On Solitude

As I was cleaning out my notebook, I came across a number of half-started posts including this one.

My favorite coffee mug is a novelty one that lists the first lines of some of the most famous novels - "It was the best of times; It was the worst of times." (A Tale of Two Cities);  "In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." (The Great Gatsby). And, one of my favorites, "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."( The Catcher in the Rye)

Late last year as I was looking for a good book to read, I had the idea of using my mug as my source and I'd read the novels I hadn't yet read. Or, in the case of some of them I read a long time ago, reread the ones I didn't remember.

I'm not sure how I settled on this one, but it begins: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliana Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

The book, of course, is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It's not a little ironic that I chose it.

That was the beginning of the post I started back in January 2024, less than nine months ago. At that time, I was slowly beginning to emerge from the isolation cocoon I'd been living in since my stem cell transplant on March 16, 2023. It had been ten months in which our normally quiet social life had been almost silent.

It's been about six months now since I've re-entered social life. And this has been a busy month of social activity with both work events and capped fittingly with a family wedding weekend event last week. It was the first time I've seen my sister in two-plus years, and the first time almost all of our three families have been together for longer than I can easily remember. It seems a long time but it’s amazing how quickly things have changed.

In the beginning of my social re-engagement this year, I would marvel every day at how many of the little things that occupied that day would have been off limits to me in my post transplant recovery. Mundane things like going to the local bagel store or commuting by train to Boston were impossibilities, let alone attending work events, going to weddings, and hugging people. As happy as I was to just have the freedom to do these things, there was more to it than that. These daily connections were water to my my parched social spirit. They reminded me of how much solitude - despite zooms, emails, texts and such - I had endured in the preceding months.

These moments have become unexceptional and harder to notice these days as distance grows from my acute recovery, but I don't want them to become unappreciated.