In Over My Head in 2020
By: David Deal
Tags: Memoir, Writing, Coronavirus, Music, Self

A few days ago, I was listening to God’s Favorite Customer, an album released in 2018 by Father John Misty, the stage name adopted by Josh Tillman. I hadn’t listened to the album in a year. I do not know why I put it on my record player now. Maybe I was prompted by a random glance at his resigned face on the album sleeve, backlit with a surreal glow, as if he were reflecting on yet another day full of disturbing news about a pandemic. I placed the album on the turntable and gave it a fresh listen.

As I explored the landscape of his naked angst, I found myself playing repeatedly a song called “The Palace.” The more I listened, the more I realized Father John Misty had written the song for me. For this moment. How did he know two years ago that in 2020 the world would spiral out of control, and some guy from Illinois he’d never met would claim the song as his own?

But somehow in the omniscient way that artists seem to magically understand and connect with people they will never meet, he knew. The great artists, the ones whose music seeps its way into our culture, always know.

Accompanied by a spare piano, Father John Misty sings of seeking refuge while he experiences personal tumult. He is alone in his palace, struggling with emotional turmoil while he writes songs. In a moment worthy of the great singer/songwriter movement of the 1970s, he offers up a poignant confession:

But I don’t wanna leave the palace

Let’s pay someone to move in here and fix this

Last night I texted your iPhone

And said I think I’m ready to come home

I’m in over my head

I’m in over my head

I’m way in over my head

“The Palace” is believed to be a reference to the making of God’s Favorite Customer, which was written while Tillman was holed up in a hotel room undergoing a personal breakdown. But the circumstances behind the song are not all that important beyond giving you a possible glimpse inside the mind of the artist.

When an artist creates music, the song belongs to them no longer. The song belongs to you and me to interpret and own however we want. The music takes you on a journey to sometimes unexpected places inside your own soul, if you let it.

Listening to “The Palace” unlocked for me the turmoil that has characterized 2020 for everyone I know. Each day has forced me to navigate a terrain so uncertain and strange that sometimes I have felt overwhelmed, and I have yet to meet anyone who has not felt this way in 2020. I have longed for a safe haven at times.

My life is not particularly different from yours, I suspect. My wife Jan and I endure the stress of doing something as mundane as leaving the safety of our home to go to the grocery store, and seeing my own family and close friends roiled by the pandemic. We have adapted to a new reality. And adapting means taking steps to exercise self-care, such as reaching out to loved ones, staying fit, putting ourselves on a news media diet, and writing. (I hope you have been taking care of yourself, too.) One of my ways of coping is to listen to music. Sometimes music does more than help me cope. Music also inspires me to create — to make sense of my own reaction to art — and to what’s going on around me. Listening to Father John Misty sing “I’m in over my head” in his pristine voice is one of those times for me.

Here are some moments from a journey like no other I’ve experienced.

Late February: Joshua Tree

Jan and I were on vacation with our good friends Mary and Patrick, hiking together in Joshua Tree National Monument and Palm Springs. We’d reserved an Airbnb in the town of Joshua Tree for the week, and our spirits were high. A week of hiking and exploring the area awaited.

We didn’t know it then, but these were our last days of doing anything remotely resembling a normal vacation before the pandemic hit. In fact, it had already hit. We just didn’t know how hard yet.

Each day, we ventured out for vigorous desert hikes that pushed us all physically. Together we explored the area. We ascended the arid, rocky trail up Ryan Mountain. We explored the Lost Palms Oasis Trail, which looked like the set of a planet from Star Trek until it ended amid an unexpected oasis of striking green trees and water. All week we found new paths.

This was a time of exciting possibilities. Of renewing our bodies and getting immersed in the bohemian cultures of the nearby towns. Hundreds of miles away, in Rochester, New York, our child Marion had received a grant to do summer research in France. Ze was researching places to stay as ze barreled through the spring semester of hir first year at the University of Rochester. The year held such promise.

