I'm Waiting

"Come on.” I say, strolling into the living room fifteen minutes after we had agreed to leave, “Let’s go. Or we’ll never get there.” The room is thick with heat, and even though I sat there all day working on my laptop, I can’t wait to get the heck out of here.  

Lately I’ve been feeling stifled. Work from home is the dream and in many ways, I love everything about it. But, let’s just say that I underestimated the benefits of office air conditioning.  

“Okay. Give me a minute to change.” She says.  

“If we had left earlier, I could have showed you that new beach I found.” I lament. She shrugs. She wanted to swim off the pier anyway. I was born for the beach though. Although I always come home feeling like the sun drained every ounce of water and energy out of me, I love the feel of the heat on my skin. I love spending my vacations and summers working on getting the optimally deep tan I always strive for, even though my dad tells me I’ll regret it in 30 years. He's probably right, but 30 years is so far away, I continue to scorn sunscreen.  

But, no beach today. Can’t win them all, even though it’s frustrating. There’s this beach I’ve been really wanting to check out. Some say it’s covered in rolling sand dunes. Others say it’s super dirty. Clearly, I chose to listen to the first description. Unfortunately it’s only open til 7 and we never leave in time.  

This always happens. We have the whole evening after we finish working at 5 or 6 until 9, and yet we’re constantly chasing daylight, ducking out at the last possible moment to get our bike or swim in.  

Chasing daylight. We’re always chasing daylight.  

Sometimes I’m waiting on my mother because she finds fifty things around the house that she can clean and organize before we go. Sometimes it’s that she thinks she’s waiting on me and I think I’m waiting for her. When that happens, it’s actually a little funny, like “well, then, why haven’t we left already?” And sometimes I’m waiting because the world will end if she misses the 6:30 news, even though at this point I can pretty much predict what it will be about. And sometimes I’m waiting because she gets sidetracked talking to someone.  

We were just talking about it the other day. When I was about sixteen, we were on a bike trip. She said I could ride ahead with some new friends I had made but I had to wait for her in the next time. I should have seen it coming. The forty five minutes I would spend on the side of the road impatiently waiting for her arrival, calling her over and over on a cell phone she never answers.  

By the time she finally arrived, I was so angry that I dumped my water bottle on her head. The people I was with were appalled, but she kind of thought it was funny. It was eighty five degrees, and I may have been an insolent teenager but I’m not dumb. Eighty five degrees on a bike and all forms of water exposure - rain, sprinklers, ice, local pools, grimy lakes and rivers, and yes, you guessed it, bottles of water over the head - are fair game. Sometimes cooling off doubles as revenge. And you can be sure she got the point. I’m too old and professional office job behaved for that kind of behavior nowadays, but you can bet neither of us have forgotten that day.

Last summer it was always like this. I’d get home, we’d eat dinner, and by the time we’d be putting on our bike clothes to go for a ride, it would be 8 p.m. Some nights we’d get home in the pitch black and my dad would ask, “What, you were out there in the dark?”  

Sometimes the waiting drives me nuts, but sometimes I think I secretly like riding in the dark.  

The moon illuminates more than you give it credit for and fireflies flicker in and out, and I’d watch them with glee even as an adult, a natural light show amongst the trees. I remember the first time I saw them, when I was probably twelve. I ran around catching them excitedly, cupping them in my hands, watching as my hands went bright yellow with light, then dark black, then the light returned.  

And sure, there are plenty of dangers and scary parts about cycling in the dark, even when you’re not in an area chock full of cars. You have to be careful to avoid potholes and that squiggly shiny line on the pavement that grabs your tire if you’re not careful. And sure, it’s a little bit creepy to think someone’s going to jump out at you in the dark, but at the same time, it was peaceful. And it was ours.  

And I would’ve told you nothing could ever take that from us.  

But then 2020 happened.  

Now, I fill my water bottle and eat no fewer than seven pretzel rods while I’m waiting for my mother to hurry up and get downstairs. Yes, I’m aware that I’m inhaling hundreds of calories by the minute, but I don’t really care. The salt is probably going to dehydrate me later, but right now, it tastes so good as I munch away, listening to the crunch of my favorite snack. Carbs are everything.  

Especially when I’m waiting. Extremely impatiently. I'm always impatient though. Always, “let’s go already” even when I’m not actually ready. Especially this summer, feeling so trapped and caged.  

