Tag Archives: COVID-19

American Dystopia

6 Replies

In the backyard, outside the window where I write, pines rise up a steep hill. The trees and a thick groundcover of amber-red pine straw almost camouflage the deer who frequent the woods; they are usually there when I open the blinds in the morning. Birds chirp and go back and forth among the feeders hanging on the fence and up the hill. Because of the hill, the sun takes its time appearing over the ridge; finally, it appears and emblazons the landscape in a panoply of light and shadow. A feisty squirrel invades the bird feeders, oblivious to the spicy mix that was put there to deter him.

In the front of the house, I open the front door and hear the incessant hum of traffic on the interstate nearby. Trees mostly block the view of the cars in the distance, but the hum is constant. My townhouse’s interior spaces serve as a limbo between these two contrasting worlds; my townhouse functions as my “safe place” in a never-ending pandemic with too many people ignoring the seriousness and consequences it entails.

I have to admit that the word “dystopia” has been creeping into my thoughts lately.

In an undergraduate political theory class, a long time ago, I wrote a paper on “anti-utopian novels” – books which would more commonly be called “dystopian” now. As I recall, I considered 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, and Player Piano, and included a mention of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon as an outlier that comes close but does not totally fit the category.

I think of dystopia when I go to the grocery store and try to avoid the unmasked people. I look at them with suspicion as they look back at me, often with apparent contempt. I think of dystopia as I follow the investigations into the insurrection of January 6, 2021, and see footage from the invasion of the U.S. Capitol that is, in its own way, every bit as disturbing as the footage of the Twin Towers collapsing on 9/11.

I heard a story on NPR today in which two women were having a serious-sounding discussion about the racial implications of the emoji colors one chooses. On NPR! I didn’t think of dystopia then; I just got depressed. I have never used emojis and, if I ever did, it would be in a whimsical spirit of irony. Now, knowing that my choice of emoji might mark me as racist, I will continue to ignore that option.

I think of dystopia when I hear people who identify as Christian, and whom I used to think of as good and reasonable people, support a dissembling celebrity politician – a wannabe autocrat – whose morals, life, and lifestyle fly in the face of everything they profess to believe. I pray that those people will finally abandon the Big Lie about the 2020 election and those who perpetrated it.

It’s an election year in my home state and I think of dystopia when I see the campaign ads of the incumbent governor, running for reelection, delivering a barely articulate diatribe against the current President and telling Washington that they don’t run our business. Or something like that – it’s hard to know what she says half the time. This woman (a friend of mine calls her “Governor Mee-Maw”) doesn’t hesitate to take and spend every dollar of federal money our state can get while challenging the government that authorized it and refusing to expand healthcare fairly to the population. A known January 6 insurrectionist, running for the U.S. Senate, touts his endorsement and support from the man whose insurrection he supported, while his opponents line up to try to outdo each other in their opposition to vaccinations, mask mandates, and the current President, their support of firearms, and their Christian credentials. One guy, who has never met an election he couldn’t lose, is going to go after the “secular left” that, he says, is destroying our country. One candidate even vows to build the “wall” (have we not moved past the wall?) while another has revealed that he was called by God to run for the U.S. Senate. And, just like the prophet Isaiah, he responded, “Here am I; send me.”

Boo phooey.

These candidates use the word “socialism” as a scare tactic, with the full knowledge that most of the audience for these ads have no clue what “socialism” actually means. They just know they’ve been told it’s bad by politicians who probably don’t know what it means either.

I guess I should be able to take some slight comfort in knowing that these tactics are national, and not confined to my home state of Alabama. But it concerns me that these politicians are making their statements and accusations as if they speak for all Alabamians and that is so far from the truth.