We were aware of the coronavirus spreading. We’d heard about the gyrations in the stock market as the uncertainty took hold. I tried to ignore the news because frankly I did not need that kind of stress on vacation. Mary reminded us all to wash our hands thoroughly and carefully, and I became more conscious of using the hand soap available in our Airbnb. But during our week in Joshua Tree, we did not wear masks, even on the plane, or avoid other people.

Next door to our Airbnb, a guy named Bob lived alone with his dog. We nodded to each other each morning as I walked around the block watching the blue and orange morning light intensify in the sky. Sometimes his big, bounding dog ran up to me and gave me a happy greeting. On our last day in town, Bob and I spent some time reflecting.

Bob said he moved to Joshua Tree in 2000 and bought his ranch house for $4,800 “long before the town went Hollywood.” I smiled at his “went Hollywood” remark, for the town exudes a distinctly bohemian, post-Hippie vibe, with pop-up-style stores selling miscellaneous vintage stuff and tiny studios creating folk art.

The houses in our neighborhood were mostly like Bob’s, with simple, sandy yards (some filled with spare car parts and random objects) enclosed in chain-link fences. I got the impression that people fix their own things when they break and live modestly, at least in our neck of Joshua Tree.

Bob was one of these resilient souls. I sensed that he was a retiree, perhaps a bit lonely, living out his last act on the edge of the desert, watching travelers come and go by day and gazing at the stars in the sky at night. After we were done talking, I asked him if he’d take a selfie with me for a series of selfies with strangers I’ve posted on Facebook over the years, which I call “Feel Good Selfie.” He obliged. This was the last time I’d take a feel good selfie in 2020.

Bob, I thought, it was nice meeting you. Stay safe. Stay good.

After we returned home from Joshua Tree, we felt things changing rapidly. The news talked more urgently and frequently about the coronavirus starting to menace the United States. On February 29, the day we returned home from our vacation, the United States recorded its first coronavirus fatality, in Seattle. On March 3, my birthday, the U.S. approved widespread testing. Businesses talked of making plans to have their employees work from home.

Even still, no one had any clear idea of what exactly we were supposed to do about it. On the weekend of March 6, my mom landed in Central Du Page Hospital with heart problems. My sisters and I made plans to see her in shifts. When Jan and I arrived, we were beginning to feel that distinct sensation known as dread. More than 90,000 people had contracted the coronarius around the world, and suddenly a hospital didn’t seem like a great place to be hanging out. When we checked in to see my mom, we avoided patients lingering in the Emergency Room.

A nurse greeted us to take us back to see my mom. She was not wearing a mask.

“What’s the word on wearing masks?” I asked. “I’m beginning to hear reports about people maybe needing to wear them.”

“Masks are not going to help you,” she replied. “We don’t wear them.”

Late March: Eye Exam

On a cold Friday morning, I sat alone in my eye doctor’s office for a mandatory check-up. I’d been experiencing “floaters” in my right eye. During a previous visit, my doctor had explained that the check-up would determine whether I might have a detached retina, which would require surgery.

This was a stressful experience under any circumstance. But now the stress was compounded by something unfathomable to me when I’d set up this visit weeks ago: the coronavirus had changed everything.

A national emergency had been declared on March 13. That same day, Marion returned home from college for the rest of the semester and settled in with some friends in Evanston. Rochester, like every other college, had told students to stay away from campus and plan on taking classes online until the end of the school year.

We were living in lockdown. We didn’t leave the house except for essential purchases. All my clients had sent their employees home, and I was getting used to a new life of managing work through Zoom conference calls. A few of my clients needed to stop working with me while they reeled from the impact of the coronavirus. It was a difficult reality to swallow, but at least I had many other clients, for which I was grateful.

Even still, as the U.S. economy suddenly began to descend into a recession, Jan and I were anxious and uncertain. How many clients would I have one month from now? Two months from now? We sat down and created an emergency plan. We were used to that. When I worked in corporate life, we’d tasted the sting of layoffs, and we knew how to circle the wagons. But this time, the uncertainty felt different. Who knew how long the pandemic would last?

Good friends had already lost their businesses overnight. Others had lost their jobs. A close friend of mine, Kendall, had been put on furlough. To make ends meet, she got her car payments postponed and applied for a job at an Amazon warehouse. She told me before the first week was up, she’d already filed a sexual harassment complaint with HR.

