Just a Little Jog — 46 (Book Two Begins)

A confusing post, perhaps. Your indulgence — your patience — is begged. A note, written now, will explain a little. Then we'll be back in the COVID year, 2020: the Year of the Jog, which will run on.

{Note, written 7/19/25: As forewarned in January of this year, my intention at my “This Reminds Me of a Story” site in 2025 was, and is, to revisit a mass of memoir-y writing I did in 2020. I made that writing five years ago largely on our front porch, when we Americans of a Certain Age Who Aren't Required Workers were ordered to stay home and communicate with other citizens by email, Text, phone and new conveyances that our children could help us with: FaceTime, Skype, Zoom. I re-read Moby-Dick that summer — I really did, and enjoyed it anew. I finally knocked off, so to speak, Anna Karenina. I helped Luci in the garden, or got in her way. I jogged. I scribbled and typed.

[At year’s end, I put the words away in the kids’ electronic footlocker for unearthing later if they were at all interested. “What did you do in the COVID, Dad?” “Not very much, as you shall see.”

[So: We have finished the Jog through our town of Mount Kisco and I’ve told a few off-road stories as I padded on. But that only got us, in 2020, to the start line of our COVID horrorshow. I kept typing.

[I remember, now, that in the continuing writing generated that year, there was much more about heritage, the virus, then the day-to-day of the year: politics (it was a Presidential election year) and other matters. I continued with those things then, and I’ll continue with them now: through to December, with occasional Interludes like the one we recently deployed on the Fourth of July. I will continue to prune and interrupt the manuscript as I feel is useful in 2025, but only for orientation or context. If I was a Fauci guy five years ago, and I surely was, I will present as such in the next many posts. The whole point here is to revisit the time that was, not to revise any past realities.

[I’ve tried to keep this site apolitical, but I fear there was no ignoring issues in 2020, just as there is no ignoring issue today, and just as there was no ignoring issue when Frederick Douglass was on the case, as in that Fourth of July Interlude we presented two weeks ago. We’ll see what happens in the months ahead as far as issues are concerned. That will not be what I deal with here. Was Donald Trump on the scene five years ago? Yeah, I guess he was — President in fact. Will he be mentioned? Sure, of course. So will Andrew Cuomo, I imagine — who seemed quite a different bird back then. Might be interesting to see what was up, and . . . Hey, it’s not like we could stir up any trouble on our lightly travelled little site here. We’re not Colbert.

[Final note here: As has already happened, I do depart from direct-address sometimes, as in the immediate next several lines, to talk either to myself or some other second-person editor. Or to God. This is just me amusing myself. It’s intentional and in my kind it is finished writing, it’s not just “Note to Self,” and it’s not trying to be meta or “automatic writing” or whatever. It’s something I’ve done when I’m writing free ‘n’ easy, not for The Boss — done it since I was twelve years old, bothering no one but myself, ‘til now.

[So, we’ll start with the horribly arch formulation of “Epilogue in Two Postscripts” and go from there. I’ve already begged your indulgence here, and do so again.

[Onwards! Backwards:]

########

Book Two

[EPILOGUE IN 2 POSTSCRIPTS; WORD “EPILOGUE” HERE, THEN 1^ST P.S. HED]

Epilogue

P.S. re.coronvirus,a.k.a.SARS-CoV-2,a.k.a.COVID-19

[or

Epilogue: Just a Little Jog Around the Neighborhood

or

Epilogue: Life During Wartime

or

Epilogue: Explaining My Old Man Project]

[CHABON EPIGRAPH HERE]

“Given the urge of those who believe themselves to have lived through a golden age to expiate upon the subject at great length afterward, it is ironic that . . .”

—Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Sometime after I started going on and on — whether on and on in sneakers or at the keyboard — I decided that I was going to add a brief-enough postscript, which I would attach to the tail end of whatever might philanthropically be called The Action. This use of the phrase “the action,” would cleverly work, linguistically speaking, in two ways, as it involves the narrative, and also a jog. (Ah, the grey cells are tireless! Double meanings are always tasty.) Then the P.S. would comment (and quickly! succinctly!) on the preceding action. It would forthrightly explain the “what” about the jog and the “why” about all that writing that had washed ashore — beached itself — in the jog’s wake. How sensible a plan.

