She is upstairs, her shower just finished. I could go up and kiss the water droplets off the nape of her neck.

But I refrain, fearing the rejection, of hearing the reasons why intimacy is impossible now, the empty promise of soon.

Wimp.

This is what the Northbound Silver Meteor, Amtrak 98, looked like passing through Ashland, Virginia on 11 May 2020. It is headed to New York City, starting from Miami, Florida.

It is a smaller train, due to the slack in demand from the coronavirus. It looks like they still have dining car service on this train.

My readers who live overseas may be unfamiliar with what an American passenger train looks like, as well as some of you who live in The United States. So here you have it.

I have been up awhile. J gets off work soon and should be home around 5:30. I guess I could sleep then.

Today I remember my mother. I miss her, dead now for nearly twenty five years, but why?  Mother was chronically depressed in a world where treatments for depression were worse than the disease.

She was bright, but could not afford college in a world where a job to support a widowed mother meant everything. She was a drama queen, as only the daughter of an alcoholic father can be. I remember her laughter and her rage. Her rage contained all the angry thoughts she ever had, externalized. She would say  she only wanted two children, but Dad wanted more.   There are four of us. I was the second. Let me tell you about Survivor’s Guilt.

She liked sit coms, from I Love Lucy to The Golden Girls.  Her favorite soap opera was As The World Turns. 

So remembering that angry, tragic, paradox of a human being is hard. I got through my sentence in her household of a prison, devoid of self-esteem,  filled with self-hatred that alcohol could never purge.

On balance, she loved us and did the best she could. That is all any Mother can hope to do.

Around ten past five this afternoon, I started my walk, opting for the six mile circuit with its road exposure. Today, passing the creek on my course, I saw an Eastern Bluebird. This is roughly the same place where I saw a goldfinch last week. How cool is this.

Spotting a lovely bird is a totally exhilarating experience. I pressed on, finishing my six mile walk. Afterwards, I saw my neighbor and asked if I could give a treat to Scout, their dog, when I saw him. She said, “Yes”.

So life is good. At times it is frustrating and lonely. But I have a home and I live in a community with nice neighbours.

This early morning has Richmond in a cold snap. It is 40°F, about 4°C, an anomaly for Virginia in May. Hopefully the fruit trees in the Shenandoah Valley have set their buds and the apple and peach harvest, come Summer and Fall, won’t be diminishef.

Sometimes being up in the early morning, with a DVD collection can inspire my mind. I wander through the discs. I just watched some pornographic movies from 1930’s France. The movies, about ten minutes long, were shown in brothels to the customers whilst they waited. There were lots of lesbian scenes. Given that shooting movies involved using expensive film, the scenes were hurried. The performers got right to the point. Porn wasn’t the industry then it is now. The women looked like women, not sex robots.

Eventually boredom takes over. I’ve seen all I can stand to watch. They’re just too sad.

I load a disc of old cigarette commercials into the machine. I watched some mid-Fifties commercials for a Brown & Williamson menthol filter brand, Bel Air. The commercials all featured an annoying tune or jingle extolling the features of a Bel Air cigarette. Brown & Williamson hàd a factory in Petersburg, just South of Richmond. The factory closed and the local economy never recovered. This was about forty years ago.

Now I am watching Camel commercials. To think I must have seen thousands of these commercials growing up. Contrasting the cigarette commercials with the porn, the cigarette commercials seem more obscene than the porn.

I’m going back to bed. J will be home in about ninety minutes.

Turner Classic Movies seems to be showing lots of Elizabeth Taylor movies of late. Now some of these movies are good. Some are just awful, Cleopatra, for example, can hold down the space of awful well into this century.

But Elizabeth Taylor was gorgeous, sexy and bright. Her voice could melt steel, it’s sooooo hot. There must have been a clause in her contract that she had to wear a bullet bra beneath all her stunning designer fashions.

I’m turning to jelly here. She was a Movie Star 🌟. No question about it.

Flowery, Yes? I went upstairs to bed about 11:00 PM last night. I must have slept a little, but then awoke to move laundry to the dryer and other unimportant things. I could not go back to sleep or perhaps just didn’t want to, until now.

I hear the train horn of Amtrak #98, Northbound Silver Meteor. It has yet to pass through Ashland , but will shortly. Here it comes. I see its lights and the crossing gate goes down. It passes by the camera view. It is much smaller than its pre-virus configuraction. Cars have been eliminated.

J is home. I missed her. She found a broadcast of I Love Lucy. Going up to watch and fall asleep.

Around 2:30, I awoke after having slept about two and a half hours. I’ve been planning on going back to sleep, but WhatTheHell, I am not sleeping yet. I watched some Russian Orthodox Liturgies, reverent and beautiful as usual. The Russian Orthodox Church is undergoing a massive revival after eighty plus years of oppression by the Communists. Now almost thirty years after Communism’s fall, Russia is embracing her faith again.

After the liturgies, I just drifted through YT, stopping at a program when my interest is piqued. Right now, I’m watching my Ukrainian metal detecting comrades. They also explore the many abandoned farmhouses of Ukraine, vacant since the collective farm economy collapsed in the 1990’s.

I had my car battery replaced yesterday. The old one gave out since I had not driven the car in over a month. I acquired the old one at Sears several years ago. Now that Sears is being converted to apartments.

Funny how our sense of permanence is fractured, not only in Ukraine, but just down the road. At the same time Communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe, I was working at the shopping mall that was a thriving retail center in West End Richmond. The mall’s days were numbered as the internet, Amazon, and a newer fancier mall surpassed it. Change is part of the world, of culture. Life is impermanent.

J is home. She has been home almost two hours after working a seven hour shift. She is asleep. I should join her.

What a day. I carried the same ennui through it that I have so many other days.

How much longer?

The closures, lock downs, shelterings in place will last til the politicians say enough, as if they and their hand-picked Wizards of Epidemiology know anything. Pay no attention to the fact that this is an election year in a bitterly polarized country.

The power walks keep me on the path of sanity, filled as they are with my neighbours, and birds, and dogs. I welcome the sweat and the water at the end. It is a little thing over which I have control, as I walk the streets, with such little traffic.

J has her 10PM-5AM shift tonight. She left with the lunch I packed and her iced tea.

Now I am alone. Just at a different time.

I was laying about, not quite into the whole nap experience, when I decided a bit of a walk might be what I needed. So off I went.

The weather was beautiful, sunny, no humidity, a pleasant breeze and the temperature was around 70°F, (21°C).

I was wavering between walking four or six miles, but opted for six miles. The six mile course goes out from the townhouse community, on the road going past a creek, and a wooded area. Yesterday I saw a mallard pair, duck and drake, swimming in the creek. Today I saw an American goldfinch flying into the woods as I walked down the road. Pretty exciting, in my opinion. Walking a little further, I see a crow chasing a hawk. I guess the hawk was in the crow’s territory.

The bird appearances made for a nice walk. Afterwards, I chatted with our neighbor, sharing walking routes. She asked about my family, my brothers and sister. I guess I should have asked about hers. She is a nice woman, about my younger son’s age.

The big takeaway from this pandemic is how we are all getting to know each other in the community. Now it shouldn’t take a crisis like this to prompt what we should have been doing in the first place. But better late than never.