campaign. It helps a little that I have plenty of company feeling the same way. The situation reignites the gut-punch of Trump’s 2016 victory. Only misogyny explains why people would have voted for that mendacious, hateful, incompetent, self-absorbed, corrupt whiner instead of for the most qualified person who ever ran for the job. Lord knows the other Democratic candidates this year are immeasurably superior to Trump, but the standards applied to women candidates are also immeasurably stricter than those applied to men. It is still incontrovertible that a woman must be twice as good as a man to be thought even half as good.

Anyway, I hug Minerva, feel the lump in my throat, and wish for a good cry to wash the lump away.

The Yarn of My Life

I was slow learning to knit as a child. The holidays I spent with my mother were too short and too filled with family adventures for her instruction to take root. My brother had no interest in knitting, so we couldn’t knit as a family. Our holiday crafts were assembling plastic models of airplanes, knights, and monsters, and painting by numbers. So the little knitting instruction she gave me in those years didn’t stick very well.

Most of the year Eric and I lived with out paternal grandparents. Grandma also knitted, and her teaching stuck better, but then she died when I was nine years old. Grandpa Lou was not a knitter, but Great Aunt Anne was. She took up the challenge of continuing my training, also without much success.

I knitted a necktie for my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Barbush. It was basically the right shape, but the yarn and needles were way too big and the straight knitting stitch was way too lumpy for the finished product to even resemble a necktie. Nevertheless, Mr. Barbush actually wore it the day of the gift, and thereby won much merit, good karma, and jewels in his crown.

Mother knitted every family member a turtleneck sweater one Christmas. Each sweater had triangles in a contrasting color knitted into the fabric around the neck and shoulders. The kids’ version had one row of triangles, and the larger ones for adults had two rows. They were knitted of sturdy wool, and were much too warm most of the time. As I grew up, the knitted fabric tried to adjust to me, growing wider (and correspondingly shorter) over the years, but eventually I could no longer get into it.

These sweaters had been knitted in the round, on four double-pointed knitting needles. This technique had too many moving parts for me to manage at that time. Mother tried to encourage me with stories about how my father knitted himself socks that way, anchoring one end of a needle in his belly button when it threatened to get away from him.

She did succeed in teaching me a complicated stitch that created rows of knotted loops. She said it was intended for creating furry fabric, by cutting the loops in half and brushing the ends until fluffy. I couldn’t bring myself to cut the loops; I really liked the texture of the rows of densely packed loops. The resulting fabric was very thick and warm. I decided to knit myself an afghan this way. However, I knew nothing about designing a pattern to result in a particular knitted shape. I just bought a ball of each color and type of yarn that appealed to me, and knitted the same arbitrary number of stitches in each row until the ball ran out. Since I had paid no attention to the contents or weight of the yarn, the balls were of varying weights and lengths. So I wound up with around 40 rectangles of various lengths and widths. I had to sort them into rows of approximately the same length before sewing the pieces together. The result was a small afghan of many colors and textures, but, boy, was it warm.

During my high school years when I lived with Mother, she guided me through every stitch of a complicated pattern for a fisherman’s sweater. She had to show me every step at least once, but I finally succeeded in finishing the sweater correctly. It was a tour de force, and I was very proud.

Musical Strangers

It must have been about 1985 when I started attending the recorder workshop at Dominican College in San Rafael. I learned about the early music workshops from my voice teacher, but was more interested in playing recorders with other people than singing. Getting a group of recorders to sound fairly good is a lot easier than tuning up a group of singers. If you put your fingers on the right holes and don’t wildly underblow or overblow, the right notes will come out.

I had come roaring out of the closet after the Milk/Moscone murders. I was out to everyone except for relatives of my grandparents’ generation, and they probably suspected.

So when I decided to spend a musical week with a group of strangers, my question was not whether I would come out to them, but rather how and when. The workshop was run by the San Francisco Early Music Society, so I didn’t expect to meet much homophobia. After all, San Francisco is the city where the love that dare not speak its name never shuts up. Had I known how many of the workshoppers came from other states and other countries, I might have been less optimistic. In retrospect, though, it seems to me that they had chosen to come to our turf, so they were in no position to complain about local mores.

I don’t remember my deliberations, but I decided to make a bold statement on arrival and let the chips fall where they may. I was the proud possessor of one T-shirt advertising my membership in the Pacific Lesbian and Gay Singers, and another one for the (imaginary) Lesbian National Forest. I would wear one of these explicit T-shirts the first day of the session, and let them do my speaking for me.

Which is how I found other lesbians in the group, including the workshop director, Frances. We looked familiar to each other and finally figured out that we had been classmates in the music program at U.C.L.A. a decade or so earlier. Later in the week, an older couple quietly made themselves known to me. Turns out, we are everywhere! I got no negative comments, and never noticed any unfriendly expressions. If you knew your fingerings and could keep up with the other players, you were in. Period.