My sister said flying was totally safe. She’d just come back from Disneyland and had no problem. “I just wiped the seat down, the armrest, nothing happened. Don’t worry about it.”

Jenny was worried. Worried that we could be stranded forever and never be able to come home. That seemed way overly dramatic to me. Besides, we’d already paid a lot of money for the Airbnb. We had to go.

So we went. The sunrise over JFK airport was the most insane I’d ever seen. Vermillion, peach, violet, the skies on fire. I didn’t know it, but that was the last New York sunrise I would see for a long, long time.

By the time we landed in Palm Springs, the world was starting to change. They had closed JFK, LaGuardia, Newark. Lockdown.

We spent several nervous days in the luxurious house we’d rented, playing cards with my son, his girlfriend, and Jenny’s sister and her husband. The news got more and more dire each day. We decided the only option was to go home with our inlaws and figure out what to do next.

The kids had arrived in a rented camper van. Rather than head back to Los Angeles, they were going to drive around the West, avoiding other people and staying safe.

We stood in an awkward circle, silent for too long, as if unsure how to say goodbye. It felt like something from some zombie apocalypse movie—a precipice of tense decisions, everyone wondering if this would be the last time we saw each other.

I hugged Jack hard. A dozen different fears flickered through my mind: What if they ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere? What if they couldn’t find food? What if this virus turned everything ugly and we never saw them again? I wanted to hold him tighter and tell him not to leave. But I didn't. I felt like a terrible dad.

We drove to Phoenix with Jacky and Ric and spent the next month on their couch. Jenny and I each had a small carry-on suitcase and a laptop. We ordered underwear and sweatpants from Amazon.

Jenny came back from Costco with a literal truckload of stuff. Toilet paper, bags of rice, cases of water, frozen pizzas, chocolate pudding. We started calling her “the Quartermaster.”

We Zoomed with Jack. He told us he’d watched a video on YouTube that said we had to wipe everything with Clorox Wipes. We bought some. We used the first wipe to wipe down the tub of wipes.

We read that we should be wearing masks. We had no idea how to get any, so we bought a dozen bandanas and skulked around like bandits.

Every morning, I opened my sketchbook and livestreamed on YouTube. Hundreds showed up. We drew together seven days a week for months, sharing glimpses of our lives in the chat. For an hour each morning, it didn’t feel like the world was falling apart—it felt like we were building something new. And that got us through.

At first, I drew at a card table in Jacky’s backyard. Then we found a furnished house to rent, moved our carryons and Amazon underwear, and livestreamed from our new garden.

We Zoomed with our friends in New York, positioning the camera so they couldn’t see our trees and flowers and pool. They said don’t come back. New York is over.

In September, our realtor said he’d sold our apartment in Greenwich Village. We put on masks and visors and rubber gloves and flew home to pack up.

The New York we returned to had transformed utterly. We stood on our balcony and looked down at a city that seemed like a stranger. Protesters clashed with police just blocks away; plywood shanties lined the sidewalks where hopeful waitstaff served outdoor dinners. Graffiti scrawled across the Washington Square Arch screamed messages of anger, hopelessness, solidarity, doom. I used to feel wonder looking at my city from above; now I felt like a visitor surveying ruins.
​

Last week, Jenny and I celebrated the fifth anniversary of our Western exodus. We had planned to go out to dinner, but that morning, we’d discovered we both had Covid. I took Paxlovid and spent a day in bed.

This plague that was so awful and killed so many people around the world has gone from being an existential threat to a couple of days of coughing and fatigue, just an annoying part of life.

But in the process it changed our life. It forced us to make wholesale choices we would never have taken on by ourselves. We might still be in New York City, moaning about feeling claustrophobic, about the price of everything, about tourists and gridlock and noise. Instead, I sit in the sunshine with my pugs, listening to the mockingbirds and quail, smelling spring blossoms. Life is different, worse in some ways, better in more.
​

2020 was not the first March to change my life. That would have been 2010, March 18th, to be specific. That morning, Patti leaned out to water the flower boxes and fell to her death. In a trice, my future shattered into something unrecognizable. Jack and I had to start again in a strange new world.

March, 2016 changed me again, this time in a lovely way. Jenny and I were married in City Hall on a random Tuesday, then joined our friends for a wedding lunch. I never thought happiness could feel as simple and quiet as it did that day. Jenny saved me—by simply showing up, showing me how to live and love again.
​

March is a lovely time here in Phoenix. The mercury is in the 70s. The trees emerge from their brief winter with blossoms and tender leaves. The quails walk along our gate, towing their calvacade of chicks. The pruned stumps of our rose bushes fling out scarlet leaves and fresh buds. It is a season of hope and change.

I have weathered more than sixty Marches so far, triumphant marches, death marches, epic marches around the world. I spent one March in Bangkok, another in Perth. I learned to bake bread in March. I published books in three different Marches. I got a black eye and stitches in March.

Each March that has shaped my life—whether through grief, love, or upheaval—seems to carry the same lesson: that change always comes, whether I’m ready for it or not. Scarred, wiser, transformed, I’ve learned to let go of the futures I expected and planned and embrace the ones I could never imagine.

Your pal,

Danny