Saturday: My social media feed fills with New Yorkers complaining about hordes of people outside, maskless, disregarding social distancing. A walk around my neighborhood on a gorgeous spring afternoon reflects a relaxation of vigilance — more maskless runners, couples, families — though not as dramatic as friends have seen on, say, the Brooklyn Bridge. A Times story outlines a psychic shift from “let’s-get-through-this-together” optimism to “when-will-it-end” depression.
Upon waking, rather than greeting the day with an “I hate CoronaWorld” sigh, The Girlfriend and I take to planning our day As If — that is, as if CoronaWorld didn’t exist.
“What do you think — the Brooklyn Museum today?”
“Great. We can walk there after we have breakfast at that diner on Washington.”
“Then maybe a movie? Let’s see what’s at the Nighthawk.”
“Or BAM. Then we can check out that French place we keep walking by on De Kalb. I’m tired of cooking.”
On Thursday The Girlfriend had what Before CoronaWorld would have been a normally busy day. When she came home, she looked so spent I worried she had again fallen ill. I asked her to describe it.
“I started by working on writing my new podcast, which I enjoy but which takes energy. Then I was a visiting guest for a professor friend of mine teaching a class on television history; there were maybe 60 students on a Zoom call for an hour. I’ve visited this class other semesters and it’s always intense, because I talk about AIDS videos, and we inevitably talk about activism on YouTube. One of my functions as an educator, teacher, and artist is to think about technological tools that have primarily been used to sell advertisements by making mainstream, popular art forms. I talk about how people have used the same forms for other ends, and I challenge students’ hard-won beliefs that popular, dominant media is itself a good thing.
“And this class was saturated with new feelings, because of the obvious connections between AIDS and Covid-19. Students for whom viral illness was abstract, nostalgic, historic — suddenly it’s not. And one of my provocations as a teacher and activist is telling people that forwarding and liking and reading political analysis is not the same as activism. I pushed them to consider what it’s like to be a media activist, after or even now, in the era of Covid-19. And that can be disconcerting for people who’ve been convinced by these systems that passive engagement is enough. So it was heavy.
“Then I had to jump in a car and drive to the East Village. I hadn’t left Brooklyn in five weeks. Manhattan has always felt very different from Brooklyn, but this time it felt desolate: empty and cold and brutal. It was a grey day, and it felt scary to travel that far, and maybe fear colored what I saw. My child’s partner was taking pictures of the architecture, which they love, and they said it was really fun — usually all the people and cars get in the way of the buildings. But to me the buildings’ scale felt ominous. I’ve lived in that neighborhood; it’s a very dense part of the city, and usually all the people and the motion fill the space, warm it up, make it human.
“And I had to do a thing that was emotionally resonant, which was to help my eldest child move from their senior collegiate workspace. In another life that would be celebratory and poignant. Here it was still meaningful but hard and drab and empty.
“Then we drove back to Brooklyn. My son is living in my bedroom, and his desk wasn’t stable and his chair wasn’t the right height. It was hard to find a vendor, so I used Target. The chair’s being mailed, but we had to pick up the desk. Target was a swarm. I’m not blaming Target. Everyone was doing what they were supposed to do, wearing masks and gloves. And it wasn’t a lot of people compared to normal Target. But I hadn’t seen that many people in five weeks. It was an onslaught of stimuli; it felt dangerous, unnecessary. I was also managing two young adults, and I was worried about their health and exposure, so that added stress.
“Then we needed plastic boxes for the things we'd just moved from their art studio. I wanted a brace for your carpal tunnel. And then I grabbed random things: Pringles for The Kid; two mini-6-packs of Coke, which were two for $5 — half the price as at your market; and clementines because I like them and you don’t buy them and we shouldn’t get scurvy. My father lived through the siege of Budapest. He was 6 or 7 or 8, and the family lore is that he lived for weeks on dried peas and got rickets and didn’t grow properly. His brothers are both over 6 feet, and he grew to only 5 feet 9 inches.
“Then the three of us drove home in a very full car. No one anticipated how much stuff there’d be: the box for the desk, a box for the plastic containers, the stuff from the studio. We had to cram it all into my small car. The kids had overbrimming bags of art supplies in their laps, and one spilled; they hadn’t packed well because they had to go in and out very quickly, and there were clay tiles and special fabric cutters and spools of thread all over everything. Then my child hadn’t eaten. They had been taking their experimental print-making class on Zoom in the car while we were driving there, and while they were packing up. That was crazy. So they were really hungry, and they were about to open one of the sodas and I said, ‘Absolutely not! We cannot eat or drink anything until we get home and wash our hands.’ And they understood that was the right decision.
