I’ve never kept a journal, not with any particular success at least. I can remember a few half-hearted attempts when I was younger, but it never took. I’m not sure why. My mother has done it, off and on, throughout her life. I don’t think her father ever stopped keeping one. In his case, I think it was more about keeping a record. There are binders of his writings hidden in a closet somewhere. Many of the entries begin with simple things like, “May 14, 1992 – A Good Day” or something to that effect. He would note visitors, what he had for lunch, what was working in his garden and what wasn’t working in the house.

I don’t know if I’m wired like that. Every day I wake up with the desire to write something. It’s the first place my mind goes when I crawl out of bed. It’s not quite the last thing on my mind at day’s end, but it’s in the mix. As I’m turning out the lights, the remnants of the day gone and the possibilities of the next are colliding with eachother. Among all of the other thoughts that are swimming around, I know that I will look back on my last day and wish that I’d written more. I know that I will look toward the next and hope that I find the time to write.

These nights are the hardest. The ones I never seem to know how to manage. I’ve accomplished more than enough to call the day a success, but it still felt incomplete because, until ten minutes ago, I hadn’t written a word. I just never seem to know what to do with days like this. I’m too jumbled to work on a story. My brain hasn’t zeroed in on anything in particular, which shouldn’t be all that surprising, given the events of the past few weeks. I feel a need to put pen to paper, as it were, but I have no idea what to say. A journal would seem like a natural solution, but it’s a term I just can’t wrap my brain around. I understand my grandfather’s methodology, I suppose. He was a historian at heart, and I think he liked keeping records. I do wonder sometimes if it was a way of clearing the decks, like Dumbledore’s pensieve, a place to put the day’s events, with the hope that they wouldn’t trouble him any further.

I have all of these new things, my father’s death, the days that lead up to it, the day it happened, and the one after that, and the one after that, and I don’t have a place to put them yet. The day I drove back to North Carolina, a week after he died, was as beautiful a day as I could have imagined, crystal clear and only the slightest of spring chills. With the COVID isolation in full swing, there was no traffic to speak of, and it’s a drive I would have enjoyed under any other circumstance. My car was filled with things that don’t belong to me, things I would have given anything to have heard my father chasing after me as packed, stopping me from taking them away.

I don’t know what to do with that day. I don’t know what to do with the drive I might have dug or the creepy guy who asked me for money at a rest stop near Winston Salem or the double quarter pounder with cheese that I (bashfully) sort of enjoyed sometime around noon. I don’t know what to do with the smell of stale air I found in the house when I got home or the dead bird I found on the floor of the barn or the card I got from the HR department or the drive back from the hospital after Dad died or the last time I saw light in his eyes. I have these things, all of these things, and I just can’t figure out where they go; and they’re starting to pile up.

What amazes me, a bit at least, is how few of those things have to do with this bug, and all of its offspring. I’m quarantined, sure. I’ve got a mask that I wear when I go out, which isn’t often. I’m working from home. I’ve had to make a few menu adjustments because Harris-Teeter was out of this or that. I miss the bookshop in Chapel Hill that I used to go to on the odd Sunday. I miss sitting in coffee shops, and I miss browsing Target without fear of catching anything, but whatever. I am not acting out a live version of “Alas, Babylon”, not just yet. It is as though all of those other things have piled themselves up so high, that I can’t see the weird crap that’s lying just behind them, all these insane ironies that people are talking about on Facebook, that I just can’t seem to get all worked up about right now. I’m calling these entries “Scenes from a Pandemic”, but they may not have anything to do with the pandemic itself, because, while I am living through it, I’m not sure I’m living with it, if that makes any sense at all.

These are the first words I’ve put down in almost two months. I left town sometime around March 18^th, and didn’t find my way back until April 11^th, with all of those new things in tow, all those things that don’t have places. These entries are not where I’ll keep them, but they might the first shelves in a closet that I’m sure I’ll fill up someday. When the time comes, I’ll pack those things away with the other memories I’ve taken on throughout the years, the ones I pull out on rainy days, like letters at the bottom of a drawer. One of these nights, when I’m not looking, they’ll find their way into metaphors or phrases or characters or angry rants at sauces that won’t come together or moments where I hug one of my nieces or nephews a little tighter. On that night, I’ll lay in bed and I’ll know the pile is gone, tucked safely inside the closet, waiting for me to sift through it.