Wet Socks?

There's a phrase I learned as a 20-something weathering the ups-and-downs of the search for love. I was doing a particularly bad job of hiding my

sadness one morning after the most heart-breaking break-up of my existence, which prompted a colleague and friend in the English department to say, "It could be worse...you could have wet socks."

From that day on, "Wet socks?" became our shorthand for checking the emotional forecast. And most days, that little shift in perspective was enough to bring at least the hint of a smile back to my face.

This morning, as I enjoyed the daily luxury of a hot shower (yes, I said luxury), wet socks interrupted my thoughts about life during a pandemic. It could be worse, I thought, as the water ran over my shoulders.

• We could have no hot water, forcing us to start the day with cold showers each morning.
• We could have no internet -- no Zoom meetings or classes, no virtual hangouts or Skype chats with friends and loved ones.
• We could have no computers or personal devices -- no Candy Crush or Words with Friends, no videogames or online Fort Nite marathons, no Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter feeds to monitor.
• We could have only one landline (remember when that was a thing?) that we had to fight each other for.
• We might be forced to get by on a diet of Saltine crackers and peanut butter or have to wipe our @$$es with scraps of newspaper.

Or we could be forced to watch news coverage of the pandemic 24/7 or tune in to press conferences that are more likely to spread confusion and misinformation than provide much needed reassurance. But no one is forcing us to do that. We can stop. Go back to getting our news once or maybe twice a day. If keeping up with hourly developments adds to our anxiety, we can step away from our screens, particularly the 24/7 opinion-driven programs that pose as news and the click bait that infests our social media feeds.

I know it is hard to be stuck at home -- and here comes the tough love -- but there are worse problems in the world than having to cope with a little boredom (or conversely, with the extra burden of having to teach and care for our children while working from home), especially if it allows those on the front lines -- those staffing our hospitals, maintaining public safety, running state and local governments, and supplying the food chain -- to continue to confront, contain, and eventually conquer the virus.

It is worse, in fact, in many parts of the world right now -- in Zagreb, Croatia where they just had a 5.4 earthquake; in war torn countries like Syria where many are living in unsafe and unsanitary conditions in refugee camps; in the impoverished areas of this country (and there are many) where the stoppage of non-essential businesses and the closing of schools means there might be no food on the table, much less a 30-day supply in the pantry.

So, friends, let's remember all those things we can still do from home -- exercise, worship, nurture relationships, practice mindfulness, learn, create, inquire, discover, and, most importantly, love each other. If we cannot work right now, maybe we can find our purpose in doing our small part to serve those who are fighting for survival.

Call me Mary Poppins if you must, but the best way to counter the grief over what we have lost or stand to lose right now is to feel gratitude for those blessings, large and small, that we do have.

And if that doesn't work, remember: wet socks.

From the Writer's Confessional

I have a confession to make.

As a fiction writer, I struggle to create detailed characters and settings -- at least in a physical sense. Sometimes I forget that the reader can't see what's in my head as I write -- what the girls seated around the cafeteria table are wearing or what posters are hanging on the wall of the main character's bedroom. And sometimes, I can't see the finer details clearly enough to write them in. Or, if I can, I can't translate those images into words that give the figures who haunt the shadows of my mind life on the page. Yet.

Maybe this is because of something in my creative DNA. Choreographer Twyla Tharp calls it "focal length." In her book The Creative Habit (a staple on my writing reference and inspiration shelf), she proposes that "All of us find comfort in seeing the world either from a great distance, at arm's length, or in close-up." According to her classification system, I am a great-distance person. Or at best, on good days, an arm's-length person.

What does this mean to my writing? It means that the close-up, make-you-feel-like-you're-right-there sensory details don't come easily, or naturally, to me. This is something my critique group finds incredibly (or at least somewhat) annoying, even though they don't put it that way exactly. But they do beg and plead -- persistently -- for more visual and tactile and gustatory and olfactory (love that word) cues so they aren't left guessing.

It means, that at least in early drafts, my characters are doomed to float around in a vast, empty, undefined space. They are stranded in the middle of a big white room or left standing aimlessly in front of a blank green screen. After all, it's hard to tell what kind of sneakers a character is wearing or how she eats an Oreo when you're seeing the fictional world she lives in as a pea-sized blue-green orb floating in a vast universe.

It means silencing my inner critic long enough to get a first draft on paper, knowing that I'll have to work at adding arm's-length and close-up sensory details to future drafts in order to bring the story's fictional world into clear enough focus for my readers to inhabit. Not sure yet if that will happen in draft 2 or draft 92 (Jack Gantos swears he writes everything 100 times), just that it will.

Seems that the great-distance perspective creeps into my real life too, like the way I view the community of professional, published authors. I know it exists, have orbited it for a number of years now, and have even been lucky (or proactive) enough to visit it and get within arm's- (or even pen's-) length at writing conferences and book-signings. But for now it remains an elusive, shadowy world built on shifting sands of creativity, hard work, and inspiration.

For now, I content myself by keeping that distant marbled orb in my sights, knowing that my writing journey is bringing me closer every day. And that one day, I fully intend to inhabit that world just the way my characters will inhabit theirs.