Except for solitary walks now and then, a trip to the
grocery store once a week, like so many across the globe, I am confined to
home. I am rereading Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of
Space. He writes of the protected intimacy of the house we have dreamed or
lived in: “The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the
house allows one to dream in peace."
I worry about the children like a boy I once taught for a
short time – he arrived in November and was gone again in April to yet another
school, his eleventh before he was twelve. He lived in a small apartment with
his parents, four younger brothers, one older sister and her new baby. Most of
his stories were about groceries, about walking to get them, about his father
coming home in a cab with them, about how they were all going to get them the
next day. Sometimes he talked about not sleeping, about the crying baby, his
wiggling brother, the noise from the TV.
And yet, for children, the groceries arrive like Christmas.
The noise is the hum of intimacy and, who knows, no doubt when the baby is asleep,
and the littlest are watching TV, there is a lull for staring at the ceiling
and tracing the crack into daydreams.
How difficult it is to disentangle the common experience –
this poetry – from the rest of it, to rest here for a moment before worry
blooms again.
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