Time is on your Side

A few days ago, I read a blog post about the pandemic. I usually avoid them like, ahem, the plague. The nasty bug is still with us and will be for a long time, and I don’t need to doom scroll about it, but what the author wrote made me think. He compared the Covid years to dog years, said he felt like he aged super-fast, saw himself much older, and asked if the ordeal hit his readers the same way. Well … I have more gray hair, a few more wrinkles, a couple of pounds to shed. Things that I believe would have happened no matter what. But dog years? 365 days times 2.5 years times seven? I don’t think so. Maybe the writer was using poetic license. Maybe he truly feels that way. There might be as many stories about this 2-3 years span as there are people on the planet. A global event with a wide array of individual experiences. Depending on your age, your health, where you live, where you work, or don’t work, your family and friends or lack of them, children or not, the worries within and beyond, the past that shaped you … it’s deeply personal.

Like the perception of time.

The author of the blog felt caught in some kind of accelerator. The nurses and doctors that raced to get a grip on the emergency would have experienced something similar, a hamster wheel spinning out of control, an exhausting run with no finish line in sight. For them, there was never enough time to do all that needed to be done.

From where I was, living in the country, six miles from a grocery store, with a few neighbors you wave at when they pass you on the road, time seemed to grind to a halt. It was that old mantel clock that needs to be wound up with a key. If you don’t keep up with it, the wheels turn slower and slower, the hands get further and further behind, and the clock eventually stops.

Early March 2020, my husband, Jim, got on a plane. It was full, no empty middle seats. When I joined him a few days later, the flight was half full. When we came back home, about a week after Jim’s trip, it might have been at 20%. Houston airport echoed with the footsteps of rare passengers, the empty voice of a recorded message, a buzz of air conditioning.

The mantel clock had stopped. Nobody had the key. Time stood still.

There was a flurry of activity as people rushed to get supplies. Remember the toilet paper frenzy? Then stores started running out of stuff. And time stood still again under a thick cloud of uncertainty. A pall of anxiety (that will age you for sure) and general fatigue set in.

After three years some of the foreboding remains. I used to kiss people on the cheek, not air-kisses, real ones, two in France, three in Belgium (yes, I know, Americans find it weird). I don’t do that anymore. I don’t even shake hands. Antiseptic wipes are a must. Crowds make me nervous—we like live music, so that requires some careful positioning in the concert venue. The last movie I saw in the theater was Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman in 2019. Granted, it was a long one, it probably counts double! No idea when I’ll wander into a big screen multiplex again, if there are any left. Maybe the next Scorsese in October, that would close the loop nicely.

I tend to tiptoe around my fellow humans now. It didn’t use to be like that. Things will eventually loosen up, it’ll take a while.

Anyway, in 2020 we were at a full stop, with no notion of how long the interruption might last.

Confession, for those of you that don’t know me well, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool introvert. You’d think that having to keep my distances from people wouldn’t be a huge imposition. The truth is that after a few weeks I started getting fidgety. People and places are a writer’s inspiration. Locked up with minimal interactions, the mind starts swirling in the void, thoughts bump against the cage. There’s only so much of your cud you can chew. Travel had always been a source of ideas and that was not in the cards anymore. Time was stifling.

I had to do something and get out of this externally imposed blankness.

I decided to join a writing class. Thinking: if I can’t go anywhere, I might as well use the time to learn something. Following the same logic, lots of people started baking bread. I hadn’t taken a class in years. My previous attempts at writing workshops had mixed results. A one-year, in person, class in Brussels was fantastic. Productive and exhausting. I wrote like a girl possessed. The beginning of a novel (still unpublished, somewhat cannibalized), a bunch of stories, a one-act play, a script for a short film written as a group ... Put a green check mark next to that experience. Another class, in Houston, was a huge disappointment. The teacher expected introspective literary stuff and I love plot and characters. We didn’t connect. Strike out that one.

This class, as the pandemic raged, was online, lasted a couple of weeks, and was a ton of fun. Over the next year, I took two more, with different outfits, all mind opening. Most of the stories I worked on during that period have now been published. I also made virtual friends and we decided to set up a small writing group. We convened, remote, once a month for a year. Putting your writing in front of complete strangers is a sobering experience that I highly recommend. Writers tend to get insular and it isn’t healthy. The writing class led to more opportunities. Students wanted to keep in touch and that meant being more active on social media (argh!). I hesitated but it ended up being a good thing. I found beta readers who became friends, magazines that opened stories submissions, fellow writers who shared their work. A community for a time of woe. Maybe these interactions would have happened without the constraints of the pandemic. Maybe not.

Let’s say that circumstances forced my hand, encouraged me to try new things, and I’m grateful for the doors that opened when I couldn’t leave the house. It has even led me to slinging words on Substack. Who would have thought ...

Now it’s your turn. What did these strange times mean for you? Did you poke out of your comfort zone, find a new hobby or passion, learn stuff, pick up that guitar that was gathering dust? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.