photograph by Niradj / dreamstime
Ever hear your own voice on an answering machine and think, “Gosh, surely that can’t be what I sound like — who is that?” Yes, I date myself by presenting this as an answering-machine-specific experience, but that’s how it exists in my mind: crouching down to record the outgoing message on my parents’ answering machine, on a low shelf beside one of the spiral-corded land-line phones. Then rewinding the little doll-sized cassette tape to go back and start again. There’s something discomfiting about hearing yourself, if you’re not accustomed to the sound. The gap between internally perceived reality (what I sound like in my head) and externally evident reality (what I sound like through the answering machine) is uncanny.
I feel similarly about looking back at my own writing. Re-reading the words I’ve shared in this space not so very long ago, I think, “Gosh, who was that? Surely that can’t be how I meant to put it.”
Most of the time, I get around this discomfort by simple avoidance: once the magazine is in print, it’s escaped my urge to tinker.
But I pulled our January 2020 issue off the shelf this afternoon, knowing I needed to review my essay with which that magazine opened. It was called — this makes me cackle darkly now — “2020 Vision.” The title seemed, okay, a little cheesy even then. I talked about how we were entering a new decade, a new year, with what seemed liked clear-eyed awareness of the challenges in our midst. I said we would need to work together, all of us, to adapt to whatever we might find in the dawning decade.
We’re programmed to believe we can understand what awaits us: this is what keeps us holding down jobs, attending school, paying the mortgage, seeing the doctor, and on and on. If we do these things, then we have some idea of what kind of life we’ll build and safeguard for ourselves.
Weirdest of all to me now, I told you I was writing the thing from a little apartment in Paris. My husband and I had traveled there on a packed airplane, and once we arrived, we dragged our suitcases along cobbled streets through throngs of people, none masked. I described the tourist crowds as light, relatively speaking, due to the transportation strikes that were ongoing. But we were in Paris! Everything was magical! So much of that trip would be unthinkable this winter. Not that planes don’t still fly to France; I hear you can book a seat for a song. But the simplicity of it all! To wake up and design our day’s agenda based on nothing more complex than the weather and our whims!
Those Paris days seem so sweetly innocent to me now, and so strange. Like some version of my past self I can barely contact anymore, whose voice on an answering machine sounds oddly familiar, impossibly far away.
I wanted, back in that distant time of one year ago, to believe that I had some ability to predict what would happen next. We’re programmed to believe we can understand what awaits us: this is what keeps us holding down jobs, attending school, paying the mortgage, seeing the doctor, and on and on. If we do these things, then we have some idea of what kind of life we’ll build and safeguard for ourselves. And all that is true, up to a point. We can raise the odds of getting whatever it is we want for ourselves and our families. True. And we can and should do our part for others, whatever that may be.
The sheer magnitude of what we didn’t yet know, not so very long ago, stuns me.
But this past year has been one long and usually painful reminder that we have absolutely no idea what’s coming. For instance, I could not have told you a year ago that “doing our part” would entail wearing masks, keeping distant from each other, being patient when our convenient modern system begins to fray because so many essential workers have fallen ill. I could not have predicted that just a few months later, my stepson would be sent home to complete his sixth-grade year at home, or that seventh grade would find him still spending his school days in front of a tablet. The sheer magnitude of what we didn’t yet know, not so very long ago, stuns me.
So I’m retiring from the prognostication business. I don’t much feel inclined to give advice or make earnest little suggestions, either. All I know today is that all this will be different before we’ve had much time to play back the memories we’re recording now. And I hope you can locate some measure of grace to help you and your loved ones through the days ahead.
