Quarantine Cleanse

I still see humans twice a week. The freeways empty at times, the international airport deserted counters and food vendors haunting even as I sent my dream girl, at ICE’s urging, into exile in Australia on the last plane. The Yeti out the window on her flight was Covid. The New Zealand crew fired mid-air because the airline could no longer afford the luxury of fourteen days of quarantine if one of the passengers had smuggled the virus on board. And passengers had been denied boarding, luggage taken off the plane, if their passports did not match up with a petty bureaucrat searching frantically for proof of their very existence in the all wise state computer.

Through Skype my shadow figure and I kept in daily contact.I watched her tomorrow minus seven hours slowly descend into madness. My daily swimmer restricted to walking for fifteen minutes once a week between two berms in front of her luxury hotel. More madness and tears.

Vodka, sex workers, Thailand soapy massages. Winston. SOS in chocolate bars and cookies.

So we told stories of what it was like in the before.

I had fathers, thrust into the school teacher role, getting creative with “Garage Cleaning 101”. Principles of thrift, geometry, bonding, and a neat garage almost made the pandemic induced constant exposure to children worthwhile. Unfortunately my only minion is me so I strapped on my headlamp and dove in.

Into the slide photo boxes, initially holding each one up, the past captured in exotic and familiar location. After the first 50 they made it directly into the dumpster. School awards, trophies and plaques commemorating every game won, tortured essays form seventh grade written over and over until the handwriting was perfect, a rush of time machine and then – the dumpster. I must confess my own closet contains shirts from Tommy Bahamas that I resented the money spent and afternoon wasted in that Serengeti lioness activity looking for color and movement known as shopping. Very occasionally, ripped beyond even the excuse of a gardening shirt, I will place them reverently in a golden can – and out to the dumpster. Cowboy boots I will never wear again line up dutifully, knowing that without assistance of a boot removing person they will languish in their leather and dust perfume, perhaps a bit of true grit from a visit to a rodeo clinging to a heel.

I understand what it is like for some objects to have incredible power through remembrance. Perhaps there is something to the psychic and the emotional energy left behind. Or the simple spitting out of neurotransmitters between neurons, hormonal squeezing of adrenals, and central neuropeptides that lead to skin changes, brain perception of time, elevated or decreased heart rate, and all the primitive responses we require to survive and thrive.

The object in question, a snow boot, blue at the base with white sides and yellow shoelaces peered up from behind a water stained crumbling box. Pristine, worn once, and so charged it glowed behind the box seeking attention.What can one do with a single snow boot, impervious to time in all its polymer glory? And why? As I leaned forward to pluck out this treasure or single boot with no use trash I entered H.G. Wells Time Machine. A winter camp for teenagers with cancer held half a century ago, when childhood leukemia and bone sarcomas were not survivable illnesses. Teenagers desperate for respite from chemotherapy, radiation, nausea and tears. To be achieved by flirting, crushing, drinking soda, drinking hot chocolate, smuggling in beer to their motel rooms, and learning to ski gloriously down the mountain on one ski and an outrigger to take the place of the one that was missing. Not to be afraid of falling because your platelet count was too low or running out of air because your red cell count couldn’t keep up with what your lungs provided.

And there was Ellen. Skin soft, eyes blue, blushing easily in the way that thirteen year old girls do. She had come down off the mountain and needed help getting her ski off, her crutch fetched from her locker, and her stylish snow boot placed after changing from her wet sock. I was happy to be her Prince putting on the shoe that fit.

When she died six months later her mother sent me that snow boot. It lives in the corner, inside the box of things that cannot be thrown away.