The morning of June 8th, 2020 began, normally, when the sunlight, beating my alarms, blasted into the bedroom of our family’s cabin in Vermont. For how little sleep I’d gotten that morning, I awoke feeling rather refreshed. I had driven up the previous night from work, arriving a little after one-thirty in the morning.
This wasn’t unusual. Work normally can run into the night, and the drive from New Hampshire to Vermont is a little under two and a half hours. The actual workday was busier than we expected, which is good. Raleigh is doing its best to maintain safety, and that involves spacing tables out appropriately, wearing a mask at all times and frequently changing gloves, dropping food at a table for guests to collect it, and regularly sanitizing surfaces. We are restricted, at the moment, to five tables. But restaurants in New Hampshire are able to open indoor seating on the fifteenth, and that will boost business and require an increase of staff. Politics of work aside, it is something to look forward to.
It’s normal.
The rest of the day progressed normally, too. I ordered from one of my favorite breakfast places online, drove to pick up my food, and wore a mask. There wasn’t an option to leave a tip on square so I gave the woman there a ten on my twenty-dollar order. Monte cristo, real maple syrup, a pre-bottled mimosa, and a cup of coffee. She also wore a mask as she handed it to me.
I ate beside the water, in the full morning sun, and finished reading a book I’d brought on vineyards, rocks, and soils. It was thrilling, I promise you. I learned a lot about different bedrock layers and whether or not it was normal to taste things like graphite, iodine, and slate in wines grown on those appropriate soils. I don’t know why there’s such a drive towards making so many things unromantic. It kind of spoils the fun of being alive. The cynic in me understands it, and does what it can to spoil my own attempts at finding what my old therapist referred to as moments of joy.
The question at heart is what those moments of joy even mean.
I’m now almost a year into this job, a job I had hoped would be consequential in my personal and my professional development and one that I am happy to say has been successful on both fronts. It’s a frequently recurring, normal, joke that my coworkers forget that I’m only twenty-four, with the follow-up being that I’m due to turn sixty-five on my next birthday. Maybe it’s because I have thoughts like this, or that I splurge on wine that few twenty-four year olds know exist, or how I dress, or that I’m even in the position that I’m in. But I feel my youth in the kind of righteous fury I still feel at things, that passionate drive to either make the world better or to be better yourself, even if I’m not sure how.
After breakfast I watched an episode of John Oliver about the current state of this country’s police, and that made me feel that righteous fury. I very nearly blogged a somewhat controversial analysis of my state of feeling for things right now. It had a lot to say about my identity and would have resulted in the second part of my book being delayed. Instead, I upped my monthly donation to the ACLU, had a bottle of wine, and called a few friends expressing the sentiments within personally. They assured me that, for who I am and for what it happening, how I feel is normal.
Even the protests happening in front of the restaurant the day after, as they happened for three days straight, felt normal.
I was a friend’s emergency contact in case she was detained at a protest in a large city.
The day after I sat on a dock in Vermont after going for a long swim and listened to our neighbors there talk about what actually is a “Meritage” and how they can’t believe the people at Shaw’s weren’t wearing masks. I couldn’t quite hear them over the sound of my own breathing (swimming is apparently a lot of exercise?), but it was interesting. When I was dry, I went back up to the cabin and read more of Dorothy Parker’s poetry and found a particularly cynical one about the possibility of changing the world.
I took a nap.
When I woke, I got nachos and had a bottle of wine standing, looking out over the water. A friend of mine shared, and later deleted (the coward) something particularly inflammatory so I blocked them. They were the third friend in a week I’d blocked over stupid positions. It’s rare I do something like that.
Chatted with a few more friends after, re-expressing some of the sentiments from the weekend and trying to figure out where to go from there. Went to bed after, earlier than I planned to, and woke to find a rainy day.
Got breakfast again, and wore a mask to pick it up. The church downtown had a sign encouraging distanced-mourning.
I have to say that, overall, it was a good day.
Apparently, it was normal.