Wally looks up: “Dad, how about nap time.” He jumps up, tucks in, and drifts off.
I feel his little belly with each inhale and exhale. What a great sleeper. Prior to drifting off, I reflect on the last 48 hours — my 19th year anniversary at this stop, to the day.
My desk has been cleared of the work phone, the headset, the zoom lamp.
I turn on my PC to find Corporate Security has wiped all of my corporate apps and my system access. Just like that, gone!
The hum of 100-200 emails a day, conference calls, zoom calls, phone calls, road trips, presentations, strategy sessions, client meetings, staff meetings, back-and-forth commutes, etc etc etc has gone silent.
19 years. Gemini estimates the production and ingestion of 1 million emails requiring 1/2 Terabyte of storage.
“What’s next?”
“I can’t see you sitting still for long.”
I stare at the screen. My fingers tap on the desk, habitually reaching for the keyboard. No task. No task. No Task. No Task.
“How do you feel?”
Right now? Unsteady.
“So what’s the plan.”
(Try to)
“Sit still and let the world do the moving.” (Stegner)
It’s 6:15 a.m, 61° F with light rain, on a dreary Friday morning.
61° F (!) in August, after several weeks of blistering heat, imagine that. I lift my face to the sky, and let the cool morning breeze and light rain work themselves into my bones.
I cracked open a new book last night, Linn Ullmann’s “Girl, 1983.” Hypnotic scenes drift in and out as I walk.
But sometimes there’s a blessed respite – like a sudden breath of cool wind from an open window…I shook the duvets and smoothed the sheets, tidied the bedside table, opened the window wide and flung the curtains apart. I wanted air and light to stream in to where I lay in the white linen – and sounds that told of a city that was awake. (Linn Ullmann)
It’s been 1,914 consecutive (almost) days on this morning walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
And even though I’ve been walking in this same park, on the same track for 1,914 consecutive days (like 5.25 years now), I’ve stepped foot in the Cove Island Park Wildlife Sanctuary, maybe 10x. This small refuge is less than 1000 feet from where I park my car at the entrance of Cove Island Park.
I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment millions of human beings are standing at crossroads and intersections, in jungles and deserts, showing each other where to turn, what the right way is, which direction. They explain exactly where to go, what is the quickest way to get there, when to stop and ask again. There, over there. The second turnoff, not the first, and from there left or right, near the white house, by the oak tree. They explain with excited voices, with a wave of the hand and a nod of the head: There, over there, not that there, the other there, as in some ancient rite. This too is a new religion. I believe with perfect faith, that at this very moment.
— Yehuda Amichai, from “I Wasn’t One of the Six Million: And What Is My Life Span? Open Closed Open” in “Open Closed Open: Poems.” Translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. (Harcourt, 2000)
It was only then I could viscerally remember what faith had felt like—this bright feeling in the nerves, a sense of being porous and airy. Reality was clear.
NY Times Book Review: June 15, 2025 – A Relationship Breaks in Two. So Does the Book That Explains Why.Catherine Lacey’s “The Möbius Book” is both an elliptical novella and a seething memoir. Decoding the connections is at once frustrating and exhilarating.
My friend Francis couldn’t play the piano, couldn’t or simply wouldn’t, wouldn’t or just wasn’t, and whatever the reason was I didn’t like the sound of it, so we made a bargain: if he could not play for himself, I would call him every morning and he would play the piano for me. It would be my job to listen and his job to play, a mutual task, as I needed obligations, and he needed to leave his mind and return to his hands… Each of my calls with Francis began the same way—brief hellos, how are you feeling, then one of us would ask the other whether they were ready, and the reply was always the same. We were always ready. I had pictured myself writing as Francis played scales or practiced songs, but for the first few days his hands hardly remembered the keys, and I had nothing to work on, no thoughts worth keeping, hardly any thoughts at all. He played slowly, sometimes with a metronome, shards of chords or songs in parts for no more than a few minutes, but after a week he began, as if by some miracle, to sing, and I muted myself and folded onto the floor to cry, not for him and not for myself and not for anything other than the fact that any pattern can be broken, that there is no end of patterns breaking down. Weeks went by and months went by, and I called him from different cities, different rooms, and over time he could play a little longer, a little freer, songs he knew by heart and songs he was still trying to write. It was as easy as it was unusual, this distant company, this regular puncturing of our tendencies toward solitude and shut doors…
But then I thought of the mornings when Francis fumbled a note or fell short of his falsetto and how he used to shyly apologize, and how over time he stopped saying he was sorry and simply continued, allowing the errors to live.
NY Times Book Review: June 15, 2025 – A Relationship Breaks in Two. So Does the Book That Explains Why.Catherine Lacey’s “The Möbius Book” is both an elliptical novella and a seething memoir. Decoding the connections is at once frustrating and exhilarating.
