In October, 2021, I had the opportunity to perform in a reader’s theatre production at The Merc Playhouse in Twisp, WA. The show was titled “Coronanthology: The Year We Held Our Breath,” directed by Phil Quevillion. The production featured original poetry, prose, essays, and songs written by community members in response to the pandemic. My piece is titled “Where Were You When?” It’s about how the comet, Neowise came rocketing into my life, during the darkest of times. The full text is below.
For many weeks now, I've been paging back through the suspended animation of 2020/21 and continue to orbit around one perplexing question:
“After everything that happened, and all the things that didn’t, will we remember the comet?”
Neowise. Remember? Neowise, the comet?
My brain continues to pry at this, and I feel a strange sense of obligation to honor Neowise as the miracle it was, or seemed to be.
Or, by mid-July 2020, five months into the Covid-19 shutdown, were we just way too far gone for miracles?
It is remarkable how Covid-19 has inverted our sense of self, space, and safety. After 790-thousand years of humans building shelter, outside is suddenly safer than inside. There is no more “safety in numbers,” if the number is greater than one, and we have awkwardly learned the new dance of showing our love by backing away, not smushing together.
How will these inversions play out over time?
And, will we remember the comet?
I, for one, won't forget it. It was mid-July, so, even at 3AM it was still hot out. I crept out of our home on East County Road, taking in a deep breath of clean country air beneath the usual blanket of infinite stars. I turned to the North and there, above some darkly silhouetted low-lying foothills, was the rocketing stillness of a comet, hanging in the sky, blazing with whiteness, and an embarrassingly long tail. I had never seen one before, but somehow knew exactly what it was.
I stood there and watched it apparently stand still, captivated by tiny object of light, moving at 40 miles-per-second, but frozen in space and time to my naked, sleepy eye.
Neowise was right up there with the most beautiful things I'd ever seen and, because the world was asleep, it was mine, alone.
After a time, I wandered back inside and back to bed, feeling like I had an extraordinarily good secret.
The next morning, I walked down the driveway on neighborly business.
“You won't believe what I saw last night,” said my neighbor.
His eyes sparkled with a secret smile. I had a feeling for the answer but asked anyway,
"What did you see?"
"There was a comet!” He said.
“In the Sky! Over Winthrop!"
I did not want to squelch his exuberance but had to confess,
"I saw it, too."
"You did?!?" “How did you know what it was?” He asked. ”How did you know where to look?"
It was such an endearing surprise to discover that my neighbor had no idea that Neowise was rocketing toward the Methow, during these dark days, getting darker.
Even in the deepest depths of Covid-19, Neowise managed to capture a few headlines. It was typically covered in the "science" section, quickly upstaged by the latest super-spreader data.
My neighbor didn't read about Neowise in the news. He knew nothing of its clearly-mapped trajectory, or the narrow window of opportunity we had to see it in the sky. He just got lucky.
It was his comet, his sighting, his miracle alone.
After comparing impressions, we reveled in the moment of our shared cosmic secret. We laughed and shook our heads in amazement and nervously shuffled our boots in the dirt, six feet apart.
We struggled to recall how long it had been since we had last seen each other.
After endlessly long weeks of social distancing, my neighbor and I were reconnected by something that was 64-million miles away from both of us.
Where were you when Neowise passed through? Did you know it was coming? Did you happen to see it?
"Where were you when" is a question we use to connect with each other.
Where were you when Mt. St. Helens erupted? When Kennedy was shot? Where were you when the astronauts walked on the moon? Where were you on 9/11? We ask this question to share a space and time with each other - to share a moment, even when we’re apart.
When a crisis unfolds, we remember where we stood more clearly than we recall exactly what happened or maybe even who we were with. Our shock, anger, disbelief, and awe embeds itself in the cracks of the pavement, the phone to our ear, the steam rising from our coffee cup.
The impact of Covid-19 is global, and deeply pervasive, but the moment is long. We lived through 9/11, but we live in a pandemic.
Imagine, for a moment, that we are the comet, and Covid-19 is the sky.
This post-vaccination spread continues to be the backdrop of our lives. It sometimes barges its way to center stage. It frames our movements and stops the action. Often, we forget our lines. Like Neowise, “the comet of us” moves very fast but it feels like we’re standing still.
And, whether we know it or not, we just shine on.