My Lunches with Andrew

About six weeks ago, the CEO of my part-time employment sent out an email assuring us that over the Spring Break the school was monitoring the COVID-19 situation, was deep cleaning and in general taking more care. That morning I had gone to the pool the same as usual and had even noticed that the locker room did seem cleaner and the water was warmer and more than usual chlorine-smooth, silky. The school crisis team was on top of things, the email said—until, not even a day later, his next email, per Governor Andrew Cuomo, said all SUNY and CUNY campuses would be moving to online classes. Boom. Initially the pool was not closed when classes went online, but then it was when there was no really clear information on the CDC website saying that chlorine really did kill pretty much everything, including the virus. Plus, there were the issues of the lockers, the benches…the whole gestalt.

At first it seemed like overkill and then it didn’t, and we now know that Cuomo knew before most of us what was likely coming down the line. And then the changes cascaded rapidly until everything at the school except essential services (Facilities, Security) was online, and then 100% of non-essential employees had to be working from home. Although I have disagreed with the governor, or at most thought of him with “Oh well, he is the best we have” faint praise, Cuomo is made for this time, this place: what can look like arrogance in lesser situations is exactly what is needed here. “Bully Andy,” as he is known, is focused, thorough, detail-oriented and articulate. And then poof! No more places to go or people to see.

“See you in 2021!” a friend texted. Maybe so. I live in a state where because of COVID-19 more people have died than on 9/11. Within a month from now, more Americans will have died from COVID-19 than did during the ten or so years of our involvement in Vietnam.

Aside from teaching one class online, for about five years I have been retired. I am an introvert who lives in a 1100 square foot house with two aging but loving house cats. Before COVID-19, I grumbled at having to get up in time to get to the pool three days a week year round and to go to lunch the other two days.  I mean, I would have to stop whatever I was doing and get dressed and go out.  Did I pack my towel and swim shoes? The lock and key for the locker? Those days, going to the pool felt different until I got there and found the exercise invigorating. And then after class, I came home, had a second cup of coffee, and felt energized for the rest of the day. Every other activity was pretty much TBD, negotiable within what I now see as the framework of a small daily routine.  

Retirement meant choices and order: I made a list every night of what I wanted to do the next day, and usually I got to all those things sooner or later. Just as I had when I worked full time. These days I make a weekly list and some things get done and others don’t. I mean, when inhaling wrong in the post office or touching a gas pump without wearing gloves could prove to be lethal, then maybe a list that has hourly activities implied seems….foolish. Silly. As the student-inmates used to say when I taught in a state prison for men, “I ain’t got nothing to do but time.” That said, let me assure you: I am in no way in prison. At the most, I can’t come and go as I might like, but I can still come and go (even if I go out to where other people are maybe once every 10 days at a minimum).

I had been planning to use my frequent flier miles to go somewhere (destination undecided) this year; for two-plus months I had time to make my choice, to develop an itinerary. There was no rush. But now my passport is gathering dust. And when I do think of making reservations to somewhere, mostly just to make them…well, I take myself for a walk—walks that pass for exercise and that do serve to air out my head.

It’s hard not to want to plan.

I am in a fallout shelter of a sort with windows, electricity, heat, water, food, Wi-Fi and a house full of stuff to keep me occupied if I so desire. Still, this time has redefined “home alone” as well as “home sweet home”. For me this time is inconvenience, not catastrophe. I did finally locate some gloves online. I suppose if I thought about the situation the wrong way I might think that one of the few things between me and possible death is a bar of soap, basically. But I don’t freak out.

I just carry on in my own time zone in a kind of suspended animation.

So in the course of a few days I went from minimal out-of-house routine plus big laundry, groceries, errands, and never getting up before eight except to go to the pool to, these days, almost zero routine except for…. meals. Feeding the cats. No pool, so no reason to put on my Fitbit, really, except to go for a walk. I have plenty of clothes, and now that we don’t know when it will be safe to go forth as usual, this is not the time to Marie Kondo anything as far as I am concerned. In fact, I wish I hadn’t donated my ancient fuzzy and comfy bathrobe over the summer back when donations were still accepted. I could use it now.

Just about never in my life have I ever been bored, including now. I may not like the stay-at-home order where I am not as free to come and go without worry as I was a month ago, but I am not in dire social straits during this retirement on steroids. I have an income and health insurance. I am privileged and comfortable enough to know I am going to gulp hard when I open my most recent report on my very conservatively invested retirement fund, but I am not going to panic. The stock market goes up; the stock market comes down. 

Maybe in some ways I have been preparing for this all my life.

