sounds familiar

Kids go back to school tomorrow.

It’s been a wild past few years for them. Homeschooled in 2018-19 while we lived on the road and traveled. When we moved to Florida we couldn’t start them right away because we didn’t know what school to send them to because we didn’t know where we were going to live. So they started school late in 2019, and classified as “homeless” since we didn’t yet officially have an address. And then, COVID. So a late start and then right back to “virtual” schooling with Mom (and maybe a little Dad) as instructors.

I know it’s just what it is to them. But I can see it through the eyes of a guy who wasn’t homeschooled for a Bedouin year, who didn’t have to take 6mos off because the world was dying for can’t catching their breath. I guess… we do actually share the “moving from California to Florida” thing… but maybe that’s another blog. So, to them, this is just how it is… which is maybe nice.

But tomorrow is the first day again. It feels odd though. Florida’s leadership is much less conservative than the west-coast, so many of our friends back there still have no option to send their kids back to physical instruction. So you catch yourself asking if you’re doing the right thing or not. Are we doing the right thing? Or, not? I don’t know.

Is gray today. Not much rain but definitely gray.

Fourteen years old and in the woods. God, you skin is so smooth, so tight. Is all girl’s underwear so thin? It’s maybe the most overpowering thing I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. You smell clean, your hair is long and perfect.

My heart is racing. No. Pounding. Everything is alive, my skin is electric. I’m terrified, I’m shaking. I imagine it shot from a helicopter, two tiny specks at first, wide. Coming closer just as the boy pulls the girl’s shirt over her head and drops it to the grass near their feet.

Your skin is white and soft. You are the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen a girl in her bra before. Everything is humming, we’re alone in the middle of nowhere but it’s a wide open space, not hidden under trees or bushes. A wide open field.

I unbuttoned your pants. Not knowing where I got the courage.

Unbelievable.

I think, more often than not, my favorite writing is the stuff where I set out with no real idea where I’m going. No plan, no topic, no goal. I just start typing. Maybe it’s about skinning a knuckle, maybe just sentences about memories. Those things often turn out best.

We slept in Walmart parking lots, sometimes. When we lived in the road, which was August of 2018 through August 2019. If we were going somewhere, and couldn’t quite get there in a day’s drive, and didn’t have an in-between there before the next there.

It’s not the romantic full-timing experience people imagine, but I really have fond memories. Maybe it’s because so… anti. You’re just smack in the middle of one thing, and in your little amniotic bubble you and your family are doing so much the opposite thing.

It’s a bustling parking lot, it’s the capitalist promenade, and you setup camp in the fucking middle of it, sleep there, cook there, shit there. You’re not even working, you’re just living in an RV.

It’s nice because, in the morning, early, but not so early it’s before the long-haul guys pull-out for the day, and not so early the work vanpools are still gathering, smoking and drinking coffee from travel mugs. No not that easy but early, still. You can go shopping. Get what you need for the next few days. The aisles are empty and lines short and you can be stocked and done and rolling before 8am.

At night, after dinner, you can hit the built-in Mcdonald’s for an ice cream cone. At bedtime, the tall lot lights make the interior not very dark. You hear an occasional car maybe, maybe bass, maybe a drug deal is happening outside, maybe they’re looking at the RV wondering if they could break in.

You’re in your underwear, it’s your home after all. You’re up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water, from the freshwater tank you filled three states ago, and you’re in your underwear. Outside a woman who works swing shift is carrying plastic bags of produce to her rusted Datsun, maybe. Someone else maybe sleeping in their car, not in the privileged way we are, though.

Yeah these things often turn out best.

I want to write more about memories. As I get older, memories that were once sharp with detail are now fuzzier, and it seems a good idea to capture the sharpness when still recallable.

We were watching the Florida football game this past weekend when this thought came to me: I went to many a UF game, sat on those benches, cheered and sweated in the blinding sun. But that’s about as sharp is the memories get. I was there, it was hot, we watched football, the student section was tucked over in the corner, the band was to our right. Flip-flops and shorts and one game we left during halftime to get a beer across the street and hustle back for 2nd-half kickoff.

When we lived in the RV for a year, we sometimes slept in Walmart parking lots. It sounds inglorious, cheap, seedy, maybe even scary or dangerous? There are pieces of sharpness to those memories that I’d like to capture though, because they are somehow special.

We always parked near or under an overhead lamp, so there was always light streaming through the RV ceiling vents all night. We’d hear big rigs coming and going, engines idling or air brakes releasing. Sometimes, super early in the morning, we’d hear or observe vanpools – cars coming in one-by-one, folks standing around chatting quietly, drinking coffee in travel mugs brought from home, awaiting their quorum before setting out together and leaving their vehicles for the day.

Sharaun always took advantage of the Walmart stays. She’d wake early and go grocery shopping before the place got busy. We’d be stocked-up and ready to roll before 8am. Sometimes we’d all go in and shop for dinner, take our ingredients back to the RV to prepare and eat them, and then take a trip back to wander around, killing time, maybe grab an ice cream cone from the integrated McDonalds.

