Thoughts About Giving Up While Dancing With My Broom

Some days I’ve had enough. And then I realize I don’t even know what enough is.

I’ve been dancing with my broom for so long now it’s rebelling at another round of salsa and telling me it wants to lead.

Give me a friggin’ break. I haven’t seen a live human face in 9 weeks, and I’ve been stuck in my apartment for 11 weeks. You want bored and sick of this whole blinking pandemic, take a look at me.

I’m up to my back teeth in positive thinking and rising above it all and staring out the window all day. I want to go outside. I want to party down. I want to see my beloveds and have things to go back to the way they were before.

These thoughts rattle around in my agitated brain as I do a thousand steps to the Glenn Miller version of Chattanooga Choo Choo.

My mother told me she used to sing that song to me back when it was on the charts (yeah, I’m that old) and urge me to dance for her while she clapped her hands. It was her favorite song, and maybe that’s why I love it so much and sing it to myself while I jitterbug a hole in my rug to make sure I get my 5k steps in, 2.5 miles every day.

Most days, my solo dancing makes me happy, and I perform for myself in front of my mirror. Today I had to drag myself to the floor, a reluctant partner because I knew I had to. Don’t start, I warned myself. When you begin taking days off, you’re heading down a slippery slope, and you won’t be able to climb back up.

But I had reached my limit for staying in. Even though I couldn’t tell you where I wanted to go. What would I do if donned a mask and gloves and braved the possibly contaminated halls and elevator of my building, or more likely, my real fear, ran into — literally — in our narrow hallway an unmasked neighbor with the virus who’d spew it all over me?

I don’t have a destination in mind. I just want it to be a time before all this happened, when life was normal. Oh, I say to myself, you mean like when you came out of the surgery that took out part of your cerebellum and your head was spinning from a stroke? Obviously not.

No, as long as I’m fantasizing, I’ll go back before that, to a better time. So, that would be after my heart surgery and worries about earning money? No, keep scrolling, before the disastrous marriage and divorce that screwed up my health and bank account.

How about to that period when I was content with being alone and not dating, but that would be before I retired when I had to go to work every day and could only dream of staying home and writing.

Okay, so let me go back before that, before all the years slogging away as a secretary. Yeah, and let’s skip over 9/11 and the shock to my system that brought. Way before that. When I had a writing contract that paid me to write a book. Oh, wait, but then they snapped that out of my hands. Talk about depressed.

So before that, when I was hopeful about the future, that I’d find the love of my life. Yeah, we know how that turned out. How about going back to when I was changing my life around and healing my psychic wounds? Thinking that’s all I had to do to make my life work. Visualize good things. Be good to your inner child. It worked. Until it didn’t.

So before that, how about going back to the really great time of motherhood. Until my child moved on and didn’t need me anymore. Well, what about the first marriage, not the heartbreaking ending, the early love-filled years? But they didn’t last, so should I go back to my youth? The Friday night dances and proms hoping the cute boy would dance with me and not leave me holding up the wall? The agony of high school? No way. Well, before that? To all that childhood trauma? Give me a break. There had to be some good times.

No, if I’m going out, if I can pick the best time to leave my isolation, how about returning to the moment I was new and innocent and perfect? The first day of my life. Except, as soon as I took my first breath, I couldn’t. They called the priest to give me the Last Rites because the doctor didn’t think I’d make it.

Of course, I don’t remember that first struggle, but I’ve learned enough in the years since about not being able to catch my breath that my fight to live couldn’t have been a walk in the park. No, I don’t want to go back to my introduction to my life and relive that respiratory thing that eighty years later is keeping me isolated in my apartment because it has made me high risk for catching the virus.

So, what about the future if the past has all these potholes? Suppose tomorrow is worse? What if somehow the virus slips in uninvited, like those cases in New York City infecting people who are solo isolating like me?

Suppose I get really sick, and with my history of troublesome lungs, I go into one of those awful spirals and end up on a ventilator or worse?

Suppose, sitting here in my pretty living room, with a refrigerator full of food, with enough money in the bank this month at least to pay my bills, a list of friends and family I can call at a moment’s notice to keep me company on FaceTime or Zoom or run an errand if needed.

Add to that a music playlist so I can get up and dance my old bohonkus off because I’m strong and healthy even though I’m as old as Methuseleh’s great aunt, safe from the virus. Suppose I have all this, and my only worry is that I’m a little bored?

What if today is the best day of my life, and I’m too busy feeling sorry for my self to appreciate it?

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