Unmoored
"So, we'll all break for coffee...ah... will we," the hostess says self consciously "...and we'll all I mean go down to our kitchens now, from wherever you are, in your (chuckle) socks, and, you know, make yourself a cup of coffee, or tea even, make tea, and come back...from wherever you are in the house in your...your PJs" She chortles at her own insouciance, trials off...
And I'm pushing up from the desk in the box room, the play room that was, shelves still holding children's books, splashy children's paintings. I am disorientated in place and time, yanked from aural connection via tele conference, and in need of strong coffee.
'Wherever you are in the house' 'our kitchens??' Oh. The words erase my inner visual of colleagues in a room around a table, besuited, a secretarial station humming just down the hall. Like I know I'm in my socks in my boxroom, but they were at work where my mind had placed them. Picture perfect, arranged, never disturbing me with visual cues or body language. My captive audience. Not. And I'm shocked into body, pins and needles, real.
I need an infusion of coffee. (not tea).
Stunned
I offer that palliative to my younger daughter, passing her room, her open door, where she is a pale silent presence hunched over a desk. She looks up and through me, failing to connect. She's online at a lecture, the lecturer's voice grown familiar to me over weeks, catching stray words, dutch accents, intoning on physics, micro-macro duality, vectors and whatnot.
She beats a path every day of this lockdown from kitchen to garden to bedroom, listening, writing, staring at a screen. Connecting for lectures sometimes in the early morning, sometimes in late evening. The Dutch are always ahead of us. Or behind us... They're down with an early start, anyhoo.
"But, so, I mean... what about dinner... the hoovering... your washing? (spilling untended from the washing machine) I variously ask, forgetting that she is not really here, in my house. She's in a lecture. She's not really there either.
Days she has a stunned look, like a bird smacking hard on a windowpane. Times she grows wild and rowdy on zoom calls, only wanting to connect, hysterical in the emptiness of virtual presence.
The Garden is taking shape under her restless fingers, strawberries forming, tomatoes, lettuce tips peeping from the raised bed. She grows the vegetables, leaves the flowers, the grass cutting to me.
She is a lover, a hugger, a dancer with dancers, given pacifiers of virtual meets, netflix, lectures online. Tossed back and forth from virtual interior to empty exterior, each and every day. Sometimes suspended in the transition. Lost.
All night she dreamzs, creates... astonishing astonished scenarios to locate herself, somehow, in this bizarre and total up -turning of her everyday life.
Dreamzs. She dreamzs, and in her dreaming leaves her lockdown, travels far and wide and seeking.
Barbarian
I stand and stare at the kettle thinking this, and remember the other one, the sister. In virtual college too, bedroom door closed, desk neat, pencils lined, computer placed, content I think you might say. Her papers submitted in a timely fashion, her grades looking good, at ease with this slowing down of every day tumult, worldly invasions. At ease at the wheel that lockdown has placed in her appreciative hands. I wonder if Beauty in her tower, Rapunzel and Sleeping were just as OK with it, were humming and upbeat in the cool quiet space created by bricked walls, lockdowns.
She comes down, steps out, slips away periodically to meet her BF, her lovely boyfriend, quarantined
in similar rooms, waiting.
Evenings she comes down from the mountain, sits with us. Knitting, headbands, scarves, a shoulder bag, her needles weaving blues and greens and reds, her eyes fixed on the TV screen as she dissects narrative arcs on box sets, Game of Thrones rehashes, Normal People. Scherezade distracting us....
I wonder how the hell she'll ever go back to clamour, non verbal communications, the great unwashed humanity. If she ever has to. I expect she can do it, she's done it before, (if she ever has to...)
I roar, invasive, from the kitchen "Hey, d'u want a cup of Coffee! Hey? Hello?... Answer me when I'm talking (shouting) to you!"
I am the Barbarian (at the gates)
Dreaming
I'm spooning Lavazza into a jug when a phone call comes in, from the boy, in the moment as you might say.
I ask him how he's going, how he's spending his days. He has refused to come home, preferring the pandemic payment, rent assist, long days fishing, long nights talking with mates on his xbox, his snapchat, his facebook page. Unwilling to give all that up. DOH! Unable to see any down side, I suppose ...
"yeah, good, yeah, I mean weathers good? I'm, like, fishing, on the river all day... in the evening I yeah, talk to the lads on the xbox?" he offers me. "Right".
