I got in my car yesterday to go out and pick up some groceries. I realize the first part of my last sentence might sound like the first line of a pop song: “I got in my car…” I also realize that with the whole sentence, I am describing an act that I would have once skipped over in a different time and place: “I got in my car yesterday to go out and pick up some groceries.”
But it hit me as I climbed in, closed and locked my door, and turned on the ignition. When I leaned forward and read the odometer as it came on, I realized that over the last month, I have driven less than 25 miles.
Before the current pandemic, I would drive almost that far to get to my job most mornings. In a typical day, I could easily drive twice that amount and think I was getting good gas mileage, only having to fill the tank once a week.
As I’m hearing it said everywhere now, welcome to the new normal. Having lived through the gas lines of the 1970s, the Gulf Wars, and environmental conflicts over drilling for oil in the States, I never would have thought that the solution to gas shortages and overuse of fossil fuels would be so simple. Just stop driving.
I know the circumstances behind the current crisis isn’t permanent, but the decline in demand for fuel has put OPEC in a real tailspin.
I’ve realized something else in my new, COVID-19 life-style, and it has to do with my writing, not with world oil markets. I realize now that a part of my writing process has always involved driving. In my car, on a paved highway or byway, sailing along, I process things. I process my life, grief, love, and problems. I process stories and poems.
Now, though, I’m mostly stuck inside, with two mile walks in the park every day, or every other day.
Writing isn’t the same.
Grief, Writing, Driving
The other night, in my grief group, I realized that driving was really a way I process things.
For example, when I used to drive to work everyday, I’d put an old Beatles’ CD on and let it play as I drove. The CD in question is not their later, more complex work. It was “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Love Me Do,” “Please, Please Me,” “Twist and Shout,” “A Taste of Honey.” Yes, it was their first album, first released in England before anyone knew about them. It is a joyful, free wheeling album with a few hints of things to come. It had become my music of choice as I drove to work and had to face a place where others wear faces and one must be upbeat.
I realized Monday night during my grief group that this had stopped.
I’ve changed this, and now, going to the grocery store yesterday, for example, I put in the CD again, drove to “Love Me Do” and “PS I Love You,” the two songs on the second 45 record I owned as a child (My first 45 was Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “Puff, the Magic Dragon”). It helped. As I drove, I remembered dancing to these songs in my grandfather’s candy store in 1964. I remembered where I first heard them.
But I haven’t had the same luck with my writing. I’m still getting ideas. I’m just not going out for drives and having reveries about possible scenes and how different ideas hold together. I’m not planning drafts from the front seat of my Nissan. Instead, I’m a senior scuffling around the kitchen and the backyard, picking things up, putting things away, and hoping to find ideas hidden behind them.
Reading has been a help, though. I’m getting ready to start working again once school is finished. And I still have the shower for morning planning.
But I do look forward to seeing the open road again. I don’t expect to get back to normal. I’ve assumed that every day now, in the present, this moment, is part of the new normal, what is to come.
Stay safe and healthy. Keep processing.