Today I re-worked a diary entry from last week.
‘Brain’ coral fossil found on Culebra, Puerto Rico. Photo by Argyro Nicolaou.
19 March 2020
I had just taken a shower, and was looking for a nail clipper in the bathroom cupboard.
Nail clippers are negligible but tricky things. You underestimate how attached people can get to them. For couples sharing a home, nail clippers can become extremely contentious possessions. Is it ‘mine’, or ‘yours’? It’s one of the few things that many people cannot fathom to be ‘ours’. I have vivid memories of my father getting upset whenever he couldn’t find his nail clippers. Was he upset because they were misplaced? Or was the idea that my mother, or one of us, had used them that upset him?
I solved this problem in my home by buying M. a set of nail clippers for Christmas.
I know from childhood—or perhaps I’m making this up—that nails are softer to clip after the shower. I haven’t clipped my own nails in months, but today I have an urge to do so. I know from the news that it will be a long time before I can get to a nail salon. After years of resisting what I considered an unnecessary luxury, getting my nails done is one of the few treats I allow myself every couple of weeks here in New York, under normal circumstances. With nothing else to do at 8pm on a Thursday—normally the night I spend practicing tango—extending my grooming time in the bathroom seems like a good idea.
Wrapped in a towel, I sit on the covered toilet seat, and start clipping away. I cross my legs and bend over my left side, so that the clippings fall into the bin. It’s never as easy as it seems. Nails, supposedly dead matter, have a mind of their own. I pick up the ones that miss their mark using the flats of my fingers, like rice grains.
Clipping my nails is almost meditative. I may be moved to this thought by soft music playing from the living room. (It’s the soundtrack from M.’s yoga-for-sciatica YouTube video.) Or I may be experiencing a revelation. For a brief moment between the video’s soft-spoken instructions, the empty music moves me to tears.
Life is this. Being at home, with whomever you’ve chosen as family, after a shower, clipping your nails. Measuring time by trimming, and adjusting, and working around your body’s inexorable growth, its inevitable aging.
I think of my mother. The times she must have sat, wrapped in a towel, on a covered toilet seat, clipping her finger- and toenails. My father watching TV in bed.
This is life. I can only think about it with such crisp clarity now. Only now, when everything else that crowds my living moments has faded into the background.