Day 31

Happy International Happiness Day!

The habitat-mate and I spent last afternoon trying to remember the rules of card games we last played decades ago.

I learned how to play Spit, which is one of those fast-paced games where both players discard to the same piles. As neither of us broke a finger, it was a rousing success.

Once I had the hang of it, we got to playing fast, with cards flying from both directions. As we thought about it, it was one of the very few things we've done at speed in a long time. Isolation makes everything slow. Video meetings for the workplace take 45 minutes to make two small decisions. Baking bread takes two days. We ordered groceries for pick-up a week ago, and we're now just a week from our appointed time to go get them.

The neighbor's skyscraping cherry tree has bloomed. Out the window, for days, we've been watching petals fall like slow-motion snow. It's lovely. You couldn't blame us for feeling like we're in an art film--a period piece that's all manners and glances, slow turns about the estate, checking twice to see if the mail has come.

My body is sore, not from use, but stillness.

I wondered in my first entry whether we'd all become night joggers, but I haven't seen the night joggers in weeks. The people who go by the yard are all treading water.

My friend Kevin, the inventor of International Happiness Day, had a difference of opinion with me once about the right sort of place to take a new boat. I told him how much I loved a placid paddle on a quiet lake, or the slow-flowing Willamette.

“Ugh,” he said, “Never. I hate still water.”

If I could get in touch with him, which is sadly now beyond my means to do, I’d like to let him know I see his point a lot better now.

I want to say that tomorrow, just to remind myself it's possible, I'll indulge in a sprint down the road, but, seriously, it feels illegal. It probably is illegal.

Then again, on Saturday we saw four adventurous young people, properly spaced, traveling by the window on roller skates, and in case this journal isn't found and read until so far in the future that the contours of the land have changed, our street, nice and flat by our habitat, drops off steeply just a few blocks away. If those eight-wheel-jockeys went on the way they were going, they went like lightning.

We gave away our rollerblades last summer, which is probably for the best. There's a skateboard, though.

I'm not saying I'm going to do anything rash. It's the wrong week to go to the hospital. Maybe I'll just sit in the driveway, thinking fast thoughts.