What’s Essential?

I stopped in at the liquor shop down the street, run by a couple of young and entrepreneurial guys, who have transformed ya decent neighborhood package store into a more creative space where you can find many good wines from all over, small brewery beers and lots of boutique whiskeys/bourbon/etc. They have a couple of old oak barrels in the lane by the registers; people use them to put down goods while waiting in line. They’ve moved the barrels now so they nestle against the counter — to give a little more space between customers and the people behind the register.

As one guy was ringing up my six pack of beer, I asked if they were pleased that the governor classified their shop as “essential” in his new directive that put a lid on many other businesses. He said, No, actually, we’d rather be home. They have kids and elders who are vulnerable, and at work they come into contact with lots of us who might be carrying the c-virus. The sooner we separate, isolate the virus and deal with it, the better off everyone will be, including businesses, he said.

I thought that was a very heartfelt and thoughtful answer. Focused on the essential priorities. Sometimes hard to do in this age of micro attention spans.

It also makes me think about all those folks for whom home is no balm at all, if they even have one to go to. Those who are alone. Or for whom home life is difficult if not dangerous. Or where increasingly now bills are hard to pay and the enforced isolation turns up the volume on daily frictions.

A friend from New York City has retreated with her boyfriend to a house up the Hudson Valley. The boyfriend, divorced, shares custody of a young son, who now is coming up from the city to spend time with them. And she worries about whether the boy might be bringing the virus with him. That’s not ALL she feels, she worries about his health, too, of course, and they’re excited to have him come up. But with the city so overrun with this disease, how could she not be concerned?

Again, how can you not be on edge?

OK, so what’s essential in Connecticut? Turns out a lot of things you’d expect — shops selling food (restaurants can do takeout and delivery only); gas stations and auto repairs service; most all health care services, including medical marijuana dispensaries; law enforcement; homeless shelters and food banks; transportation, power and communications infrastructure; manufacturing suppliers; hardware suppliers and construction trades. Also farms and farm stands, nurseries, banks, legal services, insurance and real estate offices, child care, trash collection, news media, marine vessel maintenance… and billboard leasing. And gun shops. The list goes on. What else do we need? Yeah, masks and ventilators and fast, reliable tests for the virus would be nice.

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Random question: What did we spend to print and mail out a card to every US household labeled “President Trump’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America”? Don’t we know all this stuff already from the endless hours of news coverage on TV, online, in print, from talking to neighbors? I suppose in some way it can help reinforce the basic message. But why is it HIS guidelines? It’s not his guidelines, it’s the CDC’s guidelines, probably. I am openly biased on this one, for sure. But I can’t imagine any other president personally branding this type of mailing.

Since the dawn of the TV age (at least) we’ve been bombarded by advertising — for generations now — and the lines between fact and fiction, story and promotion, art and branding, news and opinion, are so blurred, I wonder who among us can any longer see the difference? I know one guy who very obviously can’t.

Flocking Together

Two of my nieces are sewing surgical masks to donate to a local hospital. A nephew in DC is responding to demands to pass along his mother-in-law’s recipe for bourbon balls; he’s been off work a week to help care for his newborn son, and returned to work the other day, remotely. Niece B is offering recipes for banana bread and carrot-ginger soup; she’s turned on her Christmas lights and dances on her apartment balcony at night.

I’m learning all this through a WhatsApp group set up by niece B, in South Beach; she is the oldest of that generation and has been inviting family members aboard. Like birds flocking to a feeder, they flew in from their outposts — St. Paul, San Jose, San Francisco, Utuado PR, Barrington RI, Illion NY — starved for something fresh to do, I suspect.

My sister-in-law, home in Puerto Rico where the aftermath of Hurricane Maria still stings, is so angry at both the Chinese authorities for their mendacity and Trump for his stupidity, she couldn’t finish an Atlantic article about it all posted by B. But she won’t be bothered with blame just now: “The history of this pandemic is being written as we speak and the virus doesn’t care whose fault it is.”

This brings to mind the idea that we are mostly anthro-centric — we think everything revolves around us, and what we do. D’s comment speaks to the truth around that — to questions like, did we domesticate dogs, or did they simply use us as a means to foster the species, and most successfully? Or, (with a nod to Michael Pollan), did we propagate across the globe apples from Central Asia and potatoes from South America, or did they cleverly use us as pawns in an evolutionary chess game?

Now, coronavirus is happily spreading around the globe, and many of us are redirecting our social lives online. All this Skyping and WhatsApping and Zooming is, we think, helping to slow the spread of the virus. Then again, like those creepy things in sci-fi horror flicks, the virus’s imperative is to live.

