Love in the Time of Covid19

Los Angeles, California

The plan was that Joel would get tested for Covid19 on the first day of his vacation. He had been tested once before at a drive-through site, scheduled the night before for the following morning, after someone at his work had tested positive. That was easily set up as he is an essential services worker and that skips you to the front of the line. Or did. Early in the week before the 4th of July holiday weekend, he attempted to set up a test at the same site. It was two days before his vacation was to start, and the site was unavailable to him. We both tried the next day. No luck.

Joel's vacation began as we both continued to try to get him scheduled for a test. We started putting in symptoms like coughing. That was honest, as he is what I would call a 'light' smoker. He never smokes in front of me but, as he says, it is his only vice as he doesn't drink and is vehemently anti-drug. Even now-legal drugs. Vehemently. Anti. Anyway, coughing didn't do the trick. By the end of the week, we were adding symptoms left and right out of desperation, as well as indignation that he couldn't get the test based on his being in a high-risk, essential services industry with co-workers testing positive all around him. It seemed that with the holiday falling on a Friday, they were evidently scheduling even less tests. Finally, on Sunday night, I was able to get him scheduled for a test on Tuesday morning. That was day seven of his nine-day vacay. On Thursday morning, he asked me if I had checked the email address that we share to see if the results had come in. They hadn't. It was his last day of vacation. On Thursday evening we spoke on the phone, signing off after he said that he would text me at bedtime, as he always does. I checked the email at 8:15. His test results were negative. They had been sent at 7:47. I woke him up when I called to tell him. What do you want to do? he asked. What do YOU want to do? I replied.

He got to my house at 9:15 and stayed until 11:30. There was music. There was tequila. There was barefoot dancing. I had only seen him twice since February and we packed everything that was supposed to happen during the previous week into those two hours.

I was going to call this post: Covid Booty Call, thinking that would be a humorous title, and don't we need more humor right now? But I am intimately aware of the hardship in being in relationships, whether of a romantic, friendship, or family nature, during this awful time that requires having to stay apart. It's just plain damn hard and unfair. I feel it with all of my friends, and acutely with Joel. I envy my married friends, and believe me, that's not something I generally do. I keep thinking and saying to people that this isn't forever. Truthfully, I expect we might be about a third of the way through it at our current five-month marker. Can I muddle through another ten months? Yes, I can. But it gets harder as time passes.

I have not read Love in the Time of Cholera, though I have read another novel by Márquez. Maybe I will read it sometime during the next ten months. If I was really ambitious, I would study Spanish! So I could read it in Spanish! Oh, who am I kidding? I'll be lucky to get my garage cleaned out during the next ten months, much less learn a language that has eluded me for a decade and a half. Joel did promise to help me with the garage when he is next on vacation. And, believe me, we will be ON TOP of this testing thing when that next occurs. Until then, I am resigned to endure another hundred days of solitude. As Pepe LePew would say: Le sigh... Hug someone safely. Do it for me. And thank you for reading my blog.

Color of a Cloudy Day

Los Angeles, California

I have a thing about dates. Throw a date at me, and I can, most likely, come up with something that happened on that date, of an either historical or personal nature. My dad was a history buff and he had an uncanny ability to quote dates of historical events often while we were all together at the family dinner table. My memory with dates runs a bit differently, because personal events get entwined with the historical ones. When someone mentioned a mutual friend's birthday recently, I remarked that it occurs on the same day as the Lincoln assassination and the sinking of the Titanic. Don't bother fact-checking. The precipitation of both events happened on the 14th. The death/sinking didn't occur until the following morning, April 15th, which is also, of course, Tax Day!

I'm pretty good with movies and songs. I can generally get to within a year and usually right on the mark. Many have asked how I can do that, and the answer is: I don't know. Throw any late 20th century year at me, and I can tell you a few things about that year. These things might have no import to you. They might be the year of my first kiss or my first whatever. But you will learn that I have decades of at-a-glance calendars swimming around in my head. I sometimes surprise people by displaying this, but, really, what is this ability worth? In fact, I would be just as happy to forget at least half of what I remember.

My mom passed away six years ago today. It was a good passing, in that it was peaceful. It was not-so-good in that she and I had been longing, in fact praying, for it to occur. Her last years were not good ones. And the last one was truly dreadful. As I wrote recently, she would have been 100 this year, and lived past her 94th birthday. She was in hospice the last five days of her life, and I had spent the final day with her. After the hospice nurse told me that I should go home, that she was not going to die that night, I left. I drove home at 9:30 and got the call at 10:00. We all agreed that she was waiting for me to leave.

My mother never had to provide care for either of her parents nor my dad. I had to provide care for her for almost five years: for her health; for her finances; for her living situation. My sister opted out, after having dealt with her husband's illness and death shortly before our mom's situation became apparent. She was done. So it all fell to me. If I had it to do over again, I would have done it better. But like so many things that we need to deal with in our lives, I had to learn as I went. And I did learn a lot. I also got a lot of help. Tom helped; my mom's doctor helped tremendously, and my friends offered much-needed support in the form of shoulders and ears. And I was lucky to find two of the kindest women, both Israeli, who maintained kosher board and care homes. And in one of those homes, my Presbyterian mother lived and then died.

