Hope during the COVID-19 pandemic: for my dear friends in the ILAP community

Yesterday, as I returned home with my dog from a long walk through Portland’s empty Old Port, I looked up at City Hall’s clock tower. The clock had stopped at 9:35. A.M.? P.M.? Who knew. The unmoving hands embraced morning and night without preference.

“Well, of course the clock’s not working,” I thought as I took the elevator up to my place. “They have to keep it going somehow, and there’s nobody in there.” I realized that, even though I lived on the same block as City Hall, it had been almost a week since I’d heard the clock’s deep bell tolling each hour through my apartment windows. I used to see spotlights sharpen the filigree on the Beaux Arts tower most nights. On sunny mornings, I checked to catch the shine off the tower’s high gilt weathervane – a 15th century ship, three-masted, one sail afurl, the wind at its back. Yet I’d heard nothing for days. I began to absorb how silent this self-isolation period had become, mandated across the globe as countries shut themselves down in the face of pandemic. The stopped hour- and minute-hands atop City Hall alerted me to something that had gone missing.

What was missing was our city’s habit of counting time together out loud. We lacked the deep, hourly clang that measured our days and sleeping hours and said, “My keepers are broadcasting their presence to you, neighbors. They’re with you and you’re with them as long as you’re in range of my voice as I mark the passage of one sunup and the advent of another.”

That message had stopped broadcasting. Once I saw the immobilized City Hall clock, it morphed from a beacon of community into an emblem of loneliness. Through sheer habit, I kept looking out my windows to check the time. Oh, right: 9:35. The same time, minute after minute, stuck over my home, over my neighborhood – that place of dozens of diaspora, from Burundi, Albania, more  – over my bookshelf of family photos that encompassed multiple diaspora of their own. As though time were arrested for all of us while we waited for threat to pass. While we sheltered from a season of plague or locusts.

This morning, when I looked at the tower clock again, I saw it differently. I received another message from its keepers: “This is the moment, 9:35, at which we abandoned motion to allow for refuge. We did it not by calling out to you, nor by calling you in to us. We did it by joining you in a stillness that is our sanctuary together.” I’ve decided the 9:35 outside my window promises that, for as long as we need to fight for safety, we’ll dare to let cogs, like the clock’s, stop turning so we can focus on living. Or we’ll dare to let some cogs stop so other cogs can turn.

We’ll stop airplanes and boats and busses but not trucks and ventilators and distributions of food. We’ll wish that our palms could bless the truck drivers and EMTs and doctors and nurses and those who currently have no address. We’ll walk outside and maybe leave something clean at a neighbor’s doorstep. If we can, if we do not have crisis or danger in our own households, we’ll carve out a still place to which to flee and give rescuers the space to rescue. Sometimes we’ll tremble at the fragility of money, food, and lodging. Yet it might help to look at the peaceful hands of the tower clock, always pointing to 9:35, and feel there’s a purpose to this solitude that is so deeply shared it has stopped the rush of usual time.

Neighbors who move into my building often complain at first about the tower bell’s sounding throughout the night. It interferes with their sleep. Eventually, the tolling becomes a companion, as it did for me. It feels loyal. It stands for everyone. And now we must stand on our own.

Let the absence of the bell’s tolling create a silence in which we hear one another. Especially, let’s put a clean thought, a purified hope on the doorstep of each person who has escaped to this city to live away from the machines of war or worse. Let’s stop our own moving hands and listen to unspoken messages from those who seek asylum here, where we understand something new: We all seek asylum now. On the street, from six feet away, messages reside in the eyes or in a smile. Boundaries vanish.

When we resume work in one another’s presence, the clock will run again. I hope we’ll have gathered the strength to use time differently. It will be 9:35 a.m., then 9:36 a.m., then 4:01 p.m. and we’ll wonder, “How did the day go by so fast?” I hope we’ll remember at least an instant of this shelter-in-place season as a form of refuge. I hope we’ll transform that memory of respite into a peaceful heart as we offer, continue to offer, sanctuary to our brethren who must flee into our arms no matter what the timekeepers say. No. I don’t hope we do this. I know we will.

The clock tower’s quiet. It’s very sunny. Greetings.

- Stephanie Cotsirilos, ILAP friend and writer