Another Year

I do not know how to make this image less ginormous, but I can enjoy a huge steak/beef fat. (Last year’s birthday reflection = beef fat; be phat.)

It is the eve of my 44th birthday and one year since the world and New York City, where I live, collapsed under the catastrophe of COVID. I like to think that the country, and my city and life have overcome temporary pandemic-induced paralysis. Fortunately, my family enters the second year of the virus unscathed except for the effects of forced isolation. The upside of this, though, has been increased FaceTime (literally) with my parents, who live across the country. I have been able to ask them about more about their lives and our intertwined existence. I have led my 78-year-old dad through chair yoga. He’s quite coordinated, and I’m a decent instructor. We’re both working on remembering to breathe.

As I write, a seven-year-old rat terrier and dachshund mix pleads (insists) with her eyes and snout that I divert my attention to her. A year ago, Sugar lived another life somewhere in Oklahoma. She did not exist as either a member of our household or, to my knowledge, as a search result on Petfinder. Now, I medicate her twice a day and barter with my husband to walk her fewer than three times, preceded by begrudging wardrobing for winter and faux-cheerful coaxing, “Good girl!” just to get her off the couch. Dear Sugar, I relate. (And yes, I read and you should read Cheryl Strayed.)

Before beginning this post, I enjoyed an hour in our soaking tub, reading a short story Jennifer Egan wrote 27 years ago about dropping acid, and a piece by Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker about eating outdoors in pandemic — both things I have done sparingly. A year ago, we did not live where I could relax in a luxurious bath but we did rent in a doorman building where the toilet in our sixth floor apartment flushed with jet propulsion force. Though our tub is grand, our toilet now is too timid.

Although I occasionally miss the doormen — Kevin, a twin and father of four; Vinton, a huge teddy bear of a man who worked midnights; Frank, an Ecuadorian who liked heavy metal and shared freely of his heavy heart; Dinard, who serenaded the residents he liked and who rode a bike outfitted with a contraption bringing to mind today’s plastic dining yurts; and even Luis, who resembled a vampire with his Eddy Munster hairline, pale eyes and uncomfortable laugh — I do not actually miss the Upper West Side. Before last year, I already had begun to miss the Manhattan I moved to almost 20 years ago, when 9/11 was a fresh, horrid wound and I did not know and had not lived any of the experiences I can recall now with mixed emotion.

Forty-four is a weird age. It is too far past 40 for my liking, and the numeral ‘4’ in Chinese is known to resemble death. A double death year is not a birthday I feel inclined to celebrate.

Its calendrical predecessor, 2020, is a year from which we all slowly emerge. COVID anxiety, Black Lives Matter, the national reckonings and wreckage coinciding with but also long preceding Donald Trump…its residual grief and conflict, confusion and angst alternately cling to and roll off my skin like dirty bathwater I can’t see but probably should rinse off. I am not yet shiny with hope.

I am a Pisces; I am a water sign who grew up in a beach city. Two decades of living in New York have only served to confirm that I love, long for and am sensorily nourished by the sight of the sea, even though I’m too chicken to swim in it. A stubborn marine layer is a good problem to have compared with black ice, biting wind and picking up after one’s dogs (3x a day!) in freezing temperatures. I take a lot of hot baths to warm my limbs and soothe the mild mental turbulence I feel in unforgiving winter. In light of Texas’s recent struggle, I count my blessings and dwindling supply of bath bombs.

A review of Everything that has happened in the last year — my miscarrying a natural pregnancy after months of IVF among them — suggests anything can and will happen in the span of 12 months, or 12 weeks, in spite of ourselves: We live in a home we’d never stepped inside before we moved in. A willful dog squirms next to and underneath my calf, which both comforts and inconveniences me. I met people through working with four nonprofits, whose projects took on new meaning in the throes of last year. I just formed my own LLC. And yet I feel fairly matter-of-fact about all of this, like it is just the progression of life. And progression is not the same thing as meaning.

I suppose, on the eve of 44, I simply require and am searching for meaning. Maybe the answer is becoming parents, raising and supporting another life, and enjoying it. But what if it isn’t?

I guess we’ll only know better in another year.