She then got out of there.

Kendall and I swapped messages on Facebook often. We had become friends acting on the cast of the Bristol Renaissance Faire, an outdoor theater in Wisconsin that re-creates life in an English village in the sixteenth century. Kendall had acted there for 10 seasons, and I’d been on cast since 2014. We both loved Bristol. It was a creative expression for us as actors, where we had the freedom to build characters and interact with people who visit Bristol when the park is normally open on summer weekends. But it was more than that. It was a way to connect with people and uplift them through acting, just as Father John Misty connects with me. I had seen the power of in-person acting year after year. It fed my soul. As soon as early March, though, Kendall and I both speculated that Bristol might need to close for the summer. How could an outdoor village that was packed with thousands of people each day stay open with a virus spreading?

As big events one after another canceled or postponed, Kendall and I both knew it was only a matter of time before Bristol closed its doors. No one had made an official announcement, and there wouldn’t be one until June, when Bristol announced the cancellation of the 2020 season.

But Kendall and I didn’t need to wait until June to realize the season was over.

By March 26, the day before my visit to the eye doctor’s office, the United States officially became the country hardest hit by the pandemic, with at least 81,321 confirmed infections and more than 1,000 deaths. And as the numbers grew, the stories spread — of perfectly healthy people suddenly finding themselves in hospitals, clinging to life on respirators, cut off from their loved ones. As the stories spread, so did the Facebook posts from people who felt compelled to breathlessly share updates on death rates.

I began unfollowing people on Facebook and stopped following the news in the evening.

But as scary as the stories and the data were, I was more overwhelmed by a sense of grief for Marion, who had been finding a groove on campus at Rochester, making friends and connections that challenged hir in the way that college should. It was impossible to find that kind of reward hundreds of miles away through a crappy Zoom link. And it was becoming more clear that Marion’s plans doing research in France were going to be dashed.

Don’t let anyone tell you differently: when your child is hurting, you hurt.

And then you hurt some more. You never stop hurting.

Jan and I both grieved together, even as we scrambled to keep our lives as normal as possible. This is your child’s future on the line — a trajectory interrupted for . . . how long? Would returning to college in the fall even be a choice?

All of these things made me feel lost and in over my head as I sat in the patient’s chair in the doctor’s office. Dr. Raichand had canceled most of his appointments for the safety of his patients, but he’d insisted I come in, which underscored the gravity of the situation with my eyesight. Jan and I carefully entered Good Samaritan Hospital, where the doctor kept an office in an area set aside for professionals. Getting to the entrance meant that Jan and I had to walk past the emergency room entrance, which felt like tiptoeing past a rabid dog. When we entered the lobby for the professional offices, nurses took our temperatures and asked us a battery of questions about our health. In Dr. Raichand’s office, Jan was instructed to wait in the outer hallway while I went into a patient room.

Dr. Raichand dilated my pupils and announced that he needed to see other patients. He shut the door and left me in darkness. Alone, I had nothing but time to consider the possibility of eye surgery.

Of course, I imagined the worst: my eyesight compromised by surgery, or, even worse, my contracting the coronavirus somehow.

I tried to meditate, but meditation did no good. So I just let my mind wander where it needed to go.

I saw a figure emerge from the darkness: Jim Morrison, in black leather pants, white shirt, and leather jacket. He gyrated like a ghost dancer as if to mark his place in the darkness. Then he was engulfed in flames as the opening credits of the film Apocalypse Now appeared in my mind, when a napalm strike blows up a Vietnamese village as “The End” by the Doors plays.

“The End.” Last song on the Doors first album. I gave myself a tour of the entire album as I tried to remember every song in its correct sequence.

The lights to the room came on. I heard Dr. Raichand’s voice. On his instructions, I opened my eyes. He peered at them.

“Your pupils still are not properly dilated,” he said. “Please shut your eyes again.”

And then he left.

