Unaccustomed as we are to it, we ate lunch today, avocado sandwiches filled out with sliced steak that I’d grilled and arugula.
It was so filling that during our walk later with O’en (I used to complain that our neighborhood was comatose, now I’m grateful that it is), Mary said she might reconsider the popovers she’d planned to make. “Ah, flattening the curve?” I said.
You’ve got to laugh.
“Some day,” I said, “looking back on all this, you’ll be able to say, ‘I won 60 backgammon games to Jack’s three.’“
Actually, I have yet to win more than one, but what a game it was, the first we played the other day. The luck was all on my side. She likes to pin me in from the beginning, but my rolls — two double sixes as I recall, and there were other doubles — were most pleasing. Like people laying waste our stores, so too did I sweep through her defenses, the gods with me at last for one glorious moment. As she counted up what she would have owed if we’d been playing for money, I thought that self-isolation could indeed be fun.
So emboldened was I that in the next game I rashly doubled the bet, as it were, when there was still a lot of ground to cover, and, you guessed it, she redoubled and killed me. What else is new? Though she does not gloat, as I would. She is generous, rather than churlish, in victory, and it’s nice to see her happy, and to think that she might be thinking of other things than the cratered backyard to which I, a flatlander Sisyphus, may again be consigned to smooth over in pleasing green once she tires of beating me in backgammon. So play on, I say, play on.
Remembering the while that Camus imagined Sisyphus as happy.
The emphasis now is to steer away from nonessential stories, which, for me at least, raises a question: Are not stories having to do with sports, uplifting stories, as I see hem, essential — especially at a time like this?
I’m not arguing that I be unduly burdened even as our salaries have been pared, but would like to remain relevant, as they say. As for thinking myself indispensable, I’ve long been disabused of that.
“I give it two weeks,” I said to Mary as we strolled along with O’en the other day. “Two weeks of ‘We miss him, we miss him. . . .’ Then oblivion. I am — and it’s been freeing to finally acknowledge it — dispensable.”
It’s not a bad feeling, to be a cog in the universal machine and, in my best moments, sentient. You should have seen the stars the other night and it wasn’t cold; then, in the morning, a cardinal, and kids paired off at play.
It helps while mostly homebound these days to be reading some of Emerson’s essays. He was an unregenerate optimist, looking with equanimity on “this marvellous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.”
In the end, though, things tended toward the good, the beautiful, and true in his view. A bit of a stretch to contemplate, I’ll admit, as we confront this worldwide pestilence, but, being an optimist too, I’m inclined to agree — that, despite all, the world is beautiful and that there is an animating spirit within that inclines us toward the good, the beautiful, and true.
“The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons,” Emerson says at one point. “No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. . . .” And yet: “I cannot look without seeing splendor and grace.”
Sport is certainly a way in which the animating spirit can be made manifest. It is essential. Actually, it’s my life.