TWANQUILITY BASE

Ikea put out a cookbook for cooking with food scraps.

“Salad days” is an overused idea, but if ever I had them, it was 2007–2008. Fresh out of college, (eventually) at a local paper, where the printing press was downstairs and the newsroom was full of friends and mentors. Little money and few responsibilities. I’m sure if you’d asked me then, I would have disputed the latter.

For a stretch there, my friend James Robinson and I spent every Saturday morning hiking in Micheaux State Forest and, once a month, on an overnight backpacking trip. In reality, that pattern probably lasted three or four months, but like the autumns of my youth, it casts a much longer shadow in my memory.

A post I made on Facebook 13 years ago today stirred this memory—about a backpacking trip he and I took. It’s been a baker’s dozen years, but I vividly remember the rhododendron forest around the Appalachian Trail we hiked through in the pouring rain, and the smell of the tongues of my hiking boots as they melted because I’d put them too close to our campfire.

¶ Such Great Heights

The Postal Service is one of those things that is frozen in my memory but somehow also alive and a universe unto itself. Every time I listen to the album, I’m immediately transported to college. 2004. Wandering around the campus at night, desperately wanting to be Bohemian and a poet and effortlessly cool. It’s the music that would keep me company as I walked from my apartment on King Street onto campus, or straight through campus and to my girlfriend’s apartment. It was on a mixed CD I gave her.

I played it over and over and over again. Especially sitting in my room (which was very Bohemian, by the way, in a converted attic with a sloped roof so my “desk” was a coffee table at which I sat cross-legged, with a bedsheet as a curtain and—I kid you not—prayer flags strung across the ceiling).

My girlfriend became my fiancée became my wife, and she took me to see The Postal Service at the Mann Center in Philadelphia for their tour. It was such a cool experience, to see this music live, out in the open, on a beautiful summer night.

Human beings suffer,

they torture one another,

they get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

can fully right a wrong

inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols

beat on their bars together.

A hunger-striker’s father

stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope

on this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

on the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:

The utter self-revealing

double-take of feeling.

If there’s fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

the outcry and the birth-cry

of new life at its term.

— Seamus Heaney, “Chorus” from The Cure at Troy

# [The New Stability](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2016293)

We’re beyond “wash your hands,” and “wear a mask,” and “stop going to bars.”

We’re now at pressure your municipal officials, county executives, state legislators, governor, federal legislators, and president to get their fucking heads out of the fucking sand and help us combat this virus.

Acceptable methods of combat include:

1. Listening to scientists
2. Working on legislation to provide financial assistance to small businesses and people so they don’t die
3. Self-reflection to the extent of figuring out what the hell is wrong with them that they would try and politicize something this serious, but not at the expense of not doing 1 or 2

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

—Go to the Limits of Your Longing, Rainer Maria Rilke

This morning on the way to preschool, #thingone asked if tomorrow was a school day (meaning preschool).

“Yep!”

“And the day after, daddy, what day is that?”

I hesitated for half a beat before replying, “That’s kindergarten, bud.”

In the rearview mirror, I could see him talking to himself, quietly. All I could make out was “kindergarten.” But I’ve known this kid for five years, and, statistically, half his genes are my genes. I know in my bones he was saying some mantra along the lines of, “Everything will be OK. You can do this.”

It broke my heart.

I can tell him in as many ways as possible that everything will be OK and he’ll love kindergarten and I know new things are scary but I also know through experience that the worrying is the hardest part. Way harder than the actual scary thing.

But it takes growing up to learn that—there are no shortcuts.

So I’ll say it to the ether instead, in as honest a voice as I can, for whoever needs to hear it.

Everything will be OK. What you’re afraid of happening will happen. Or it won’t. But the fear of the thing happening is the bad part, and the fear happens whether the thing happens or doesn’t happen. And if the thing happens, it happens, and you deal with it—*we* deal with it—and it’s fine. And even if it’s not fine right away, it *will be* fine.

To my son, I said, “You’ll have a lot of fun at kindergarten, but that’s Wednesday. Today, go have fun with your friends.”

My first kid starts kindergarten at the end of the month, and it didn’t hit me until my wife bought him his required-by-the-school pencil box.

It’s just a blue plastic box. It snaps closed with a lid. It smells like plastic. She printed little labels with his name on it and stuck them to the front and the back. Inside are four pencils (unsharpened), a rectangular, day-glow-colored eraser, and a box of crayons (unopened and pristine).

It actually didn’t hit me until my kid found another pencil, and rushed up to his room, got his pencil box, came back downstairs, opened it, put the new pencil next to the three others, closed it, then rushed back upstairs to put it on his dresser where it was. That’s when it hit me. Like a truck.

Day care/preschool has always been just that, pre-school. Somewhere for kids to learn about what school is like. What they’re signed up for for the next 13+ years of their lives. This is a classroom. Your class will look like this, sound like this. This is how you identify a class if you come upon one in the wild.

Kindergarten is the giraffe that you see from the back of a Jeep in Africa, who is suddenly galloping at you at speed, like the tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park. Oh, right, that’s a giraffe, not this little toy you’ve been playing with.