The Unspin Room: Even in isolation, what we do still matters

In the dog days of summer, trips are still mostly limited to around the block and to the supermarket. At the latter, the early morning senior hour doubles in its essential nature as being not only safer but before anyone who would see I’m a senior is up and about.

With travel still restricted, I voyage out in dreams, vivid and lost. Often sleep finds me searching for something — car, office, father alive again in memory, theater seat, old friend, shards of life. I used to read every night, but now we crave moving pictures of a gone world, so every night is movie night, streaming movies and bingeing series from foreign locales — Paris, London, Tokyo, anywhere but here. We used to put on the evening news over dinner, the habit of a lifetime, all the way back to Cronkite and Swanson TV Dinners, but now it is unbearable. I think back to our apartment in New York, gorging on pretzels as the Million Dollar Movie defined Saturday afternoon. Languor was good.

Now there’s too much of it. Before summer’s heat settles in every morning, I run, run, run through a neighborhood newly teeming with barred owls — in daytime! — geese, coyotes, deer, box turtles, squirrels, hawks, blue heron, Mr. Fox and Rocky Raccoon, who tries to climb the pole to the bird feeder and sometimes succeeds. When Mr. Fox chases a squirrel, off go the cardinals, bluebirds, sparrows, blue jays, woodpeckers, mourning doves, yellow finches, tufted titmice, robins, crows and hawks — Hitchcock in reverse.

It’s a Jane Goodall life, and I shouldn’t complain. And yet — and yet — there is all that we miss. Seeing the kids. Saturdays with my tennis buddies at Starbucks, dissecting the political madness of the day though refills. The office yielded the hum and vibration of hallway gossip. Dinners out, wine flowing — always better when someone else is cooking. Sharing a hug, a handshake or a double-buss for European acquaintances.

Now there are bandannas and masks of every definition and persuasion, COVID-era accessorizing, often with sunglasses above. We are all desperadoes in someone else’s spaghetti western. It’s an old Twilight Zone, “Eye of the Beholder” from 1960, bandaged head being slowly unwrapped to yield both ugliness and beauty. Indeed, there is much hidden change to be grateful for. Togetherness that doesn’t tear you apart pulls you together, more than decades of marriage, and long overdue. After years of work-life separation, suddenly you are home 24/7 and you discover you like it. Wonder what took you so long. Can’t imagine returning to commuting and a bifurcated weekday life. Hey, maybe you really could retire and survive it.

When we emerge from our caves, where will we be? Will our newspapers still be in print? Our neighborhood restaurants there? Movie theaters? Parents? The White House? Most of all, will we have learned anything, grown and not shrunk, gained empathy for those who have less and suffered more? Will broken bones heal stronger? Try 10 not-quite commandments:

- Take 10 minutes every day and meditate, pray or just generally turn off your brain.

- Call at least one person you haven’t spoken with since the plague and listen to them.

- Eat a cup of ice cream slowly, savor every spoonful, and thank the cow it came from.

- Reread your favorite book; I promise it will strike you differently all these years later.

- Play some evocative music over dinner, hum or sing along, alone or an off-key chorus.

- Say the nicest things you can think of to your loved ones and don’t require a response.

- Make a plan to go somewhere you like or have never been in 2021 and start saving up.

- Take a favorite small item in your house, pen a note about it, box and mail it to a friend.

- Inhale through your nose for four seconds, hold for seven, breathe out from your mouth for 8.

- Forgive the political party you find evil and stupid; remember that anger eats the angry.

Maybe you have a better 10. Maybe the world now seems dark and endless. Maybe you have had enough of suggestions and you just want solutions. Well, Big Pharma is working on those. Meanwhile, every day is an accretion of small seconds. Try to experience those moments: taste them, touch them, see them for what they are, the gossamer beating of butterfly wings. We can’t control the big. But if we make the most of the little, and build more good bits than bad, then we’ve fashioned our luck. We’re on the right side of the dirt one more day. Others are not so fortunate. Spread good cheer. One day when we look back let’s say we made the most of our time as exiles in our own country. Remember we are all dancing on a ledge. Enjoy the dance. Even if it’s Swan Lake.

Dalton Delan can be followed on Twitter @UnspinRoom. He has won Emmy, Peabody and duPont-Columbia awards for his work as a television producer.