It's funny where we find comfort. Often, it’s in the familiar. Even the sadly familiar.
Because of my assorted medical issues involving headaches and dizziness and nausea, I can't do much at the computer. I can’t write much. I can’t read much.
I used to spend hours in the den in front of the screen, writing this blog for SDPB or my newspaper column for the Rapid City Journal doing cell-phone interviews so I could do more writing, and reading newspapers online and doing research online, and writing. More writing.
Always. More. Writing.
These days I can do very little reading (a lot of listening, to public radio and sometimes to podcasts or NYT stories read aloud on my Audible app), and very little writing, save little offerings like this. And tweets. And short On the Other Hand with Kevin Woster Facebook updates. And the occasional short SDPB blog, when the eyes and head and stomach allow and the will demands.
But I still spend lots of time in my familiar chair in my familiar den surrounded by familiar books I really can't read. I sit at the computer, often with my fingers resting lightly on the keyboard they used to pound for hours each day. I stare over the top of the screen, out the window and beyond my deer-ravaged lilies at passing bikers and hikers heading up to the Skyline trail system, or neighbors strolling by more slowly with their dogs or kids.
Or, as I did this morning, I lean back and doze a bit, with Twitter up on the screen, waiting for another "ding" to announce that someone has liked or not liked or had responded to a Tweet I sent out earlier about wearing my mask to buy groceries, despite being fully vaccinated. (With the variant about and the rally coming, it makes sense to me)
I open my eyes at each ding, check out who liked it or didn't like the tweet, what they said, and maybe offer a short response.
Then leaning back again, I turn on public radio, drifting with the fetching voices and conversation of one relevant subject or another until the next ding on the screen, as someone I know or don’t know reaches out to me in that way.
Which is one of the ways -- a limited way, an insufficient way, but a way, at least -- I stay in touch with the world of ideas beyond my den, beyond the limitations of my physical ailments.
I sit at a screen I can't use much, surrounded by books I can't read much on a familiar chair in a room that still gives me comfort, and inspires me, sometimes, to write something.
This is that something today. It’s not much, but it’s something. Something written. Something with a tiny piece of my heart attached.
Something that helps me remember, during a time when I might forget, exactly who I am: a writer, who just can’t write much these days.
