Finding Structure in Chaos
To deal with COVID-19, I did what I do best — chronicle the things I saw
Memory is a funny thing, the moments and experiences we keep and the ones we discard, or at least think we do.
Certain memories become our warhorses, the stories told over and over because we find them relevant or funny or sad. Random occurrences can trigger floods of memories (nostalgic, traumatic, seemingly trivial in the grand scheme) that we had not thought of in years.
Writing has always served me as a forum of professional and personal expression. Working for newspapers and magazines, I thrived on the adrenaline and structure of deadlines, using interviews, research and observation as a way to get to the heart of the conflict that is news.
Chronicling your memories, something I’ve done to process what is taking place around me, is a different beast. It doesn’t have a deadline. It doesn’t have structure, unless you choose to provide one.
COVID-19, ironically, helped me find that structure.
A Preview of My Photo Book — Keep Your Distance
The Social Distancing Diary
Five years ago today, our daughter Kate married her husband, Matt, in a small ceremony at the Fairfax County Courthouse. Our families — the Cooks and the Crawfords — celebrated with a lovely dinner at a local restaurant. It was a beautiful event.
But something was terribly wrong outside our bubble. Large events — including South by Southwest — were being cancelled due to a mysterious virus that was spreading rapidly around the world.
Nine days later, the federal government moved to “maximum telework.” On March 21, 2020, the first day of spring, I drove to New York City to pick up our youngest son and his girlfriend. The world was, literally, shutting down.
I started keeping a journal — a “Social Distancing Diary” — about what was taking place in our family and in the town where we live. The diary served a written and visual chronicle of observations made while walking the streets of Alexandria, Va., the town we live in just outside Washington, D.C.
Twelve months later, after almost 2,000 photos and 4,000 miles of walking, I stopped taking diary notes and started working to rebuild my business. But even as I scaled back on the walking and ended the daily chronicle, I knew I would return to the diary at some point in some form.
The result is my first photo book — Keep Your Distance — and a new section of my Substack site, which is looking back at the year through the diary entries I kept. The posts — 2 to 3 per month, published on Thursdays through March 2026 — will be accompanied by photos that didn’t make it into the book.
I hope you will join me on this journey, either through buying the book, following the diary entries, or both. It was one hell of a year.
Keep Your Distance: Walking Through the First Year of COVID is available for $40 plus $5.95 for shipping and handling. You can order it by visiting this link.
congratulations! I enjoyed watching the images.