A silence... "So, the days are like melding? one into the next? in a dream, like, a daze?..." he says
slowly. Hmm.
He is a poet, a baulker, a bird you toss strategically, tenderly, from the nest. As I had done a while back, watching keenly from back here on the nest's rim as he got on top of routine, got into having to work every single solitary day even summer, got his head around paying for things. Which he managed, pretty well.
Until now. When he doesn't have to manage anything at all. Uncongenial, I mean.
We talk some about his (maybe) Masters, his (kinda of) notion to do an MA in the Autumn. About getting going at it, taking steps, that sort of thing.
I mean I talk, and he (half) listens...
I Will be your Virus.
He tells me how he won't come home, start yet, infect me maybe...maybe? baby!, I think, truly, you've got nothing I've not given you? and maybe I won't call you out on that (just yet) ( I'll wait) (timing's everything) Yeah.
In the kitchen the Caged Bird has taken over making the coffee, and Beauty has the cups.
I catch them eye rolling as I say goodbye to the Boy, remind him to switch off the Xbox occasionally, eat Good Stuff, wear Sun Block, come Home (occasionally)
Enmeshed.
Somehow we've slipped back in time, in years. I have put on the halter of Mammy and they the mantle of adolescence, as though leaving home, growing up, flying solo had never happened at all... has to happen all over again.
Sometimes I slip into my car on my own and drive. For foodstuffs, or medical supplies or, I mean
essential business. The car is my Oyster, my Chariot to Nowhere, my own crazy headspace. My own.
And just when you're thinking you're getting away with it a txt flashes in on your screen which you decide not to read and you read...
"where u? in town? u nvr sed!!!
You stare at the screen.
And another
"We'd hve likd 2 go 2? get out of here 2!!!"
And another
"U nvr sed?"
I am barbarous...keepy...viral... I am.
Sometimes I wish I didn't know so much about them. I wish that they didn't know so much about me either...
(Do feel free to share my post dear readers, if you have enjoyed it!)
________________________________________________________________________________
And something else for you
My recently published ebook
The Chemical Angels Came for Us
"So, we'll all break for coffee...ah... will we," the hostess says self consciously "...and we'll all I mean go down to our kitchens now, from wherever you are, in your (chuckle) socks, and, you know, make yourself a cup of coffee, or tea even, make tea, and come back...from wherever you are in the house in your...your PJs" She chortles at her own insouciance, trials off...
And I'm pushing up from the desk in the box room, the play room that was, shelves still holding children's books, splashy children's paintings. I am disorientated in place and time, yanked from aural connection via tele conference, and in need of strong coffee.
'Wherever you are in the house' 'our kitchens??' Oh. The words erase my inner visual of colleagues in a room around a table, besuited, a secretarial station humming just down the hall. Like I know I'm in my socks in my boxroom, but they were at work where my mind had placed them. Picture perfect, arranged, never disturbing me with visual cues or body language. My captive audience. Not. And I'm shocked into body, pins and needles, real.
I need an infusion of coffee. (not tea).
Stunned
I offer that palliative to my younger daughter, passing her room, her open door, where she is a pale silent presence hunched over a desk. She looks up and through me, failing to connect. She's online at a lecture, the lecturer's voice grown familiar to me over weeks, catching stray words, dutch accents, intoning on physics, micro-macro duality, vectors and whatnot.
She beats a path every day of this lockdown from kitchen to garden to bedroom, listening, writing, staring at a screen. Connecting for lectures sometimes in the early morning, sometimes in late evening. The Dutch are always ahead of us. Or behind us... They're down with an early start, anyhoo.
"But, so, I mean... what about dinner... the hoovering... your washing? (spilling untended from the washing machine) I variously ask, forgetting that she is not really here, in my house. She's in a lecture. She's not really there either.
Days she has a stunned look, like a bird smacking hard on a windowpane. Times she grows wild and rowdy on zoom calls, only wanting to connect, hysterical in the emptiness of virtual presence.
The Garden is taking shape under her restless fingers, strawberries forming, tomatoes, lettuce tips peeping from the raised bed. She grows the vegetables, leaves the flowers, the grass cutting to me.
She is a lover, a hugger, a dancer with dancers, given pacifiers of virtual meets, netflix, lectures online. Tossed back and forth from virtual interior to empty exterior, each and every day. Sometimes suspended in the transition. Lost.
