Not here, today

Here, today, I realize I struggle to remain there. It is not so much that, like Billy Pilgrim, I have come unstuck in time; it is more the amalgamation which is me is so accustomed to considering past and future. I meal plan, imagining how we will use not just these ingredients, but what form the leftovers will take, and to what reasonable, delicious reaches things can be stretched. I schedule out assignments, all online until June, figuring how they will fit together and how much time they will give my students. I plot grading tasks, scribbling in the day-planner that keeps me calm and organized. I think forward to where we will go, what we will do, who we will see, when this ends. When.

And I move backward. By scholarly interest, I am often present in the past, casting my thought lines back hundreds of years, treating Sir Gawain and King Arthur and his other knights as objects of interest but also, as they gather around that table in my thoughts, as papery companions to be considered with affection as well as analyzed.

Here, today, I find things that pull me away from today. What begins as a shuffling in a drawer becomes a journey back, back, back, past high school and into those awkward years before: ID cards I didn’t know I had. Cards I’ve kept for decades. An almost-love-letter I didn’t read again before recycling and am now sorry. Glossy images cut out from a calendar I loved too much to let go. And at the bottom of the pile: a stack of stationery. Like Proust’s narrator sampling that madeleine, like Ratatouille’s Anton Ego tasting the eponymous dish, I was thrust back suddenly and utterly into a Christmas party my family attended thrown by Dad’s company when I was in eighth grade. There was a Santa Claus, and I felt odd when my mom sat on his lap. I was the oldest child in attendance. I played Christmas carols on my flute, joined by several other musically inclined employees — one was on trombone. One on piano, perhaps? There were gifts for all of the children. Mine, the only one I remember: a beautiful floral box filled with stationery, the very same stationery I was looking at sitting on the floor in my own office in my own house with my dog sniffing my hands.

Here (no longer today, but it takes time to compose such things), I immediately and easily write a four page letter on that same stationery to a dear friend who needs the words, pack it into the final remaining matching envelope, stamp and address it, and put it in the mail, to move forward in time.

Here, today, I venture back again in time as I think forward: a big pot of lentil soup uses easy ingredients, will last a long time, will freeze well. The recipe, it strikes me suddenly, comes not from any of my own devising, not from cookbooks I own, not from my mother’s recipe collection (even though the small card on which I painstakingly wrote the ingredients gives credit to Mom). It comes, I remember with surprise, from a cookbook housed in my middle school’s library. I hated that school, but its library brought me Anne McCaffrey, Joan Lowery Dixon, Caroline B. Cooney, Richard Peck. (How did I forget I liked suspense and ghost stories so much then?) And somehow, implausibly, the lentil soup I’m smelling, seeing, tasting, here, today.

Maybe this is why I dwell with relative, guilty ease, here, today. Because here, today, I am not always here, today.