Life

I live in the hills near Austin City Limits. We have no lawns where I live. My driveway is dirt. The post oaks in front of my house have been inching higher since the Civil War. But where I live is less country than when I moved in. Thousands of new homes line a rolling ridge that shoulders rush hour traffic past my small neighborhood. And the night’s dark sky isn’t as dark as it used to be and the swoosh of tires across the ridge continues deep into that silver night. Austin has grown.

I bought my acre when that road was silent at night. I chose this place because its small house on a cliff’s westerly edge offered a 180-degree view of the valley below — no houses in sight — while located within minutes of an extraordinarily vibrant and off-beat city with a voice all its own. I could listen to the birds in the morning and the Blues at night. And in-between was silence.

The 5 Stages of Cool…

Stage 1: Artists discover a beautiful and affordable town. They set up shop.
Stage 2. Trendsetters discover the hidden art community and christen it hip. Tourism follows.
Stage 3. Chic visitors become residents. Wannabees follow their lead. The town becomes a city.
Stage 4. Corporations follow the money because wannabes love nothing more than white chocolate mocha lattes. The city’s unique personality withers under the weight of international branding.
Stage 5. Demand pushes prices higher, local artists and entrepreneurs are forced out, and all that is left in their mirrors is the fog of once cool.

Austin has thrived since the 1990s. The influx of tech and the money that comes with it has made us shinier, sexier, cosmopolitan. New York. Miami. Austin.

Our new chic has brought us dozens of rising skyscrapers along Lady Bird Lake. Their sparkling lights offer a facade of life. But those of us who lived here before their erection, those of us who knew Austin, recognize that its vibrant mortal coil has grown cold. The city has become increasingly a destination. Less a home. Out-of-staters have priced the people who shaped us — artisans, musicians, regular folks who could once afford a home town that allowed them to march to their own beat — out of their homes and away from the city. Imitation has replaced authenticity. Brand has supplanted place. Austin, Texas, has become a grayer shade of blue.

My parents both worked but were home by 5:30. We had four TV channels and lousy radio. The internet wasn’t a thing. Neither did we have the overly-scheduled lives of today’s children. Our nights and weekends were our own. We rode bikes, played in our yards, found things to do with the clutter in our garage. Life was slow.

Last night, a man bored within a pandemic, I again found myself with time to burn. So I sat in my yard and listened. The two-laner between all those new rooftops — widened a few years back into a high-speed commute for the boom of newcomers who wanted a country existence within the shortest possible commute — was quiet like it used to be.

Friends of mine in Houston have made similar observations. Lives have also slowed around them. One wrote that for the first time since he moved into his neighborhood he saw the family across the street, parents and children, playing in their yard. I’ve read the same from strangers on social media. Soccer practices and high-dollar vacations have been canceled. Nights out with buddies have replaced by evenings home with wives. The amplitude of our existence has been turned down. We are decelerating to our natural speed. The presence of death has offered us a remembrance of life.

The threat of the grave is everywhere now. We view everything with suspicion as if but for this virus our bodies would live eternal. But that, of course, is a lie. Death is always near: bullets, illness, weird accidents that would be funny except for the toll. The ridiculous variety of things which can kill us inoculates us to the truth that we’re not long for this world. A distracted driver could hit you three minutes from now.

…gone.

But there are more subtle ways of dying than a final heartbeat. Do you sense them now that you’re still? They — as sure as a distracted driver, a stage-4 diagnosis, Big Macs — have been killing us for years. They are quiet deaths that rob you no less than your conclusion: death of home, death of intimacy, the death of intricate and beautiful pieces of yourself. Those are the deaths which no vaccine can cure.

Covid-19, like Austin, is the bright shiny object getting all our attention. But Covid can only end you. And surviving its passage won’t alone bring you life, because life requires more than functioning lungs. Life requires wide eyes and open hearts that deeply inhale the natural world and the love of your people. Life requires you to be present. It requires that you surrender your time today so that it may enrich the time you have left.

Covid-19 will pass. What will you do if you make it through? With what will you fill your time between the black death and white sheet? What will flow through your mortal coil?

Nobody wants a pandemic. But maybe we can learn from one.

Use this time wisely.

My wife and I have hunkered down for the virus. Sorta. I’m at home, but she is at the small local store she’s managed since it opened fifteen years ago. They’re open. They’re deemed “essential.” Her store’s owner has been given a shot at survival and he’s taking it.

Because I’ve worked from home for years and my wife is still working at the store, our life resembles what it was pre-Covid 19, except that she and her boss offer curbside service now, and masks are required inside, and they wipe the place down after every customer, and she and I share an uneasy alliance. Roll the film noir stock.

INT. LIVING ROOM – NIGHT
Wife enters. She and her husband timidly embrace before she exits to the bathroom and closes the door. Sound of faucet running.

When we take a good hard look at our methodical hand scrubbing, the absurdly long stares we give doorknobs before we touch them, and the paranoid curiosity that accompanies every package left at our door, it feels like we’re living through a The Walking Dead spoof where bleach replaces machetes and my wife and I debate kissing. Yeah, kissing. Because while we share a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bed, kissing shares air and air can kill you. So in the back of my mind every time we kiss are images of the people who entered her store who wore the pointless surgical masks or those people who pulled their masks beneath their noses when out of line of sight or who lifted them to speak before my wife could tell them — or not — to place the masks back over their mouths. Did she get out of the store “clean” or is she simply asymptomatic? “What do you mean, you don’t feel well? What feels wrong?” My feet are dangling off the deep end.

And so now we kiss like strangers before we drift to sleep amid gunfire — exhaling, snoring, coughing inches away from each other as bullets whiz — that we hope won’t hit and infect us in our sleep. We’re doing what we can to remain safe, but we’re married with bills.

‘What we can,” though, doesn’t feel like enough. Because I’m searching for time.

I spoke with Mom tonight. We’ve long talked frequently (almost nightly), but our calls feel more precious now because she’s ninety-eight years old and I’m a disabled middle-aged male. Both of us are in Covid-19’s crosshairs. But my priority is my life, not hers, and not because I’m a dick, but because a mother shouldn’t stand over her only son’s grave, not after she put so much effort into keeping him alive.

Daddy died 25 years ago. That’s when I inherited a singular job: become healthier. I began swimming, eating organically, protecting my life, because I have to outlive her. By at least one minute.

But years pass and habits change, and I am now a mother’s child who wishes that as an adult I had continued eating better, had kept on exercising, had traded screen light for sunlight. To gain just that minute.

But life…

I met someone, settled in, became lazy and careless, rediscovered doughnuts. How many minutes did that doughy goodness cost me? It matters now.

My childhood was spent in hospitals, but I was rarely alone. I was frequently sad, but depression wasn’t allowed ground to root. Because Mom was there. My mother did more than give me life. She saved it. I can’t destroy hers now by neglecting that gift.

Just one minute.

I missed grades 7-12. Illness. Yet ten years later, I graduated from a top tier university, married a woman far above my grade, started a surprisingly successful business. You know whose invisible hand supported me as I passed those mile markers. You know.

You can never dismiss dark clouds nor anticipate the different forms they will take. They are that much bigger than we are. And that much smaller. Invisible to the naked eye. Microscopic.

It’s now left to us to manage our protection, to “stay in place,” to breathe less deeply until this machination of nature passes us by.

Tick. Tock.

I am in my fifties and never fathered children. I am an only child. My DNA is speeding down a wide two-laner toward an unavoidable end. No exits. A definitive final scene.

I’m okay with that.

But give me those final 60 seconds.