I mean, all things considered, it’s not too terrible to be a non-essential worker even if it comes with a little sensory deprivation.

It’s funny how even those small tasks, those boxes on the calendar, the items on the to-do list served a skeleton to hang the time of my days. No more almost-daily excursions, and every once in a while I have to stop and think what day it is. Tuesday I hold an online office hour and put out the garbage; other than that, my time is mine in a way it never has been in this time in which the outside-of-my-house has the potential to be a biohazard site. I used to get up at eight at the latest, but these days it’s sometime between eight and nine; after decades of getting up at six to go to work and being in bed by ten, I now stay up until midnight or later. The cats have figured out that something is up, I think; Moonbeam Drama Queen when she is awake brings me her favorite toy at least once a day and cries if I do not immediately lavish generous praise on her for providing for me. Swishy, on the other, hand has decided she needs to stay close to me all morning after breakfast, once we are both up and functioning—and she can’t decide if she wants to sit on her chair, on my chair in the kitchen, on the cat scratcher with the catnip, or on the table. (I have long tried to make her a lap cat, which would reduce her indecision, but I have learned yet again: she will never be a lap cat, always a next-to cat.)

I am in no way in a bad way in all this suspended animation; this is The Time of the Introvert. I have occasionally felt overwhelmed in loud crowds. But I was designed to succeed in situations like, this say-at-home-if-you-can, “social distancing” time, pre-, post-  and during pandemic life. Besides, I filled out the census form which took all of ten minutes and resembles nothing like the one I remembered doing in the past, but I was counted, and therefore I am. I still tend to sleep a little later on weekends than on the other five days, and when I do go out even for a walk, it is usually, still, at the retired person low-traffic hours at the supermarket: noonish, during feeding.

I am sure extroverts find this try-to-stay-home time as a shock to their systems (and those who do not know what category—introvert or extrovert--they fall into should find an online version of the Myers-Briggs Test and find out for sure). I do hope they survive to do the work to get things rolling again full-time and loud when the pandemic is over. In the meantime, let’s hear it (but at low volume) for peace and quiet. Maybe Pascal was right in some ways: “All men’s [sic] miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

But in the meantime: the gyms, the bars and clubs are all closed. No more sports. So? My life is in some ways seriously the same except I can’t come and go as I like. And my modest destinations (pool, lunch, wherever else) are off limits in this time of suspended animation.

I mean, it’s not as though we are being asked to be our versions of Anne Frank here.

That said, somehow, sometimes, our leadership (and I do not mean Andrew Cuomo here) has seemed to be willing to decrease the surplus population. Maybe the observation attributed to Winston Churchill was correct: Americans always do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted all the other alternatives. Let’s hope we finally do.

After a couple modest pandemic pandemonium (food apocalypse now!) trips to the supermarket a few weeks ago, I likely have enough food for a month and then some.  I have to eat the perishable food first: apples, salad, or blueberries on oatmeal, before I go to the frozen blueberries under hot oatmeal, the blueberries al dente. I am not hoarding, but thorough: canned beans, salsa, bread, cheeses, eggs, pasta (and I am not one for pasta in normal times). Canned corn and green beans, many of the things my mother had in the cupboard except no Duncan Hines cake mix. Tuna and salmon in cans. I decided to try tater tots since there was no waffle or pancake mix in the supermarket, but I did see on the internet that you can make a waffle of a sort, pretty much, with sweet potato tater tots (and I already had several quarts of maple syrup that will need to be used). One can of Dinty Moore beef stew just because (but I drew the line at Spam). Sauces since I am not much of a cook. Nuoc mam and Vietnamese chili sauce. Rice. Laundry detergent and especially, especially, coffee and decaf and cream. Since it was evident that I would be inside through Easter, I did buy a small package of Peeps. Through the miracle of Chewy.com I have enough food for the cats, at least for now. The big stuff—comforter, cat beds--has made it through the super-duper washer at the laundromat.

On sunny days I go for a stroll around the neighborhood. My back gets stiff if I sit too long, so I snooze. (Rehearsal for this was fifteen months ago when I had to stay inside for two weeks after hip surgery. I was not as mobile and functioning then, though. These days, it is a little more difficult to be housebound when you are not recovering from surgery.) But hey, people from the northeast US are used to spending time indoors, though usually because of massive blizzards and roads unplowed for at least a few days. And this time is evidence that we can adjust: during yesterday’s trip to buy fruit and veggies after two weeks, I was masked and gloved and with purpose, but not with the drive of the first couple trips: I wasn’t back in what I think of as the pre-COVID-19 supermarket trance, exactly, but I wasn’t rushed, either.