If it was hot you could run the generator all night to have AC, no one to bother when you’re way out at the end of an empty parking lot. I used to enjoy walking around inside the RV in my underwear while overnighting at Walmart… even though we were smack in the middle of a very public place we still had a little enclosed enclave where we were the masters of our domain.

Sharpness. I gotta get more of that down. Love you.

It’s early, before 6am.

The sky is just starting to lighten, shade by imperceptible shade, slowly, maybe every ten minutes being subtly different.

I’m in bed on my phone, writing this. I don’t really have a solid idea what I’m going to write about but I know it’s loosely something about how, at the moment, things are stressful and uncertain and the ways that makes me feel.

But that feels almost too much, like writing about it will only come off as complaining. Truthfully, we’re doing pretty well. We remain healthy, we can pay bills, we have close family we get to be with regularly.

I think maybe it’s that duality that is hard. What are we doing? Are we still hiding-out from this very real thing, or are we sending the kids back to school in January? Are we going to restaurants? Should I be back in the office?

Things that one minute seem to have clear unequivocal answers, and the next not so much. I feel inconsistent, undecided, even flighty. We wear masks, I don’t think we take unnecessary risks, but we’re definitely not as steadfast as we were in March.

It feels hard to have black and white, and I struggle in the grey. It’s not just COVID, stress in general is high. Stress at work, stress at home, plus a kind of corporate, global stress.

I yelled at Keaton yesterday, and I really dislike yelling at my kids. Sharaun and I bicker when we shouldn’t. I’m grumpy when I shouldn’t be.

Gotta get right. Gotta be better than all this, rise above. C’mon Dave. Get right.

I’ve always felt this strong desire for something I’ve called “stability,” but I’m wondering lately if what I’m really talking about would be better called “stagnation.” What’s more, when I say I value “security,” what I suspect I’m really saying is that I dislike variance from “routine.”

These statements may seem simple, but putting them into words is kind of revelatory for me. I’ve always know that changes of plans are hard for me to deal with – but I don’t think I’ve ever really admitted that the stability and security I purport to value so highly is probably just a more acceptable way for me to say that I don’t do well in liminal space, that I have a low tolerance for “in between.”

Take “now,” for instance. I have said recently that I believe that, later in life, looking back on these past few years, I expect they’ll all seem to be one “period” in time: the epoch that began with my father’s death, had a middle-section of leaving my career, going on the road for a year, moving across the country, losing my mom, and now this period of COVID-induced quarantine. I have thought that, looking back, there will be a discernible block of time from dad-dies to COVID-ends. And that, most telling, after that period of time we’ll go back to normal, to “stability,” to “security.”

But maybe that’s wrong. Or, probably it’s wrong. Maybe now is just now. I guess, it’s all but certain that now is just now. It’s not a moment of transition which will have a nice clean end where things return to normal… it’s just now.

And what’s more, I am almost certainly, to some degree, squandering now by waiting for it to end so that things can be “normal” again.

No; I certainly am.

It’s week eight of quarantine. I don’t think I’ve driven the car more than a handful of times. I’ve not been to a single store. Interacted only with family. I know not everyone is, or has the luxury to be able to be, this cloistered. Like all things there is a scale with opposing extremes at either end and we’re all at different places for different reasons, and maybe we even move around.

But how do we go back? I know, you’ll come back with, “we don’t; we go forward” and I’ll pretend I’ve not heard that. Whatever you call it aside… how does this end?

There does not seem to be hope for a binary end; no light-switch. But is it forever, then? It can’t be forever, right? So it has to be somewhere between on/off and forever. And if there’s no black/white transition but instead a long period of lightening gray, what the heck does that look like?

When do we start doing what? With whom? How often? I know the disease is awful and it’s terrible to compare anything to the loss of human life – but the “coming back” from this is going to be hard. People will be judged, people will judge. Everyone will have their own scales and timelines. People will shame other people.

In the US, we are so intolerant of each other right now, so divided and tribal. I can’t help but feel like this “recovery” is going to fan those flames. What’s correct? What’s safe? What’s sensible? Where is objective truth? People are listening to all kinds of tripe; clinging to fringe voices because it’s easier than the consensus.

I honestly don’t know how to behave, but staying here at home is normal now and changing that seems difficult and indeterminate so maybe we just do that? How do you behave unselfishly moving forward?

I hate thinking about it because I can’t fit it into a framework and I crave framework. When I’m 65 I think we’ll look back on this past 12-24mos as one connected “happening.” Leaving Intel, living on the road for year, moving to Florida, starting a new job, Mom dying, the isolation of self-quarantine… it will be one strange blur with a bright-blazing theme of transition. The now/then being so starkly different we won’t help but be able to think of life-before and life-after.

We’re still settling, then. This transition hasn’t ended. Maybe… maybe the the stability and normalcy I enjoyed in California is a thing of the past.

Dunno…