A fence along Brooklyn's Caton Avenue makes even flowers seem self-quarantined.
PUBLISHED IN RUBBERTOP REVIEW
The bedroom door shuts me in, not out. Here I’ll write for as long as I want on my cellphone. It was hard to compose or revise once the pandemic made family togetherness an all-day affair and limited laptop use to what my wife’s job requires. Sharon and I have decades of service in high schools with her social work and my teaching history until June when I retired.
Crafting essays or nursing a manuscript took much of my days from then on. Conversing with Katy, our daughter home from college, and romping outside with our rescue dog brought further pleasure on weekdays until Sharon returned and we “caught up” over afternoon coffee.
On Wednesdays I helped cook for and serve 300 CHIPS soup kitchen guests, earning joyous exhaustion. Attending lectures at St. Joseph’s College, the Brooklyn Historical Society and Fraunces Tavern Museum replaced evening lesson planning, and I published a few book reviews. The crisis shattered a fulfilling routine though I’m fortunate as the world walks its life or death line.
Envelope, napkin and legal pad scribblings surround me on the bed’s edge. An open window brings enticing fresh air. Seeing friends outside on the sidewalk would inspire but for that I camp out in the living room.
I view brick walls back here but I’m grateful to be alive. Sharon’s uncle has died from a previous illness; injuries that a car collision inflicted killed our 89 year old soup kitchen coordinator.
Objects piled beneath the bedroom window point out I’m old: high school yearbooks, Katy’s framed childhood portrait, the first piece our son Sam published in Penn State’s campus newspaper, an autographed picture from George McGovern for serving on his 1980 South Dakota senate campaign, my hockey scrapbook of ticket stubs, programs and player cards. A lifetime’s artifacts lend comfort as I warm up to write.
Sharon and I in Prospect Park muse that a silver lining lies in the pandemic’s having launched in spring. Early buds renew trees and spirits. We greet sparrows skittering across sidewalks. We marvel at squirrels’ agility; they in a flash attach themselves to tree trunks and surge five stories high!
Facemask breath fogs my glasses, blending magnolia and dogwood hues as if by a French impressionist. “Perhaps Monet was nearsighted, maybe that was his secret,” my beloved observes.
Greeting joggers, talkers, cellphone scanners, dog walkers, bench sitters, bikers and tai chi practitioners builds community, a band-aid for loneliness and isolation. After brief but warm exchanges Sharon and I head home, mindful that people with nowhere to go can’t “shelter in place.”
3,283,000 people lost jobs last week, the New York Times told us, in what Washington insiders
call “the greatest country in the history of the world.” Homeless populations already immense as I’ve
seen in Seattle and Detroit, Baltimore and New York, will become catastrophic.
“Coronavirus Update” emails warn of food emergencies while candidates for public office selfishly seek
funds that could send ventilators and protective equipment to hospitals. The “urgent deadline in Kentucky,” “chance to flip a seat in Maine” and “need to build momentum in South Carolina” do not move
me. The system’s greed enrages.
May empathy replace the arrogance of power.
Business Insider credits 11 prominent Americans including Bill Gates with unheeded pandemic warnings. Why didn’t they pool resources for full-page newspaper ads? Clamor at the White House gates? Cry out from the galleries during House and Senate sessions?
They’ve left us grasping at straws, infatuated with Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose able role is what we
have a right to expect.
Rhetoric abounds. Congressmen Max Rose and Greg Meeks on MSNBC hail doctors and nurses facing the virus with handkerchiefs and bandanas as “front line soldiers in our war against an invisible enemy” but do not aid them. God bless those heroes and heroines, but it otherwise seems we’re alone.
Young parents’ letter in our brick building’s lobby offers elders help with grocery, mail or laundry
chores. A teenage son and his mother across the street shout a similar offer that I by reflex decline. I’ve since reconsidered.
My dad taught me to solve my own problems in childhood; as a teen I was eager to prove my potential. I felt proud at 14 as a political club’s youngest voting member, at 17 the youngest of 43 on a college freshman dorm floor, at 23 a legislative aide in Washington.
At 67 I carry on as if young but realize I’ve been in denial. I took precautions as the pandemic began but my weak immune system that lets colds linger till a potential bronchitis concerns me.
This afternoon I felt sweaty but not from fever. I coughed but it wasn’t the virus. “You’re bad at
asking for help,” Katy noted, provoking anxiety.
I bow to her wisdom as the mirror shows snow-colored hair.