The morning after was a cloudy July day, rare for Los Angeles. I listened to rather elegaic music and did some baking. I felt sad. But I also felt relieved. And there is no shame in feeling relief at the death of someone whose life has become a burden to themselves. A friend remarked, at the time, that I didn't seem to grieve for my mom. But, the truth is, I already had. While she still knew who she was and who I was, and still remarked at the smallness of my hand as she held it, she was barely there. A wisp at the end.

Today is also a cloudy day. I have all the doors open, and am at home, hobbled by the continuing threat of Covid19. But I'm ok with it today. It gives me the time and solitude to think about what happened on this date which I will always remember. To think about my mom. My sister once said that she never wanted to remember death dates; that she thought it was morbid to do so. But dates offer us a commemorative opportunity to think about our past, our history, and those we have loved. And to remember a cloudy day in the past that was filled with music, sadness, and relief; comprehending that at some time in the future, these days of frustration and trepidation will also be recalled as a time in the past. Someday, this year, 2020, will be remembered as a difficult time that we moved through, and we may come think of this time in the colors of these cloudy days. Thank you for reading my blog.

Getting Closer to the Ground

Los Angeles, California (Yep. Still.)

I was a figure skater who couldn't master the sit spin. A gymnast who couldn't do the splits. A dancer who could not get my chest to the floor in a straddle stretch. Until now. Ok, not really. I am still not flat to the floor. But I am getting closer. Note: A straddle stretch is a position where you sit on the floor with legs in a wide V and stretch your upper torso towards the floor in front of you. In case you didn't know... Not that it's important to know this.

Why this could possibly matter in the middle of a pandemic is a good question. My fairly-new friend, Beth2 (number-named by me because I also have a Beth1, and an ex-Beth), recently commented that I was "doing the most while at home" of anyone she knows. I doubt that. I think we are all finding our way through these times as we do without company and the comfort of most of the components of our pre-pandemic daily lives. When we first went into lockdown, I immediately drew up a schedule. I thought I would be doing pilates several days a week and subscribed to an online pilates site. I was cleaning my own house for ten weeks, until Ana returned to see what a mess I had made of it. Seriously, housecleaning is a skill and if you haven't done it for awhile, you forget products/techniques, as well as how much effort is required. In addition to the pilates and housecleaning, I intended to devote entire days to writing, as that is something that has generally given me a needed, calming focus. I also toyed with the idea of finally reading Ulysses.

Instead, my life shortly became about hard workouts, long telephone and Facetime conversations, cooking, drinking, watching too much CNN and cleaning out closets. None of this was on that initial schedule, but some of it has worked out for me. Not that I am breezing through this time. At night, I fall into restless sleep after the bubbling up of the bleak and anxious thoughts I kept at bay during the day. And I wake up every morning with some resignation to visualize another page flying off the calendar, as in those old movie montages. I want to see enough pages flit by that the summer passes. I am taking it a season at a time, and trying not to reflect on its aspect of wishing my life away.

The positives have been about weaning myself off of CNN (which hasn't diminished romantic fantasies about Sanjay Gupta), curtailing the scotch, and getting my nose closer and closer to the floor in that straddle stretch. Many of my closets are impressively organized. And I am getting to know new friends better through email correspondence, or Facetime happy hours. I am continuing to connect with old friends through daily texts, or frequent long telephone conversations. And I am back here, writing again.

Life has changed for everyone. And while we have a choice as to how to spend this time, it can be a circuitous route to figure out what really works for each of us. I don't feel like I have filled my time especially well. Rather, I feel I have found a way to fill it in a necessarily productive manner. If I had vegged out on multiple cable TV series, I would simply not have survived. But then, even in the best of times, I have never been a binge-watcher of anything, despite the previous post, Bounce, where I described bouncing back and forth between two series. I tend to utilize those marathons to keep me company while I attend to projects. Since I have replaced CNN as my go-to, when I actually do sit down to watch something, I choose old movies, or reruns of a couple of old TV shows, where I can find some wit. I do better with half-hour episodes, as I have a hard time staying put for much longer than that. But I have always been like that, so the pandemic can't be blamed.

In addition to learning more about the lives of new and old friends, I have learned a lot about myself through this. I have learned that I can sometimes drag myself into my designated space for a workout, confident that I will not have the energy to warm up, much less do 45 minutes of aerobics and an additional 30-40 of weight and floor work. But then I surprise myself by pushing the aerobics to 50 minutes and adding additional weight to my upper body workout. I have learned that eliminating scotch (tequila/wine/IPA) from my weekday nights was ridiculously easy. I have learned that I still hate tofu, kale, and any product referred to as milk that didn't come from a cow -- but that is another post altogether.

So, if we are only halfway through this, God willing, I will learn a lot more about myself and about my friends and about the world out there. And maybe just maybe, for the first time in my life, I will get my face down to the floor in that straddle stretch. I don't think of this as a noble goal. I mean, I could have aspired to learn a language. Then again, is it any less noble than baking sourdough bread, I ask myself..? Something to ponder in the calm of that ever-extending stretch, as those calendar pages continue to whiz by. Thank you for reading my blog.