Magical Realism

Covid-fueled snapshots of songs, sloths, schnozzes, shit shows, and the transportive power of stories.

July 4, 2021

I am alone with nothing to do and nowhere to be, while seemingly everyone else is leaning into red, white, and blue celebrations. My neighborhood is eerily quiet and I feel like a person left behind during an apocalypse.

In commemoration of its 50th anniversary, the New York Times has recently published 50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s Blue, dissecting this “coming-of-age travelogue.” I decide to go along for the ride and spend several happy hours listening to the album, track by track, and reading the inspiration behind every song. I’d never listened to Blue that way before, never experienced it as a story from beginning to end. I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling. Blue breaks through my sad isolation.

In the Amazon

There is a sloth in the tree I can see outside through my bedroom window, I’m sure of it. It can’t be merely a steroid-induced hallucination, inspired by the book I am reading, Ann Patchett’s Amazonian jungle tale, State of Wonder, while recovering from a series of steroid injections to heal a herniated cervical disc. No, that sloth is real and I periodically check to see if has moved a millimeter or two. Being forced to lie still is a pain in the neck, but it’s a pain in the neck that put me here and I want to avoid surgery. So I take my cues from the sloth and stay put.

It works.

In India

I break my nose diving into the shallow end of a swimming pool in Mumbai, India. During my recovery, I read Midnight’s Children, but it does not transport me away from my painful and humiliating reality. Noses feature prominently in this book, including the bulbous and congested nose of the main character, who ends up having magical powers.

Coincidence?

Footnote: Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is one of my favorite books of all time.

Shit show

I am writhing in pain on my bedroom floor, trying not to vomit and wondering why the doctor on call doesn’t think I need to go to the emergency room. What gets me through is Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms, a memoir of life interrupted, which is lying on the floor next to me. If I hold myself just so, I can pick it up and read snippets without causing another abdominal spasm. What Suleika has to endure through cancer treatment and the road to remission is so much worse than what I am experiencing and she is only 23. Her bravery keeps me going.

Eventually I do go the emergency room and end up being transferred to another hospital for emergency surgery because my intestine has folded in on itself, causing an obstruction.

The doctor on call is waiting for me there.

She apologizes for discounting my pain.

On the Road

It’s early morning on a cherry orchard in Mosier, Oregon at the Columbia River Gorge and one of us, tired of waiting the other one out, will go downstairs to make coffee, bringing it back to bed so we can enjoy it while losing ourselves in our “Gorge books.” We always bring meaty books with us, but the bookcases in the house where we’ve stayed every summer for 20 years are filled with unexpected delights. In the early days, J discovered Harry Potter here. Later, we find Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River, Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, and so many more.

A stuffed rabbit named Felix gets lost in an airport and sends letters from his travels around the world to the little girl anxiously waiting for him at home. We read Letters from Felix, which includes real stamped letters, to our little girl. As she grows into a voracious reader, we share Gorge books with her — The Night Circus, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. When her baby sister comes of reading age the whole family passes around the Hunger Games trilogy and of course, Harry Potter.

“I need a Gorge book,” J says before every trip.

Every morning, the innkeepers stealthily leave mangoes and coffee on the deck of our hut in Roatan, the island off the coast of Honduras, where we have come to scuba dive and snorkel. We enjoy this simple breakfast while reading our individual copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Magical realism is our favorite genre of travel book. On other trips we will read Love in the Time of Cholera and Like Water for Chocolate.

We’ll take turns reading Shalimar the Clown on an interminably hot night in Costa Rica, while soothing our youngest daughter, who is plagued by head lice and bug bites. These books become just as much a part of the fabric of our travel experiences as the jungles, conch fritters, and crocodiles.

‘Where are you in our book”, I ask J, even though I can always check his progress on my Kindle. We are in Portugal, reading Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water, a tale that unfolds over the course of three generations, and features its share of misery. We are sometimes each other’s reading cheerleaders, the one further along encouraging the other to keep going.

Last year in Portugal, we downloaded every book we could find on the subject. My taste ran towards the classics - Pessoa, Saramago. J read Yann Martel’s The High Mountains of Portugal, which features a backwards-walking man and a chimpanzee.

Back home, nostalgic for Portugal, I give it a try. “Where are you in the book,” J asks me. “Keep going,” he encourages me. “Eventually it will mostly all make sense.”

Photo courtesy of https://www.yesterdaysairlines.com/airline-history-blog/hippie-express-loftleidirs-low-cost-long-haul. Check it out!

As part of Blue’s 50th anniversary, Cary Raditz, the cane-wielding, omelette and stew-cooking mean old daddy who inspired at least two songs on the album, shared his version of events. I loved finding out that he got to Europe the same way a lot of us did back then, on a cheap Icelandic Air flight to Luxembourg. That sent me down a rabbit hole of memories from my time hitchhiking alone through Northern Europe — of youth hostels, No Nukes campaigns, celebrating Icelandic Independence Day in Reykjavik in 1980, and the books that were my lifeline during that time. I was a big Leon Uris fan.

J has similar feelings from his year traveling around Asia, which is also the year we met. A book was something to be savored, a private haven where you could retreat when you needed a break from the sensory onslaught of exploring the world.

“Where are you in the book,” J asks me. We are home from Portugal and I have COVID. Seems as good a time as any to read Demon Copperhead, a book I knew I would eventually get to, but had been avoiding because of the dismal subject matter.

Each night, my fever rises and I can feel the army of immune system warriors assembling to do battle against the virus. Demon Copperhead doesn’t have it easy and neither does Carmy from The Bear. They are my companions during the days of fatigue and isolation and the fevered nights.

It’s weird to be home, yet not home, because we can’t go anywhere and we can’t see anyone.

Masked in our separate quadrants of the house and yard, we surrender to this period of suspended animation.

The stories will see us through.

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