One sister of mine, living in a small town and well-connected into her community, bakes a cake every evening to take to a neighbor. (I hope she has a good stash of flour — the local market had none on the shelves yesterday.) In the mornings, she Skypes her grandchildren in Minneapolis, and they work on a book, a chapter each day. It began with a warthog growing angry at his toaster, because it kept burning his toast. So he threw it into the sky; the toaster flew all the way to Mars. The Martians liked the toaster because they like burned toast and use it to fly around on. A child’s imagination will not be confined.

Yesterday M and I watched via Zoom (instant celebrity platform) as our niece at Dartmouth gave a public presentation of her PhD thesis: in microbiology, about proteins and inflammation and Parkinson’s disease (which her mother’s mother had) — trying to understand how it all gets started, with a goal of making earlier diagnoses, and finding ways to treat it before the body’s functions start breaking down. Hardly understood a word but wow, she was impressive. To one side of the screen sat her committee; another panel showed K, and then her slide show of graphs and charts and photos of lab mice took over. After a break, she spent an hour and a half privately Zooming with her committee, answered their questions, and passed. Dr. K!

At 5:30 she invited friends and family to a Zoom party to toast her victory. The screen filled with images, from the East Coast to Honolulu, parents, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles and cousins, old family friends and old school chums. Seeing everyone so gathered, like the Brady Bunch or Hollywood Squares, made us chuckle; it also felt awkward as people chimed in, making their image pop up larger on the screen, then replaced by someone else uttering something, very staccato and not always intelligible. At a real party you talk to people one to one, one to two. Here you’re at a meeting and talk to the group, and somehow it’s harder to find something to say, even as you’re directing your comment at one or two people on the screen. It’s fun and social, but not intimate or conducive to thoughtful, deep conversation. Well-suited to cousin C, who has a knack for hilarious one-off comments. K ended the party by inviting us to get together again next Tuesday at 5:30. C: “So basically I’m now making a doctor’s appointment?”

Alternative Reality

You don’t need to ingest mescaline or the like to experience altered reality, or alternative reality. We probably tend to resist it, but we’re here now, right? Why else would we expend all this effort to find comfort in some familiar things (a favorite movie or TV show, a book, music, a nap). A long hike in Westwoods the other day felt normal, and not: Out there it all looks just the same, paths well trod by us and many others, dog trotting down the trail in front, bird calls echoing through the still gray woods. We know the world out there has shifted quickly. The world we’re stepping through runs on a different clock.

The elegant granite outcrops sit unmoving, remnants of deep upheavals so, so much older than human memory, now exposed, cracked apart and etched by eons of change — freeze and thaw, the patter of rainwater, the breath of wind, glaciers growing and receding, something taking root, altered even by a coat of soft bright green moss. Atop one hill sits an erratic as big as a bus that has been split in two — it may have cracked open 10,000 years or so ago when the fading face of the ice sheet dropped it onto a hunk of bedrock. For a meager 26 years, I’ve watched a cedar grow inside that crack from sapling into adult, looking for all the world like a big sprout popping out of a granite nutshell.

A friend tells us about an encounter at the supermarket — she stood in line with someone who’d filled his cart with boxes of cereal and other goods, a big pile of stuff. She said, Well, you seem to have enough carbs there… Then he explained that he runs a food delivery service, and these things were for people either unable or afraid to go out on their own. His business is booming. And so yes, reality may not reveal itself on first glance.

Of course many people don’t need to spend much time considering this question of altered reality. They work in a hospital, a grocery store, a pharmacy, a restaurant now closed, some other job unsuited to plugging in a laptop and working from home. The public library, which offers via email many tips for online activity, is closed, the Cole Porter tribute concert this weekend evaporated — a minor thing but still, I wonder what Cole Porter would have to say. Don’t fence me in?

The virus has snipped threads of community life: the local book store and barbershops and nail salons; Metro Pooch, the dog boarding service down the street; Guilford Savings Bank (just drive through service). The guys due to come in and re-tile our shower hesitate, because they have small children at home. We can no longer walk into Maplewood, the assisted living place in Orange where M’s Mom sits in her lovely apartment, reading the paper, waiting for a phone call, waiting for an aide to bring a meal to her door or help her with some daily chore.

The other night we had our final (for now, of course) trip to a local restaurant, South Lane in Guilford. We got there early because as of 8 p.m., all such places had to shut down. Five or six people sat at a couple of tables; we two took seats at the bar. The young and cheery waitstaff were absent, already home and filing for unemployment insurance. Two cooks worked the kitchen — takeout orders provided extra work. They delivered food to table when needed. Our friend the owner handled the rest, which mostly was helping us and chatting across the bar about this new life we’re in. Kids at home, staff let go, she and her chief chef and husband were organizing to handle only takeout orders after this night, figuring out what to do with their daughters.

We went to show loyalty and support, and add a couple of drops into the bucket. It felt good to talk and empathize and commiserate, laugh a bit, and also worry about those less able to ride out the storm. Even as we turn our routines inward, we’re thinking about ways to sew things back together.