I used to have a recurring dream about losing my purse. The purse I haven’t touched since early March now seems vestigial, as if the social identity I used to have nightmares about misplacing has finally outlasted its relevance. No keys, bank card. These days, I only descend my front steps, furtive and masked, to let my dog pee.
My house feels like a spaceship sealing me with my shelter-in-place family (including my ex-husband, twenty-year-old daughter, her partner, Zoe, and my partner, Rich.) Along with my three pets, we share a mostly comfortable domesticity we couldn’t be more grateful for. Yet, who knew how exquisite our former routines were? Sirens meant fire or crime, not contagion. Now my fellow pandeminauts exchange dinnertime fantasies about our first casual meal out of lockdown—in six months, a year? Nothing fancy, a sloppy sandwich in our local bar, as long as it has survived as well? A street slice? It’s like porn to imagine emerging, unmasked, to the pavement.
My most human-feeling time of day is at seven, when I open a window to join in the whoops and applause for those who risk their health to rescue us. I’m not religious, but this noisemaking feels holy: voices keening from directions one can’t pinpoint, pots clattering, my fellow-shut-ins howling with gratitude and admiration for the Essentials. We can’t survive this alone. And for two or three minutes, I’m buoyed by this crying out with other people. By delight when I spot where the cheering is coming from: a serene-looking young woman framed in the window across from us, and once, my own daughter, directly above me, steadily whacking her drumsticks. (She’s a percussionist.)
With jellyfish swimming through Venice in the wake of our retreat, Jerusalem open to foxes, I wonder if it isn’t time for us to submit to this erasure for the sake of life itself? Though the evening chorale reminds me of what is unique about our species, so creative in healing each other and expressive in our gratitude and terror. This, documented by the New York Times, is the one of most beautiful spontaneous urban performances I’ve seen.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/nyregion/nyc-7pm-cheer-thank-you-coronavirus.h