For the record: I am an independent liberal and support everything that label implies. I understand and can have an intelligent and factual conversation about socialism. I do not believe the 2020 election was “stolen” from anyone. I support universal health care. I do not own guns and I support strict gun restrictions. I don’t condone banning books. I am fully vaccinated and boostered; I have been fortunate in not having COVID yet. I will wear a mask in public until I determine it’s safe to take it off. I trust the science and understand that only we humans can address the threats of climate change. I am an Alabamian, the son and grandson and great-grandson of native Alabamians, the descendant of soldiers on both sides of the Civil War, and am committed to work for progressive change within my home state. I love college football (Roll Tide) and don’t care much for NASCAR. I am not alone in Alabama and will work for change from within — not criticize from without. Any questions?

I think of dystopia when I hear a woman earnestly tell a school board meeting that her children will never wear masks and that she will bring out all of her guns – “loaded” – if anyone tries to mandate masks.

I have tried to remain silent about these things because, frankly, such insipid cluelessness scares me. But these people have no qualms about spewing and supporting these lies to my face, on social media, and on television, so it’s time they begin to know how I feel – I’m not on board with their callous stupidity.

A new book that captures the zeitgeist of our current moment is Noah Hawley’s novel, Anthem. A post-pandemic dystopian novel, Anthem looks at a time in the near future when young people are starting to commit suicide in alarming numbers, leaving a distinctive meme behind. I recently ran across an excerpt from Anthem in which the author, addressing the reader directly, apologizes for the ridiculous world he has created in the novel, explaining that the senseless world in which we currently live is equally ridiculous. He writes:

“Consider this: … 34 percent of his neighbors have gone to war against tiny pieces of fabric worn across the nose and mouth. They believe these tiny pieces of fabric are robbing them of their personal freedom. And so they have declared war against these pieces of fabric, even as scientists present evidence that those same tiny pieces of fabric will protect them from a deadly virus sweeping the globe, killing millions. But for the 34 percent, the fabric, not the virus, is the enemy. And so they lie dying in hospitals from a disease they argue does not exist.”

I ran across that passage and, just like that, I ordered the book.

I am weary of the pandemic, of politics, of all of it. Still, I look for comfort to the artists that are dealing in their own ways with our current moment and Anthem – despite its Tarantino-level violence and most disturbing plotlines – fits the bill. On the other hand, David Byrne’s jubilant stage show, American Utopia, is upbeat and hopeful while acknowledging the challenges all around us. That show existed before the pandemic, but it somehow is perfect for its moment as captured on film by filmmaker Spike Lee. I see new fiction dealing with life during the pandemic in publications like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Poet Hank Lazer’s 2020 collection of poetry, COVID19 SUTRAS, tackled the situation head-on in its early months.

Somehow, the writing influenced by the pandemic era is more meaningful than the deluge of daily headlines. They are tackling difficult times but provide a balm in its midst. Their efforts show me that, in a still isolated time, I am not alone and can always look to our shared artistic community for comfort and support in times of stress.

When I started this online journal, I did not plan for it to become political. But I didn’t plan for the current crises we are forced to navigate, either.

I think of dystopia when I worry that we are now living in one. Even so, there are silhouettes of deer grazing atop the hill and birds are chirping in the yard. There is peace for a moment.

Savoring Sidewalk 2021

Leave a reply

REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” blasted through the Alabama Theatre near the start of the Opening Night festivities and screening for the 2021 “Homecoming” chapter of Birmingham’s Sidewalk Film Festival. It was labelled “Homecoming” because the festival was returning to its home in Birmingham’s downtown theatre district after exiling itself to drive-in screenings for the 2020 pandemic version.

When I preordered my pass for the festival, I was not expecting the upsurge in Covid outbreaks and the “break-out” cases of fully-vaccinated people that have plagued the second half of the summer. Also, Alabama – embarrassingly – has one of the lowest rates of vaccination in the country. As my great-grandfather McCarn, who was an old-time country schoolteacher in Cullman County, allegedly said about some of his students, “You just can’t beat sense into these stupid people.” (And Grandpa taught school back in a time when you could try.)

But the good people of Sidewalk have been conscious and responsible throughout the time of Covid and, when screenings resumed at the Sidewalk Cinema + Film Center late last year, I felt safe each time I attended. For this year’s festival, proof of vaccination or a current negative Covid test, diligent masking, and lowered seating capacities made the event feel as safe as it could be in our current moment.

