Sunday: The Girlfriend feels better than she has since her illness started, 14 days ago. Her energy is almost normal. All week she’s seesawed between good and bad days, but she’s sliding back less, improving more. A week ago something in her lungs shifted from pure tightness to a loosening of phlegm and congestion; her breathing exercises show that’s improving, too. I still feel lung tightness but no body aches, less fatigue.
We walk farther each day. Today we head north to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where artisanal breweries and metal manufacturers have transformed lines to make masks, gowns, sanitizer, other medical supplies. We wear masks from handkerchiefs and elastic hair ties. The ties hurt my ears. We stop in a pharmacy — our first visit to any store in four days — spend $9 to buy six simple medical masks, feel lucky to get them.
We hold a family phone call. Everyone’s healthy. Mom in the Bay Area says she and eight or nine neighbors have been gathering in a courtyard on separate benches, chatting for an hour each day. “I’m getting to know a few new people,” she says. “It’s not that I have relationships with them, exactly, but it’s nice to create connections. I’m happy to say, none of us complains. It’s rained the last two days, and I’ve missed it. I can feel myself go a little stir crazy.”
My sister up in Washington Heights has a sore throat from her regimen of several daily videoconferences with her mid-Atlantic university, where she’s a library administrator. “I must shout more than I think,” she says. But otherwise she and her dog are tucked in, doing fine.
My other sister is spending workdays mostly alone in her office, setting up videoconferences for the mayor of her mid-sized Western city. The city was early to shut down, thanks to the forethought of her boss and the state’s governor. Anyone flying into an airport of her state goes into quarantine for two weeks, no questions asked. (This contrasts with our federal policy; despite Trump continuing to tout his “early” shutdown of travel from China, it likely came too late, and more than 40,000 have since flown from there with little screening, much less quarantines.) Much of her city’s economy flows from tourism; the mayor has canceled a couple of international festivals, through which some craftspeople earn 80-90 percent of their annual income. The city’s coffers will dry up, too; the budget picture is bleak.
Like local governments around the nation, hers is also struggling with how in a time of lockdown to maintain a schedule of mandated public meetings: city council sessions, regulatory commission hearings, etc., all required to be accessible to the public. They tried an open meeting by videoconference; residents wishing to speak had to sign up digitally by 1 p.m. with the city clerk, then use their home internet connections to speak or ask questions at the evening meeting. But the state attorney general fielded a complaint, and now they need to try another format. A public meeting elsewhere in the state was video bombed and had to shut down. She summarizes the dilemma: “How do we allow public access and input and not allow the nonsense?”
My brother in the Bay Area is conducting a surprising bit of business for his wholesale flooring company; he gathers it's mostly homeowners finishing remodeling jobs. (Installing flooring requires only a couple of laborers and no permits, so most can likely skirt California’s ban on non-essential construction.) His roommate is a newly-underemployed chef; the chef’s father recently sent a few packages of fancy steaks, so “we’re eating like kings,” he says.
My brother has more than a quarter-century of sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous; he sponsors lots of newcomers and attends a regular slate of weekly meetings, all of which have closed their doors, some moving online, with mixed results. A recent videoconference with 60 or so regular attendees had 250 registrants. (The password was made available to a listserve that anyone could read.) Proceedings were waylaid by video bombers asking to speak, then inviting people to local bars, posting porn, other assorted foolishness. He feels for the newcomers, for anyone learning to cope without alcohol and living through the fresh hell of quarantine. He says, “Thousands of people across the world are getting their jollies by fucking with people in real need. I just don’t understand that way of thinking.”
I’m a recovering addict myself, with five years’ sobriety and my own schedule of meetings (less aggressive than my brother’s). I’ve been making do with phone calls to friends; many of us, it seems, are leaning heavily on tools learned in 12-step programs.
— For starters, “one day at a time” is a reasonable philosophy for CoronaWorld.
— A wise soul early in my recovery told me a core question I could usefully ask no matter the circumstance: “What is the next right action?” I’m asking myself that a lot: whether I should go to the grocery store (better to eat leftovers and shop tomorrow); whether it’s safe to visit The Kid (not until The Girlfriend and I feel healthy for 72 hours); whether I should wash my hands (always yes).
— “Practice gratitude”: That one has kept me feeling positive through all kinds of lousy situations. At dinner the other night, The Girlfriend and I toasted to things about which we feel grateful. One of mine: not feeling the urge to act out in my addiction, despite living in the epicenter of the U.S. CoronaWorld. At least not today.
— “Right now, it’s like this”: I can use all of the “this-too-shall-pass” reminders I can get. My brother has a daily phone meditation practice; my Washington Heights sister has been finding comfort in hers. I don’t much meditate, but I’m finding soothing the principle of life as constant change.
“I had a crazy wave of panic this morning,” my Upstate Friend texted the other day. “Every once in awhile the enormity of the situation crashes over me. And then I took several deep breaths, counted my many blessings, and moved on.”
“I hear you,” I answered. “This shit absolutely comes in waves. I fear our society will be transformed. We're inside for another month, maybe a lot longer. Something has arrived, something has shifted. And: things are always shifting. That's the Buddhist teaching, right? We have the present moment; we have the things we can control. And we move on.”
He wrote: “Impermanence.”
I responded: “Is the only permanence.”
I responded: “Is the only permanence.”
(New York state numbers as of Sunday: 122,031 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 7.3 percent, the first single-digit increase in a month; 4,159 dead, up 17 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 9,534, up 14 percent.)
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