It had been a long time since I heard the owls cry in the night. Last night in bed I counted three in the distance, a hoot-hoot with a menacing tone. It reminded me of waking in Marrakech to the sound of the first daily prayer, amplified by old loudspeakers from the minarets. You could hear the chanting start in one place and then combine with the others until it all coalesced into one, a communal hum. They were like human bees those voices, a deep buzzing thrum. I imagined those owls calling to each other, relinquishing themselves to instinct. What being part of a tribe meant, to conscript your voice to a higher mission, to give yourself to the group. That was the way of nature; groups mattered more than individuals.

And so I guess it was natural we finally got Covid. It was more natural than isolating forever and it didn’t feel good to always be alone anyway. I went back through my memory to retrace where I might have gotten it, like my hypochondriac grandmother once did. She would unpack every banal grocery store encounter trying to pinpoint who gave it to her like it was a conspiracy. But we had just come back from dropping Lily off at college with a thousand students and their families so yeah, the possibilities were endless. No one in masks, crowded classrooms, amphitheaters and restaurants.

But I don’t think anyone has the stamina to care about anything for so long with such intensity. Or that it’s even good for us as a species to fear contact with each other, as I had. Shedding masks and my fear of contact came as a relief. I won’t say it was worth it to get Covid, but if getting what amounts to a seasonal cold allows me to feel sociable again and human, I’ll accept that. Many others don’t have that flexibility for health reasons and will have to mask or isolate for who knows how long?

Isolating while we were sick reminded me of the lockdown times, what must have been weeks piled upon months for a couple of years. The time our family set up the TV in our garage for an outdoor movie night we called “pandemic theater,” complete with faux movie tickets the kids made and a menu of concessions. We said we’d do that throughout the summer but only did it once, though we saved all the flyers and artwork. At times it felt like life moved brutally swift or sickeningly slow. We had returned to the slow part, a middle-aged smear of indistinct days bookended by the launching of our kids and concern for our aging parents. Life tugged from opposite ends without enough for us in the middle.

One morning I spotted a coyote running through the yard with something in its mouth, and realized it was the dog’s bone. Ginger had left it on the lawn and the coyote had made off with it. Then in the middle of the night Ginger wanted out and mysteriously returned with the bone, as if the coyote had brought it back. It was like they were communicating or playing some game. I felt pathetic knowing it would be only one of a few things of note to transpire that day. Running out of things to talk about made me feel old.

Waking to the owls felt thrilling because it reminded me of the life right outside our window, and how I might still be connected to it if only I could wake from this spell, this middle-of-life thing. Harkening back to that summer in France, that October in Morocco, who I was and imagined myself to be was more interesting than how I’d turned out, it seemed. And yet we couldn’t keep going away to drum up more life. It was right here for the taking. Why couldn’t I see it?

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, identity, mid-life crisis