Focus

More than six months have slipped by since I last wrote.  We are now just about half way through our sojourn in Pleasant Hill, thinking more and more about our return to Otsego County.  I’m not sure why I’ve taken such a long break from writing, but I’ve certainly been busy.  Jay and I made our marriage official on pi day, 3/14, after over 13 years together.  We had a tiny ceremony at the City Hall in Martinez.  After all our time together, the legality changes almost nothing, but I do like to be able to say I’m his wife.  And I picked up his medical and dental insurance.  I can’t think of any similar benefit to him, but he’s happy with the arrangement.

I made four trips east during these months, three to Cooperstown and one to Pittsburgh and Maryland.  In Pittsburgh I saw my daughter Liz and now eight year old grandson Rowan happily settling in.  (Sean and Asher were in California visiting Holly when I was there.) In Maryland I got to meet my newest great nephew, Evan, Shane’s younger brother, Liam and Dawnea’s children. Liam is the youngest child of my sister Shayne, of blessed memory.  It’s such a joy to watch her family growing – with three marriages and five grandchildren now – but such a heartbreak that she didn’t live to see her amazing clan.  On my last trip to Cooperstown I stopped in to see Keely, Shayne’s oldest, and her family.  They, too, are thriving, with Shayne’s seven year old grandson, Isaac, getting the award for most changed.

I bought two houses during this period, only one of which was a complete disaster. The short version of that long sad tale is that we discovered the house was irreparably unsound, and we’re now working on getting it torn down, a process complicated by the presence of asbestos in the attic insulation. Once the site is finally cleared we’ll decide if we want to sell the lot or build a home for ourselves there.  Like the house Jay already owns in Cooperstown, the lot is on Walnut Street, where Peter and Aviva live.  So either we’ll be their next door neighbors in Jay’s house after a remodel, or we’ll be just up the street in a new house built exactly to suit us.

Dealing with the purchases and remodeling of the two houses I bought has certainly taken up a lot of my brain cycles over the last six months, and contributed to my finding it hard to focus on writing.  But yesterday, out with Charlie on our canal trail walk, I was watching the intensity of his focus on his immediate surroundings.  Charlie notes every smell, and wants to stop to investigate most of them.  I don’t imagine that he gives a moment’s thought to what he’ll do when we get home from our walk.  He’s just entirely present in time and space.  Of course, I am too – it’s all we can ever be.  But my mental focus is often miles away and months in the future or in the past.  I see many walkers with their earbuds in and their gaze on a middle distance, and I think of the lovely, interesting walk they are missing.  But I miss a lot of my walk too, even without the earbuds.  I’ll come to the house with the chickens in the yard and realize that I haven’t been focused on my walk at all, that I haven’t noticed the sights and smells and sounds around me, that Charlie’s pauses have barely registered with me.

Maybe in part because a lot of the big decisions about the properties in Otsego County are behind me, I’m paying more attention to my immediate surroundings again.  It’s just over a year since we moved here, so I’ve seen a full cycle of the seasons and am seeing things for the second time now.  It’s hot, as it was when we moved here. The sun rises just north of the east end of Hoover Avenue, and sets just north of the other end, so that in the morning, heading east to the trail, I get a face full of sun, and in the evening if I’m driving home from the store I have the sun right in my eyes.  The trail is littered with acorns, and our neighbors’ crepe myrtle is past its full bloom. The season is turning again, heading down towards fall.  The children bike past our house in cheerful little gangs on their way to school.

I’ve joined a wonderful Zoom class with our former rabbi from Oneonta, reading the psalms.  There are five of us along with Molly and we have become a wonderful little community.  Because the others are all on the east coast – spread from South Carolina to New York – the class starts at 7:00 am for me, a civilized 10:00 for the rest.  It starts my week with a great lift, seeing friendly faces, laughing together and thinking together.  As with much of the Bible, the psalms at first seem to belong to another world, not relevant to mine.  But as I quickly found with Torah study and Talmud class, the psalms deal with eternal human issues.  In a way, the differences between the psalmist’s world and mine, massive differences of time and space and culture, bring the fundamental human similarities into sharp relief.

Perhaps living between two coasts has made it hard for me to focus.  So many of the issues I’ve had to think about and make decisions on have been remote.  I’ve spent almost as much time on phone and email and texts and zoom as I have on the things right in front of me, living here, but mentally in cyberspace a lot of the time.  It’s a remarkable gift to have a brain that lets me do this, but there are times I wish I could have more of the purity of focus Charlie has. The psalmist spends a lot of his time thinking about things not immediately present, about distant enemies and future punishments he hopes they’ll suffer.  But his poetry is most vivid and compelling when he connects those thoughts to his physical reality. That’s the focus I want to keep working on.