Travelogue 896 – March 28
Under the Metro

It’s not the most colourful neighbourhood to be trapped in. We didn’t move to Spangen to contemplate the littered streets and drab, decaying architecture. We moved here five years ago to have a nice apartment on our budget, and to be within reach of the rest of the city.

Now it seems the rest of the city has faded away. I spot the high buildings once in a while, when cresting some small rise nearby, and I salute wistfully. Once I lived in a city. Now I live in a neighbourhood. There will be many lessons learned from the coronavirus, and one will be that a place is only as good as its half-kilometre radius.

Now it’s been nearly two weeks since I’ve seen any other part of the city. The furthest I go is the supermarket, which is on the other side of the Metro station. In the other direction, I take walks occasionally in the afternoon. Years ago, walks were my daily staple for sanity. It’s nice to have them back. But my past lives had prettier backdrops. It’s a struggle to squeeze any inspiration out of this one.

I find myself drawn to the pitches on the other side of the Metro line. Out here, the Metro line itself rises from the earth like a stalking giant, extending a high platform away from the city and toward the rail line’s next stop in the neighbouring town of Schiedam. Under that elevated track are the pitches I’m talking about, a complex of half a dozen or more community pitches.

Some young people and families flout the social distancing rules to come out and kick around a football, but, for the most part, the pitches are now quiet. It’s the peace that draws me. And it’s the sense of space. It’s nice to have one place nearby where you aren’t ushered down narrow alleys among city buildings, and where you can see some distance. The mind and body respond immediately, as though there is more oxygen and as though thoughts find more space.

I turn one corner and cross in front of a school that is dark and neglected. I turn another corner and walk the length of a parking lot facing the pitches. Half the cars parked there are occupied by someone busy with their mobile. I’m from another time; I can’t see that as anything but creepy. Down farther, I pass the broken façade of an abandoned fire station. Leaving the parking lot, I follow a path underneath the elevated tracks, skirting the edges of the far pitches. These fields are grass, and no one plays out here. It occurs to me that I would rather play on grass, but then I’m no football player. Gaming fields have their measures, and my walks are short.

We’ve turned a corner in the corona shutdown. We’ve entered long stretches of temporal space that we hope are the middle stages of the crisis, though it’s hard to escape an uneasy feeling we’re entering a vast open territory we would call the Future, or a new age, if we just knew.

Travelogue 895 – March 24
Week Two

I can still find my class schedule on the school website, like a report from a ghostly life beyond the reach of the coronavirus; like glimpses of people in a parallel Metro train, where they don’t have to keep 1.5 metres apart; like the world you think you wake up to before your memory corrects you.

In my ghostly class schedule, I see the rooms numbers where students would have been waiting for me on this very day; where I would have flung my jacket around the back of the chair and sat in the swivel chair to log in on the computer; where I would have stood at the window during the last minute before class started, staring out over the decommissioned harbour six storeys below.

But that is just our shadow world now. Each day’s events take us further away, as though those Metro trains were drifting steadily apart on divergent tracks. This world is the quiet one, in which everyone maintains an empty seat between themselves and their neighbours.

It’s funny how quickly it all happened, and how easily. It overtook us like a spring breeze, rippling grasses and bending slender branches among the trees, then raising goose bumps when it arrived. It was all the stranger in the way it arrived with spring, blue skies dawning on quarantine.

Our last day of normality was a rainy one. I dressed Little Ren up and put her on the bike. Wow, I’m already nostalgic for that kind of whimsy: to take my little girl out to the café, just because we felt like it; just because we craved a treat; just because we wanted a change of scenery. I worked on the laptop at our table; Little Ren played among the toys in the children’s corner.

As I paid our bill, I asked the barista what time they opened in the morning, and he told me with an awkward smile that the boss had just called to say that the government was shutting cafes and restaurants for three weeks. A chill ran down my spine. Life without the café? Now it’s been almost two weeks.

Those were grand days. People sat freely at tables, all in the same room, sharing the same air, touching tabletops that strangers touched only moments before. We lived dangerously.

Travelogue 894 – March 18
High Noon at Eight O’Clock

We have found our quiet routines for a quiet new era. It doesn’t take long. Animals are built for habit. We’re up early. Even with nowhere to go, sleeping in is not an option. Little Ren wakes up, and she makes her noisy way downstairs. She dresses herself. She insists it’s time to go.

When the corona shutdown began last week, it triggered a wave of hoarding. By Saturday, many shelves at the local Albert Heijn were empty. There was no meat, no greens, no fruit. There was no rice, no pasta, no bread. “Aha,” I said to myself, standing forlornly amid the desolation. Shopping could no longer be random.

That’s when we started shopping first thing in the morning, right when the supermarket opens. Little Ren took this mission to heart. After the first morning trip, she was committed. We were not going to miss a day. She dresses herself in the morning. She puts on her tights and shoes. He pulls on her own jacket, though she leaves the zipper to me. She finds the bicycle helmet, and she silently, but impatiently, waits for me to be ready.

