“Believe you and I sing tiny

and wise and could if we had to eat stone and go on.”

– The epitaph for poet Richard Hugo, from his poem Glen Uig

I noticed it when some friends and I “met” for cocktails online.

For days, all of life had felt novel and strange. Nothing as it was, every hour uncomfortably new. But during that online gathering, I finally viscerally felt that these eccentric days, which had done such violence to routine, would lurch into another gear: Not normal, but suffused at last with a sense that underneath it all, if we stay healthy, these plague days would hold fast to a resilient core of what matters most.

Of who matters most.

That was a week ago. My friends and I – who get together regularly to talk about books and life and politics and who’s going to make the next drink – gathered via Zoom.

We had begun arranging this days earlier. There was a spectacular degree of technological incompetence involved – mine, mostly – but eventually, somehow, there we were, the six of us, together in the miraculous virtual whatever, sun setting outside my office window as we fell into our rhythm, catching up on our days, our aging parents, our jobs, talking about what we’d been reading or watching, joking and laughing and interrupting and laughing and deploying amusing objects onscreen – a cleaver-through-the-head gag! a luchador mask! – and laughing and wondering if the world would end before we meet online again.

It was a good night. Not normal, but normal. Like going to a foreign country, and, after spending a few days seeing nothing but difference, awakening to the fundamental, underlying sameness.

It opened my eyes in one way. The next day opened them in another.

My wife lost her job. And like that, the mirage of a resilient normalcy evaporated with the knowledge that what comes next might be unrecognizable.

Millions of people are losing their jobs right now, and many have it worse than we do. We have a tiny bit of economic padding in our lives, and I still work in a thriving industry (plague humor!). We’re not playing chess with Death just yet. But it was a blow, to my wife especially, and to the expectation that we would easily withstand pandemic and depression.

Strange days, indeed. For many, they will be worse than strange. The number of infections and deaths are rising exponentially, and a deep economic crisis is already underway. Most of us, though, will experience this through the lens of our shut-in days, during which normalcy hums inside the incredible, even as the incredible stretches normalcy all out of shape.

The day my wife got the bad news was a strange one even by current standards. We’ve been all together in our home a lot lately, of course – me, my wife and our son. I imagine our days are like those of many others. Working distantly. Stepping all over each other. Arguing over homework. Playing video games and watching TV. Reading (“Wolf Hall”!) and forcing the kid to read. Trying to write. Clanking on the piano, talking to family by phone, checking social media too much. Cooking and cleaning the grout and making stock in the pressure cooker and bickering and going to the park to remember what the sky looks like.

Sharp in my memory is the fact that just two days beforehand, I had glibly told my wife that – because we were so far healthy and lucky – there were parts of this new reality that I found kind of fascinating. Routines shattering. Interesting times.

My wife’s news came Monday, late in the afternoon, and the times veered rapidly beyond interesting. I happened to be out driving between interviews for a column, when the text arrived: “I’m unemployed. Talk later.” We knew things were bad in her business, just like they’re bad in my business, just like they’re bad, suddenly, in so many businesses. Still, it was a cold, slick blade between the ribs.

We talked on the car phone as I drove. I went to my last interview, taking notes in a kitchen that feeds and houses families who have nowhere else to live. I thought about our home, so warm and full of life. Our great good fortune. It was hard to feel it just then, however much I tried to.

I left the interview and called home again. Neither of us wanted to cook, so I stopped at a restaurant – the new DeLeon’s on Hamilton. Because I was distracted by the news, or maybe because I’m just always kind of distracted, I bungled the order, asking for more than enough food for three, then changing my mind and asking for a whole different lineup of more than enough food for three. Instead of replacing the first order with the second, they prepared it all, and then when they brought it to me, I felt too foolish to back out.

I came home with enough to feed a Mormon ward after a day of fasting. My wife looked at me like I was crazy.

“I just got laid off,” she said, when I told her how much it had all cost.

My son, on the other hand, was elated. All that food! All those choices! Tacos and flautas! Carne asada and al pastor! Days and days of it.

He wrapped me up in a big hug. He’s 12, and the days of him giving us hugs – as opposed to grudgingly accepting – are on the wane.

It was a small, happy moment on a strange, bad day, and it was glorious.