Social Distancing: Week Four
In Oregon, we are entering our fourth week of enforced social distancing. In this preternaturally health conscious state, citizens and businesses fell in line quickly. I wasn’t surprised.
Nor was I surprised when a few days ago, Jackson County (our county) made COVID-19 news: our per capita testing rate, it turns out, was second only to New York City, a statistic credited to the conscientiousness of local health authorities. As of today, there are 39 confirmed coronavirus cases in Jackson County (a number that has held steady for five days) and no fatalities. Ninety-nine percent of those tested proved negative.
It’s hard to imagine, in sum, a better place to wait out the pandemic and, for this, I am so, so grateful.
Of course, no amount of distance can lessen the fury I feel every day at the Trump Administration. I subscribe to Andy Borowitz’s daily satire in the New Yorker, “The Borowitz Report,” and it’s better than a vitamin pill.
“Experts Recommend Disinfecting Television After Trump Has Been On”
“Trump Optimistic About Winning Nobel Prize in Medicine”
“National Incompetence Stockpiles at Full Capacity”
“Trump Practicing Distancing from All His Prior Statements About the Coronavirus”
“America’s Teachers Urge Trump to Use Time at Home to Repeat First Grade”
“Dr. Fauci Gently Tells Trump Why He Can’t Hold Parade to Celebrate Great Job He Is Doing”
“Fauci Begs Pharma Companies to Speed Development of Anti-Narcissism Drug”
Mental health experts, I know, say that routines are good for us, most of all when our world is upside down. Maybe this explains why Trump persists in his daily briefing. I’ve never been good at routines, though: my free-spirited mother—some would use other adjectives to describe her—believed that routines robbed life of the spontaneity she craved. It’s a wonder that Tony and I have headed to Starbucks for coffee and conversation every morning for twenty years; it’s not my style.
Speaking of Starbucks, the store we frequented in downtown Ashland, from the day we arrived, closed a month ago. A new, upscale Starbucks with a drive-thru window opened near us last week. When we placed our order at the drive-thru speaker the first day, the barista shrieked, “Oh my gosh, it’s Barbara and Tony!” Every morning now, we check in with the young baristas and vice versa; it’s a daily reunion.
Otherwise, here is what colors my days.
Family
A week ago, our son Dan and his partner Einor, who live in Los Angeles, welcomed their first baby, Damian Anthony. Up until the day of delivery, it wasn’t clear whether Dan would be allowed to join Einor at the hospital. He ultimately did, though he had to leave two hours after the delivery, picking up mother and the baby the next day. Einor went into labor with bronchitis and a bruised rib from coughing, but it ended well.
Our Brooklyn crew—Carl, Kidist, Lucas (now five and a half) and Timmy (almost six months)—are thriving, having found a way to turn their four-room apartment into a home, workplace, school, stage, an obstacle course and more.
Every day, Kidist “messages” me photos and videos of Lucas and Timmy that fill my heart. Ah, there’s Lucas parading around the living room with every inch of his body wrapped in tin foil. (He love costumes.) Oh, there he is walking down the sidewalk in his face mask, strumming the guitar he built from a Kleenex box, a stick, and plastic string. OMG, here are the five robots Lucas built with cardboard boxes, paint, and plastic cups; he’s drawn a sign that says “Robot Factory.” I commission Lucas to build me a female robot with special powers. He calls to ask what color skin she should have. “Dark chocolate like my mom, white like my dad, or something in between?” he wonders.
For Timmy, “tummy time” has become much more than a neck exercise. With a pillow assist, he watches Lucas act, read, sing and prance before him. Lucas makes him laugh, which in my book beats that first smile.
In one video, Lucas (dressed in a white shirt and yellow tie) gives Timmy a full body massage. In another, Lucas attempts to teach Timmy to crawl. “Use your muscles!” he exhorts.
This week, Lucas was the online “star” of his kindergarten class and the teacher asked him to submit a photo. He picked a picture with Timmy and him sitting side by side, staring at the camera.
“Can you tell me why you chose a picture with your baby brother?” the teacher asked.
“Because he is part of me,” Lucas said.