Once I have room in the refrigerator, the plan is to order hot and sour soup from the Chinese restaurant and maybe even freeze some (if Google is to believed, this is possible). (IF the Chinese restaurants are still open, and rumor already is they may not be.) Plan B: tacos and chili.

Much of my current food stash would be appropriate for a fallout shelter during my childhood, but I am in no bunker. I have electricity, water, heat, a roof over my head, Wi-Fi, music, and good feline company, all of which without the amenities would make for a different experience. (Once the weather warms up and I open the windows, I am going to have to lower my voice so the neighbors don’t hear me talking to the cats, but that is a subject for another day.) I listen to podcasts including BBC Desert Island Disks, which seem appropriate, all things considered. I have finished bingeing Foyle’s War on Acorn. No need to duck and cover since no nuclear bomb is going to drop, and I am not going to have to plant a Victory Garden. I don’t have to start canning. One of my earliest memories is visiting an aunt when she was in an iron lung—polio was also caused by a virus, by the way--and it is not likely I am going to end up being the latest version of that if I am careful. If the Fates allow.

But now I understand why my grandparents had what looked like a huge Victory Garden and why, when we finally cleaned out her house in the 1990s, we found food my grandmother had canned as late as 1947 in her basement. It’s not difficult to understand putting up stores, borderline hoarding, when it feels more like providing for yourselves--trying to make sure in a time when any other certainly seems nowhere in sight. Provide, provide. Not exactly whistling in the dark, but…well, which way do you want to bet?

I am also trying to remember the context for a former biologist colleague telling me a good thirty years ago that it is likely we are all going to die from a virus. We could have been waiting for a meeting to start, but how the hell did we even wander on to that subject? He was also the person I asked about something I had happened upon in the college library in Jane Fonda’s book: yes, he confirmed, all the cells of the body are completely regenerated every seven years. Who knew?

Back to the present: I have a pile of books to read, as always.  I still have some of the books I didn’t read after hip surgery: The World According to Garp, for instance. A couple weeks ago I assembled the three adult books I remember being in the living room, between the bronzed baby shoes bookends, when I was growing up: Kenneth Roberts’ Boon Island, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar. Since the public library is closed, my book does not have to be returned right away: Daniel Levin’s Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives, a 500-page book which is proving to be…. slow going (and may be unreadable). For my birthday right before lockdown I got a volume of E.B.White’s essays. I have online subscriptions to the NY Times and the Washington Post. So I have no shortage of things to read or even to watch.

I have always washed my hands, but now I wash them even after I take the newspaper out of the plastic sleeve it is delivered in. It’s hard not to scratch my nose when I can feel allergy season beginning now that the snow has melted. I’ve made a mask out of a scarf, and I also have several dust masks I bought when I was in Lowe’s in late February, right before social distancing; Trump had just said there were many “elements of medical” (language so bizarre that it was in itself a flag) and said that all would be well. Yeah, right. So I bought dust masks.

Beyond those precautions, I can only wash the door knobs so many times.

I am not going to turn into Felix Unger about the surfaces in the house. But yes, they are cleaned more than they used to be. I may be living in Weimar USA, but I can’t gather in a crowd to protest.

Even if there is no immunity to COVID-19, I have to think I have reasonably good immunity built up.  My inoculations are mostly up to date--even typhoid, Hep A, Hep B, typhoid, polio, and Td/Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis). Right now my prescriptions are filled. I lived in Vietnam during SARS--and stayed put--because the closest person infected was 1000 miles away (and the closest one at home, had I been home, was in comparatively nearby Toronto. Granted, when I stopped in Hong Kong for a few days on my way home after SARS had pretty much faded away, I was one of very few tourists in the Hong Kong airport and in the hotel). I think of the developing nation hotels where I have stayed for $15 a night, the food I have eaten: the balut--fertilized duck egg--for instance, and the platter of chicken heads, all facing the same direction and looking something like Abraham Lincoln in their brown nuoc mam, and the dishes that were wrapped for me by others in rice paper, at the table--and I wrapped their food, too. The (occasional, I grant you) street food I have munched. Swine flu, bird flu. The squat toilets (and the toilets that seemed so much like Cholera Central that I decided that maybe my bladder was stronger than I thought it was, after all). This all by no constitutes immunity to COVID-19, I know, but still. So good, so far. 

Also, public service announcement: I have never had malaria, but the two types of prophylactic medicines have been so powerful (with bizarre side effects that started with nightmares) that I stopped them before I should have. I have never taken hydroxychloroquine but I would not unless I really had to. Anything malaria-related requires strength I may not have.

