On Tuesday afternoon, before my appointment with the foot doctor, whose office oddly enough is located in the same building as my accountant*, I walked through Bryant Park. With a few minutes to burn, I stopped to ponder the shuffleboard courts. I thought about my father, who spent many years of his retirement enjoying the game, which perfectly suited his love for competition involving some skill and a high degree of luck. (Cribbage and poker are also good examples.) If he had been here now, we would have definitely played a few games, and I'm sure he would have enjoyed it. Unlike me, he was very good at 'living in the moment,' not getting caught up in arranging the details of his life like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that must eventually be fit together. I'm always on the hunt for meaning, which can be rewarding but exhausting. Not everything, I've come to realize, has to matter.
*The kind of coincidence that does seem to weigh in favor of our lives being a computer simulation.
After the foot doctor, I went to see my therapist. In many ways, I explained, it had been a hard year -- I had witnessed the death of my father, Zephyr, and one of my favorite trees in the park (oh, and most recently, our rare woodland peony) -- and the grief of these deaths had accumulated in ways that I was only fully acknowledging now that we were back from Lake Michigan and entering the summer doldrums.
There was a lot happening in the world: Biden had finally stepped aside, the Olympics were about to start, and some smart people had finally filed a lawsuit against our horrible governor demanding that she reinstate congestion pricing. The wildfires were beginning. Something good was maybe on television.
There was a period of my life when I could have been very engaged in these events -- although it's been a long time since I've been able to drum up much enthusiasm for the Olympics, whose appeal largely faded as the international organization became so hideously corporate and ridden with corruption -- but everything felt distant. I was more interested in the last clematis flower on the vine.
The world outside was too chaotic to be contemplated. I knew that I was living in an aquarium -- or, actually, a terrarium -- but I had no desire to escape.
I thought about Clio, who could not stop talking about her love of a little cat bed we bought for her that clips on to the side of the desk, allowing her to watch the monitor and relax at the same time.
Why go anywhere if the pleasure you seek is right at home?
The garden is forever beckoning.