About fifteen months ago, I wrote a column called “The Pace of Life”, in which I celebrated, perversely, the quietude of the pandemic, as experienced with my adorable personal fiend, She Who Must Be Taunted:
“I do love being on stage, as anyone who’s seen me knows. But I also love these quiet evenings with SWMBT – the seduction of having nothing to do except stroll in the warm night air, rock gently on the porch swing watching the world go by, tuck in early to my wife’s comfy embrace. The expanse of time has been a gift – a guilty pleasure to be sure, given the havoc that the pandemic has wrought on our planet, and the wild injustices that it’s laid bare, but a gift nonetheless. I have Things To Do which have waited fifteen months for my attention: an album to record, the (eventual) return of the Somerville Songwriter Sessions, all the trips that SWMBT and I have postponed. And I truly want to do all of them. But that fifteen-month pit stop, man – it’s gonna be hard to hop back into the driver’s seat after getting to watch the world go by.”
Prescient, much?
Somebody threw a switch on Labor Day. While I’d been slowly ramping up my activities over the summer – starting on the album, seeing friends, helping to plan the fall SSS series – September 6 came in like a lion and refuses to stop roaring. SWMBT and I keep an old-fashioned paper calendar on the wall, and the last six weeks look like a billboard for a movie in worm language. I had the final percussion session for the album; I drove down to DC for a weekend to have my brother record the bass parts; we visited my nephew and other good friends in New Haven; I went out to see music; I actually had a last-minute SSS gig when Phil Henry had the audacity to get sick; I’ve returned to my actual office; dental appointments, home repair, vaccinations, rehearsals, art shows, plus an old, dear friend of both of ours who’s in Boston for these two months getting medical treatment (to which SWMBT, bless her fiendish heart, is devoting the lion’s share of her time). And yes, most of these things are things that we want to do, and are damn lucky to have the chance to do, but, yeesh.
Faithful readers may recall that SWMBT and I have twice hit the road for two-month odysseys across the country. The remarkable thing about the USA is that if you were to balance it in the middle, the eastern side would plummet to the ground, because of all the people. And when you spend a month in the Southwest, you get used to the wide open spaces, the miles without anybody around, the they’ll-never-find-our-body-ness of western America. And then, you reach the azimuth of your journey, and turn around reluctantly to make your way back to the East Coast, and you get to, say, St. Louis, with its designed-by-the-village-idiot highway system, and all of a sudden, on this side of the Mississippi, there are cars coming at you from all directions, and the chaos is momentarily unbearable – and then you drive for a couple more days, and you get to New Jersey, and it’s ten times worse.
That’s how I feel this fall. I’ve crossed the Mississippi of the pandemic, and it’s unbearable chaos here on the other side. Don’t get me wrong; I’m pretty sure – pretty sure – that if I were to spend the rest of my days watching the Celtics, reading romcoms, and snuggling with my wife, I’d find it somewhat wanting. I really don’t know how to sit still; I putter, therefore I am. But finding that Goldilocks spot where I’m neither bored senseless or tearing out what’s left of my hair is proving to be something of a challenge. And I suppose I’m out of practice, although, in retrospect, I was never very good at it.
Maybe the grass is always greener on the other side of the river of chaos.