I take my two-and-a-half-year-old with me on a rare errand in early February. Since the COVID pandemic began, almost a year ago, he hasn’t been my shopping buddy—we either pick up groceries curbside or one parent goes for an early morning shopping trip while the other stays home with the kids. But he and his brother have been fighting all day, and we don’t have a crucial dinner ingredient, and I am so tired of the walls of our house that I could cheerfully burn it down, so here we are.
He is wide-eyed at the bustle as we step through the slushy puddles of the parking lot. “Look at all those CARS, Mama.”
I tug a shopping cart free from the chain at the entrance and swing him into the seat. He is oddly uncooperative as I maneuver his legs through the holes of the seat, and at first I blame it on his stiff snow boots, or just a fit of stubbornness. But then he smacks the red plastic cart handle experimentally with his chubby palm, listening carefully as the wire frame reverberates. “Mama, what IS this? Can we take it home?”
He has forgotten about shopping carts, I realize. Then it turns out he has forgotten about grocery stores entirely. The shining piles of fruit, the helium balloons, the “food monsters” on cereal boxes, are all stunning. So, too, is the news that we can’t eat food while we’re still in the store—and doubly so, because it isn’t ours yet and because we can’t take our masks off.
Back home, I list other things he can’t remember. Restaurants, airplanes, swimming pools. Public transportation of any kind. The inside of the library.
None of these are a disaster. There is plenty of grocery shopping ahead of him, years upon years of travel and exploration and collective joy.
And yet. At preschool he learns that we mustn’t share toys, that we don’t sing or hug other children. He has stopped asking if we can invite friends inside. He wonders why the characters in movies aren’t wearing masks. He doesn’t mind that neighbors cross the street when they see us coming down the sidewalk. It doesn’t occur to him to miss his grandfather.
None of these will bring disaster.
We have it easy, I know. I know! We have each other. We have a warm house, the food we need. Our breath flows easy through our bodies. I know! And yet.
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.