This is a writer's life.  The first day after being laid off.


I'd been at the new apartment a year.  It had seemed daunting to get that far back at the time when I moved, in sad uprooting circumstances which I could have predicted but was somehow unable to do anything about.  A year in, I'd begun to accept the place, through many of my things, books in particular, remained in boxes.  The best part was the nature around it, the birds, trees, the bluff, the grasses, the light, the field just this side of the reservoir.

And then the coronavirus hit. And then the restaurant closed.  Which prompts big questions in life.  It would have taken a Kerouac or another poet to understand my behavior, how, when laid off, my first instinct was to write, a way to get back to myself, a traditional way to figure out what might be done, even if nothing much is done but a sort of waiting it out.

But what drastic thing should I do, and how can I afford to move, and where should I go, or should I just stay here and hunker down...  Fix my habits a bit, without the physical burden of the restaurant shift always a tick too long.

Do I surrender all my things?  That was one thought.

One feels ashamed of himself, a sad bum.  Phone calls and passwords at new sites are daunting.  Energy is low.  One needs something hopeful.

To get some light into the situation, just after nine in the morning, I call my mom.  "Get some good writing out of this," she says.   She has adapted to the silence of retirement, she says, which is not all true, but I'll take that now optimistically as an underlying core.  "Take it as a little vacation.  Eat well, sleep well," keep the wine stocked.  My thoughts on the holiness of life and the sacredness of creation, the Christian-observed beauty that applies to all people and creatures and those of The Beatitudes comes back to me, even as the sky is grey.

My mood lifts from thoughts about this 55 year-old loser who is otherwise unemployable...  who needs a day job now, now, now.

After walking down the day before into Georgetown in my attempt to quell a great depressing uncertainty with the task of returning a teapot via the UPS Store, and some other errands, I have a new look at my little perch here.  I am reminded of the quietness of the Palisades.  There isn't the mad rushing traffic of highways, nor the bustle of the traffic coming off and onto the great bridge across the Potomac River, nor the crumbling bluff of weeds and old rubble and buttressing stonework of the old canal bridge, that must look out over such a sight every day.  The price one pays is the airplanes overhead out here.  Here it is quieter.  This is not ideal, but acceptable.  And I always have my little five minute walk to the little pine trees like Kerouac had his Dharma Bums St. Jack of the Dogs moments down in North Carolina with his sister, Nin, in Rocky Mount.


The morning now, after the night of being laid off, the restaurant closed, I go to the kitchen, with enough energy now to look through the refrigerator to throw things out, emptying plastic containers of stale leftovers and tuna salad remains, still making an effort to recycle.    I pour the hot tap water into the Instant, fresh liquid soap after it's soaked for at least a day now, scrub it out from the last beef stew I made, save the sturdy plastic quart containers, scrub the silverware finally, and all into the rack stacked to dry out.


There's a zen to things.  I don't mind that.  Feeling a bit better now.