I Don’t Want To Think.
When I was little, I wanted a pen pal more than anything in the world. I may even have had a pen pal – but I don’t remember it.
What I do remember is my mother saying, “Why don’t you write to your grandmother? She would love that!”
And so, I wrote to my grandmother. She lived a thousand miles away, so I didn’t know her very well, and I wasn’t even a teenager yet. I had no idea what to say. But I wanted to write, and I wanted someone to send me a letter, so I wrote to Grandma faithfully for a long time.
I have no idea what I said, but I remember her letters to me.
Grandma’s letters were always the same happy tone, lighthearted descriptions of life in Florida. “It’s 78 degrees and sunny,” she would say. Or: “It rained yesterday and all the flowers started blooming.”
She never said anything of substance, and I never knew why.
I was bored with talk of the weather. To me, weather is something that just is – not an entire topic of conversation. If you’re standing in the rain, you know it’s raining. If you look out the window, you can see if it’s windy or sunny or cloudy. Why would it be a topic of discussion?
To be totally honest, I still have a hard time with the weather thing. When Bill talks about the weather forecast as if it’s an actual “topic,” I want to run screaming from the room.
But today, only two days after taking a beautiful bike ride on a gorgeous spring day, I walked outside and I was struck with bitterly cold wind – the kind of wind that shocked, and took my breath away.
So when I sat down to write today – with absolutely nothing going on in my life – I realized: the only thing I wanted to write about was this surprisingly blustery weather.
And that, of course, made me think of Grandma. Which then made me think: I am old and I have nothing better to discuss.
Partially, that’s true. I am old. But the truth of the matter is, the weather is easy to discuss. And I don’t want to think about anything else.
I don’t want to think about the virus. I don’t want to think about online school. I don’t want to think about the numbers of sick people around the globe and in my backyard. I don’t want to think about Bill’s trip to the grocery store, whether or not it was safe. I don’t want to think about the pandemic that’s ravaging the earth, one life at a time.
More than anything, I don’t want to think about the director of the CDC who, on CNN, specifically mentioned “reactive airways disease” as one of the top three underlying conditions – along with diabetes and hypertension – that is likely to cause a coronavirus patient to die. I don’t want to think about how many times he named those three things, over and over and over.
So today I will just say: it is bitterly cold and windy.
So cold. So windy.
And then I will pray for Grandma, who probably just didn’t want me – in my youth and naïveté – to dwell on anything deeper than the weather.