Life in a COVID-19 Hot Spot: Week 21 – Cutting Closer to the Bone
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I’ve gotten used to the lack of retail therapy as most stores have limited access, and aimless browsing is discouraged. I’ve gotten used to the empty parking lots around offices, schools, and churches. I’ve gotten used to meeting friends on ZOOM rather than meeting them for lunch. I’ve gotten used to take-out food rather than white tablecloths at my favorite restaurants. I’ve gotten used to bringing my own folding table and chair when I visit a park.
I put up with cancelling a trip to Europe (my husband’s bad knee wouldn’t have stood the trip anyway), cancelling a long weekend at a hideaway inn to the north, cancelling the family reunion picnic we had scheduled for my milestone birthday this year, cancelling my grandson’s 6th grade graduation, my other grandson’s high school graduation. My monthly visits to help look after my toddler grand-daughter have morphed to bi-weekly story times on ZOOM.
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I’m just beginning to feel some fraying in the social fabric. My son refused to get together for a mid-point picnic between our homes, as his son and daughter had recently traveled and he couldn’t guarantee they weren’t infectious. For the same reason my other son canceled a planned joint camping trip with his brother’s family – an infection in his four-room apartment would be a disaster, and he couldn’t risk it. Still not “serious”, no-one is ill, but when families are afraid to meet, that’s wrenching.
On the other hand, my sister and her husband just returned from an expedition to Yosemite. They were able to obtain a day pass, they set off at an ungodly hour of the mroning, and by 10AM they were beginning the hike up the Mist Trail to the top of Nevada Falls. She said “It was like I remember from my childhood – no shuttle buses, but not so many people, and no crowding on the trails. We picnicked at the top of Vernal Falls and dangled our feet in the pool beyond Nevada Falls. It was lovely.”
Maybe this is the preview of our future: much- curtailed activity and options for most of us, but for the few who are able to maintain their income stream, travel safely, obtain the right permissions, and keep their health, a rather pleasantly emptied world. It’s not the future I want.
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When I was a child, my parents moved us from Palo Alto to a small city of about the same size in the segregated South. (It was a bad move, but that’s another story.) My parents were from a part of the country where you were more likely to see an antelope walking down the street than a person of African descent. I had to learn some new words, and meanings of words.
Which leads to that awkward expression “person of color.” Since “colored” historically referred to those people now called “Black”, a new term was needed which would be more inclusive of people who are not of European descent and appearance. This includes those formerly called “Indians” who are now “Indigenous”, also capitalized. It also includes people originating from south of the US border who were “Mexicans” or “Spanish” in my youth, and then became “Hispanics”. This word has now been discarded as being too deferential to the genocidal Conquistadores. “Latino” was used next, but this word recently has been interpreted as sexist and supplanted by “Latinx”.
Years ago, my father used to say “Everything I know about life I learned from Tarzan of the Apes.” Although some tattered Tarzan paperbacks were around the house, somehow I never got around to reading them, though my kid sister read the series avidly. Some time back I mentioned this family story to my husband, and as a gag gift at Christmas he gave me the first four books of the series. They sat on my bookshelf untouched until four months into lockdown. With all libraries closed and the neighborhood Little Free Libraries exhausted, I turned in desperation to the Lord of the Jungle for escape.
Of course, we couldn’t leave it there. The second volume, The Return of Tarzan, sees Tarzan transformed into a 1912 version of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher: handsome, well-spoken, without ties, and able to fend off an adoring female or fight off a dozen malefactors without suffering a scratch. I’m about half-way through this volume, but I’m pretty sure that Tarzan’s true love Jane Porter will end up in his arms by the end. After all, I still have Son of Tarzan and Tarzan the Untamed waiting on the shelf, and I’m pretty sure Tarzan didn’t get it on with any of the apes.
I read the disheartening news articles at the end of May about the George Floyd protests gone awry. I read about looters standing with crowbars at the ready as peaceful protesters marched down the streets of San Francisco and Oakland . They were waiting for the right moment to turn and smash a window for plunder. I read about rubber bullets and tear gas and arson and professional criminals driving up in vans to strip computer shops and appliance stores of their goods.
Before the Lockdown, we lived in six of the rooms in our nine-room house. We slept in the bedroom, and used the adjoining bathroom. We watched TV in the TV room (den, to real estate agents.) We cooked in the kitchen, ate in the dining room, read and had our pre-dinner glasses of wine in the living room.
The TV room is still where we watch TV, but it is also my exercise studio, as my thrice-weekly exercise class has moved to Zoom. And it also serves as a chldren’s library, as I have collected all the children’s books in the house and spread them out on the sofa as resource for my bi-weekly Skype Story Time with my toddler grand-daughter.
I was due to have a milestone birthday this month, and we had planned a big family reunion picnic at a central location convenient to my two sons, my sister, and a couple of nieces and nephews. Of course, several weeks ago it was clear that was not going to happen. My friends and relatives compensated with a cascade of birthday cards. It was not quite the same.
Allyson Johnson 