I replayed the entire Doors song catalogue, album by album, recalling each song as accurately as I could. By the time I got to L.A. Woman, I was immersed in “Riders on the Storm,” the last song on the album. So dark, foreboding, Morrison sounding like an old man. Sounding like I felt sitting in the eye doctor’s office. I imagined Morrison alone in a Paris apartment, living out his last days.

The lights came on again. Dr. Raichand examined my eyes. This time, they were properly dilated.

He sat down across from me and positioned the awkward equipment that eye doctors need to test your vision. There is no other way for them to do their jobs but to position themselves inches from your face. The only precaution available to us was to wear masks, which we did, even though the CDC had not yet officially urged the public to use them.

He had me perform a battery of tests, including looking in different directions while he examined my eyes.

“Try not to speak,” he said. “If you have a question, wait.”

Then he stood up. He announced that I did not have a detached retina. No surgery. He said I’d need to come back more regularly to monitor those floaters, but otherwise my vision was fine.

I burst into tears.

He watched me wordlessly. Then he asked, “Is there anything you need to talk about?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just relieved.”

He smiled at me. “Everything’s going to be OK.”

Late May: One Last Visit with Dad

My dad and I lived 1,000 miles apart: Dad in Boylston, Massachusetts, and Jan and me in Downers Grove, Illinois. We needed to see him. In person. In April, he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He was now at home receiving hospice care. He was not expected to make it through the year. It was time to go see him and say goodbye.

But in May 2020, traveling was not an easy choice to make. By now, the CDC had recommended everyone wear face masks in public. I could not conceive of flying to Boston after hearing about packed plane flights and passengers ignoring mandates to wear masks. And even driving meant taking risks, such as staying at hotels and stopping at places where we’d increase our risk of exposure. My stepmother and half-brothers were willing to host us even though we would be bringing those risks with us.

Even still, I agonized. My dad was dying. But would traveling make the situation worse for everyone? And as a recession took hold, I worried about the wisdom of taking time away from running my business. Normally I would not have hesitated to see my dad. But when you’re in over your head, you don’t always think clearly.

I wasn’t thinking clearly because I was not sleeping. I was not sleeping because I was afraid. Afraid of contracting a virus that could either kill you or possibly debilitate you for life. Afraid of losing our source of income. And I continued to grieve for Marion, who was trying to make some meaning of a higher education system that had collapsed overnight. Each day the stories flooded my world: horrible pain engulfing people who were healthy one day, sick the next; people losing their jobs and businesses, with no end to the economic turmoil. I could not avoid these stories; my job required me to be online all day doing research, and it was impossible to avoid them.

Jan and I sought solace attending church services on Zoom. At first they were comforting, but as the weeks passed, I began to dread them. I dreaded the prayer sessions, when congregants shared their own sorrows resulting from the pandemic. I dreaded hearing our pastor express those sorrows in prayer. The prayers were essential to people who needed to share their challenges, but they only compounded the horrible things I was exposed to each day.

So Jan and I stopped attending each Sunday.

At night, I struggled to fall asleep, and when I did, I usually awoke in the dead of night, worrying about what awaited us in the morning. To fall asleep, I imagined an angel talking to me with soothing words, like Paul McCartney’s mother Mary in “Let It Be.” Sometimes the angel told me to rest. Sometimes the angel convinced me everything was just a dream. Sometimes the angel assured me that I was actually a spirit, and I was free of worry forever. These worries were just remnants of a past life that mattered no more. All I had to do was float away.

I would fall back to sleep and wake up the next day, oftentimes with my dad on my mind.

Dad was a lovable rascal who’d settled down with my stepmom Joan in Boylston after spending many tumultuous and restless years finding a way to be a dad on the road while living apart from my mom. Jan, Marion, and I had made a point of visiting dad once a year. He always teased me about the fact that I was self-employed, taught Marion how to play poker, and invited Jan to visit them anytime without me. Those were the ways he showed his love.

He possessed a puckish sense of humor. He took delight in small acts of mischief as I was growing up, like the time he taught me and my brother the art of stealing hotel soap from the housekeeping cart. He could have just asked for the soap, but what was the fun in that?