This summer, everything is messed up. The whole world is faltering. Half this country doesn’t care that it’s falling apart, that all ignoring the Coronovirus pandemic is going to do is prolong the situation.  

And the other half is angry and scared, the internet erupting with trolls commenting on every travel post there is with comments along the lines of “Ummm, are you sure you want to go there? You might want to skip that hotspot.” I never thought I’d be an internet troll, and I try to be as polite as I possibly can, but every time I see a post complaining about beaches closing down or masks required in Florida or Delaware, I get mad. I want to reach through the screen and shout, “People, wake up!”. Slowly, I’ve calmed down, but still I'm waiting. For things to turn around or for things to become more of a hot mess before they get better? I’m not completely sure which.

Finally, my mother comes down the stairs and pulls the car out of the garage. “Grab your father’s chair. He’s coming too.” She tells me, and I groan. I just asked him if he wanted to come, but he was just sitting on the couch, like he has been lately: blue leather, best spot in the house, if I may say so myself. Anyway, he was just sitting there, not doing anything, just kind of dazed, with the fan blowing on him. And big surprise, he refused to come.  

I’m losing him. He’s fading away from me. I keep trying to lure him back in, but he’s lost his zest for life. It slipped away somewhere between the day routines crashed and burned and the day that having a social life meant putting your life in your hands with every event, dinner, etc. Now he stares all day. Or sleeps all day. Mostly I try not to think about it, but I miss him, and I wonder if he’ll ever come back.  

But when she tells him to come to the pier with us, he obliges. She has a way of getting him to do what she wants. I think the words were somewhere along the lines of “It’s 87 degrees inside this house. You will come.”  

And finally we’re in the car, all three of us eating fruit popsicles like little kids. The popsicle is melting fast, a metaphor for life these days, like it’s saying “You snooze, you lose.”  

This isn’t where we’re supposed to be this summer, searching far and wide for the best swimming spots to survive record-breaking temperatures - 8 straight days in the 90s. That doesn’t happen here. Until it does.  

We couldn’t go to our family cabin this summer; it’s the biggest first world problem ever but it’s still part of us. It seems like an outrageous thing to complain about missing the beach and the woods in a world where everyone’s lives have stalled and many have been curtailed. And yet, we still feel like we’re not quite home this summer. We’ve never spent the summer in the city. Every day when I wake up, I google, “Canadian border reopen” and every day I’m met with assurances that we’re not getting in. And I get it, I really do. I wouldn’t want to risk letting me in either.  

And yet, I still feel lost. Like I’m separated from a piece of myself, not only who I used to be, but who I want to be.  

What if I drew a line 4 miles from your house and told you that you weren’t allowed to cross it indefinitely?  

What if you crossed that line your entire life to see your friends, run, bike, go to the farmer’s market for samosas, hit the beach, have a bonfire with friends, go wine tasting, visit family, get Chinese food, have a getaway at your family cabin and even buy your favorite chocolate bars at WalMart? What if you crossed that line for the perfect late night bike ride, just you, your mom and the fireflies?  

And then with a flip of a switch, or a brokered deal between politicians, it was just all gone?

And I’m telling you, those were some phenomenal samosas. And I miss ice wine in a serious way.  

So now, we’re just waiting.  

I used to live in Israel, so you’d think I of all people would understand closed borders. But mostly I just hate it. I mean, it’s no secret that Israel and its neighbors don’t agree on most things - including the existence of the country itself. And that sucks in its own way.  

But Canada and the US? I'm no history expert, but I’m pretty sure there hasn’t been a war between those two in the last 200 years. We’re basically the same country, but Canadians are just nicer, right? The truth is, the last few years, and especially the last few months, have proven to me exactly how not the same we are.  

On a sixth grade field trip to the power plant, the tour guide pointed across the river and asked if it was a foreign country over there. I raised my hand and proudly said, “No, it’s not foreign. I go there all the time.”  

As you can guess, that day I learned that the word “foreign” applies to all nations under different governments than ours, friendly neighbor or not. I never really believed it though. And the border crossing was such a synch, how could I?  

I used to call my friends while I was driving. When I got to customs, I’d tell them to quiet down for a moment. I’d flash my ID and the border agent would ask me two questions and send me on my way. Then, my friends on the other end of the line would ask incredulously, “Wait, did you just cross the border?” Of course, ten minutes later, the call would drop when driving through a dead zone. But that's an entirely different story.

