Last year, I thought that this week I would be going on a new adventure: I’d be riding my pink Felt road bike from San Francisco to L.A. on the 8-day, 525-mile epic journey called the California Coast Classic, which is a major fundraiser for the Arthritis Foundation. I signed up last year and asked for this time off from work immediately (over a year in advance) because I was committed to the fundraising responsibilities associated with participating as much as I was the miles. So, even though I had totally sucked at selling Girl Scout cookies when I was a girl scout, I thought a new challenge for me would be to raise not hundreds but thousands of dollars for a cause in which I believe in (research to cure one of America’s top chronic diseases.) More specifically, I was raising money for a particular team and a particular 10-year old kiddo with a juvenile form of arthritis. It was huge.
And then COVID-19 happened. I don’t even know if I can explain what that was like. One day, I was working in my private office on a community college campus like usual and the next my days were spent in panic-mode, creating a new COVID-19 webpage, a series of unprecedented communications, procedures, as fear surrounding this previously unknown virus continued to grow. I worked longer days, waiting at work to hear what would happen next— would we all be sent home, like on a permanent snow day? It turns out we would. My palms were sweating so badly as I drafted those communications that my fingers glossed over the keyboard, slippery from uncertainly and, I admit, a degree of fear.
Yet, even as I drafted those words I had no idea that this “working from home” would have lasted over six months. I have watched spring come to full blossom and transition into the long, lingering days of summer and now, the equinox as we pass into the still darkness of the quiet winter. It’s October and the days are considerably shorter. The mums are blooming, and the dogwood in the front yard has red leaves now. The mornings are too cold for riding or running and the days end far too quickly.
Somehow in all of that, the California Coast Classic (CCC) was lost. Given how many things—everything—has been canceled, as the months passed, I let go of everything outside of the four walls of my home office, where I spend my days and nights. But, I still had these eight days off and as it turns out, I wasn’t allowed to return them.
And so, in lieu of riding my bike and setting up camp (and pitching a tent every night along CA Hwy 1), instead I was going to have an epic 8-day staycation. I don’t think I need to tell you that I wasn’t exactly excited about this.
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So, time is funny: we often complain we don’t have enough of it, but when we’re offered time in abundance with nothing to fill it, it can sometimes get scary. Like this week, when I gazed out across these eight empty days, I half-heartedly wondered: what will I do with myself? It crossed my mind to ride the “Lemond Loop” (which is around 80 miles) over and over every day, but even just thinking about the monotony of that made me tired and honestly, depressed.
And all of that, oddly, reminded me of an essay written by one of my favorite writers, Geoff Dyer, which is literally called “Something Didn’t Happen” which all about something that didn’t happen (which is why I love him so much. He's so brilliant that he can write about non-things and still, somehow, make it interesting. And funny.) But for me, 2020 is the year that a lot of somethings didn’t happen and instead of a funny essay, it is one that, for this year at least, makes me cry.
So I started these 8 days knowing I’d been given a gift: not everyone can take a vacation or time off work. Not everyone can work, given what this pandemic has done to our economy. I really, truly had the best of both worlds. But yeesh— 8 days??? Of me and just me???? 24/7 me????
You should also probably know that two weeks ago, my cat—who’d been my only friend through three graduate programs—died. Not like, disappeared and I assumed he died, but he started wheezing and when I put him in the carrier to drive him to the vet, he mewed one last time and died before we got there. That kind of loss.
My pet chicken, Lady, also died. I found her curled under the ramp the other chickens use to get in and out of their coop. Her gray and white lady-hawk feathers were cold to the touch, and even begin to say how much of a deep dark hole of loss that leaves me with. I didn’t even have the strength to post that on social media, knowing that I would only be adding to the volume of shit we are all dealing with. I mourned her death quietly, and alone.
And then we lost another one just the other day to a malicious raccoon. So, when I say that my house feels like death to me, it really does— it’s quiet and awful and sad—and it’s the last place I want to be for eight days on end, but I can’t un-take the days off I’ve taken.
The only bright spot, honestly, is a virtual performance that I auditioned for and that—oddly—accepted my super-silly/ridiculous roller-skate movement pattern that is as close as I can come to figure skating on four wheels. I have to be performance-ready by the 16th— six days from now— and given that I was the kid who dreamed of performing on skates as I turned out routines on our oil-stained driveway about thirty years ago, I find this surreal, to say the least.
So, what do I do with myself for eight days in a home saturated in death, silence and loss? It turns out, I roller skate.
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Even given all of that, I can’t help but be grateful for eight days with myself. When is the last time you’ve spent eight days with yourself with no obligations? I think the last time I was able to do this I was nine years old. And given these conditions, I realized there are certain parts of my heart and soul that haven’t changed all that much: I love to move, I love music, I l love watching clouds, I love creating something that might not have lasting value in the world, but that is only my true expression at the moment.
And hot damn, I love skating. If we had an ice rink in Reno that was outside and that was easy to get to, watch out. Given the limitations of where I live, roller skating is the closest I can get, and the outdoor rink in Sun Valley—which is a twenty-minute drive from my house— is my refuge.
I’m up at 5 a.m. every day to skate by dawn. Hours of skating— it feels effortless when I’m doing it— until I get in my car and I wonder: what the hell—why am I so sore? I’m remembering turns, spins— and all of the life that surrounded those movements. I rode my bike, too, but these rides were to places I wanted to go, to see the changing colors of the leaves of the aspen trees that trickle down the mountains in the canyons that open to the desert floor. Solitary adventures, which often included climbing up mountains I actually wanted to climb for no other reason than to prove to myself that I can.
And other adventures—frivolous ones, perhaps— but driving to no place in particular, but driving to feel the wind in my face and to remember other times in my life when I had someone to meet to whatever destination I traveled. Walks through aspen groves off the beaten path to melt into the silence of the forest and to lose myself in a time when I feel, most of the time, lost.
I am so incredibly grateful for these eight days when I discovered that I am the kind of person who, if given the choice, wants to dance through life in the same way that aspen leaves flicker in the wind. In other words, like sequins that sparkle. After all, it is our life’s work to shine.