What’s Good About It

Photo by Varela Real Estate

As we head into the sixth—or is it the seventh month?—of the pandemic, I’m reflecting on what sweet juice can be extracted from these sour grapes.

Impossible for the many people who have lost their incomes, their jobs, their houses—or people dear to them.

But for those of us who have escaped these disasters, what good can be claimed?

First of all, confronting myself. My normal life is full of distractions, as most lives are, and so I don’t often feel that I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel.

But I’m definitely scraping now. It’s harder and harder to take care of the daily necessities, shopping, cooking, exercising, cleaning up, walking Pip, because there is no padding. BUT on the other hand, I’ve finally learned my neighborhood where I’ve lived for fifteen years, half blind. This is due to Pip’s insistence that he MUST have a walk after dinner, no matter how hot and smoky it may be.

And as we trudge along through these little lanes, many of them still unpaved, in the blessed quiet that followed for a while the absence of cars (they’re back now), I peeled my eyes.

Here, there is a doorway into a secret garden I’ve never seen; there, someone has carefully staked up four or five tall sunflowers; here, the old building that was once the neighborhood mill still looms over the Acequia Madre, the mother ditch that watered these house yards when they were vegetable gardens. Only flowers, now, and due to the drought, the Acequia only flows on Mondays. Perhaps I’ll appreciate the sound of running water even more when/if it returns.

So, peeled eyes are one of the benefits. Another is the books—although I haven’t read as many as I planned to, due to my fascination with Downton Abbey. I have to admit I’m starting to watch it for a second time, justifying this because I’ve already forgotten so much…

But I’ve read with appetite James Salter’s three novels, read long ago and forgotten, and I am now finding I can still laugh, reading Martin Amis’ The Information. What a pleasure it is to share the rage and misery of a failed writer who must accompany, praise and interview his far more successful friend…

Another rather ambiguous advantage: learning to separate the sheep from the goats.

I’ve fallen into the habit of putting up with some men with whom I have nothing in common, driven by loneliness and their always-availability.

Well, no more. The trouble with the people I put up with—and of course there’s nothing wrong with them except their total inappropriateness—is that I lose my judgement, or at least some pieces of it.

And that spreads.

A day or so ago, when I submitted to a full-body check from a skin doctor, I didn’t realize until it was over that he should have had one of his nurses in the examining room.

No harm done, as they say, but the particular weak-mindedness encouraged by the pandemic had its day.

So, all and all, not too bad—but I need to begin exploring again, to fill up some of these gaps. This is an enormous, wild and beautiful piece of the southwest and I haven’t seen a fraction of it.

And I have a new car that will get up anything.

In New Mexico coronavirus James Salter