Toward the end of July, I had a massive panic attack, and as a result, many things in my life changed; huge changes were made.
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But let me mention some sad things that happened before that event, even some terrible things, and some good—even lovely—things that happened as well.
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The first terrible thing that happened was this:
At the end of May a policeman knelt for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds on the side of a Black man’s neck. The man’s name was George Floyd. You could watch this on video as George Floyd said, “I can’t breathe, I cannot breathe,” and the policeman had no expression on his face as he knelt on the neck of that man, George Floyd, who died.
This happened in Minneapolis, and the protests started there and then moved throughout many different cities in the country, even around the world; night after night we watched on the television as people protested, and at times there were flames that reached into the night sky, and storefronts were smashed while great crowds of people protested the murder of yet another innocent Black man, George Floyd.
I thought, “Oh God, they will all get sick.” But I felt more than that. I understood the anger, I really did.
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Night after night we watched the television: Portland, Oregon, was especially having trouble. The protesters were being threatened by others, and also the police were involved. It terrified me. In New York, people took to the streets again and again.
As all this happened I felt both hopeless and also hopeful. It was as though the racism in this country had suddenly exploded, hurling forth. But people were caring about this! Many were.
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I remembered this: Years earlier, when William and I were still married, a young Black man—his name was Abner Louima, I looked it up online to remind myself after the death of George Floyd—had been arrested in New York, and one of the policemen who arrested him sodomized him with a broom handle in the police station. I had had a deep response to this; I can still see the young man’s face, I mean Abner Louima, who this happened to. He had given an interview from a hospital bed, and his face was an open face, a lovely face. And the policeman who had done this to him lived alone with his mother on Staten Island. And I hated that man; I hated the look on his face, with no remorse at all, his face stayed blank. And I remembered having that feeling of wanting to hit his face, which, as I have said, scares me. That feeling, I mean.
I have never hit another human being.
But I have had those feelings; they are hidden very deep inside me.
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And then Becka texted me one day and said: Don’t tell Dad but we’ve been going to the protests in New Haven. Don’t worry, we are safe!
I called her immediately but she did not pick up.
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I did not tell William. I thought how he had gone down there to Connecticut, trying to save their lives, and that he would worry—as I did—that they were now in crowds with no safe distancing. God, I worried. But I was really proud of them too.
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There was for me during this time a sense of being dazed. As though, in a way, I was not capable of taking in everything that was happening in this world.
ii
The second thing that happened—which was a lovely thing—was this:
We started to make friends in Maine. We did this through Margaret and Bob; it was really summertime now, and they began to invite us to different places with different people—always safe-distancing outdoors and with masks—and I began to realize that I liked the people we met through them. They were varied.
I will get to them soon.
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But I need to confess this first:
I went to the grocery store by myself one day; I went to get detergent and a few power bars, and more wine. There was a long line outside. People stood wearing masks, six feet apart—the store had laid down taped markers on the ground to indicate where we should stand—and waited to be summoned into the store. It was midafternoon on a cloudy Sunday, and as I parked the car I saw many people hurrying across the parking lot, and I understood—or felt that I did—that people wanted to get into the line quickly, because the line was growing longer by the second, it went around the building. I took my place in line behind a young man who kept looking at his phone, and as we got closer to the entrance of the store I saw a man—he was elderly and pale and had a look of being unwell—I watched him walking slowly across the parking lot, and I thought: Well, they will let him get in ahead of the line. But the man walked past me and I saw him getting toward the end of this long line. I thought: I should go and get him and let him trade places with me—because at that point I was only a few minutes from getting into the store.
I even looked around to see how long the line was, and it had gotten very long. I did not go and get the elderly man.
I did not do that.
A woman two places ahead of me—she looked my age, maybe just a few years younger—said to the young man behind her, the young man with the phone, “Hold my place in line.” The young man did not look up from his phone, and I saw this woman go and get the elderly man from where he was walking, about to turn the corner of the building for the back of the line, and she walked him up to her place in the line, and he was able to get into the store right away, and then the woman who had done this looked around a bit, as though—maybe—wondering if she could get her own space back, but no one said anything, or even seemed to notice her, including the young man who was supposed to be saving her place, he was still looking at his phone, and I watched as she went around the building—I presume to the very back of the line; she had given up her spot and had to wait again.
And I thought: That should have been me. I should have done that for the elderly man.
But I had not done it.
I had not wanted to wait in the very long line, as this woman was now doing.
And I learned something that day.
About myself and people, and their self-interest.
I will never forget that I did not do that for that man.
iii
Before I tell you about the friends we were making, let me say that it was one afternoon in the first week of June that William came back from his walk and said that the next day he was going to drive to Massachusetts and that Estelle would meet him at Old Sturbridge Village—there was a park there—with Bridget. “It’s been far too long,” he said, and he had a dark look as he said that.
I asked if he wanted me to go with him to help him with the drive, but he said No, it was only three hours each way, he could do that. I asked if Estelle was driving up by herself, and he said Yes, so I figured that she would not be bringing her loser boyfriend.
The next day William took off early in the morning. I had made him a tuna fish sandwich and he almost forgot it. “William,” I called, following him out the door with the sandwich and a bottle of water, “take these!” And he took them from me. “Call me if you need me,” I said, but he only waved his hand and got into the car—he had put the New York license plates back on again—and drove down the steep, rocky driveway.
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