On sacrifice and service

what did I know, what did I know?

I’m also thinking about the lines of one of those poems I read in early high school that I never forgot. And about our grandfatherly new President, who actually cares about poetry.

I’m sitting in the overstuffed chair by the living room window watching tiny snowflakes twirl past the glass, meditating on how they hover in a circle, like specks of dust in a shaft of sunlight, barely perceptible, almost seeming to melt in the air before they land. Gently, gently, they accumulate on the very tip of the straw-colored winter lawn, dusting it in a thin layer of white. It’s a midweek workday in the middle of January, and I’m about halfway through my workload quota for the day. I’m grateful that I can look up from my screen at regular intervals and refocus my eyes onto the black branches covered in snow on one side and take a brief break, “from labor in the weekday weather made”.

“Did you say something?” says my spouse Janyce.

For a change of pace, Janyce has come up from her basement office today to make me a fire in the wood stove, and is now standing behind me at the table, her own laptop propped up on a foldable plastic standing desk we move around from room to room.

“I said I am looking at the nest that the red squirrel made,” I say.

But really, I was thinking out loud about the cold outside and how warm it is in the house, and about those lonely looking black branches outside covered in snow, and about my father who just had another birthday this January, and Janyce’s father who texted the other day to say that he wants to have a zoom call at exactly 6:45 in the evening.

I read a Harvard Magazine cover story this morning by Jacob Sweet on the psychological effects of loneliness. In his article, he quotes Robert Waldinger, professor of psychiatry and a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, who said, “What the pandemic did was it froze our lives, right? It froze us in these weird positions where we’re closer than we want to be to some people, and we’re too distanced from others.”

I actually feel pretty lucky that I like being so close to my spouse like this. But I’m definitely not happy being so set apart from all my friends and my family still, almost a year later. I texted my ex-husband Jim the other day because I was worried about him living all alone in his house, even though he is just a few streets away. “Goose, I miss you. What are you doing?” He wrote me back a few hours later saying, “I haven’t seen a friend in months wtf…living in my head…keep writing!”

I’m also thinking about the lines of one of those poems I read in early high school that I never forgot. And about our grandfatherly new President, who actually cares about poetry.

In a beautifully constructed WGBH video of Robert Hayden’s famous poem Those Winter Sundays, President Biden, who was Vice President Biden at the time the video was made, has joined several scholars and regular people to talk about, and ultimately deconstruct, this tiny poem so rich in imagery and feeling. It is a perfect poem for a frigid cold afternoon in January and I pull it up on my screen to read it again now.

The poem is about many things, but most noticeably it is about sacrifice and service. And I’m noticing that, for one moment at least, I have a kindling feeling of optimism. We now have a President who has promised to lead the country out of a deadly pandemic and to work every day to solve the many problems of our country. I don’t think he will actually accomplish as much as he promises, and I don’t think that everything is going to be okay, either.

But still, he’s a person who is willing to reflect on a poem about service and love and actually dare to make promises to the country based on his own values and morals about those things—it’s such stark relief to the vacuity of the previous administration. This makes me feel less worried right now. It actually gives me some real hope.

This video is so worth 27 minutes of your time, if for nothing more than to hear our new President talk about things that matter.