Tuesday: I wake at 6 a.m., for no reason. The morning is CoronaWorld quiet: a few birds twittering, no sirens — either their sound has been in steady decline for the past week or we’ve become inured. Maybe both. I’m in a foul mood, for no reason other than it’s CoronaWorld.
Two problems creating short-term anxiety in our household have been resolved:
1). I’ve been able to apply for extended unemployment insurance online, and the state Department of Labor has deposited into my account two weeks of checks, including the $600 federal bonus that more than doubles the benefit. That relieves my economic stress into the summer; I should even be able to replenish a bit of my savings.
2). The Girlfriend solved a homeowner’s insurance snafu that was threatening the sale of her southern California house, wrecking her sleep. Details are baroque, with plumbing problems at the root. (Pun intended; roots have infiltrated her pipes.) For a time her insurance company declined to renew her policy, which meant she’d likely need a last-ditch state insurance policy that would put a digitized red flag on her home, potentially scaring off buyers. An insurance broker she found online advised her to speak to her claims adjustor’s boss, or the boss’s boss; when she explained her situation, the boss responded like an empathetic human, approving a policy (albeit with raised rates) that means her home sale can proceed. When she ended her 30-plus minute call, she literally hopped with joy.
Our bigger pictures remain cloudy. The Girlfriend still has to sell one home, buy another. Her public university is likely to undergo dramatic budget cuts, rumored to be as high as 25 percent; her tenured job is unlikely to be at risk, but her conditions of work will almost certainly change, along with those of thousands of other faculty and staff.
The city’s Department of Education publicizes its revised grading policy: for middle schoolers, “Meets Standards (MT),” “Needs Improvement (N),” or “Course In Progress (NX).” (No students will fail.)
“What about Exceeds Standards?” asks The Kid, a regular standard exceeder.
“‘Meets’ is as high as it gets, Rabbit. Sorry.”
“That stinks.”
How the policy will affect placement in public city high schools — a process more convoluted than applying to college, and for which 7th grade is typically the main barometer — remains uncertain.
The Kid’s worried about summer camp. This would be her fourth year going to a two-week camp affiliated with her after-school writing program. She remains connected to camp friends in several states, including, during CoronaWorld, through a videoconference comedy writing class a parent has set up on the weekends. But camp, to which she looks forward the entire year, cannot be Zoomed.
Meanwhile, her writing program sends a fundraising letter, its future in peril.
Also in doubt: the city program designed to switch mid-career professionals into K-12 teaching, for which I’d been selected and was to start this summer. The program has sent three emails telling entrants it has no information, that our questions are valid but can’t be answered given the city’s uncertain budget picture. Will K-12 summer school — where we were to begin our training — even take place? Will classes by taught by videoconference? What about our university night classes? Our teaching evaluation sessions? The standardized tests we all must pass? The program’s social media page remains a swamp of anxiety, which I avoid.
What will I do if the program is postponed? Canceled? I don’t know.
The nation is rushing to reopen businesses, stop quarantines, get back to normal. Given the insufficiency or absence of programs to track and isolate the infected, the policy will have fatal consequences in state after state. The president is supportive, eager for an autumnal economic rebound — likely his only chance at re-election, and maybe of the GOP to hold the Senate. His party’s November plan: blame China; blame Democrats; ignore the president’s mishandling of the crisis (aside from his China ban, the insufficiency and porousness of which will also be ignored).
A social media friend posts an analysis: April will likely see the most deaths from a single cause in U.S. history (60,000), save for October 1918, when 195,000 died from Spanish flu. Other social media friends are skeptical that Covid-19 exists, express anger at state governors imposing shutdowns, whom they view as authoritarian tyrants. I don’t know how to respond to their posts, which infuriate. I want to send them stories from the front lines, but because they’re published in mainstream media outlets they’d be dismissed.
Other friends eager to end physical isolation throw around the term “herd immunity,” which in the case of Covid-19 would mean infecting 70 percent of the population, which would likely mean more than 20 million U.S. hospital cases, more than 1 million deaths. (That holds true only if you can’t catch Covid-19 twice, which no one yet knows.)
With nothing productive to do I take an early morning walk. By habit I’ve been avoiding my walk to the Atlantic Yards subway stop, since Before CoronaWorld I of necessity traveled there so often; today I realize I haven’t taken the route in weeks.
My barbershop is shuttered; on its block, two other barbershops/salons have “For Lease” signed in the windows. Can my barber hold on? From fourth through sixth grade, when I walked with The Kid before 7 a.m. to the subway to get to her school bus, he’d alway be there, hair under his rastacap, feet on a chair, half-watching news on a large screen TV that other times would be turned to soccer. Occasionally he’d be cutting an early customer’s hair. Either way, he’d wave. He has two kids in school, I remember.
A few blocks away is the Center for Fiction, which opened last year; I bought a membership last spring at The Kid’s school PTA fundraiser. (The PTA budget for next year will be crushed.) We haven’t used the upstairs reading rooms often, but we’ve bought books from the ground floor store several times. The building is lovely; the rent must be high.
“It’s so pretty!” The Kid said last night when we passed the gleaming storefront. “I want to buy something!”
“You and 90 percent of the rest of America,” I said.
At moments things seem almost normal in one of the world’s great cities. A fair amount of traffic flows east on Flatbush Avenue, headed to the Manhattan Bridge. Downtown Brooklyn skyscrapers glisten in the early light. Construction workers, many of whom are coming back to work, trudge in their orange vests and helmets. Then you realize how many wear masks, how they have to line up outside McDonald’s for their crappy egg sandwiches and coffee. The homeless folks still sleep in the subway entrance The Kid and I use. But even though it’s after 7 a.m. on a weekday, no school children pour out on their way to Brooklyn Tech, Bishop Loughlin High. Signs in the windows often refer to pre-quarantine times, when the return of a chicken sandwich seemed like news.
I come home, check my mailbox: empty. I used to at least get flyers from theatres, museums, arts organizations, realtors. Those have stopped. Just another CoronaWorld vacancy.
(New York state numbers on Tuesday: 295,106 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 1.1 percent; 335 dead, to a total of 17,638, up 1.9 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,865, to a total of 52,179, up 3.7 percent.)
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