It seems like I’m eating breakfast every fifteen minutes.

Pandemic time passes peculiarly. You must have noticed.

The calendar seems to have almost stopped. One homebound day slips into the next, like those blank days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

A friend confessed that, rather than remembering what day it is, he just calls every day “Schmursday.”

I’d have thought that a long string of empty days would move more slowly, that the stretch from noon to nightfall would feel like a week, as it did when I was a boy and every hour seemed filled with limitless possibilities. Quite the opposite. I’ll think it’s early afternoon until I chance to glance at a clock and find that it’s time to start cooking supper.

Hunkering down together in a home we love is not unpleasant. We do a little yardwork, assemble jigsaw puzzles, ride the bike trail, take a nap, figure out supper, do the dishes, watch good TV when we can find it. Last night we finished Padma Lakschmi’s “Taste of the Nation,” which was excellent. The series scratches the travel itch and made me hunger for something cooked by someone other than me.

I haven’t set foot in my church or school for a hundred days. Likely, three or four hundred more days will pass before I can prance, posture and pontificate in the classroom or sing in my beloved church choir, things I very much do miss doing.

I am taking an unpaid sabbatical from my teaching until there is a vaccine.

For the first time since I was three years old, my calendar is completely empty. Back in 1954, my first day of school was about fifteen months in the future. Same thing now. Maybe longer.

The situation frees me to take up again some of the things I used to do when I was a boy. I still have the wooden blocks my dad made for me and I have been thinking of passing some time building structures with them on the floor in our cool and quiet basement. There’s a wide open space on the floor down there that calls for a castle. I have a yen to paint toy soldiers.

We devote much time to following the news. It is a season of sad crises. I feel a little ashamed to find myself reasonably happy when so many are suffering so much grief, shock and depression. There’s the virus, jobs lost, long lines at food kitchens, and an intense and troubled awakening to the misery of our fellow citizens who suffer the results of the racism our culture has sanctioned for so long.

The collapse of our standing internationally troubles me, too. I’m still proud of the achievements of the greatest of my fellow Americans. I could look my French friends in the eye and say, “Tu as donné au monde Victor Hugo, Debussy et Monet, oui, et je te remercie. Mais nous avons donné Walt Whitman, Louis Armstrong et Georgia O’Keefe.”

I am still proud of our national parks. I’m still proud of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence but I am also shamed by those documents, given how far short we’ve fallen from realizing the ideals expressed so explicitly therein.

Our progress toward ‘a more perfect union’ is faltering worse than ever and the whole world knows it. As David Brooks wrote in the NYTimes yesterday, “We Americans enter the July 4 weekend of 2020 humiliated as almost never before.”

And to think that another hundred thousand Americans will likely die from this virus before winter. Who knows how many more will follow?

What are we to make of the death threats and armed harrassment that our fellow citizens are visiting upon the very public health leaders who are trying to protect us, forcing many of them to resign so as to protect their families? What kind of a culture breeds idiots who are capable of such things?

Remember when you-know-who said he didn’t want people coming to the USA from “s--thole countries”? Now that we have far the highest number of infections in the world, many countries don’t want us coming to them. Who is the “s--thole country” now?

What can one do? I phone my Congress people. But I’ve done that all my adult life and never felt that any good came of it. If our representative democracy is working then why do solutions favored by a large majority of our citizenry stagnate in Congress?

Still, who knows? My call or yours, might be the one that tips the scale.

And thus ‘tempus fugit’ at the Sowash household.

Let’s hear some music.

I wrote a song for baritone and piano in 1975 entitled, “I was remembering this morning…” It’s a setting of a short speech from Thornton Wilder’s wonderful one-act play, “The Long Christmas Dinner.” The oldest member of the family is sharing memories of the pioneer days, “so long ago” as to seem a different world to the listening relatives. Some day the times through which we pass will seem equally remote … which is the point of “The Long Christmas Dinner.”

To hear baritone Noel Bouley and pianist Phil Amalong performing “I was remembering this morning…”, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.