Love is Everything

It’s true that money can’t buy you love but, these days, love is everything and everything is love.

For a brick and mortar retailer, right now, every transaction is evidence that we are needed and still relevant. We have not yet been discarded and abandoned to the ash heap of modernity, replaced by a few keystrokes and clicks, free shipping, and hassle-free returns.

My heart flutters everytime the shop phone rings or pings with a text notification. Before answering, I hold my breath until the tears recede like an ebbing tide of hope and sorrow.

Exhale sorrow, inhale hope.

Faith, so sorely tested by the challenges of these past few months, is momentarily restored as the will to survive kicks in with an almost comic ferocity - like a jack russel barking up at a bored pitbull.

When I fly, I always marvel that the plane I’m on stays in the sky. I’m partly convinced it stays aloft only because everyone on the plane is willing it to. Nobody wants it to come down.

I am that airplane nobody wants to fall from the sky.

I think I’ll stay up here and enjoy the view for awhile.

Love in the Time of Corona Virus

It’s 9am, a time when I would normally be back from yoga, finished with breakfast, showered, dressed, and ready to begin my day. That was before.

This is now.

I haven’t gone to yoga and breakfast is relative now as are so many other daily rituals. I might shower and put on some big girl pants. I might not. I can’t remember when I last brushed my hair. I’m starting to look like a Chia Pet.

I’m sitting in my study, wondering if the world will ever again resemble something normal and what that new normal will look like. Will we never again hug each other, shake hands, clink glasses, huddle together for warmth? Will we learn to show love in new ways in a world that may never be the same?

I doubt any of us will ever again take for granted the comfort of human touch, even if just the result of clumsiness - an inadvertent brush against a stranger in a crowded grocery store would be so welcome right about now.

We might also be more reluctant to assume access to each other’s personal space, a finishing touch on the work begun with #metoo. This virus has made us painfully aware of where we end and another body begins.

I suppose, if we haven’t lost a loved one to Covid-19 or had to struggle to recover from it, we might find a silver lining.

The sky has returned to the blue of my first years in San Francisco, over three decades ago. How wonderful if some of the more pleasant side effects of sheltering-in-place were to become commonplace.

We wake to the singing of birds, suddenly audible in the silence of this too still world. The sound of an airplane overhead is unexpected and jarring. The constant hum of traffic has faded into a distant fermata.

I saw a squirrel run across Castro Street near 19th the other day as I returned from the grocery store. It stopped in the middle of the street and stood up on its hindquarters. It looked right at me, as if to say, “Go away human, nobody likes you.”

There is a deepening awareness of our connectedness even in our separateness. We are united by our need for each other and in our collective grief over everything we have so suddenly lost.

My neighbor across the street, here on Fillmore Street, arranges a different post it message in his window every day. Yesterday, it was HELLO. Today it’s HH 5PM!

Yay, not all is lost.

We will always have Happy Hour.