Sunday. Feelings come in waves; today I feel scared. It’s colder. Prospect Park remains busy but less dense. The park’s southwest corner, where Caribbean folks gather for reggae, drums, barbecue, had a sizable party Saturday evening; tonight at dusk sees but a ghostly remnant. A half-mile away at the parade ground another group of Caribbeans play spirited soccer. It’s their last gasp, presumably. New York is shutting down for all but necessary workers at 8 p.m., and Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio say police will break up large gatherings.
The spread of Covid-19 cases in New York continues unabated: 15,168, up 4,812 from Saturday (46 percent).
Kai Kupferschmidt, a molecular biologist and journalist, writes, “The virus has gone around the world at astonishing speed.” According to the World Health Organization, it took three months to reach 100,000 cases, 12 days to reach 200,000, four days to hit 300,000.
Kupferschmidt cites the world’s odd complacency in January and February while the virus raged in Wuhan, despite China’s sophisticated public health system. Bergamo showed the West how the virus can overwhelm a community’s hospitals, but even then governments in the U.S. and England acted late (too few tests; limited physical distancing). Peak ICU need in Wuhan came four weeks after the peak in Covid-19 cases, so the cost of inaction to New York City and London is pending. Costs to Latin America and Africa will come later.
“We are all Wuhan now,” Kupferschmidt writes. What worked there: ruthless state action to identify cases, isolate them, find their contacts, quarantine them. We’re not following that pattern. And how long can we isolate entire communities? And will isolation work? Wuhan remains on lockdown; the virus threatens to resurface in other parts of China. Cases in Singapore and Hong Kong, which took aggressive early action, ticked up this week; the dean of Hong Kong University Medicine cites what he calls “response fatigue” after two months of quarantining.
We hold our family phone call, which we’re doing weekly rather than monthly during the crisis.
— My mom, 89, is fine. A few neighbors in her 55-plus northern California community gathered on courtyard benches to chat Saturday, which she describes as a surprisingly powerful gift. It will rain this week, but perhaps they can use the community’s good-sized common room.
— My older sister is helping her boss, her Western city’s mayor, connect to his meetings by videoconference; the technology bamboozles him. Her husband, who has a variety of health woes, had cataract surgery in his one “good” eye (through which he has quite limited vision; the surgery could help enormously) postponed because it’s not an essential medical procedure. Her son, a teacher who bartends summers at an arts festival, will lose income when the festival cancels.
— My younger sister, a university librarian, drove Saturday from the town of her mid-Atlantic college campus (now closed) to her New York City apartment and is happy to be in her upper Manhattan neighborhood near her boyfriend and me and others in her community while she works remotely.
— My brother, who runs his own business selling flooring to retail outlets across California, faces financial uncertainty. California’s shelter-in-place order has the construction industry scrambling. “Critical infrastructure,” including housing construction, plumbing, and electrical work, is exempt. But most home renovations are presumably not. No one knows which jobs can proceed. Some of his customers are open, some not. His main flooring supplier suspended operations. He’s got long-term projects to prepare; he may use the slowdown to change his product line and customer base. But none of that will generate short-term income. Will his business qualify for government loans or grants? Who knows?
On our Prospect Park walk my daughter says “everyone” in her house — her mom, her mom’s fiancé, the fiancé’s 14-year-old daughter — is driving her crazy. I tell her The Girlfriend and I, battle-scarred relationship veterans, agreed from the start, two-and-a-half years ago, never to move in together. We’ve vacationed together but otherwise never spent more than three or four nights together in a week. The intermittent distance suits us. Now, suddenly, because her son had to leave his dorm and is living in her bedroom, we’re cohabitating.
“Annoyances?” I tell the kid. “The Girlfriend makes two cups of espresso every morning and leaves coffee grounds on the countertop, every single time. Her dishwashing is, by the standards of either of your grandfathers, terrible. She never cleans out the kitchen sink. She never turns out the bathroom light. She never puts the tops back on anything — she just places it, like a decoy, so you think the top is on and when you lift it the entire bottle spills. Our two toothbrushes are different colors but she uses them indiscriminately. Same with our towels. She likes a lot of pillows and just brought two new ones; I sleep with one flat pillow, so now I have to throw four pillows on the floor every time I want to go to sleep. Should I continue?”
“Please, no,” the kid says.
I haven’t thought this conversation through. In fact, The Girlfriend and I are doing fine. Later, I wish I’d said: “Living with other people is hard. Annoyances are real. They’re relevant. You need to learn how to process them. Some of them you may need to negotiate. And some of them you’re going to have to let go. Families are tricky, and right now, if you’re lucky, they’re pretty much all we’ve got.”
My mood remains apocalyptic. A social media friend says she’s listening to a Patti Smith album of cover songs called Twelve. I stream it. The album is imperfect; some songs (“Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” say) are clear missteps. Smith delves deep into no one’s catalog; with a couple of exceptions, each song is among the artist’s biggest hits. She performs no radical make-overs; each song is in its original tempo, with modest arrangement changes. (“Smells Like Teen Spirit”’s banjo-and-violin treatment is as experimental as it gets.)
Still, I listen over and over. Smith strikes me as a singer from a saloon in a distant colony, like the town in Altman’s “McCabe And Mrs. Miller” but more sere: civilization’s last dusty outpost. She’s leaning against the bar, unreadable, lank hair swinging in her face. She knows everybody, is friends with maybe the barkeep, maybe the pianist, maybe nobody. She can size up a stranger in seconds. She can drink you under the table and beat you at cards, quoting Rimbaud or Burroughs when you fold your last shitty hand. She walks to the piano, closes her eyes, breathes deep, and kicks her world-weary voice into a spare rendition of “Gimme Shelter,” talk-singing the heat of a street burning like a red-coal carpet, or “Helpless,” making you wonder about a town in north Ontario. She’s a signpost marking the existence of rock’n’roll, what it means, what it conveys, its potency, its ephemerality. The post may not stand much longer, but it’s what we’ve got, and it matters.
Twelve
(Found poem, based on songs from Patti Smith’s “Twelve”)
A storm is threatening my very life today.
The clock says it’s time to close now.
There's a room where the light won't find you;
The chains are locked and tied across the door.
I feel stupid and contagious,
And I've gone by the point of caring
The way we look to a distant constellation.
And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion,
They've been wasting most their days in remembrance of ignorance.
When you think you've had too much,
Remember what the dormouse said:
Eden is burning.
Either brace yourselves for elimination,
Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.
Trumpets and violins I can hear in the distance.
I think they're calling our names.
— By Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Roland Orzabal, Neil Young, Kurt Cobain, Gregg Allman, Paul Simon, George Harrison, Stevie Wonder, Michael Stipe, Grace Slick, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix.
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