I had thought that the closest I ever wanted to be under house arrest had already happened when I was asked to stay within the walls of the school I was at in the Mekong Delta after a rumor—totally unsubstantiated—arose that the local Muslim pirates in the Bay of Thailand were planning on kidnapping the two Americans in town at the start of the war with Iraq. (And even as I was told this, I was also assured that the pirates did not kill anybody but just held people for ransom: “They are nice pirates.”) Every school is surrounded by a wall, and you are a “member” or not, and with help from the US Consulate, the compromise was for me to tell the guard at the gate where I was going, and, if possible, to take along a local. Just to be safe.

That was then. These days, the phrase “going viral” will never seem the same. I put on a mask before I go out. It’s sweaty under there. I don’t need to wear earrings or makeup. I tell myself the mask is a fashion statement. Indoor clothes, outdoor clothes.

And every once in a while this all still seems so surreal that it cannot be happening.

According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it seems that these days we are pretty much at the “Safety” level, far from the Self-Actualizing level. Or at least we are aware of that Safety level in a way I at least was not in the past. Then again, as they say on the internet: “Your grandparents were called to war. You are being called to the couch.”  How much we took for granted even a few weeks ago. That said, it is difficult to imagine that health insurance costs will not skyrocket. To their credit, my employer has done all it can to manage to keep even part-time workers employed, at least until the end of the semester. Other people are without work; people at work are being careful in ways they never imagined.

Speculation on Twitter and elsewhere is that nothing will ever be the same again after the pandemic; children who were born circa 9/11 are now coming of age. Will we again be forever changed?

Maybe so. Already I have heard that it seems that, looking back, we really didn’t need all those meetings after all—and a lot really can be handled by email! Maybe people who are rushing to hoard toilet paper might (I did say “might”) think more kindly of refugees who are in many cases fleeing for their lives, not hustling for (and with the means for and the luxury of) a 12 pack of Charmin. I hope that after these months we will all be beyond what I think of as the German Hamsterkaufe stage (“Hamsterkaufe” meaning shopping like a hamster cramming food into its mouth); we may not have been buying food before the virus as we did recently, but many of us were certainly were happy and regular customer-consumers.

Some say after this is over, there will be the big party of all parties. We will hug freely again. Nobody is predicting that people will be going, “Oh boy, back to the meetings that we replaced for a few months by email.” Maybe there will be less support for the Edifice Complexes of The Powerful and the accompanying reorganizations and remodeling of the many probably not-necessary levels of management, tasks completed mostly in an attempt to justify job and salary. Maybe.

And I hope we try to fix the things that we did to ourselves, the parts of our society that we broke, resulting in lack of (or criminally unfair) healthcare and employment compensation--and our relentless consumer culture. We had a serious lack of worst case preparation for the next pandemic.  (Note: this event is less like Pearl Harbor than it is like Chernobyl where the powers ignored the problem until it was too late to stop it. And there should be Nuremberg-type trials after this is over.)

The One Per Cent versus the Rest of Us. I know how modestly fortunate I am; I teach a variety of students online, many of whom always, still, represent the first generation in their family to go to college. They all work at least part-time. I have not, in the past month, been brave enough to go back to their first week online introductions where they told us all a little about themselves; I am afraid I would now find myself making an educated guess how many are now no longer employed. We live in discombobulating times: one of the best returning adult students whom I imagined as fairly unflappable recently handed in a writing assignment that was blank. (Of course I asked her to resubmit it.) Who knows how many will test positive and have to be hospitalized? The possibilities seem horrific. Viruses are shape-shifters.

Until the situation improves, to be safe, I am not being lazy so much as I am being energy-conserving (but getting exercise) just in case. I would like to postpone any currently avoidable trip to the doctor, to the veterinarian. I want to maintain some pandemic equilibrium, so to speak. I don’t want to catch a cold, pull a muscle. Please may I not need a plumber. Let’s hope the furnace doesn’t need fixing. It seems likely that the home repairs I had penciled in for this year (such as replacing the garage door) may have to be postponed since I don’t want somebody tramping germs around. So far the worst thing that has happened is the printer does not seem to be working, but that proved to be fixable with a USB cord. 

And even now in this time-with-little-structure there is still always something else to do, and if this retirement on steroids does not prove that work—any task—expands to fill the time you have for it, I don’t know what ever will. I get a few things done every day and call it good; the most ambitious pandemic housekeeping project I have undertaken is cleaning out my underwear drawer.

