This week, the fifteenth of the lockdown, I was reminded that high humidity is the worst kind of running weather. Am I literally dying is a question that crossed my mind many times as I staggered up a hill that, in the past,* I would have glided up and over without a second thought. But it still felt good to reach the top, where I stopped to admire the cone flowers, just making their entrance onto the garden stage. I like how these flowers look like badminton birdies. Or maybe they’re (also) called ‘shuttlecocks’ (?) as per an Amazon page I just found that had a ‘Customer Question and Answer’ that made me laugh.
Q: May these be used in the pool?
A: Could give to your cat to play with.
By Amazon Customer June 14th, 2020.
*two weeks ago
Someone was apparently (heroically?) spending their lockdown providing hilarious, nonsensical answers to customer questions about obscure items on Amazon. I wondered if there were many people doing this, and if they traded the best answers with each other. It sounded like fun. (In theory.) Or maybe I could find some people to play badminton with. I had always loved playing badminton as a kid. Badminton would be a good Phase Two pandemic sport; you could play with a mask and keep physically distanced. I felt confident that our society would be a better place if we replaced our obsession with football/basketball/baseball/hockey/race-car driving/video games with badminton.
Like wouldn’t it be great if, in a hundred years, the history books said something along the lines of, ‘In the course of emerging from the pandemic, the United States, after instituting a very progressive taxation system and outlawing professional sports leagues (and cruise ships), developed a national obsession for amateur badminton. As cities closed their streets to automobiles in lieu of more environmentally friendly forms of urban transportation, many cities — in addition to replacing private automobile storage with trees and gardens and park benches — erected badminton courts.’ And maybe shuffleboard courts, too.
Maybe this was the community I needed to find, but I knew I would never look. I didn’t really care about badminton. Or shuffleboard. One of the things I’ve accepted about myself is that I’ll never be a very social person. Most of my earliest memories involve being terrified of people, but I learned — or was taught — to overcome that fear. For a long time, I overcompensated: I went to parties, I lived in Brooklyn. In retrospect, being social was largely a disguise — like another, more obvious disguise — and, over time, I’ve learned to value my innate fear of other people, in the same way I’ve learned to embrace being gay.
Here, in the empty park, I was grateful for the silence and for the astilbes, which were providing a different kind of fireworks than the ones everyone was complaining about.
I felt grateful to be alone in the dawn, to have enough space to accept what the world was offering.
