Covid19 | Quarantine
Years ago when I was a boy of 9, I went, by myself, to see You Only Live Twice. It was my first movie and I wondered if we really do live twice! Ha!
As I sat in the big dark theatre waiting for the show to start, I thought to myself – “Cool, I like this – being alone.”
My family had moved to Morgantown, West Virginia where my father was teaching. We lived in the hill country. I had trouble sleeping and making friends due to our constant traveling across the country while Dad searched for tenure, as so many young professors did at that time.
Years later I thought of being alone again.
I would have neat ideas. Maybe I would have a tragic but not deadly serious accident and be in the hospital for a long period of time.
I felt a great need to be alone, to cloister myself and create something.
My poems had been enjoyed by my teachers but we moved so often that school was a blur seen only in the rearview mirror of Dads’ green dodge dart.
I dreamt of being alone often. I later came to understand the dreams were the romantic aspirations of a young child who had been spoon-fed books such as The Man in the Iron Mask and Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In my rush to be alone, homework and chores were done quickly and without thought. I could allow my mind to wander down the lonely byways of my childish dreams. I knew somehow that I would at some time in the future need to self-isolate in order to create what I needed to create.
I would find excuses to be left to my own devices even if I wasn’t writing! I needed time to master my thoughts and work on my story ideas. The world did not hold sway over me. I was lost in another more interesting world. I wrote poems by candlelight. I felt I was an outcast and developed a toughness that I wore like a hard leather jacket.
My words became weapons that wounded often. I anguished over each word, each title, each phrase. Later I began to study the master storytellers and attempt to write stories in their style.
I left the family home at an early age.
I went into bars and arm-wrestled for beers. I prowled the streets. Coffee shops became my refuge. I would sit in a back booth of some dark cafe, a cold cup of coffee my only friend. There in the dim light and safe from the world, my ideas would come.
Later in my early twenties, I traveled to London and saw the world. At some point, I realized we don’t live twice and so gathered what modicum of talent I had and started to learn how to write historical fiction.
Now that Covid19 has caused a worldwide lockdown, I see that I have been preparing my entire life for this quarantine.
Excerpt from the King James Bible:
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And the cares of the world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful…
“The cares of the world…” as Jesus said so well, are not my cares. At least they do not make up the bulk of what I think about. Conjuring up the next storyline or thinking about what my characters will do next is much more important.
What we do with our time right now is important.
Create something!
Come out of your comfort zone.
Do something different.
Build your masterpiece.
You have the time.
Robert