“We were all overwrought. You know the way your body loses muscle tone if you’re not active? I feel like all our muscles of being in the world have atrophied. Doing small things, like parking in a parking garage or finding the desk for item pickup — it’s not that I couldn’t do them, but I had to push myself.
“The good news is that I got all those things accomplished. The confusing, unsettling, hard thing is that it used all my resources as an industrious person, supportive parent, and functioning adult to do them.”
My sister, working remotely from Washington Heights for her out-of-state university, wonders how to stay psychically robust. She’s in videoconference meetings five to six hours a day, plus hours of email. She’s structuring her days, taking breaks, took a vacation day Friday.
Still, she says, “At the end of the day, I don’t want to do anything. I’m so tired. Everything we do is contingency planning: If this, then that; if that, then these other things; the chain of possibilities feels endless. It’s exhausting. I want to take up a hobby, but I don’t have the energy to learn a language, or read anything analytical. I want to give myself relief, but I can’t figure out what it should be.”
She says, “One of the reasons I live in New York City is because I like all this togetherness. Sometimes I used to think: I’m changing trains in Penn Station with thousands of people — isn’t that cool? Now the thought is just alarming. I walk in the park with my dog, and I constantly worry — are they too close? Do they have a mask?”
My other sister, working for a mayor in her western state, says, “My brain gets so tired. I have no energy. I tried to read Jane Austen, couldn’t do it. I’ve got a Harry Potter book on my nightstand; I read three pages and go to sleep. I had a day where I ran five errands, and I went to bed at 4 o’clock. It’s the stress of thinking all the time: Which way should I walk down the aisle? Where should I move? Is that person coming toward me? I was hyper-alert for hours, and it made me nuts.”
My New York City sister: “I was going to leave for South Africa next week. I’d been looking forward to it for months. Whenever I plan a vacation, my spirits lighten. I imagine my whole life as a series of trips like that. Now that might be gone. I don’t want to whine — I’m employed, healthy, have not one but two lovely apartments. But the grief is real. It’s hard to see it on my calendar. And there’s nothing to take its place — that’s the hardest part. I’m thinking of taking an online dance class, but that will not replace it.”
My mom, in the Bay Area: “Your sister and I were scheduled to go to Alaska this month. It’s a part of the world I’d really like to see. I got halfway through a National Geographic book on Alaska. Now I see that book on the shelf all the time. It’s a simple loss, and it was a good decision not to go. But I’m 89. I’m not sure I’ll ever get there.”
My brother, who runs his own Bay Area flooring and tile business: “Staying home day after day after day, I have to look at a calendar to figure out what day of the week it is. I’m going to start assigning myself specific tasks to do on specific days: go to my storage unit on Mondays, stuff like that. For some reason, my business has continued to do OK. It’s better for me than for any other [of my main supplier's] reps in the United States. Everybody’s asking: What am I doing to make this happen? And I don’t know, other than doing my job.”
He says, “One thing I’m doing, if I’m sitting around and driving myself crazy, is to reach out, once or twice a day, to contact people and see how they’re doing. I’ve done that as a person in recovery, and it’s been really helpful lately. The more interactions I have, the better off I am.”
Mom continues to enjoy daily connection with neighbors in her 55-plus housing community, where none of the 120 residents (to her knowledge) has taken ill. Seven or eight of them sit on courtyard benches or bring folding chairs, maintain physical distance, chat. She described this to members of an eldercare community for which she’s served as a facilitator, and they were so hungry for connection that several of them brought bag lunches one day to hold their own outdoor social circle.
She’s calling each person in the eldercare group every 10 days or so: “My co-leader likes to email, but I’m much more of a telephone person, as you may know. I’ve gotten to know them better than I would at our meetings, certainly. Most live by themselves. They’re missing friends, really missing children and grandchildren. But in our group, at least, there’s a lot of good mental health going on. It’s encouraging that we can be resilient in a time like this. It seems like we’re appreciating each other and focusing on what we can still do, rather than on the many things we can’t. It may sound corny, but I don’t experience it that way. I really feel it.”
My brother, a San Francisco Giants season-ticket owner since the ballpark opened in 2000, says he’s imagining the post-CoronaWorld reality: “I keep picturing walking into the ballpark. How grateful I’ll be. We took so much for granted before. I’m hoping our world will be a better place because we’re all experiencing this.”
(New York state numbers on Saturday: 282,143 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 3.9 percent; 437 dead, to a total of 16,599, up 2.7 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,829, to a total of 47,930, up 4 percent.)
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