All night she dreamzs, creates... astonishing astonished scenarios to locate herself, somehow, in this bizarre and total up -turning of her everyday life.
Dreamzs. She dreamzs, and in her dreaming leaves her lockdown, travels far and wide and seeking.
Barbarian
I stand and stare at the kettle thinking this, and remember the other one, the sister. In virtual college too, bedroom door closed, desk neat, pencils lined, computer placed, content I think you might say. Her papers submitted in a timely fashion, her grades looking good, at ease with this slowing down of every day tumult, worldly invasions. At ease at the wheel that lockdown has placed in her appreciative hands. I wonder if Beauty in her tower, Rapunzel and Sleeping were just as OK with it, were humming and upbeat in the cool quiet space created by bricked walls, lockdowns.
She comes down, steps out, slips away periodically to meet her BF, her lovely boyfriend, quarantined
in similar rooms, waiting.
Evenings she comes down from the mountain, sits with us. Knitting, headbands, scarves, a shoulder bag, her needles weaving blues and greens and reds, her eyes fixed on the TV screen as she dissects narrative arcs on box sets, Game of Thrones rehashes, Normal People. Scherezade distracting us....
I wonder how the hell she'll ever go back to clamour, non verbal communications, the great unwashed humanity. If she ever has to. I expect she can do it, she's done it before, (if she ever has to...)
I roar, invasive, from the kitchen "Hey, d'u want a cup of Coffee! Hey? Hello?... Answer me when I'm talking (shouting) to you!"
I am the Barbarian (at the gates)
Dreaming
I'm spooning Lavazza into a jug when a phone call comes in, from the boy, in the moment as you might say.
I ask him how he's going, how he's spending his days. He has refused to come home, preferring the pandemic payment, rent assist, long days fishing, long nights talking with mates on his xbox, his snapchat, his facebook page. Unwilling to give all that up. DOH! Unable to see any down side, I suppose ...
"yeah, good, yeah, I mean weathers good? I'm, like, fishing, on the river all day... in the evening I yeah, talk to the lads on the xbox?" he offers me. "Right".
A silence... "So, the days are like melding? one into the next? in a dream, like, a daze?..." he says
slowly. Hmm.
He is a poet, a baulker, a bird you toss strategically, tenderly, from the nest. As I had done a while back, watching keenly from back here on the nest's rim as he got on top of routine, got into having to work every single solitary day even summer, got his head around paying for things. Which he managed, pretty well.
Until now. When he doesn't have to manage anything at all. Uncongenial, I mean.
We talk some about his (maybe) Masters, his (kinda of) notion to do an MA in the Autumn. About getting going at it, taking steps, that sort of thing.
I mean I talk, and he (half) listens...
I Will be your Virus.
He tells me how he won't come home, start yet, infect me maybe...maybe? baby!, I think, truly, you've got nothing I've not given you? and maybe I won't call you out on that (just yet) ( I'll wait) (timing's everything) Yeah.
In the kitchen the Caged Bird has taken over making the coffee, and Beauty has the cups.
I catch them eye rolling as I say goodbye to the Boy, remind him to switch off the Xbox occasionally, eat Good Stuff, wear Sun Block, come Home (occasionally)
Enmeshed.
Somehow we've slipped back in time, in years. I have put on the halter of Mammy and they the mantle of adolescence, as though leaving home, growing up, flying solo had never happened at all... has to happen all over again.
Sometimes I slip into my car on my own and drive. For foodstuffs, or medical supplies or, I mean
essential business. The car is my Oyster, my Chariot to Nowhere, my own crazy headspace. My own.
And just when you're thinking you're getting away with it a txt flashes in on your screen which you decide not to read and you read...
"where u? in town? u nvr sed!!!
You stare at the screen.
And another
"We'd hve likd 2 go 2? get out of here 2!!!"
And another
"U nvr sed?"
I am barbarous...keepy...viral... I am.
Sometimes I wish I didn't know so much about them. I wish that they didn't know so much about me either...
(Do feel free to share my post dear readers, if you have enjoyed it!)
________________________________________________________________________________
And something else for you
My recently published ebook
The Chemical Angels Came for Us
Available in iBooks and Amazon books
Https://books2read/The-Chemical-Angels
Https://books2read/The-Chemical-Angels
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