The plan, as evolved in my head during the first and then subsequent winter jogs, led to planning: When I’m home from a final jog and after I finish whatever it is that I want to write for the kids, I’ll got to stay seated and add a P.S. explaining things. Explaining that it’s intended for them, that it’s always been meant for them, our kids. (You: our kids.) Explaining exactly when it was that I wrote it (mid-Jan.-thru-mid-March-’20). Maybe tell the kids (you) how I planned to then put it away and give it to them at Christmas? Thereby they (you) will know why they have received this email with attachment from Santa. All will be clear. Clear enough.

Now that I dwell on even the smallest bit of this, it becomes clear enough that the development of the plan probably, actually, came here at the computer, not while I was huffing and puffing away. I probably did settle on doing a P.S. pretty early, maybe during a jog in late January, figuring I would be wrapping by February 1. But the answers — what it was, who it was for, etc. — continued to evolve throughout that second month, and I’m sure I started sketching some half answers here at the keyboard.

It probably was on some February run that it became obvious — to me; only to me, certainly — that things were getting away from me, that I certainly would have explaining to do. My initial plan—that I’d write the kids a little piece with a story or two or five about me and their mom, and them growing up, maybe with Caroline’s sleigh ride, Jack’s eye surgery, MG as Clifford, how good New England ice cream is . . . Well, that modest plan had clearly grown to immodest proportions. And I was still typing.

Yes, Luci (and kids), I had some ’splainin’ to do.

So: Once whatever it was that was happening to me with the writing had begun to happen,, I realized that, even if I pre-sold them (pre-sold you kids, kids) with the legend of Kerouac’s On the Road “roll” and theories of automatic writing, none of them — none of you, not even Jack—would accept that I had done all of this scribbling in a rambunctious day or two or three, or a tireless week or two or three. Yes, at Time Inc. we had to write plenty fast on deadline, but not even with a Kerouacian stash of bennies or a Schwarzeneggerian shot of ’roids could I have written all of this junk — all of these hundred-thousand-plus words — in a la-de-da afternoon and subsequent casual evenings after the jog. No way, no how.

I would have to explain — at least to myself and to them (to you) — what this writing is or was supposed to be: the reasons for it, what had happened with it, what the hell it’s for. (This is assuming—presumptuously presuming — that you might care about this wordplay at all and ever. This is supposing that this is for anything at all.)

You see: What had happened with it, the wordplay, and also with us in the interim between that lovely January day and this chilly afternoon in March changed all my plans even as they were formulating. It started with the writing running away from me for its own and my pleasure, then continued with the world running away from us all and veering straight to hell.

What had happened to us and to everyone was, of course, the most devastating imaginable catastrophe, from Wuhan to Westchester. If I was ever going to present a piece of writing from 2020 to anyone, I would need to tell that particular someone (myself, first) that I never really meant to ignore: there has come a virus. I was aware of it, but it just wasn’t what I thought it was going to . . . Well, it just wasn’t what I had planned to think about and write about, and even as we were growing increasingly scared it wasn’t This Goddamned Big to us—to me—until yesterday, when the NBA called off a game. Who’s fault that is—that we didn’t realize, or that we were stubbornly blind, or some admixture — well, history will sort out, once the pissing and moaning are faded notes — who’s fault was that, that we didn’t know till now? Maybe, for the moment, that’s beside the point.