Fittingly, the Opening Night movie was Television Event, a 2020 documentary by Jeff Daniels (not the actor) about the making of the 1983 made-for-television movie, The Day After. Opening Night at Sidewalk is often something frothy and light-hearted – a respite, perhaps, before the usually more serious fare of the festival weekend. This year the programmers chose a heavier appetizer.

The Day After, directed by Nicholas Meyer, is a drama about a nuclear attack and its impact on the town of Topeka, Kansas. Daniels’s documentary explores the fear during the Cold War era and the controversy and politics surrounding the production. Younger audiences can’t comprehend what those years were like for Baby Boomers who grew up when “duck and cover” school drills for nuclear attacks were almost as common as fire drills. The film reminds us that a large portion of the U.S. population expected nuclear war within the decade. I remember seeing spray-painted outlines, representing vaporized bodies, drawn on the sidewalks at the University of Alabama to commemorate the anniversaries of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima.

One hundred million Americans watched the ABC broadcast of The Day After when it premiered in November 1983. Television Event makes much of the fact that such a communal television experience can never happen again. The documentary implies that the film might even have influenced Reagan’s decision to pursue nuclear arms limitations with the Soviets.

The screening was followed by a made-for-Sidewalk panel moderated by AL.com’s Ben Flanagan and including broadcast journalist Ted Koppel and the director, Nicholas Meyer. Among the more urgent comments made during the panel were Meyer’s suggestion that, with the rise of terrorism, the nuclear threat is as bad as it’s ever been and Koppel’s assertion that cyber-attack is an even greater threat than nuclear to national and world security in our present time.

The eye-opening Opening Night screening was also entertaining and lived up to Creative Director Rachel Morgan’s promise to scare the audience. It was good to be back at the Alabama Theatre in an ongoing search for somewhat “normal” experiences in 2021.

I have a tendency to watch mostly documentaries at Sidewalk and 2021 was no exception. Ailey, directed by Jamila Wignot, provides an intimate portrait of the celebrated choreographer and stunning archival footage of performances by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. Ailey was screened at the Lyric Theatre and, in its introduction, the audience was reminded that we were the first audiences in the Lyric since March 2020. Dancer Germaul Barnes, in a moving and dramatic pre-screening tribute to Ailey, encouraged the audience to look around at the people around us. It was a reminder to be in the moment.

The Capote Tapes, directed by Ebs Burnough, revisits the life of the twentieth-century writer with new audio from George Plimpton’s interviews for his 1997 oral biography of Capote. The film focuses on the many scandals and broken friendships that attended Capote’s final legendary but unfinished novel, Answered Prayers.

The homegrown documentary, Socks on Fire, directed by Bo McGuire, chronicles a family drama. McGuire, whose writing and voiceovers in the film are impressive, directs a vivid and imaginative rendering of the squabble over his beloved grandmother’s estate – centered on homophobic Aunt Sharon, who changes the locks, and drag queen Uncle John, who assumes he will continue to live in his mother’s house.

Socks on Fire takes place in Alabama and earned the best documentary prize at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. McGuire tells his family’s story with humor, love, and energy. The film itself is a creative log ride; in case that was not enough, McGuire’s animated introduction included live performances by three drag queens on the Alabama stage (well, two drag queens and a third act, “Saliva Godiva,” whose frenzied performance seems to defy any known label). One performer, Queen Brown Suga Spice, seemed to have a couple of praise dancers as back-up. As the ladies performed, runners passed the hat around the theatre to collect tips from the audience.

In his introduction, McGuire again made the point that seemed to be a theme for this 23rd edition of Sidewalk. He stressed the importance of the communal audience experience that is central to the filmmaker’s art. Being back together in actual theatres in downtown was a reminder of how much has been missed over the past year and a half.

Queen Brown Suga Spice at the Alabama

In earlier years, I would try to see how many screenings I could squeeze in on Sidewalk weekend. Nowadays, I curate carefully and take time to savor the experience. Sidewalk 23 did not disappoint.

