Twenty Plenty

Do you like where you’re living?
Do you like what you do?
Do you like what you’re seeing
When you’re lookin’ at you?
Do you like what you’re saying
When you open your face?
Do you got the right feeling?
Are you in the right place?
— Monsters of Folk, “The Right Place”

There has been a lot to hate about 2020. So, so much. So much to mourn and to regret. So much to pour over and resent. To stay up too late and wake up too early pondering and replaying and trying to wish away. To curse past the point where our throats are raw and our fingernails have dug red crescents into our palms.

More than any other year I can remember and it seems more than many that came before any of those, 2020 has taken on a sentience. An ability to do things to us that has superseded our own human agency and has almost uniformly manifested itself in a brutal malevolence, willful and conscious and unrelenting. We all began ascribing this sentience months ago, back in March and some of us even earlier, attributing every personal, regional, national, and global dilemma or crisis regardless of severity to the malignant whims of This Fucking Year. To add too fine a point, this all goes far beyond the poisoned ink of headlines and statistics that have bonded us all in one form or another for going on nine months now. Lost your credit card? That’s 2020 for ya. Hail storm knock out your power? Man, this year, huh? Flat tire? Damn, when will 2020 stop it?

We are in the annual stretch now where we’ve just digested Thanksgiving and have only begun to swallow that Christmas is so rapidly approaching, when with every action we take and in every direction we turn we find a reflection, or at least feel through pressure we put on ourselves or pressure applied by society and custom some sort of need for reflection. Here amidst the last few days standing, in the waning of the year, it is just sort of assumed that we will look back on all that has happened since the last time too many of us had too much to drink and wore too many funny hats for no reasons beyond the time and the date.

And we can do that dutiful looking back. And we will. And we are. But the corollary to that expected reflecting, the secondary pressure that naturally follows, is that as we reflect we will be grateful for what we see. That we’ll be happy about it.

Happy? About 2020? Are you freaking kidding?

But I am. Against all logic and reason and sense. I am.

Because among the many other things that 2020 has done, it has taught me, confirmed really, sealed for me one certainty: That I am in the right place.

It seems like something you’d make up just to tell a story, especially in hindsight after all that has come since, but I swear that this is true: When the clock struck midnight in my time zone last January 1, literally at the second that 2020 began, I was sitting in a wheelchair as it and I were being loaded into the back of an ambulance. A young EMT-in-training named Michael, not even half my age, had apparently drawn a short enough straw to be on call New Year’s Eve and so was fastening my chair in place, tightening the straps and locking the wheels, when his watch beeped and I heard his voice behind me. “It’s midnight. Happy New Year, James.”

My mouth croaked out a dry uncertain whisper in reply. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere else, like another person was in front of me letting air out of a balloon. “Happy New Year… Michael?”

Earlier on December 31 and I am convinced that throughout the day or two before that, I had had multiple seizures, an unknowable number of them, a series that culminated in one that froze my entire body as I was having lunch with my family and convinced me to get to an emergency room. About eleven hours later, short-strawed Michael took me from my first hospital to another, and there I stayed under constant observation by a team of neurologists and med students until the third day of 2020. Later I learned that during my stay, I had experienced nine more seizures.

Most of the other details are as fuzzy to me now as your need to read about them, but among the few I’ll never forget was that as we arrived at the hospital in Center City Philadelphia and Michael wheeled me around a corner down a sidewalk toward the lobby entrance, I saw a prostitute approach a visibly skittish middle-aged man in a parking lot and even in my weakened, frightened, seized and confused state I distinctly remember thinking, “Wow, at least I’m not the only one having a bizarre start to 2020.”

A month later, on February 12, after more MRIs and other brain-scanning-type tests, my neurologist called and informed me that I have something called a cavernous hemangioma, a two-centimeter benign tumor in my brain made of tiny blood vessels knotted together. The news didn’t mean surgery, fortunately, but in addition to scaring the freshly driven hell out of me it did mean that I had to surrender my driver’s license for six months. My exceedingly patient wife would have the pleasure of chauffeuring me to all the places I would need to go.

One month after that phone call, no one could go anywhere.

This window we’re in right now, it’s strange in 2020, to state the vague and obvious. All year there has been something morbid embedded in the experience of joy, something painful in feeling great, something burdensome in being at ease. It shouldn’t feel like bragging out loud, the simple act of silently acknowledging the good in your life, but so it has felt this year. Your mileage may vary, of course, but in 2020 I have paused even if only for a split second during nearly every occasion in which I have found myself proud or excited or just otherwise generally content and I have noted, consciously and quietly reminded myself that each of these moments has in and of itself qualified me as inordinately and almost obscenely fortunate, even more so in This Fucking Year than it would have in any other.

Each instance of goodness has hit me like a blunt object, a stick of color swung out of the dark, a reminder of how much unearned fortune I have been swimming in my entire life but especially in my adult life, most particularly in these last few years and indeed in this year most of all. My kids haven’t been the only ones learning from home since March.

I won’t rehash all of it because you don’t need me to. I won’t hum the whole tune because all along we’ve each been singing our own song. But what I want to say more than anything is that here in this stretch, I’m not looking back and feeling grateful in the same way I have in other years, the way so many of us have before. This year the thanks I’m feeling, I’m actually feeling it as opposed to reciting the words because the calendar says it’s time for it. To a person we are probably all glad this year is ending, as if Fate or God or Whatever Controls All This abruptly switches tactics at that stroke of midnight on 1/1. But sitting here now as the waning begins in earnest, I think back on 2020 and I am genuinely happy. This is the part where I make a list:

→ I didn’t die in the hospital and was never really close to it despite how it felt at the time, and my condition is treatable with medication I’ll be taking forever, rather than requiring potentially life-threatening brain surgery.

→ I work for a company that provides fantastic insurance and coverage, and for managers who were incredibly generous and understanding as I dealt with my situation, even before the shit hit the fan for the entire world.

→ It turns out I really like my wife and kids. Like, like like them. I’ve always loved all three of them, of course, with everything I have. But spending all this time with people, day in and day out, brings certain things into stark relief. If you didn’t know before, you knew for sure by, say, July, if you are or aren’t cool with the people around you. Even if you thought you knew before, as I did, you really, really know now. And I know. I’m cool.

→ I am deeply proud of my two sons. At 9 and 7 they seem older than I was at 11 or 12, and with every step across this hellscape year they have been more outwardly surefooted than either of their parents. They have kept their senses of humor, their wits, and their curiosity, and somehow have not spent this entire time telling us every five minutes that they’re BOOORRRRRRRRRRED.

→ The four of us are healthy, and we’ve had the amazing fortune to become close friends with several families in our neighborhood who have remained just as healthy and who have been every bit as careful as we have throughout this year. We have a level of trust and comfort on our street that we don’t have off of it, and as time has passed and our friendships have grown it has made a huge difference in helping us deal with All Of This.

2020 will stop. It will, even if it happens only by virtue of the clock ticking over to 2021, and while we’d all like to think that things will improve or at least shift in the right direction right at the stroke of that particular midnight, we all also know better. Years don’t do things. Fate or God or Whatever doesn’t check the calendar. Better or worse, richer or poorer, sickness or health, they’re not on a schedule. Time is neither on nor not on your side. Time doesn’t heal wounds or open them.

Shit just happens, and then you check your watch.

But at the end of the day, at the end of the year, here, in this moment, I would argue that you need nothing else if you can conclude, if you can hold this one grain at your fingertips, if you can know. Know.

That you’re in the right place.