Or the time when he taught me how to crash a convention of gasoline retailers at a hotel. “You just have to walk in like you own the place,” he said. And so we did. We pretended like he and I were the father-and-son owners of a chain of gas stations. We glad-handed a bunch of industry types passing out free merchandise to the convention attendees. We walked out of the spacious room with a bag full of worthless calendars, bag clips, and card decks branded with the names of businesses we’d never heard of. But we didn’t care how useless our load of goodies was. The fun was in the masquerade.

He was often on the road when I was growing up, and sometimes I joined him. When I was about 15, he took me to Las Vegas. He hunkered down at a poker table and told me if I needed anything all weekend, just stop on by. So I wandered the Strip, where I mingled with all of humanity, ranging from tourists to the Las Vegas underbelly. Dad was true to his word. He never left that poker table all weekend. Moments like that — and there were many more in other cities — gave me confidence to explore. To figure out how to read people. To be comfortable around anyone from any walk of life.

When he was home, his idea of settling down for the weekend was to visit a place called the Cicero Hunter’s Club, where he played poker and gin rummy all night. He hung out with old men with names like Pineapple who drank wine out of tiny juice glasses and shouted unspeakable obscenities at each other. This was a secret world you did not dare try to enter unless you knew someone. And my dad knew someone. Oftentimes, I would sit by his side. Here, the lovable rascal became a quiet reader of the faces of other men. I would watch him run the table, never losing his focus, never joining in the macho banter. We’d leave the next morning and, over pancakes at a Denny’s somewhere, watch the sun rise. (“My old pal,” he’d sometimes say, while the two of us shared the moment.)

How, I wondered, could someone maintain such a calm, measured focus even when he was hundreds of dollars in the hole at 1:00 a.m. in the Cicero Hunter’s Club, only to emerge flush with cash by 5:00 a.m.?

One night, my dad had to step away from a game of seven-card stud. He let me play his hand. Somehow I managed to beat a table of five plump old men wearing lime green sweaters and smoking cigars. When I raked in the cash I’d just won, a stony silence fell over the table. The old men were not amused. I sensed that this was not a time to celebrate victory. My dad came back to relieve me, and I’m pretty sure I noticed a small smile on his face for a split second.

Afterward, over pancakes, I told him how excited I was to win a hand. He nodded and replied, “So, did you raise anyone?”

He loved to play cards long after he retired. When he taught Marion how to play poker during one of our visits to his home near Boston, he was doing what came natural to him. But at the card table with Jan, Marion, and me, he was the lovable rascal, needling me mercilessly about my lack of skill at cards and assuring Marion that she inherited her love of learning directly from him. Later in life, when he was supposed to eat a salt-free diet because of heart problems, the lovable rascal took delight in sneaking potato chips or putting salt on his food (even one time salting his sour cream just because he wanted to try to get away with it).

He possessed a singular charm and charisma. Since I could never be like him, I instead invented a make-believe character named Nicolas Wright who embodied him as I acted in the Bristol Renaissance Faire.

After learning about his cancer, we stayed in contact with him as often as we could, by phone and on FaceTime. He would leave me messages on my phone, joking that he wished he could still call collect and leave me with the bill, always asking about Jan and Marion. The only thing he’d say about his declining health was, “They haven’t gotten me yet.”

But we both knew they’d get him soon.

During our FaceTime talks, he constantly asked me when we were coming out to see him. My answer was always the same: when we felt it was safe enough to travel.

One day in May, he asked the question again: when are you coming out? I choked up.

“Dad, I don’t know,” I said, sobbing. “I love you. But I don’t want to put anyone’s health at risk. I just don’t know what to do.”

Jan knew what to do.

She was no more eager to put anyone’s health at risk than I was. But she nudged me in the direction we both needed to go: East. When you don’t think clearly, you need someone in your life who will help make things clear.