On our way to the pier for our swim, we drive along the river, and I look at Canada. Every thirty days, they say it’s closed for another month. And it goes on and on and on and on. Never ending. It’s kind of like groundhog day, except that the cases keep rising day after day in this country, and dropping on the other side of a line that our forefathers drew in the sand.  

When we get to the pier, my dad refuses to sit where I ask him to. I’m afraid of what will happen if I leave him to drag his chair up a dozen steps so I do it for him, but not without a hint of annoyance. He’s slipping away from me, his personality fading. We used to spar back and forth with cheeky arguments, smiles on both of our faces, but now he doesn’t even smile. He wouldn’t leave the house if I didn’t force him to. At twenty five, I never expected to be practically babysitting my eighty eight year old father. But, sometimes that’s how the cards fall for the late in life kid.  

He stays in bed all day, like there’s nothing worth getting out of bed for. Food is his nemesis instead of his salvation, and he won’t even eat the chocolate I give him. When he gives it back, I cave in, and eat it myself. If this is what eighty eight years old looks like, I don’t want it. Not now and not ever.  

When I get back to the car he’ll tell me he didn’t even bother to watch the sunset and that we should have left him to boil in the evening heat of a room lacking AC. That fact alone will make everything feel so pointless. I know he had his day to care about sunsets and grand adventures, but it still seems so sad.  

My mom and I throw our towels on some rocks, and walk down the steps into the water. The waves seem strong as they lap against the rocks and for a moment I'm worried the current will be strong enough to be risky. But once I get in, my biggest concern about the waves is how they hit parts of my body that aren’t accustomed to the water temperature yet. Tired of the cold feeling hitting my stomach, I submerge my full body in, with my eyes on the sunset. I swivel my body through the water, back and forth, feeling the stress in my abs as I flip over back and forth. “Does this count as a workout?” I ask my mother. She says it does.

The water’s refreshing on my skin, but if I don’t keep moving, I start to shiver with cold. Amazing that when it’s 90 degrees outside, it can even be cold in the water.  

We reminisce about the Amazon Jungle, swimming at sunset right after spotting the pink dolphins, that were misleadingly only visible in grey and not pink. We chat about the Canadian shore of Lake Huron, sneaking onto private property to watch a killer sunset, and searching for shipwrecks the next morning. We remember when we dragged my 83 year old father on a 3 mile hike with roots and hills that he managed to conquer singlehandedly, although by the end he was too exhausted to notice and pose with the beautiful rock formations surrounding him.  

The sun’s now a pinky orange ball of light in the sky, so close I feel like I should be able to reach out my hand and pluck it out of the sky. Suddenly, it begins to descend, flitting away, and the part of me that doesn’t understand science is curious where it’s going. 

“Should we get out of the water before it’s completely down?” My mom asks, but I shake my head.  

“It’ll still be light out”, I tell her, and when we finally head for shore, the sun itself is gone, but the blue sky is lit up with glorious oranges and pinks that will follow us on the twenty five minute drive home.  

In this moment, with my mother watching this sunset in this water, I should say I don’t want to be anywhere else. I should say I don’t want anything else. But, I’d be lying if I said that in the back of my mind, a part of me isn’t still waiting for everything to finish changing.  

I’ve spent twenty five years waiting on her, and now it seems like that hasn’t changed, but now I’m waiting more than twenty minutes. I’m waiting on everything. I’m waiting on normalcy. I’m waiting on my father to come back to me mentally, or for the other shoe to drop when I find out he won’t be the same again.

I’m waiting on government officials to resolve a spat that affects my life and yet doesn’t actually ruin it in the same way their policies on unemployment so affect my friends. I’m waiting on the whole world to either heal or explode a little bit more.  

And I’m waiting until she and I can go back to chasing exotic spots in the world. Snorkeling with giant sea turtles and taking walks past lagoons filled with flamingos.  

But you know the one thing I’m not waiting for tonight? The perfect sunset. Someday there might come a day where the world has lost its luster, and when that day comes, you can be damn sure that I didn’t waste the moments I did have. Everything’s so uncertain and different and in many ways, this year feels like a wash, but this lake is here and so is the sunset and so am I.  

Yes.  

So am I.