My New Normal. New Reads and Loves.
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
PLAGUES PAST
It’s the height of hubris to force my thoughts on helpless email contacts, but I thought of a novel that seems so relevant to our current coronavirus panic and wanted to share it: YEAR OF WONDERS: A NOVEL OF THE PLAGUE, by Geraldine Brooks. It’s set in 1666 and based on true events that took place in the English village of Eyam, which extraordinarily decided to quarantine itself after bubonic plague arrived there in order to prevent the spread to neighboring towns. Brooks is a wonderful writer, and the story of how her narrator, a young woman who helps care for the sick and dying, struggles to retain her humanity and that of her fellow villagers during the year of quarantine has made this one of my favorite novels ever. An amazing side note: In the actual village, no one broke quarantine even as the death toll rose!
AND PANDEMIC PANACEAS
Because I love essays, I have to recommend one that momentarily took my mind off pandemics and market crashes and glacier meltdowns. My writing partner, Stephanie Hunt, sent me a link to a piece in the February 23rd edition of the NYT by Margaret Renkl titled “One Tiny Beautiful Thing.” In this dark time, it’s a beautiful hopeful read. Nature is her church, her therapist, her antidote to despair. If you like it, try her book called LATE MIGRATIONS: A NATURAL HISTORY OF LOVE AND LOSS, print copies of which I gave to my book club for Christmas so they could freely underline and dog-ear.
A DAILY PRACTICE
In keeping with the Renkl essay, Austin Kleon suggests in his weekly newsletter (free and wonderful—I hope you subscribe) practicing something he calls “retrospective cheerfulness” to offset pessimism and curmudgeon-ism, which is often my default mode. Every day, he notes in his journal the best thing that happened to him the day before. Sometimes he has to scratch for it, really dig to come up with a good thing, anything, and it doesn’t always happen. I’m constantly seeking grand epiphanies, but I want to believe that the mundane can be miraculous, too. Like finding the first field daffodils of the spring at Trader Joe’s yesterday, some of which are opening their tiny beautiful faces on my coffee table right now — a prescription against panic, an Rx for anguish.
I HEART
My current crush: The Starbucks London Fog, an Earl Grey latte that my daughters have been urging me to try. It tastes like something in between coffee and tea, a different genre of drink that I imagine might be served in an outer space cafe. I think it could have a secret addictive ingredient like their pumpkin bread, which sort of tastes like pumpkin bread but not quite and leaves you wanting another piece right away, despite or because of the odd aftertaste.
MURDER THEY WROTE
My secret fantasy: I love my iPhone and computer and can’t imagine life without them now, but I hate that thanks to the internet and facial recognition and digital databases, it’s no longer possible fake your death, get a new social security number that belonged to a dead person, dye your hair and start fresh in a scruffy little beach town in California where you completely reinvent yourself and get a waitress job in a real dive bar that wasn’t created from scratch by hipsters. Oh yes, and you fall in love with a rugged old surfer with laugh lines who has a side job as a private eye and you live happily ever until he finds the Glock and getaway bag you keep hidden under a floorboard in the closet. Can you tell I’m a sucker for murders, missing persons and mayhem? The crime novels I’ve loved recently are all the titles by Dervla McTiernan, Celine by Peter Heller, The Do-Right by Lisa Sandlin and the Sean Duffy series set in Belfast during The Troubles by Adrian McKinty.
SOUL FOOD
If you feel as battered by constantly breaking bad news as I do, I recommend the healing power of poetry. Two poems that have brought me comfort recently: “Praise the Rain” by Joy Harjo and “Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Lameris. And if you’re as addicted to chaos and catastrophe as I’ve become, try hitting the MUTE button and turning on Closed Captioning periodically. Everything Pence says is still moronic, but it’s easier to stop yelling back at him when he’s just moving his mouth and no sound is emerging.
Finally, don’t forget to wash your hands—other than not inhaling, it’s evidently all we can do to stay healthy in this era of expensive, highly advanced medical technology.
Nikki Hardin is a writer of stories, musings, and memories. Her poetry has been published in Riverteeth Journal. She was the founder and publisher of skirt!, a monthly women’s magazine in Charleston, South Carolina. You can reach her at nikki@thedailynikki.com.