So in late May Jan and I packed sanitizing supplies put together for us by my sister-in-law, and headed out for the two-day drive. In a sense, we knew the terrain: we’d taken this drive many times visiting my dad. But in 2020, we had to think of the journey in a new light. We visited rest stops by the highway only when absolutely necessary, and when we did we proceeded carefully, avoiding people and surfaces. The first time we pulled over at a highway stop, we entered the lobby carefully, using our elbows to press the wheelchair accessible door buttons to trigger the doors to open without needing to touch them. When I went to the bathroom, I was careful to avoid walking too close to the corner of the doorways, lest I get too close to someone rounding the corner on the other side (a precaution I’d learned in March while navigating grocery stores). I was relieved when I noticed that the operators of the rest stops had taped over several men’s stand-up latrines to force people to stand six feet apart. After washing my hands, I dried them on my own jean pant legs and then used hand sanitizer. We packed snacks to eat in the car, and wore masks and gloves even when we pumped gas in open-air stations. We selected a hotel that we’d stayed at before and carefully researched the rate of COVID-19 in the adjacent areas. After we checked in, we wiped down our room.

When we arrived at my dad’s house, all of us kept a social distance at first, but when you are visiting family, you just aren’t going to maintain a six-foot separation at all times. So, we took risks and broke protocol. But even still, we avoided hugs, even with my dad. Though he was in poor health, he’d rallied for the weekend visit. We spent our time together quietly celebrating music and doing things I knew my dad loved to do. He grew up playing gospel songs on the trumpet and piano in Nazarene tent meetings,. So I streamed old-timey gospel numbers on my laptop. Willie Nelson. Johnny Cash. Elvis Presley. They all took us back to the Midwestern fields of his youth, and then my own, when I, too, attended those church meetings. Willie Nelson’s soft voice especially connected with my dad on songs such as “There Shall Be Showers of Blessing.” When I played Willie singing “Softly and Tenderly,” I felt a spiritual presence filling the room and preparing my dad somehow to die:

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling

Calling for you and for me

See on the portals He’s waiting and watching

Watching for you and for me

Come home, come home

Ye who are weary come home

Earnestly, tenderly Jesus is calling

Calling, “O sinner come home”

At one point, he was so taken with the music that he sat down at his own piano and played for a few minutes, probably the last time he ever played an instrument in his life. Jan and I watched him play with energy and passion for a few precious minutes.

I read to him, and we talked about old times. We watched a 1970s Burt Reynolds movie, The Longest Yard, which I knew he would like. I remembered seeing this movie when it came out, and my dad buying my brother and me “Mean Machine” jerseys like what Burt Reynolds wore in the movie. But for the most part, we bonded through music.

And then it was time to go home.

As we gathered on the driveway and said our goodbyes, Jan and I hugged him. With a twinkle in his eye, he said to me, “To hell with you.” We both laughed. It was his way of saying, “Don’t get sentimental on me. I’m not ready to die.” And he wasn’t quite yet ready. But we would never see him in person again.

As we drove home, we followed the rapidly unfolding social unrest that was engulfing the world in the wake of George Floyd’s death. We were disgusted with what had happened to him.

We also shared a growing awareness of how our return trip was radically different than the drive out to Boston. When we stopped for gas in smaller towns in New York, we noticed that police had blocked access to some stores amid reports of looting happening in cities across the United States. We had made lodging reservations at a hotel near Cleveland, and notices popped up on our phones telling us that exits to the city were closed as looting took hold. We also received scraps of incomplete information from back home, such as looters targeting businesses near where we lived. What exactly was going on? It’s one thing to read about the news — quite another to see it hitting close to your home.

When we arrived at our hotel, the parking lot was quiet. But even after we settled in for the night, I stepped outside to walk around the block and see how the neighborhood felt. I wanted to be sure.

Jan and I were both emotionally and physically spent from the weekend, and we settled in for some needed rest. At around 2:00 a.m., my phone rang. When your dad has cancer and your phone rings at 2:00 a.m. you had best answer it. Groggy, I stumbled around in the dark to find my phone, which I’d set aside to charge. I was too late to pick up the call, but I’d been left a voice mail: Marion was in a Chicago jail.

Ze had been out Sunday night, protesting Floyd’s death, and was arrested. Marion was in jail. I called the police. A harried dispatch officer told me Marion would be processed and sent to another jail in due course. I’d need to call back later.