Wallowing | Contemplation: Chilly Scenes of Winter

Leave a reply

January 22: It was never my plan to wake up at 5:30 this morning, but I did. Opening the bedroom curtains, a gentle post-rain fog hovered over the street, blurring the street and occasional headlights. Last night I was in the middle of reading a Calvin Tomkins 1970s essay on the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)-designed pavilion for Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. That geodesic-dome architecture was perennially surrounded by Fujiko Nakaya’s installation of artificial water vapor – a thing I would have loved to see.

Being awake in the fog at 5:30 this morning, there seemed no better time to finish the Tomkins essay, so I retrieved the Tomkins book, took a seat by the open window looking over the foggy road, and began to finish the essay as the fog dispersed and the sun eventually shone. The ground was white grey, the trees were frosted, and the mist was frozen.

Eventually the sun broke through with a golden light. A bright red cardinal, lurking in the bushes, flew onto a tree branch. He was transformed, for a moment, into a brilliant golden glow. In the past year, cardinals have become, for me, some kind of omen.

So was this one.

Such contemplative moments are a luxury always, but today – at the beginning of a welcome new administration in the Oval Office – they are especially cherished.

I think that most of us have taken on a more philosophical mindset during these months of relative isolation. “Look around you and pay attention” was a directive I often gave to acting and directing students and it’s a directive I find myself following closely in this challenging period of an early COVID-driven retirement.

It seems that, in these moments of privation, I am drawn to things that try to make sense of our challenges. I seek escapism, but also those things that make sense of this current moment in time.

COVID19 SUTRAS, by Hank Lazer, is a new book of poems and sutra-like meditations that deals with our cultural isolation, division, and longing in ways that inspire, incite, and calm the soul.

Intimations, the new book of COVID-inspired essays by Zadie Smith, gives a sort of skeptical hope. Smith — intuitively – knows the landscape, but approaches it with humor, acid, and civility. She remains among my favorite living authors. Her thoughts on our current time lend strength.

Don DeLillo’s The Silence is a brief and pointed novel – written before the pandemic – about a time when social entitlements are suddenly, inexplicably, withdrawn. What happens, DeLillo wonders, when electronic assumptions fail and society is left to wander, cluelessly? It is significant, I think, that DeLillo’s cultural deprivation occurs on a Super Bowl Sunday.

The Silence was most evocative, to me, of Edward Albee’s 1966 play, A Delicate Balance. In Albee’s play, a group of individuals comes together in incomprehensible fear of something existential and undefined.

In a recent New Yorker, Lawrence Wright’s intense investigation of COVID19 and the American response – “The Plague Year” – provides insight into a real-life crisis of existence and our current moment that can’t be wished away.

The bookshelf landscape is not completely bleak, however. One grey morning this week, I was reading Verlyn  Klinkenborg and Calvin Tomkins near the bank of the Flint River in southeast Madison County.

There is strength in the essays of Verlyn Klinkenborg. His essays on “The Rural Life” in the New York Times were an anticipated feature in my readings of that newspaper through the years and I am now making my way through the sequel, More Scenes from the Rural Life. I also look forward to reading Klinkenborg’s The Last Fine Time, the chronicle of a family-owned tavern in Buffalo and, especially, Several Short Sentences about Writing, his tome of advice for all writers.

The aforementioned six-volume collection by Calvin Tomkins, The Lives of Artists, is making me most happy. Starting with a profile of Marcel Duchamp in 1962, Tomkins’s essays, spanning seven decades, present a very personal history of art in the second half of the 20th Century and beyond.

This crucible year of the 21st Century challenges our strength and stamina. Great writing currently explores it; great writing also provides an escape from the day-to-day obstacles it offers.

At one point in Intimations, Smith writes, “The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art.” That might be true, but in times of stress and change, we often look to the artists for sustenance, understanding, and courage.

