It's Been a January for Me

A local city two towns south of us, known as Sunnyvale, is determined to do something about an abundance of crows that have gathered in such numbers that the Sunnyvale sky is said to be covered in black clouds. Elected leaders decide to scare off the crows by pointing green lasers at them to simulate the eyes of predators, and by playing loud music to "freak them out." Suddenly, we now have crows back here in our trees in Palo Alto.

Sheds further light on this important new term "supply chain."

Which brings me to the cargo ship bound for the U.S. from Singapore that encountered such turbulent weather and high seas that a bunch of its massive containers fell overboard and sank into the vast ocean deep. Lost items include highly anticipated cookbooks that will have to be reprinted. Meanwhile their publication date is pushed back for months.

The lost cargo and returned crows somehow feel like metaphors for our times, although my mind can't seem to connect those dots for you right now which I'll just chalk up to January. By which I mean the second January of this damn pandemic. Truth be told, for much of the pandemic, my 82 year old mother has loudly hissed at the crows that lounge about and squawk from our trees, going so far as to bang pipes against the metal frame of the abandoned hammock out in the yard to get them to move on. She might be why they flew down to Sunnyvale in the first place, so I can't exactly complain that they're back.

How are YOU doing?

Two Fridays ago, I know I've already blown a major work deadline for the following Monday, with no better excuse than I need a break. On said Monday, instead of trying to make a bit of headway with said work, I spend an hour and fifteen minutes with fellow authors, all of whom are dear friends with kids of their own, and many of whom are also mental health clinicians. When one of them says when is someone going to ask us how WE are, we look at each other with eyes-wide-open silence. I can't tear myself away from the raw honesty.

The children are sad and scared and lonely and are creating depressive artwork and articulating suicidal ideation. The teachers are out sick and being yelled at by parents or by their school boards. The elected leaders are being yelled at too. The elders are alone and mystified by Zoom and harassed by scammers who infiltrate their computers and phones. We, who are somewhere between the age of child and elder, hold the fraying threads of home and work and homework and modified school situations and mental health breakdowns and quarantines and isolation and school refusals and broken appliances and the post office offering testing for a virus our relatives may or may not care about and relatives who need us while our primary relationships, if we have them, go to seed like untended fields, and if we don't have them, we are the most alone people of all, and if we are single parents we are superheroes in tattered capes. A woman calls my hotline to say "I woke up sobbing." A woman DMs me to say her teenage daughter has lost six classmates in the past year. Mothers in Boston do a primal scream. Yet the bosses come up with their inane plans for us to return to in-person work, and all we can think is Don't you realize we're humans?

My reserves are depleted, how bout you? Human interaction is the most fortifying juice for humans, so, twenty-two months into the life of a virus that would like to kill us, we keep ourselves inside, at a distance, masked on a never-ending high alert for anything that might encroach upon our safety and that of our loved ones. Instead of being nourished by each other and the things humans do together, we are parched and dry and brittle. And fragile.

I realize that I probably blew my Monday deadline because I really hope this project will be successful. Therefore I am terrified to start it. Afraid to invest in a future. Afraid to say I want.

How bout you?

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📸 Cover Photo Credit: Getty Images/Malte Mueller/fStop

✍🏻 Cartoon by Gemma Correll