This week, the tenth of the lockdown, was marked by beautiful spring weather and an ongoing hurricane of conflicting and often polarizing information. Deaths and cases were down in New York City, but the situation was less clear around the country and in the rest of the world, notwithstanding the fact that (at least as far as I can tell) we reached five million cases (from four million) in a shorter period than it took to get from three to four. Whatever the reality of the virus, there was a collective sense of having been through the worst of it. Everyone was getting excited to go out and get back to ‘normal.’
Well, maybe not everyone.
I stayed home with Stephen and the cats except for an hour or so each morning when I went running. Waking up at dawn, I realized that one of my (many) problems is that I enjoy the hours of the early morning — by which I mean anywhere between 5:00 and 7:45 am — and also the late night, which starts at 11:00 pm and lasts through 1:00 or 1:30 am. Perhaps you can see the practical difficulty here, which is the reason why, if I don’t take a nap during some portion of the worst period of the day — 1:00 pm to 4:30 — I find myself slipping into zombie territory. There’s something about going to an office each day from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm that regulates behavior, which I’m sure is not a coincidence. I don’t miss that kind of structure, but to be unfettered in a physical sense means that you have to compensate by working at all hours of the day and night (between periods of not working at all hours of the day and night).
One of the nice things about running is how songs will get stuck in your head, but in a way that’s somehow less annoying or obtrusive than when you’re not running. Last weekend, Stephen was rewiring some stereo components and we tested the turntable with a vintage copy of Odessa, the concept album by the Bee Gees (a double LP with a red velvet cover: classic). It’s not a record I listened to a lot even at the height of my Bee Gees infatuation — it’s not a great record — but the song we played (the first song on the third side) was ‘Lamplight,’ which is a relatively unheralded classic that belongs in the high pantheon of orchestrated pop masterpieces for which they will always be known. I love the unapologetic melodrama of the song; it’s the reason I’ll always choose the Bee Gees over the Beatles. I was immediately gripped by it; I sang it a million times as I ran through the streets and park.
With apologies to Bee Gees purists, I decided to record my own version:
Here’s a link if the video doesn’t feed through.
At the park, I admired the wall, which along with the rest of the park’s infrastructure was built by a WPA-type of program during the Depression. I wondered how bad things would have to get now before our government started helping its citizens in meaningful ways, which is to say with work, health, and the environment. You would think that 40 million unemployed and 100,000 dead would be enough, but apparently not.
I was relieved to be at the park early enough so that I didn’t have to follow the physical-distancing arrows someone had chalked onto the pavement.
The song played and the flowers glowed.
Lamplight, keep on burning.
