Eventually, though, I did sink back into my work. I just had a general feeling of distractedness. “For the first few days, I seemed to keep writing the same three pages over and over again. I relate to that scene now much more than when I wrote it.” Then he comes upon two women talking up a storm together, and he’s extremely pleased to see them. Lo and behold, there was Micah on his early-morning run fantasizing, briefly, that the empty streets were due to some global disaster and he was the last person left alive. A friend asked recently, though, how I’d known to write pages 94-95, so I checked to see what she meant. “I haven’t read the book since the virus began. On how the book, completed well before the pandemic, might read now: I’m surprised at how often now I feel the need to step out on my front stoop and start a conversation with a passing neighbor.’“ First I thought, ‘Oh, well, never mind I basically shelter in place anyhow, and I already know about working from home - how you have to be sure and change out of your pajamas.’ But then after a few days I thought, ‘Oh. “I think he would have handled it the way I have. On how Micah would handle social distancing? In such surroundings, how could I possibly invent a mean-spirited character? Not even an eye-roll! I think this has an influence on my writing. Baltimoreans stand by quietly, or they try to help out if they can. Watch some trying episode in, say, a supermarket checkout line - a customer taking too long counting coins or a cashier who doesn’t know his produce codes. Just about everyone here, across all classes and cultures, behaves with grace and patience. And yet it’s such a kindhearted city, paradoxical though that sounds. “I guess it’s no secret that Baltimore is going through a hard spell. The experience started me thinking: How many other mistakes, more serious mistakes, do we repeat in the course of our lives? How often do we fail to realize that they were mistakes, even? I thought it would be fun to explore the issue.” “Several times I mistook the same object for another on my morning walk, although you’d think I would have learned after the first time. On the book’s title, based on a recurring hallucination of Micah’s: But also the events that he’s reflecting upon here - the synagogue shooting, the plight of immigrant children - weigh so heavily on my mind these days, as I imagine they do on everyone’s, that I felt even Micah would have to be affected by them.” We all have lonesome moments, after all it’s no stretch to imagine those. “I found it easy to ‘be’ Micah, so to speak, throughout the book, but especially in that passage.
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