COVID-Diary, Week Eight

As we enter the—what is it, anyway, the seventh week of stay-home/lock-down or the seventeenth?—well, whatever week this is (for the record, it’s the eighth: Governor Cuomo’s original state-of-emergency declaration was on March 7), as we enter this interminable period of unsatisfying stillness (if it were only possible, I think I’ve become even less good at Zen-style quietude in the service of inward-directly insight than previously), as we move forward towards the great goal of beating this damned thing without actually moving at all, I think I’ve had enough. (My prose is suffering too: that last sentence is only theoretically possible because it clearly does exist, not because it should.) I think we all have. And so, as we enter the third month (that actually is correct) of doing something by doing nothing, of moving forward by remaining in place, of feeling daring when we venture forth to the grocery to buy a package of cookies or a tomato (I bought several just a few days ago and have hardly calmed down since—big, red, juicy ones too: delicious and hopeful non-poisonous, perfect for making into delicious and hopefully non-poisonous sauce), as we do this thing that Governor Cuomo wants us all to do to make our state safe—and our county and the tiny piece of it we call home and in which we once used to interact with our neighbors and friends in physical space rather than in the context of semi-real virtual reality (and who are we really kidding?) projected on our computer screens—as we stick to the rules of non-interaction with the world other than when we venture forth to buy staples (in an amusing aside, I actually went to Staples the other day and bought, among other things, a package of staples), as we do The Right Thing and make ourselves and each other, ideally, safe, we need to be more proud of this massive effort we have undertaken than we are irritated by the way it has impacted on our former lives, versions of existence in which buying a tomato was an ordinary and uninteresting chore instead of a daring and death-defying act of survivalism. I suppose my mood is coming through in my prose. And it’s true: I actually am feeling a little all-over-the-place these days. The sauce, by the way, was delicious, even if served—regretfully but also responsibly—on our last package of Pesach pasta.

It would be easy to be cynical as we try to do something by doing nothing. Are we, to quote myself, like demented warriors trying to break into a walled city by throwing snowflakes at its ramparts? Or—as we all prefer to think—are we doing precisely the right thing by standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the actual physicians, nurses and health care workers on the front lines—those specific people for whose wellbeing and whose safety we pray daily on our Shelter Rock Zoom platform—are we standing with those people by in our own way doing our part to wrestle the pandemic to the ground and own it in the precise way it has so far managed instead to own us? Surely, that latter option must be the correct one. And yet there’s a little bit of me seated on both sides of that specific aisle. To speak wholly honestly, I suppose I don’t really know what to think. The numbers seem slightly encouraging just lately. But that has to be weighed against the fact that 337 New Yorkers died last Sunday alone of COVID-19, bringing the state-wide total of those lost to the pandemic to 17,303. By the time you read this, of course, that number will be higher. By hundreds.

And so I present myself this week in conflict…with myself: optimistic and pessimistic, hopeful and worried, fearful and (sometimes, although mostly not so much) fearless, cynical and incredibly impressed by what we have done in only a few weeks to adapt to a new normal that none of us saw coming.

I spent two and a half hours this week watching—and loving—the 90^th birthday tribute to Stephen Sondheim on youtube. (Click here if you haven’t watched dozens of Broadway’s greatest stars singing a broad, cleverly-chosen selection of Broadway’s greatest composer’s best songs and I think I can promise that you won’t be disappointed.) I’ve been a fan my whole life, or at least ever since the ten-year-old me was taken by my parents to see A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the Mark Hellinger Theater. (That was not my first Broadway show, however—my grandmother took me to see My Fair Lady when I was even younger than that—nor was it Sondheim’s: West Side Story and Gypsy were both earlier, but Funny Thing was the first huge hit for which Sondheim wrote both the music and the lyrics.)

Sondheim is our national muse of ambiguity. Not by any means a cynic, his lyrics more than anything else express a deep sense of ambivalence about…basically about everything: about love, marriage, and relationships in general; about friendship; about the value of work; about the nature of art and artistic creation; about the power of music; about the inviolate nature of those human relationships widely deemed to be the ones that simply cannot dissolve in irritation or pique, or even in fully justifiable rage—the ones between parents and children, between siblings, between the kind of best friends who truly are each other’s soulmates, between lovers, etc. That’s what I hear the most clearly, for example, when doomed Tony, blissfully unaware that he won’t live out the day, sings out that he’s certain there’s a miracle due, one that’s gonna come true, one that’s he's sure is coming to him even before he actually meets Maria. And it’s what I hear when the baker’s wife in Into the Woods, who will also not live out the day, sings about her decision to return to her husband after her brief affair with the prince, when she opts for “or” instead of “and” and decides to “let the moment go / don’t forget it for a moment though / just remembering you’ve had an ‘and’ when you’re back to ‘or’ makes the ‘or’ mean more than it did before.” And it’s what I hear when the maid sings out—I think I somehow understood this, by the way, even as a naïve twenty-one-year-old watching A Little Night Music for the first time—when she sings out that “it’s a very short road from the pinch and the punch to the paunch and the pouch and the pension / it’s a very short road to the ten thousandth lunch and the belch and the grouch and the sigh.”

None of those sentiments is at all foreign to me. You do make your decisions in life and then live with the consequences. You do eventually have to choose “or” over “and.” You basically never know what’s about to happen. And it really does all fly by in the flash of an eye.

But there’s also a different side of me, one that also keeps jumping out at me from the cupboard these days: the one of non-ambivalence, of commitment undertaken and maintained, of values somehow becoming more, not less, firmly held as I grow older. Someone sent me a video created by the Masorti Movement—the Israeli version of Conservative Judaism—in which are intertwined the words of the 126^th psalm (“those who sow in tears shall reap in joy / those who go forth weeping bearing seeds for sowing shall return shouting with joy as they carry their ripe sheaves back home”), the words of Hatikvah (“as long as the Jewish spirit yearns deep in the heart…then our two-thousand-year-old hope to be a free people in our own land will be realized and not come to naught”), and the words of Saul Tchernikhovky’s famous short poem “Laugh, Laugh at My Dreams” (“Go, make fun of me for believing in humankind / for I even believe in you / and, indeed, for as long as my soul yearns to be free / I shall not sell it out for a calf of gold”). I’m usually a bit impervious to that kind of video, but I actually found myself moved—and incredibly so—by its sincerity, by the profundity of its single idea, and by the way it so perfectly framed the sentiments that co-exist in my own heart with the Sondheimian ambivalence about the universe referenced above. (To see the video for yourself, click here and you’ll see what I mean.)

Do I have to choose? This week brought more horribleness, more sickness, and more death. But it also brought us Yom Hazikkaron, the day of remembrance on which we recall the 23,816 men and women of the Israel Defense Forces who gave their lives in the defense of the State of Israel since statehood was declared in 1948, and Yom Ha-atzma·ut, the seventy-second anniversary of Israeli independence. My native cynicism dissolves in the contemplation of both those days and is replaced by a deep sense of purpose, commitment, and faith. There will always be a bit of Sondheim in my soul, which is probably a good thing. (I heard that. And, yes, I am being ambivalent about ambivalence. How amusing!) But, at least this week, I feel that part of me overwhelmed by other sentiments featured on my constellation of personal emotions, on my private zodiac—and faith and hope foremost among them—as I look out at the trees suddenly in full bloom all around and feel inspired to look neither to the past nor to the side, but to the future.