Memories

Pandemic Diary: Just a Box of Rain

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry.
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
—T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets

* * * *
One day, he decided to read the pages that I’d left next to my typewriter. I was a literature major in graduate school, and I had just pounded out some pages about “The Waste Land” for a summer T. S. Eliot seminar. “I don’t understand anything you wrote, but it sounds like you know what you’re taking about,” my dad said with a chuckle.

My dad had a pretty good chuckle, just so you know. Chuckles are difficult to rank because they receive little attention in the universe of laughs, but they are worth a note. My dad’s chuckle was never one that claimed he knew more than the person with whom he was speaking, or more than anyone else, for that matter. It was an honest assessment of how amused he was at the moment, which I realize now was one way that told us his full-bodied laughter was true and truly felt.

I did not appreciate my dad’s chuckle that summer day so long ago, though. “The poetry of T. S. Eliot is more important than a laugh,” I am certain I thought. (I was insufferable, I assure you. My insufferable self, so convinced of his own importance, still is around here somewhere, but does not show up often.) Well, Eliot’s poems have plenty of laughs and chuckles available, as I now know, and I also know now that my dad’s message to me was a sort of baffled pride in a son so different from and yet so similar to him.

As I have grown older, I have come to appreciate Eliot’s volume Four Quartets and its deeply considered meditations on time, man’s role in the cosmos, eternity, and the permanent immanence of eternity in any possible moment, never at any individual’s bidding. With my father’s death from COVID-19 on Sunday, May 10, those themes become that much more important to me, and since he chuckled at my Eliot paper (“your report” he called it), perhaps a start with Eliot (“East Coker” opens with “In my beginning is my end”) today would have earned a chuckle from him.
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Pandemic Diary 17: So Near, yet so Far

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A need to connect: Unsolicited wisdom from me and unsolicited poetry offered to me …

* * * *
I speak to or even see my friends each day thanks to technology both old (telephone) and new-ish (online video conference). Most of our conversations are about how much we do not like this or about what we are doing to occupy the time.

Since I am a disabled and retired person anyway, certain facts of my life remain unchanged in quarantine: the availability of time combined with its rapid disappearance each day. Others are new: I do not drive and I reside too far from the nearest anywhere to walk there (my town is mostly shut down now, anyway), so I have no command at all over travel. Mere weeks ago, I could reach out to a friend and ask if that friend planned to drive past my neighborhood and could I grab a ride to town. If not, I could reserve a cab. I could walk around town for however long I might want. That day will come again, but that loss of independence (when I think about it, like I am now) is one I feel acutely.

The acceptance of that loss has been a fairly straightforward one to make. My friends mostly live quite near, so the video conversations, while welcome, are a little surreal, that over-used word. Again, if I think of it, it is surreal, so I do not. I realized yesterday that other than my housemate/landlord (with whom I travel to the grocery store), I have not seen a person whom I know in person since this began weeks ago.
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Pandemic Diary 15: A Rainy Day

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Quarantine considerations: Outdoors or in?

* * * *
A 1964 article in Nature with the euphonious title, “Nature of argillaceous odour,” gave the world the euphonious-sounding word, “petrichor.” In the article, two chemical researchers attempted to scientifically break down what it is we smell when we smell the world after a rain shower and to give the phenomenon a name.

The two authors coined the word, “petrichor,” which I have been mispronouncing in my head since I first encountered it in 2015, when an article on the Huffington Post started to make its social media rounds. It has a long “I,” so say it like this: “petra,” then “eye-core,” which is not how I hear it in my head, with a short “i.”
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