So, again: I would certainly need a postscript to explain that I’ve been working on this, for the most part happily, for two months now. I would need to stress that I now realize it seems to exist somewhere amidst cavalier, uncaring, cruelly insensitive and just plain nuts to leave 2020 behind, even on the page, with a surprisingly nice and sunny day in mid-January, when the birds and crocuses (and all of us, apparently) are being faked out. I would have to admit to any painfully unfortunate future reader who had, to whatever extent, suffered through the coronavirus, that I hadn’t meant to seem inhumane or even ironic with such a happy/ominous/portentous ending as “Welcome, 2020! Do your best for us.” Such goals as cruelty or irony would require that the writer knew already that COVID was on the march, changing and mutating and spreading, and was surely destined to be Goddamned Big. But I swear, even with the nursing homes in the Northwest and that cruise ship coming up from Mexico to California, it wasn’t until the NBA indefinitely suspended its season on March 11 because a guy on the Utah Jazz had tested positive that I realized we were in some way doomed. My cynicism, built on experience and learning, told me last night that the NBA or any U.S. major sports league would not be throwing away this kind of money unless it thought it had to.

So, again and again: The virus invalidates everything about this year that isn’t virus-affected or virus-informed.

Therefore (talking to myself again here): You would look like a fool if you didn’t attempt some perspective for the kids down the road.

Make sure you write a postscript.

Which starts now.

∞

That day of the jog, even before showering, I did write out, in longhand on lined paper, a whole mess of notes. I don’t use “mess” messily. I just kept remembering things, then more of them. That night, I started to make a sentence, and things kept going on and on in the next few and several days.

Also and as I say and we all know: In those weeks following, COVID-19 became very real in New York and everywhere throughout the country. Suddenly I had even more time on my routinely idle hands, and this was an obvious problem here at the keys: more and more time to play with words.

Finally, at long last, my narration had me heading back home from the jog. Two months had passed, and I had collected those hundred thousand-plus words, purposely avoiding events of the day in favor of events of yesterday because, after all, the writing was intended — I say this baldly, kids — for my and Luci’s three kids: for a reading by them at some point in some vague time that might exist in tomorrow’s tomorrow’s tomorrow. By then, COVID-19, whatever it’s going to be, will have been just one more thing in their lives, and something they and their dad didn’t have when Dad started his report.

(I might’ve claimed in January, when I started typing, that I did so for no evident reason—to have fun; to kill time; just to write — but you might well have said, “for no good reason, you mean.” I might’ve come to agree with you as my deployment of all those words — the building of a store of (for God’s sake) a hundred thousand-plus words (more or less) — was ridiculous, useless and self-indulgent. But I found I was coming up with other personal reasons to follow the path I’d chanced upon. Perhaps as an out, I figured on the postscript: That will explain all, set everything right, cheer as all up. I typed forth, figuring the P.S. might even help explain things to me.)

Today is Friday, March 13, 2020. Everything above has been written, at least in draft. I will go through it, probably over and over, because that’s my instinct, my forty-five-year habit, my way to use time, and also because I know the narrative is littered with redundancies, and that’s because I do tend to tell the same stories over and over. Ask my kids, ask my wife.

Today is Friday, March 13, 2010 and the COVID is now urgent. There is no St. Patrick’s Day parade in Mount Kisco this weekend, no parades anywhere. We won’t be seeing Bobby Jr. curbside, which is fine; Luci and I aren’t really up for chatting with anti-vaxxers just now, even if they’re Kennedys.

So: I was going to add a postscript explaining something about the writing and how it turned into what’s called — and this is an actual term, coined by someone smarter than me, as we will soon learn — an Old Man’s Project.

I will ease into this postscript with that exegesis on Old Man Projects, as planned. The more I’ve thought about the postscript the more psyched I’ve become about this part: It’s going to give me the chance to chat at greater length about readin’ and writin’, two things I enjoy chatting about as much as I do about, say, the Sox or Pats. Then I’ll talk a bit about where the COVID has left us. To talk of our world just now — maybe even your future world, kids — within the light of the coronavirus. That seems like something to be done. Chew up some alone time.

Look, kids, it’s clear: This is what I’ve been doing, and I need a way out.

I think I now at least have some kind of plan that will allow me to end this grasping project.

On, tomorrow, with the PS!