Manet

Sunday is a good day to make a picture of Saturday, which was yesterday.

Today, everyone's gone to the park to bounce soccer balls off their knees and heads, the girls just as good at it as the boys, and drink Gatorade and cans of something called White Claw. I watched them yesterday, Saturday, gathered in groups on the lawn, observant pandemicicians, mostly obedient to the new laws of the land. I wanted to crawl into the look in their eyes, if just for a few seconds or so, to see if their carefreeness was as casual as it seemed or the kind of mascara a skilled undertaker might use to make a dead person look even more beautiful. Did they still have jobs, I wondered? Or were they still going to school, university? Was this latest freak of nature--the Covid-19 virus--more frightening since not man-made, merely another pothole in a road littered by endless pretend wars, disappointing political leadership, and the general feeling that the governmental structure our leaders like to call democracy is instead operating as a carnival show not even fit for prime-time tv. Were these physically skilled, alert young people, who could have been pictured on the side of a Grecian urn, been aware of anything more than glimpses of the present time as provided by our free press? So that they too, like all of us, are forced to make a complete guess of their futures? 

The Roman poet's line, nothing human is alien to me, whispered in my ear as I made my way past the handsome young people enjoying their Saturday afternoon, until I'd made something else out of it, something my very own--everything alien is human to me.

And so I walked home from the park, thinking that Sunday would be a good day to make a picture of what I'd seen Saturday--people playing, walking around, spreading blankets on the grass, free from their worries.

C-SPAN, screenshot, May 9, 2020. Photo by author.