There was nothing we could do to help Marion but reach out to hir roommates in the apartment where ze was staying in Evanston. And that was it. Totally powerless. Totally lost in a legal system we knew nothing about. In over my head.

I called the police back, and they literally had lost track of Marion. They didn’t have a record of which jail ze was in. Just call back, they said. So I did. And I got a quick-busy signal.

But Marion’s roommates were also looking for Marion, and they found hir. Marion was released on bail the next day. In the following months, Marion would navigate the Cook County Legal System while also researching whether ze wanted to return to college for the fall of 2020 with the pandemic continuing. Heavy decisions and matters to weigh. Jan and I watched as everything around us kept coming undone.

On a humid afternoon shortly after we returned home, I walked downtown Downers Grove, just blocks from my house, to clear my head. I came across a protest and march against racism. I thought of Marion marching in Chicago and getting arrested. If Marion could march in Chicago, where the personal risks were greater, surely I could do the same in sedate Downers Grove.

The protestors chanted peacefully as they walked through downtown, and I was right there with them, livestreaming the moment. The protest ended at the Downers Grove Police Station. A line of police watched us as we knelt on the sidewalk. One of the protestors started a conversation with one of the officers. The protestor talked about growing up afraid of police. The police officer talked about the police he knew who just wanted to serve their communities. The protestors asked the officer to join them in taking a knee. “Out of respect for you, I will,” the officer said.

And so I found myself filming a moment that would end up being broadcast on the local news and discussed widely on social media. Some people on social thought the story was a positive sign. Others rolled their eyes. But I didn’t care what anyone in the social media echo chamber thought. Protesting what happened to George Floyd was a moment of trying to find purpose in an ugly year. Of trying to feel a little less in over my head.

July: Record Cleaning

On Sunday morning, I was at home, cleaning a mediocre record album by Joe Walsh. I’d picked it up for $5 at a vinyl store in the area, and unfortunately it had a skip in it. Well, maybe the album just needed a cleaning. I carefully removed the album from the turntable, left a few drops of cleaning fluid on it, and began to lightly wipe the vinyl with a cleaning cloth.

The phone rang. It was my sister Karen calling.

“David,” she said. And then she sobbed uncontrollably.

My dad was dead.

I knew the call was coming any day. During the past week, his health had rapidly deteriorated. By Friday, he was too ill to talk on the phone. It was only a matter of days.

I considered the ridiculous fact that when I learned of my dad’s passing, I was cleaning a subpar album by Joe Walsh. A gospel album would have been fitting. Anything but a lame Joe Walsh album. I’m sure my dad would have had no idea who Joe Walsh is. But at least I was doing something music related. He would have appreciated that.

A funeral service was scheduled to be held in his church in Boylston. And the pandemic would leave another reminder of its ongoing presence in our lives: we could not attend the service. We’d need to stay home and watch it on a livestream. There was no other way.

How fitting for 2020.

Looking Back and Ahead

Many things have happened since my dad died. Jan has gotten her writing published. Marion is writing a novel and poetry. Even though Jan and I won’t be returning to a place like Joshua Tree anytime soon, we have found ways to nourish ourselves by leaving the house for short weekend getaways and bicycling and hiking. We’ve joined our friends Mary and Patrick for socially distanced movie-watching nights in their backyard, too. Leaving the house is always a health risk, but we need to weigh the physical risk against the emotional and mental cost of living in lockdown.

Life is as uncertain as ever. The U.S. election could be thrown into chaos, and I’ve read more than one news article discussing a possible escalation of violence in the streets in November, violence exceeding any we’ve seen, even this summer. But it’s up to me to decide how to react to the news. The steps I’ve taken to exercise self-care — such as leaning on my family and friends for support, staying physically fit, and putting limits on my intake of news — are incredibly important for living through uncertainty.

And listening to music is essential. Music refreshes me, and sometimes, it takes me on an unpredictable journey that leads to an act of creation.

I might not have written anything had I kept that vinyl copy of God’s Favorite Customer on the shelf. “The Palace” chose a path of creation for me.