September Song

2 Replies

My mental and emotional soundtracks tend to run toward the very seasonally suggestive. While George Winston’s December album never works for me beyond its titular month, Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns lags after Labor Day.

September rolls around and it’s hard to ignore the imminence of Autumn. The last days of August were grey and partly gloomy as the eastern-most remnants of Hurricane Laura passed through northern Alabama; other storms followed in her wake. Fall college football season will be so depleted as to create anxiety and despair rather than jubilation; it’s hard to work up the usual enthusiasm for a Kentucky Derby on Labor Day weekend without crowds. Even so, I want Bob Baffert-trained horses to win.

Back in the early summer, four packets of flower seeds arrived in my mother’s mail with a charitable solicitation. They sat around for a bit and, one day, when I had the luxury of working in my yard, I popped them in four separate pots without great expectations.

Ultimately, most of the seeds have sprouted and grown with varying levels of success, but the only ones to bloom so far are the vivid blue forget-me-nots. The garden table and surrounding yard where they sit is laden now with leaves from the cherry tree in the neighbor’s yard. That tree is always the first to shed its leaves, but also among the first to herald spring a few months later.

Short days and cooler weather often have a negative effect on my mood, but a suggestive impact on my inner soundtrack. I will swear that yesterday, on the first morning of September, I woke up with Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” running constantly through my head.

As I got more awake, “Try to Remember,” from the Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt chamber musical The Fantasticks, began to dominate with its recurring motif of words that rhyme with September and other infectious internal rhyme and wordplay.

More fully awake, the tune that haunts me is Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” a song that, like all universal literature, morphs depending on the moment. Written in response to a parent’s death from cancer, it has dealt with the tragedy of 9/11 and war and the loss of life and dignity after Katrina.

My most visceral musical response to this particular September of 2020, however, is Rosanne Cash’s haunting duet with her father, Johnny, in her song “September When It Comes,” a plaintive song of memory, pain, and reconciliation. She sings:

Well first there’s summer, then I’ll let you in.
September when it comes.

These past six months have done a number on all of us. The pervasive pandemic and its still-indecisive outcomes and after-effects have worked on all of our nervous systems, regardless of our political affiliations. The fact that it has become political adds to the undeniable and needless tension and stress.

I have chosen to minimize my intake of “news” for a while. I need to step back and more judiciously protect the information I consume. I need to halter the despair.

The writer, Verlyn Klinkenborg, whose contemplative essays often provide balm in times of stress, remarked on the over-saturation of media coverage in the aftermath of 9/11 almost nineteen years ago. He calls 9/11/2001 “that sudden Tuesday.” Could it ever be summarized more perfectly?

Reacting to the saturation of media coverage of that event, and to the fact that we Americans were re-playing the tragedy over and over on our screens, Klinkenborg wrote:

It’s hard to know, just yet, whether for each of us this witnessing has caused an erosion or a sedimentation, a stripping away of the skin or a callusing. But paradoxical as it may sound, to continue to bear witness, in conscience, it may be necessary to stop watching for a while, to turn off the television, to break what for some people has become a self-reinforcing circle of despair.

In those stoic days after 9/11, I was working at Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery. Our theatre complex was located in a pastoral park, across the lake from the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. A couple of days after “that sudden Tuesday,” I escaped to the Museum for a quiet lunch away from the news reports that permeated every space I encountered.

A group of older ladies was seated at a table near me. As I eavesdropped on their chatter, I discovered that they were from all over the country — stuck for a while at a hotel in Montgomery, waiting for the airports to open and for travel to resume. Periodically, during the conversations, I heard references to the tragedy that had left them all stranded for a moment in time. Mostly, however, I heard the resolute and determined voices of American women who were forced together in the most unlikely of circumstances and were making connections and “making do” until they were able to move on with their lives.  They were awaiting the break in the clouds that engulfed us.

Might that “circle of despair” be somehow broken in this current moment?

Ascetic August 2020

Leave a reply

Local tomatoes are prolific in this mid-summer early August as I gratefully accept all offers from friends and neighbors. There may be a glut of home-grown tomatoes right now; they will – like the summer – disappear soon enough, and much too soon for my tastes.

