Pause.  Perceive time.  Defined by ticking timers with bells at the end, clocks and calendars is one time.  Linear, predictable and plodding.  But time.  My time.  Our time.  Is different.  It rushes ahead, it slows to as thick slime over cobbles, it slides sideways, quickly, irreverently, without regard for wishes, dreams or clocks.  Over the long covid spring, summer, fall, winter and early spring, time lurched and sputtered.  Time lost themselves is a foggy reality of days that lost their names.  There was too much, not enough of it. It was not manageable no matter the breath and depth of my schedules and calendars.  There was no corralling it for me.  I did not write my Lear.  I did not read Proust.  I read and digested a few poems.  Very few, very short.  I was anxious and scared.  I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and grabbed onto a lot of outstretched hands.  I wrote some.  I dug two gardens.  I pushed Julia’s interests and her future doings along bit by bit. Like Sisyphus.  Didn’t he write emails and phone calls to agencies and people?  A modern Zeus would have surely assigned him to tackle DDS, SS and DIB.  Chasing genius ideas to the dead ends of realization—there should be a word for the feeling of frustration and failure when lots of energy has gone into a promising lead that is chased to an unsatisfying end.  

The quality of time was a small ball of clay that could be removed from the greater river of time in which we all swim.  We gathered via zoom with others but there was a sense of privacy—not cherished and beloved privacy but something like a hidden shame, even though there was no shame—we were visible in our small, regular zoom boxes with backgrounds of books that grew to be familiar and to a much lesser degree to the peopled world from noses up. 

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