The Distinguished Thing

The Indigo Girls, Summer Stage, Central Park, September 2021

Apparently when Henry James was dying a slow, painful  death, he said, toward the very end,  “so here it is, at last, the Distinguished Thing.”

Last night I went to an Indigo Girls concert in Central Park. It was outside, run by the NYC parks department, and proof of vaccination was required.  It was all of the things that the CDC says are relatively safe. And the data suggests that if I do get breakthrough COVID I will just have the equivalent of a bad flu. I do not come into contact with immunocompromised people so I don’t have to worry about making someone really ill through transmission.

And yet. There I was, freaking out at the concert. Standing in a big crowd of mostly unmasking people, singing their hearts, filled me with as much dread as joy.  I tried to focus on the joy. I looked around at the mostly queer crowd, reveling in just being together again. I looked up at the backlit birches, majestic against a moody, Sendak sky.  I hugged my girlfriend, reminding myself of how lucky I was to be here, in this moment, with her.

The past 18 months of the pandemic have forced us to face the Distinguished Thing head on. Death has taken close to 700,000 people in the U.S. That  number is so big, it’s hard to contextualize. I found out this summer that Vermont only has 840,000 residents. If contained to one state, the virus would have wiped out most of the entire population.

Then there is the personal--depending on who you are and how much privilege you live in, you have seen some version of this death. Once, twice, or hundreds of times.

I  live in a privilege bubble. My closest circle of love has been spared, though watching  someone I love grapple with the horrendous side-effects of long-term CO-VID is a different kind of heartbreak.

And yet, in spite of all of the privilege,  I have lived in terror for most  of those 18 months.  In the early days,  it was relentless. Hearing the sirens blaring non-stop, 24 hours a day in Brooklyn,  scared to even go outside and walk around the block for fear of ending up in an overflowing hospital waiting for a ventilator to free up. Then, with more information, the idea that wearing a mask offered some semblance of protection, so that while still fraught with anxiety, a walk was possible. Then a bike ride. Then tentative, masked walks with friends, which drove home how much we humans need the presence of other humans to feed our souls. 

Now, here I am, a fully vaccinated person living in a rarefied bubble.  And yet,  my body still signals fear every time I step a tiny bit out of isolation. Riding the subway in a car with unmasked people feels treacherous. Standing in a small crowded bodega waiting to pay while unmasked people order coffee and a buttered roll feels dangerous.

Last night at the concert,  the Distinguished Thing was part of our collective dance. It injected  the concert with high voltage, human electricity.  The performers and audience were so viscerally connected we might as well have been  holding hands. Death was the darkness falling around us; and it was what made each note so much sweeter.