Not long ago, not having a fresh tomato on hand, and sort of craving tomatoes, I made the mistake of buying one on a whim at the grocery store. It has been years since I purchased a supermarket tomato and I was shocked anew at the lack of taste and the plastic consistency; I was reminded why I swore off supermarket tomatoes in the first place. After a couple of bites, I threw the pretender out and waited for a farmers’ market or a kind friend to come through. I never had much luck growing tomatoes on my own.

Fortunately, tomatoes have been coming from all directions in the past few weeks and I haven’t wasted a single one. Salads, tomato sandwiches, and sharp acidic sauces are the order of the day and, for many meals, a tomato sandwich or two suffice.

After the first frost, I may use good canned tomatoes – preferably Italian San Marzano, as needed, for recipes and sauces, but the authentic taste of a fresh locally grown summer tomato, still warm from the plant, is the epitome of summer southern comfort.

In the ascetic summer of 2020, simple home-based pleasures like fresh tomatoes take on added significance. I’m grateful for my retirement; this fraught fall semester of teaching would surely have done me in.

I recently read a piece about Ernie Pyle, the iconic World War II war correspondent who was a casualty of the war in Japan in 1945. In a dispatch during the war, he wrote: “Someday when peace has returned to this odd world, I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges.”

Tonight, a full moon is just appearing through the trees over Green Mountain and I understand Pyle’s longing — a longing that is in most of us, I suspect. Pyle expresses the opportunity to return to something loved, something missed, something yearned for. The idea of “normal” is toppled, but we try to make amends.

In 1989, Norman Rene’s Longtime Companion, with a script by Craig Lucas, was the first theatrical film to address the AIDS crisis. In the final scene, three friends who have survived the initial onslaught of the virus – before it was quite understood – are walking along a lonely Fire Island beach. They are musing about what it will be like when a cure is found.

Willy, Campbell Scott’s character, says, “I just want to be there,” cuing a fantasy sequence in which hundreds jubilantly flock to and party on their beach. The three stalwarts are reunited with their old friends who have succumbed to the (then) mysterious virus. As abruptly as it began, the fantasy ends, and the three figures are left once again on the beach, alone.

Ronald Reagan’s denial of the AIDS outbreak during his presidency, in the early years of that particular pandemic, calls to mind the current self-serving denial of the Oval Office’s current occupant. I cannot change the world, so I will try to nurture myself with its bounty and trust the doctors to see us through. And I will vote come election day.

I just want to be there.

Shadows and Light

Leave a reply

Shadow

There is a large quasi-Palladian window in the bedroom where I sleep at my parents’ house. Draperies cover the main window but the top arch is open. From the bed, I can see the stars, the clouds, and, frequently, the moon as it appears above Shades Mountain through the arch.

Just outside the window, a crape myrtle with rich burgundy blooms stands sentinel in the front yard. As I was going to sleep a couple of nights ago, I was struck by a silhouette on the bedroom wall opposite the window. A bright moon had cast a delicate shadow of the top branches of the crape myrtle. A gentle summer breeze was slightly blowing the branches and there was a lacy arched silhouette swaying against the bedroom wall. It relaxed me as I fell asleep.

Strangely enough, I started contemplating “Plato’s Cave.”

Plato’s “Republic,” from 380 B.C., includes an allegory about prisoners who have lived most of their lives in a cave, facing in only one direction toward the cave wall. Behind the prisoners is a fire and shadows of objects cast from the fire onto the cave wall are their only concept of “reality.” If they are ever able to escape from their cave of ignorance and see the true light, they tend to be distrustful and frightened of the true “reality” beyond their illusions.

It’s more complex than that, but that’s the gist. My political science degree must have kicked in one late night. I may just be excessively contemplative these days because I’m quarantined awaiting COVID test results. However, my night vision made me think about how we may be plagued just now with too many delusional cave dwellers in “leadership” positions and not enough seekers of enlightenment …

Mainly, though, I was struck by the beauty of a shadow on the wall as I sank into slumber a couple of nights ago.

