I’ve been thinking lately about how we spend our days. Not what we write about on social media: the highlight reel, heavily edited. Instead I’m thinking about the minute-by-minute unfolding of our lives from the time we fumble off the alarm in the morning to the time we set it at night, and how that gets lost.

Historians have asked people to keep records on what they do during the pandemic. I’m betting that in many cases it’s the highlight reel that gets recorded. Either that or peoples’ feelings and moods instead of what they actually do, which is the valuable part. A slow unfolding of the mundane details would reveal how things are different from Before, as I think of it. Writing it down sounds boring, but it’s irreplaceable.

Also demanding, which I can say from experience, since I tried it once.

A decade ago, during a beach vacation in Mexico, I wrote down everything I did in a day. It took several days to get on paper, working both in real time and from notes. We’d gone to an all-inclusive resort since I was exhausted; I can’t remember why. I’d probably had a freelancing fail where I’d taken on too many projects at once, afraid of never getting another job if I turned something down. As one does.

This means I was physically spent from a series of very long days, but my mind was in overdrive. I was as close as I’ve ever come to burn out, my brain like charred paper. I hated the feeling, and decided to distract myself—to get back in the moment—by writing down the observed minutia of one particular day. 

Maybe you’ve done this. Maybe you want to try it, given the pandemic lockdowns.

What I did was partly a writing exercise. Lying on the beach in the shade of a palapa, I tried to describe the changing colour of the sand as the sun moved across it, the changing shadows cast by the sun, the effects of the rising tide. 

But also, of course, what we saw and did—swimming, eating, drinking, and how we did it—along with what I heard other people say. Some of it was wicked, since the staff didn’t know we spoke Spanish. Esos pendejos por allí, a waiter told another one time, directing him to a particular table. Those idiots over there. (Literally, those pubic hairs, one of my favorite Mexicanisms.)

Most of what I overheard from the other guests was incomprehensible fragments as they spoke in shorthand about family and friends. I seem to remember that a few lines stood out, but I can’t think now what they were, and I’m too lazy to go into the attic and dig out my old journal. Let’s say they were along the lines of something I heard this past summer, sitting on my front porch as two guys walked down the sidewalk. 

“Then she married her brother so she could get citizenship.” 

Yet even though most of the dialogue I overheard in Mexico is gone, I can still see the beach in minute detail. It wasn’t large, a curving stretch of sand between two headlands. Sitting in my office, I can still walk myself along it from the rocks at the north end to the tidal pools at the south, wishing I was there and meanwhile remembering many of the details I wrote down, even of things that aren’t memorable.

The washrooms were located up a curving flight up steps back from the beach. I can still see the volcanic rock floors inside the ladies’ and the powdery sand left by sandals and unhygienically bare feet. In the corner, making herself small, stood a woman in a white uniform who was waiting for me to leave so she could sweep up the sand for the hundredth time that day. 

The hotel had installed sensor towel dispensers, the ones where you wave your hand to make it roll out a paper towel—never long enough—and automatic soap dispensers. This was the first time I’d seen those in Mexico, and since we’d lived there for three years, and went back frequently for visits, they must have been pretty new. 

Would you usually write that down? I wouldn’t. Remember it without having recorded it? Probably not.

There was also a little incident I probably would remember. A skinny teenage boy walked out of the surf near the rocks at the north end of the beach wearing knee-length blue bathing trunks. He was holding a snorkel in one hand and something in the other than was causing people to drift over. 

When I joined them, I found he was holding a small octopus. It was still alive, and looked very much like the octopus in the documentary My Octopus Teacher, which I recommend highly. 

I hung back until the other guests had gone, and the boy told me he was taking the octopus up to the hotel kitchen to sell. I put out my hand and the octopus reached out a tentacle and wrapped it very gently around my index finger. 

I got a very clear sensation of the creature asking for help, which may be sentimental and mistaken, but it left me terribly touched. I tried to pay the boy to let it go, but he wasn’t interested, maybe because he knew it wouldn’t survive anyway. It was flagging by then, letting go of my finger, and the boy was eager to get it up to the kitchen. I’ve never eaten octopus since. 

What has brought this whole idea of dailyness forcibly to mind is a small black change purse I found when going through our family boxes. My winter project: organizing and purging generations of family memorabilia. 

Opening the purse, I found a mysterious assemblage. There was an old-fashioned key, a lock of red blond hair inside a folded piece of paper, and a tiny one-inch-square photo of someone I think must have been one of my Scottish grandmother’s sisters. 

There’s no name written on the back, and my uncle, the last of his generation, doesn’t know which of his Scottish relatives it might have been. It’s one of only two photographs of this woman that I can find, and on the back of the other—a group photo—she’s mis-identified as my grandmother. 

By process of elimination, I think her name might have been Lily, but I have no idea if the beautiful hair was hers or what she had to do with the key, if anything. I have relatives in England I can ask, since Lily is the only one of my grandmother’s five siblings with living descendants. But even if I pin down her name and a few details, I’m struck by the lost dailyness of people who are gone—generations of them. 

How did they awake in the morning? What did they do next? How did this change within the lifetimes of the people whose tiny photos are all that is left of them? A few photos and their birth and death dates in my uncle’s genealogical records. 

Everyone in the photographs would have seen great change during their lifetimes. Several of the photos show my seafaring great-grandfather with his spade beard and large hands. Trains would have been new when he was young, and bicycles arrived as his children grew up. My grandmother’s generation saw the emergence of motorcars and airplanes, of radio and TV. And it’s probably wrong of me to imply that even the seventeenth and eighteenth century farmers from whom I’m descended didn’t feel that life was changing around them, and that they had to change with it. 

I read reams of social history and novels, but of course each individual would have done things differently. Lived their lives differently. And now that’s gone. 

Does it matter?

Lesley Krueger’s latest novel is Mad Richard, which is available here.