Hast Seen the White Whale?
I shut off the alarm, slippered to the kitchen and turned on the gas flame for coffee water wondering if this is the day I notice a cough or something else untoward. A slow southeast wind nags and bends the exhaust being vented from the school next door. It suggests a question mark, a grammatical symbol for our time. Yesterday morning the crescent moon stood on her tiptoes balanced on the roof of the school. I rest my face in my hands and think oh shit then remember I have already washed them twice since I got up a half hour ago.
Quirky stuff this, like writing in war time. Revisiting Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass with a CD from the library, now renewed indefinitely. One of my influences as a high school trumpet player. Listening in the car and all of a sudden I think “he’s in his eighties now listening to the same news as I am and part of the most vulnerable cohort.”
On a run after work I laughed at my wrinkled elephant knees since it was in the fifties and I didn’t have to wear a base layer against the cold. I brought home food, we had a big spaghetti feast with chunks of Italian scratch bread and wine. Normal everyday stuff.
Working in the grocery industry, I’m apparently on the front lines. Never been there before. I hear the empty pallets being wheeled to receiving and the warning beep of the jack. Just normal store stuff feels good. We’re open now 8–9 AM only for over sixties with wrinkled elephant knees. I wondered if seniors would have to show their license like everyone has to at Fenway for beer, no matter how old they look. Will I be buying beer at Fenway this summer? The question mark appears again.
I asked a fellow team member about her marathon in May and she said she can’t believe it will happen. Hard to know what to do. Her next long training run is eighteen miles. Another colleague said “They should still have it. Everyone really run fast to stay away from each other.” Yeah,” I said, “PRs for all.” I count steps like on Denali. Still thirty three up the stairwell by tortillas, thirty four on the receiving side. “Boeing’s down to $102 from $398,” says yet another. Opportunity is here, even in a time like this.
I just keep making notes on every little thing. Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings with frightening World War I memories. Is this virus like a mosquito? What purpose does it have? Where does it live? What do they eat when they don’t have Hobbit, as Sam asked of mosquitoes? Am I noticing some kind of grudging respect for a microscopic creature without locomotion that has brought the world to its knees? What kind of power is that? What’s the use in being angry? It’s like ascribing malignant intent to a white whale.
Melville wrote Moby Dick in 1850–1851, in the years leading up to the Civil War, another major cataclysm in American history. I have seen the book described as a sort of genetic code for America, relevant in all times and all historical events without precedent. First mate Starbuck said “I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? It will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market. Vengeance on a dumb brute! That simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
We are all on the Pequod together.
