A Few Musings During Quarantine

I write today from Chicago, where we are quarantining before we visit family. The decision to travel in these times was a difficult one. During the summer, we determined we could not leave Norway. This time, with more information, we made the choice to come, and I pray it was the right one.

In my circles on social media, there is a lot of posting about the irresponsibility of traveling during Covid. Memes, by their brevity, suggest that an issue is simple, but of course no topic of import is. We had the means to take the precaution of a quarantine before seeing family, and when we do our Covid tests early next week, we hope to find that our masking and social distancing en route kept us safe. If in fact they have not, and we are infected, then this story will go a different way.

Quarantine is the perfect excuse for doing nothing, but surprisingly I have been writing little. I am instead busy knitting Christmas gifts. I’ve knit more the last four days than I have in the last year, and I am reminded of how relaxing and satisfying it can be, to watch a functional object blossom from the hands, something for someone I love. Coming up too, I have letters of recommendation to write for students, more this year than ever I think it must be. And so at least in terms of writing, December is proving not nearly as productive as November, but so it goes. I am hopeful for a lighter term at school in the new year.

*Chicago at the golden hour, with Lake Michigan in the back. We’re fortunate to have a place like this to quarantine.*

I am reading The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and soaking in the mid-century Latin music scene. In this first part of the novel, brothers Cesar and Nestor work to get their foothold in the tantalizing playground of New York. I was struck by this brief description of the brothers’ diverse styles of songwriting:

And there were songs about torment beyond all sorrow. That was Nestor's specialty. While Cesar knocked his songs out, Nestor worked and reworked the same compositions over and over again. Loving the torture of composition, he would spend hours hunched over a notebook with a guitar or his trumpet, trying to compose a ballad, one beautiful song.

These two, the quick off the press and voraciously productive, the slow and agonizing. I am often a Nestor, I think, looking for that masterpiece of perfection, although I am trying to channel some of Cesar too, to just let things out and produce more work, which in the end I think will take me where I want to go more than the labored perfectionism of singular focus.