Light

Saharan Sunset | Moveable Feast

1 Reply

The fact that our lives in the Southeast United States this weekend were significantly influenced by an infusion of dust from the African Sahara is a reminder of how small our world is and how close we all are.

There is a quality of light on this early summer late afternoon that is striking. It’s hard to determine, really, how much is cloudiness as a front settles in and how much is the dust. I just finished re-reading Faulkner’s Light in August and, as a firm believer in the Faulkner claim that his title refers to an actual natural phenomenon, I prefer to attribute the odd quality of the sky today to natural occurrences from across the Atlantic.

Driving down a two-lane highway into Oxford, Mississippi, on an August afternoon some decades ago, I was sure that the specific light through the long-leaf pines was what Faulkner, and his wife, Estelle, who suggested the title Light in August, surely meant. It was a special and translucent light that is hard to describe. When you encounter it, you will surely recognize it.

It has been raining off and on all day in north Alabama, and the pre-dusk light has taken on an intensely bright quality. The sunset last night was splendid, but tonight’s dusk tends to be leaning toward a chalky mundane.

Lifestyle changes have been the order of the day – every day – in this year of the pandemic. Much of my social activity for years centered around meals and an effort to satisfy my interest in foodways — in social as well as historical terms.

The last time I ate a meal in a restaurant was March. As restrictions have begun to be loosened – prematurely, I think – I still have no real desire to “dine in” for a while. I want to support my local eateries and I have ordered take-out from some of my favorite places in an effort to do so. Even as the restaurants do their part to ensure safety, there are just too many people who don’t seem to be taking this crisis seriously. Currently, I know of about eight people who are diagnosed with COVID.

I know many of the restaurants are open on a more restricted basis and I wish them well. I was amused to read that The Inn at Little Washington (www.theinnatlittlewashington.com), the much-acclaimed Virginia restaurant outside D.C., had plans to seat costumed mannequins in its dining rooms upon reopening so that the place would not feel so empty. It’s an amusing solution, but a little depressing, too.

Among the things I’m missing most are the Friends of the Café dinners in Florence at the factory/atelier of designer Natalie Chanin’s Alabama Chanin brand (www.alabamachanin.com).  These dinners began about five years ago and were my introduction to many chefs whose work was only previously known to me by their reputations and awards. I have met people from all over the world at these events and formed friendships along the way.

Four Friends of the Café dinner events were scheduled for 2020 and I had tickets to the whole series. The first two were postponed. The rest are up in the air for now. I am a little pessimistic about the likelihood that there will be any trips to Florence for Friends of the Café this year. The dinners also served as fundraisers for notable causes like Southern Foodways Alliance  and Chanin’s Project Threadways.

I have frequently written about these dinners in the past. The ambiance and sense of community they inspire always impressed me. Each featured chef has been on some part of the James Beard Award spectrum and the dinners have become a treasured part of my year.

American Public Television’s “Create” affiliate has aired the PBS show “Moveable Feast with Fine Cooking” (www.finecooking.com/moveablefeast) for a few years now. That program comes as close as anything I’ve found to capturing the spirit of those magical Florence meals. During the pandemic, “Moveable Feast” has become a brief escape for me, reminiscent of a more social time of the recent past.

The show’s title is inspired by a Hemingway title and quote about Paris in the 1920s. Each episode features a different location – sometimes American, sometimes international. The program host introduces the location and a couple of chefs from the area. They visit local purveyors to choose what to prepare for that evening’s “feast.”

Then it’s off to the kitchen where the host and guest chefs prepare their recipes for a pop-up communal meal. The show has always been appealing; nowadays, the sight of convivial guests gathering, hugging, shaking hands, toasting, and sitting down to have a meal together evokes bittersweet nostalgia.

