A Strange Peace
A strange sense of peace has descended on me over these last few days, following, I should probably say, a strong desire to tear out all my hair. This happened because some robot somewhere hacked into my Gmail account, then showered a million droplets of spam in the direction of every last person in my Contacts. The account was promptly suspended by Google and, I was advised, on the page where one might plead one's case, that it could easily be three or even four business days before they got around to 'hearing' it.In the meantime how odd it is has been to look down at the phone I practically bring into my morning shower and see nothing waiting for me! There is such quiet all of sudden! And in all this quiet I am noticing things I had previously missed:I’m noticing how nice it is to wake in the morning and NOT see a lot of urgent headlines summoning me from the little cigarette-pack that is the iPhone 6.I’m noticing how nice it was to look out my bedroom window at the dawn sky the other day and see a tiny silver dart of an airplane. It pierced the rosy clouds in its ascent from the oceanside airport next to close-crowded Boston with its jumble of buildings like the tall quilt-looking vanilla cookies you'd get as a kid when some kindly grownup thought to crown your scoop of as ice cream with a few. Why have I not spent ten minutes looking out at this slice of sky every day? I ask myself.I think too how simultaneously alarming and comforting it was for me that morning to look in the bathroom mirror a little longer than usual and discover my mother's very face looking back at me, though the lady has been gone these 30 years.I also had time to notice too a long silky hair I had never seen before, sprouting from a new place on my chin. With my new shorter hair and my now far more meager eyebrows I also had a shock: "Hold on!” I thought. “Am I actually starting to look like a man? Like maybe Paul Giamatti in his role as Sam Adams?"But no, I told myself at that point. If I am to be without the incessant pinging of incoming emails for this interlude, then let me harbor thoughts less and silly self-involved.I walked back to my room then and opened the curtains wide. My husband had left our bed at 4am to make a 6:30 flight across the country. I crawled back under the covers and looked out at the sky - just in time to see a second silver dart rising from the horizon-hugging clouds. "It's him! " I thought. "There he goes!"And isn't THAT a much better way to start the day than with that brackish tide of awful news?