People bloom in different times and in different ways. Always have. We don’t know when or how we will come out of this. Maybe there will be dancing in the street (as opposed to in the living room), but maybe there won’t. Maybe just a sigh of relief and a move from a stroll to a having little more spring in the step. I look forward to driving where I want to—even through the potholes. I am hard pressed to believe I will be glad to navigate holiday rush hour traffic near Albany again, but maybe I will once I am free to come and go at will. I do know I will be glad to get my hair cut. To see my family and friends.

So be it. Truth be told, I don’t mind not having to accomplish too much. At least for now, the cats still sit on the book I am reading and even on the yellow pad I am writing on. I still text Dad jokes to my nephews. The laundry still waits to be put away longer than it should on the rocker upstairs for a day or two. Somehow the T-shirts still need touch up ironing and I have to admit there is (as I knew pre-COVID-19) a lot to be said for sitting around in sweat pants all day. Now that there’s less of a routine of sorts, it’s okay, although I do miss having to go out and see people. I miss the freedom to do whatever and not have to worry about getting exposed (or exposing someone) to something invisible and airborne that has the potential to kill me since I happen to be in what I think of as the “endangered species” (at risk) category per the CDC and Andrew Cuomo. I miss the whiff of chlorine as I rinse out my bathing suit in the sink three mornings a week. My guess is I will want to dress a little better than I used to before all this self-quarantine began, but after those first few days, I make no promises.

I started going to water aerobics because I wanted to get more exercise, exercise that I correctly assumed would be easier on my knees and hips, than, say, jogging—or anything that happened in non-water gravity. Water aerobics has the feel, sometimes, of splashy gym class, but most often, with the music, it seems as much like dancing in the low end of the pool than anything else. The locker room is rackety and crowded, with never enough room, the floor as often as not slippery. But once we get in the water, we (students, mostly women of a certain age) are visible only from the neck up. I don’t even get my ponytail wet. Being in the pool is like being in church in that we students each have our usual places in the pool to occupy: I am a low end of the pool kind of girl, and even there the water is almost up to my shoulders.

Nobody can tell if I am kicking as high as anybody else or lifting my knees halfway to my chin or not. For me, a non-swimmer in the low end of the pool, this is a non-competitive, low-impact, invisible, Zen activity. Still, I watch the faces of the other women as we form a circle around the teacher: my face, I like to think, is Zen but observing, counting the steps as in dancing school. Others also seem serious—or really focusing far more than I am—and a few always seem to be happy happy, what I think of cheerleader happy, as we go from jumping jacks to a 100 step cross country ski move. One student even once asked the lifeguard to take her photo as she smiled and posed with her weights as the rest of us bounced around in the blue waves and the bubbles. Esther Williams we are not.

In the water, collective as the activities are, nobody cares as long as you don’t go under (which I did, by the way, and went home to dose myself prophylactically with leftover atomic antibiotic, just in case). Go with the flow but not totally.  I now think of the pool as normal, inconvenient life, a place of fluid, splashy business.

Someone once told me that at the end of first grade, second grade looked scary. True enough even though a pandemic is not the same old same old, exactly. These days, my late morning/noontime routine is what I think of as Having Lunch with Andrew Cuomo, a person on a screen one I have never met, and a government official in a jacket and tie delivering mostly bad news in a way that does not make things sound, well, totally hopeless. At least somebody (technocrat that he is) seems to be as in charge of this much as anybody can be. In my little way I just have to live through it all. Still, I really do look forward to doing (or not) my regular everyday social distancing on my own terms again sometime; I’ll be glad when these kitchen lunches are over.

After he finishes, after I wash the dishes, I go for a stroll around a few neighborhood blocks. The air is spring fresh and the few neighbors—relative strangers--I see keep their distance and offer friendly small gestures. Their little dog strains to come over for a pet but they keep him close. We wave. We say the sun feels good. I don’t always recognize them, and I am not sure they recognize me, either, with my baseball cap, sunglasses and mask—and it doesn’t matter. I’m not even much of an outdoor person but all of a sudden I like being outdoors for that hour or so more than I used to. I can’t smile at anybody, and I can’t see anybody else’s smile, either.

I’m not exactly pounding the pavement, and I miss the buoyancy of the pool. I’d really rather be going there, to the pool, where we all weigh 15% of what we weigh on earth (or so I am told and as I choose to believe), where I bounce and stretch more easily in the flow and amid the bubbles and the waves, where the water is far more forgiving than gravity is or ever can be. And even at an inconveniently early time of the morning.