Food
Grocery shopping has been easy here. The shelves are packed, the fresh produce rolls in, there are no lines, and six-foot spacing rules.
The only time I’ve encountered a modestly crowded grocery store was when the local Safeway created “seniors only” shopping from 7 to 9 a.m. two mornings a week. We had been going to the Starbucks counter inside this store for our early morning coffee run (before the drive-thru window opened near us). We’d been used to an empty parking lot at that hour and were amazed to pull in one morning to find the lot packed. We wondered, as they say, if we’d “missed the memo.” Inside, we discovered seniors (appropriately masked) everywhere. I’ll take the regular hours.
Filling time
I’ve never given much thought to filling time, since I never seem to have enough of it. After twenty years of working at home, much of it leading a virtual national organization, the challenge for me was to stop and look up. Though now somewhat retired, this is still true.
While friends and colleagues turn to Face Book and other social media for connection, I never have (except, of course, with this blog). I am largely an introvert, with some extrovert tendencies, and COVID-19 hasn’t changed this.
For years, though, I’ve imagined a time when I might organize the 20,000 plus family photos and video clips I’ve accumulated in the era of digital cameras and iPhones. (I have an additional 20,000 photos in my What Kids Can Do archives, though these are reasonably sorted.)
Oddly enough, I figured this photo immersion would happen some day when I was homebound, on the upswing from an injury or illness. Homebound now and healthy, I’ve dived in. Logging four or five hours a day, I’ve sorted the surfeit of images and video clips in my iPhoto library (plus 500 scanned photos from pre-digital days) into 40 plus albums.
But this is just the start. I’m onto phase two: creating mini videos that pull together and capture the spirit of each album—a family skiing trip to the Dolomites, push-up contests on our front lawn in Barrington, excursions around Brooklyn when Lucas was a toddler, family cats we’ve loved and lost. “You’re the family curator,” my daughter-in-law who works as a paid curator at the Los Angeles County Art Museum says. I guess so. For me, it is buoyant work.
[Here’s one of the first of these mini-videos, a collage of still images of Lucas and Timmy (2:30 min.), taken by Kidist in the past few months.]
For the Jackson County Animal Shelter and its Working Cats program, I am compiling a list of vets and clinics that will spay and neuter at reduced rates. (It turns out that there are as many vets as there are massage therapists in Southern Oregon.) For our local homeowner’s association, of which Tony is president, I’ve been designing friendly but threatening signs warning dog owners who walk the development’s greenways to leash and pick up after their dogs. We have a poop problem.
Streaming
This account wouldn’t be complete if it omitted streaming. At night, Tony and I, like much of the Internet-connected world, sink into the TV—which truly does feel like sinking. We are past the age where we can read and stay awake after dinner, but streaming works. Our taste is eclectic, though. We just exited from five seasons of the effervescent Schitt’s Creek and entered season one of Masterpiece Theatre’s dark Wolf Hall.
Fear
As fear sucks the oxygen from life in the time of COVID-19, I’ve though a lot about my lifelong propensity for anxiety. Strangely, I feel neither fear nor anxiety (different animals, I believe) in these outrageously unsettling days. Like the writer Barbara Kingsolver, I put on optimism with my socks each morning.
I was struck, though, by a recent TED interview with Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame and City of Gods). Gilbert related a conversation she’d just had with the young woman, Amanda Eller, who got lost in the jungles of Hawaii for 17 days and survived. Eller fell off a cliff, broke her knee, walked for 40 miles without shoes, slept packed in mud to protect herself from the cold and mosquitos. When Gilbert asked her how she had managed, the young woman said that on her second day in the jungle, she closed her eyes and asked the universe to take away her fear. The next morning when she opened her eyes, the fear was gone, replaced by gut intuition. Gilbert recounts:
She was guided by some deep intuitive sense located somewhere in between her sternum and her navel. Every moment she would ask ‘right or left,’ ‘up or down,’ ‘eat this, don’t eat that,’ and absolutely surrendered to her intuition, in the moment. It saved her life.
We all have navigation systems within us that point towards health and survival, Gilbert contends. We just need to give them credence and space.
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