For several weeks last year, Salut! published the lockdown diaries of friends and acquaintances from around the world. Those from Bill Taylor in Toronto kicked off the series and accounted for 34 of those that appeared here (many more went on to his Facebook pages without Salut! lifting them). It seems right to return to Canada for an anniversary edition to which can be added birthday greetings ...
What did YOU do in the Great Lockdown, Daddy?
A year in the trenches. If this was World War I we’d still have another three to go.
But it isn’t (though it might be WWIII), which should be a consolation. All that mud, for one thing, and the dry-cleaning business not what it used to be.
This isn’t just the lockdown’s first anniversary, it’s also the month (though not the precise date) in which I find myself embarked, willy-nilly, upon my 74th year.
A faded red-letter day at best, all the more so because it was also the day last year that Mike Babad, one of my dearest friends, died.
It becomes more and more apparent that I’m putting down roots in my fourth country. England, the US, Canada. And now here I am, irrelevantly dwelling in L P Hartley’s “the past… they do things differently there”.
Incapable of playing the later editions of Trivial Pursuit because I don’t get one in 10 of the cultural references.
I came across one of those perpetual “do you remember” click-bait lists: “’90s snacks that will make you nostalgic.” I didn’t recognise a single one – I guess I wasn’t eating a lot of pre-packaged snacks by then. Anyway, the ’90s, for me, is/are not nostalgia. Cue The Carpenters: “It’s yesterday once more. Shooby-doo lang-lang.”
Sometimes, and always without warning, the trapdoor springs open beneath you. Resilience of the soul having gone the way of resilience of the body, you don’t bounce out, you climb out, hand over painful hand, wondering what triggered it this time and cursing your brittle infrastructure.
Still, those who age gracefully are just asking to grow old. Instead, a couple of months ago and foolishly optimistic, I went looking for the previous me behind the facial hair. It’s not that I wish I hadn’t done it but I do wish it could’ve been undone just as quickly…
Jowly, querulous, uncertain, sullen and greyly pallid around the edges, with Dickensian undertones. Not so much David Copperfield as Wilkins Micawber.
Something will turn up. Or won’t. It doesn’t always.
Lesley, whose eyesight has never been 100 per cent, said I looked like when we first met. Me? I was seeing not just echoes of my parents in the mirror but my grandparents, too. That was not to be countenanced.
For a while as it was growing back, and with the hair on my head reverting to wilderness, there were godforsaken echoes of Steve Bannon.
Still, it served to pass some time as we continued to progress with the months in increments of mundanity, meal to meal, bottle to bottle (it’s the progression that’s mundane, never the meals and seldom the bottles), laundry load to laundry load.
Even a routine visit to the dentist takes on the charm of novelty and you’re thinking maybe it’s time to start living really large and schedule an eye appointment.
Learning to function without people in general has been a useful skill to acquire but not as valuable as figuring out which people in particular you really can and probably should live without.
But now is no time for small decisions.
The lease on my car hasn’t long to run. I’m already getting emails about the handing-back process and hey, let’s talk about your NEXT lease. Advantageous terms if you sign up early.
Thanks, but...
It’s not just that at this stage four years is a longer commitment than it used to be. I live downtown and have no real need to drive, except for occasional supermarket trips and weekend outings.
(I may not remember ’90s snacks but vaguely recollected weekend outings colour my dreams.)
So maybe it’s time, for the first time in close to half a century, to go without a vehicle of my own and just rent one when I need it.
Or perhaps I’ll splurge (circumspectly) on an old pickup truck, something from the past. One last chance to be John Clellon Holmes’s “giggling nihilist, eating up the highway at ninety miles an hour and steering with his feet”.
How I loved that concept once. Before I had a driver’s license.
We tiptoe through the minefield as if tiptoeing might help.
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