“Create” showcased hours-long blocks of “Moveable Feast” episodes over the weekend and I found myself drawn to them – even though I had already viewed most of them. I was most pleased to revisit a charming episode in which host Michelle Bernstein visits and cooks with Jeremiah Tower, a godfather of California cuisine, in his current hometown of Merrida, Mexico. The occasionally prickly Tower, whose memoir California Dish is among my favorite books on food, exudes immaculate charm and wit as he shows Bernstein around the town and introduces her to a wealth of local ingredients and their knowledgeable purveyors.

In another favorite, host Pete Evans attends an event of “Outstanding in the Field” (www.outstandinginthefield.com), a roving pop-up restaurant event founded by artist Jim Denevan. The guest chef is Ravi Kapur and the site is Secret Sea Cove on the California coast. Guests at the table closest to the ocean get a gentle foot soaking as the tide moves in during the magical feast.

I was interested in what “Outstanding in the Field” is up to during the pandemic and found a moving letter from Jim Denevan on the website. He explains that the project is on hiatus until 2021 and concludes, “The table will be set. It will have been a long time coming. We are looking forward.”

In the milky sunset of a Saharan-influenced dusk, I will only add “Amen.”

The Panic of Cardinals

2 Replies

At the end of February, as friends and I left a late performance at Louisville’s Kentucky International Convention Center, we were stunned by the appearance of a bright red cardinal, trapped in the gigantic convention hall. He was clearly in panic, flying frantically back and forth along the massive third floor concourse where, as far as we could tell, there were no clear openings to the outside. Others gathered to watch the bird in frenetic flight. All of us cheered him on.

At dinner the next night, other friends spoke of seeing a female cardinal trying to find an escape from the same place the next morning.

Cardinals, you know, mate for life.

I find myself worrying about those desperate cardinals each morning when I awaken. I hope they found escape; I worry that they did not.

Tradition from many cultures tells us that a cardinal sighting is the visitation of the spirit of a loved one, letting us know that we are being heard and watched over.

At the time, my friends and I didn’t suspect that the theatre convention would be our last opportunity to be around people, business, and social events for who knows how long.

This current international health crisis, frankly, has me flummoxed. I try to find comparisons. Most recently, for my part of the world, there were “After the tornadoes” (2011), “After the BP Oil Spill” (2010), “After Katrina” (2005), and “After 9/11” (2011). But all of those had the hope of an eventual “after” of some kind. This current crisis is so ill-defined, … so nebulous.

I find comfort, as always, in nature and the circle of life.

At my father’s graveside service after the funeral four years ago, one of my most distinct memories is the abundance of wisteria vines in full glory in the trees just beyond his gravesite. Today, as I drove through Alabama, I was stunned by the transient presence of wisteria wherever I gazed.

Today, at home, my Japanese pink cherry tree is starting its annual bloom. My neighbor’s white blossomed cherry is reaching its peak, and my crimson camellia, at last, has yielded a respectable bounty after two years. My grandfather’s legacy rose is thriving, as is the wild rose I harvested from a friend’s lakeside ten years ago. My redbud is stagnant, while redbuds bloom in profusion everywhere I look; this is its habit and I will trust it to sprout its heart-shaped leaves before long.

I’m afraid I tend to be a pessimist by nature. That increases my personal stress and tension in times such as these. I find myself drawn to less exuberant literature of my past. In these times, two titles that keep creeping into my consciousness are Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. I re-read Death in Venice on my first extended visit into New Orleans after the Flood; it calmed and strengthened me.

I heard a recent interview with poet Reginald Dwayne Betts; he spoke of how the current crisis is making him more aware of nature. He comments that on a walk with his son, “I heard the sound of a squirrel’s claws as he climbed a tree – as stressful as this time is, it gives us time to reflect.”

When Alexander Pope wrote “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” in 1732, I have no doubt his specific choice of verb was intentional.

At dusk a couple of days ago, as I drove along the crest of Shades Mountain, two cardinals – a male and a female – flew up out of the sunset from the ridge and directly into my path. I braked, but they were already clear. The pair skimmed the surface and flew into the darkening woods. I watched them fly up through the trees and disappear.

It’s enough to make a man superstitious.