The Transfiguration of Normal

It’s not quite 9am. I’m sitting at the kitchen table. I’m going through morning email, some from work, some not. I’ve got coffee, and I’ve got a smoothie. All of this defines what is, for me, someone who regularly works from home, a very typical weekday morning.

Meanwhile, my six year old has rediscovered his trains. Thomas and Victor and Percy and Lexi are racing around a track. Commentary is being provided. All of this is occurring LITERALLY IN THE DOORWAY TO THE LIVING ROOM which will in short order necessitate my hopping over Cranky the Crane. And you thought your supply chains were disrupted? This cargo keeps crashing all over the place.

This commotion eight feet away is balanced - though that’s probably not at all the correct word - by the sounds of John Fahey’s The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death eminating from my Oontz - a small bluetooth speaker for those of you unfamiliar - currently positioned three feet away on the kitchen table.

If the name John Fahey doesn’t ring a bell, that’s okay. This album is from 1965. The style would come to be known as “American primitive guitar”. You should give it a listen. It’s 55 years old but may still somehow be unlike anything you think you’ve ever heard.

John Fahey seems like an appropriate soundtrack for these times. What could be simpler than just a man with a guitar, without even vocals? But his music is hardly simple, and was definitely never considered normal. Fahey was a man out of time - as we now all seem to be.

And yet the trains are still rattling around the track on the floor in the doorway. As Sir Topham Hatt - ahem, The Fat Controller - might say: Carry on!

For a six year old in kindergarten, for whom Spring Break was about to roll around anyway, for whom there’s no particular sense yet of the typical annual flow of the school calendar, for whom life is a healthy mix of the new and the old, for whom we must try diligently to project a sense of not nostrums but normalcy, well, isn’t this all just kind of normal then?

He knows of the coronavirus but it makes little sense to say he knows about the coronavirus. The school district keeps sending email with helpful links, one of which was for talking to kids about the virus, but that’s kind of irrelevant for a kindergartner.

The word now is that the entire rest of the school year might be effectively canceled. We can’t even wrap our minds around that at the moment. But him? Well, he’s six, so he just rolls with whatever. And whatever, that just becomes part of the normal.

Many of you are no doubt thoroughly disrupted right now. You’re working from home when it’s not a good way to work, or you’re not working at all. You’ve got multiple kids around who better understand what’s going on and have different needs. You or someone in your immediate family is highly susceptible because of compromised immunity or respiratory function.

Here, though, things are about as normal as The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death: which is to say, almost completely, and not at all.