The ride to the store is quick and agreeable. Little Ren chatters the whole way. She likes to tell me, “You’re going the wrong way, Pop.” I play along. “Oh, really? Well, let’s try this way.” There are enough turns along the way to make that game possible.

The weather has been fine. The moment the corona crisis broke, spring came to the Netherlands, as though nature had only been waiting for a sacrifice. The weather has been eerily pleasant; all the more eerie for how miserable the winter was, relentlessly wet and windy.

The cherry trees have blossomed. Tulips and daffodils are blooming, often in bright patches among grass strips dividing the roadways. The girls are at an age that they love flowers. These are the high points of cycling with them, when they shout out in delight at the sight of more buds opening.

The shelves are never as empty as they were last weekend, but there are always a few key lacunae. Some gaps rotate; some are constant. Fruit and vegetables, for example, come and go in quick succession, different colours for different days. Pasta and pasta sauce come and go. Meats each have their two- or three-day season. Even precious toilet paper appears suddenly in great bounty. The more fixed gaps are among the soap and medicine shelves. Sanitizer and paracetamol are simply gone.

When we arrive at the supermarket, Little Ren takes charge. She marches through the entrance and straight to the turnstile. There she pauses like a gunslinger at the doors of the saloon. This is it. Papa, grab that basket.

Travelogue 893 – March 11
Real Men, Real Viruses

The coronavirus panic is spreading quickly in Europe. Italy is in lock-down, and schools have been closed in Spain and Greece. I read this morning that a hundred are dying per day in Italy.

It’s surprising that the simple fact of a virus loose in the world would be controversial. There’s a lot of chatter in Europe, not much of it real controversy. But the news from the U.S. relays all kinds of debate and indignation. The cult of politics is omnivorous. Its appetite is limitless.

On the right, people have suddenly developed strict standards about how many need to die before a virus gets a badge of authenticity. Not enough people have died! Anyone promoting containment is … a cry-baby, a socialist? Is that what they want to say? It seems like an odd line to draw in the sand, but I suppose you have to admire their bravura in the face of a threat that typically makes people mad with fear. Humanity doesn’t generally spit in the face of disease.

Denial of frowning faces is kind of a vogue among the right. So much bad news is exaggerated, they say. Racism and sexism, Russian interference and the Holocaust, they’re all bogeymen. Mexicans are rapists, but the wall stops them. It’s quite a happy and uncomplicated world the right sees out the window. There’s something nice about that, I guess.

I continue my daily reading project, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I take in a few lines every night. It doesn’t seem as though the emperor’s world was so tidy as Trump’s. His duties weighed on him. Moral choices didn’t seem so obvious. And mortality was a concern at closer proximity. His regular contemplation of mortality was common enough for philosophers of all ages. It was an exercise in humility. It was also a kind of booster shot against the horror of non-existence. The daily reminder was like exercise or toothcare, a kind of small pain as inoculation against the big one, inevitable though it may be.

I think about our solaces. I think about our conversations with nature. “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away,” to quote another philosopher. “Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither.”

Travelogue 892 – March 6
What Are the Odds?

A hundred percent, the weather app says. The chance of rain in the next hour is one hundred percent. I linger over that prediction a moment before I share it with Little Ren.

Little Ren wants to go outside. She requests it over and over, so that it’s hard to say no. “It’s raining outside,” I say, and I hold her up to the window so she can see. The pavements are dark with the damp. The brick wall opposite is streaked with rainwater. The rain gutters are full. In every puddle, we can see the drops of rain splashing.

Little Ren loves the outdoors. She’s curious. She is drawn to the open spaces and new sights. On occasions when we do step outside, she wants only to run. She feels a joy in the act of running. I can tell: I still feel the same sometimes. Her short legs plug along, churning quickly. She looks down at her feet, always wondering, and she stumbles. I watch her from behind. She’s always running away, and without hesitation.

Water is beading on the windows. The patter of rainfall is steady. The clouds above don’t vary in the grey shadow they cast over the city. I suggest to Little Ren that we go out later. She hears any equivocation as a no. She stomps away, dejected.

This is our world now, warmer, wetter, and windier. It’s been a dreary winter, a drag on our spirits. It takes energy to travel into the wind. It takes energy even to live with so little light. Ice and cold have their own effect on morale, but they offer something to engage with. The scenery changes. Landscapes are white. Or, at the very least, the chill air makes for sharp perspectives. Puddles ice over; your steps crunch. Climate change is just making the world greyer and more tired.

I think about our solaces. I think about our ghosts. I think about the conversation between humanity and nature. I reflect on the echoes and the harmonies that we interpret as chatter. They inform us, whatever their source or their motivation. God talks to us; the moon talks to us; the unconscious talks to us. Even conceding that each of those may exist, even conceding they talk, do they see us as interlocutor? Is it wrong that we collect their utterances as text or captions for our stories?

I return to the weather report contained within my phone. One hundred percent, it says. When does a calculation of odds become a flat statement of fact? At one hundred percent? Do we sometimes forget what we meant when we created the idea of probability? Can we use probability to overrule chance? Do we then become creators? Let there be light. The grammar seems ambiguous.