Dear Coco: Familiar Streets During Quarantine

Friday 4/24/20—Quarantine Day 41

Dear Coco,

How are you doing?

That’s a loaded question, these days, I know. 

I don’t like being asked. It panics me. It feels like work, trying to sort out an honest answer, to untangle the messy truth. The truth is always somewhere in the middle of oppositions:

Good and bad.

Happy and sad.

Hopeful and afraid.

Content and antsy.

How am I? I am every feeling, every thought, every mood. I am inside out, but I am not outside at all, ever, except for in the evening, when the sun is going down, and Nathan and I venture out into the neighborhood for our daily 3 to 4 mile walk.

Then I am outside, and the world feels very close and familiar. Nostalgic. Like childhood. 

I can remember what it was like to play in the streets of my very small farm town in the evening, with no worries about traffic, because there was no traffic. Families were at home. Dads were home from work, moms were making dinner. It was very old-fashioned, imperfect, flawed in so many ways, but I didn’t have to know that yet. All I had to know was that it was time to come home once the street lights turned on. Park the bike in the garage or by the side of the house or in the backyard. Toss the sneakers off at the front door so as not to track dirt on the carpet. Check what Mom was cooking for dinner. Hear Dad singing “Hey Good Lookin’” to Mom. Understand the sweetness of the moment, even though parents were generally embarrassing.

At the dinner table, saying grace, and getting to know each other again after a morning and afternoon apart. 

“How was your day?”

We’d take turns around the table, giving our respective answers. The answers were always quite simple, and usually the same. Work at the ranch was busy for Dad. Mom was was learning to make wreaths and potty-training Megan. I was reading another Nancy Drew book. Of course, answers became more complex when I reached adolescence and started blowing dinnertime up with fits of untamed shock and rage at having to loosen my grip on a dissolving childhood.

Perhaps that’s when it first started to awaken in me: the slow, sorrowful realization that I had been taking this simple freedom and family and life for granted. I had not understood it’s preciousness.

Now, decades later, I am the age my parents were then, and I am taking nothing for granted because I’ve lived the difference. I’ve lived an ambitious, unsatisfying, dizzying race of a life. I’ve exhausted myself, I’ve survived emotional and physical breakdowns. I’ve lost jobs, relationships, dreams, energy, inspiration, and sometimes I’ve lost hope.

But there is a little hope waking up quietly, bashfully within me tonight as I take a slow stroll through my neighborhood which, two months ago, could feel like a freeway for all the speeding traffic and honking horns. So many drivers heading god knows where—perhaps the gym, the mall, the grocery store, the bar, back to work. If anyone had asked them where and why, they would have been very assured of its importance. Certainly much more important than home.

Tonight is different on these streets, because the world is on lockdown, so there is nowhere for anyone to go. As Nathan and I walk, the streets belong to us, just as they did when we were teenagers, driving around our small towns in the middle of the night with nowhere to go and a lot of trouble to get into. Parents were asleep and their world was ours for the taking.

Tonight I don't want to take anything. I only want to feel everything. I want to feel and remember. I want to remember the comfort of knowing families were at home together, eating dinner. Playing games. Fighting over the remote control. Getting sick of each other. Loving each other. Laughing at Dad for laughing at his own jokes. Hoping desperately that Mom would just say “yes” and not “we’ll see.” There was always a whole lot of noise happening on the inside. But outside, the hum of that inner world was a soft hum, purring, “Everyone is where they are supposed to be.”

I know it’s an idealistic, selective memory of an imperfect childhood in an imperfect world. I’m not under any illusion of “the good old days.” Things are imperfect, still. There is more loss, fear, uncertainty and trauma unfolding around us than I could even begin to list. The list would be haunting and not helpful.

All I mean, is that in the evenings I’ve been going for quiet walks around the neighborhood with my husband, and remembering what life felt like before I knew what fear was. I am reacquainting myself with a sense of home. A place to return to, rather than constantly try to escape from. It feels familiar, close, gentle.

So even within the fear of this day, I am able to feel a few moments of lightness and freedom. It makes me hopeful. It’s a hope I want to learn from.

I worry that when the pandemic resolves itself, and we start to venture back outside, we’ll surrender that gentle quiet to the unrelenting roar of “progress.” I don’t know if I can survive life on a freeway again, now that I remember how it can be.

Maybe this is how you are feeling too?

Or maybe it’s just me.

Magnolia Street at dusk, Eastside Costa Mesa,.