#MOC-19: One of Two

Last Saturday I had the first of two vaccinations against COVID-19, courtesy of Moderna and the National Guard. Every day since I’ve received a text from the Centers for Disease Control, asking me to check in and tell them how I’m feeling.

When I follow the daily link they send, I’m greeted by three emoji: a green smiley to tell them I’m fine, a yellow dude looking mildly disgruntled, and a red face that’s definitely seen happier days. After choosing an expression for the day, I answer several questions. Are there symptoms I may be exhibiting that are a side-effect of the vaccination—pain at the injection site, chills or a fever, nausea, vomiting, or bodily aches and pains? Are the side effects interfering with my ability to carry on? Is there anything else I’d like to tell the CDC about my condition?

So far I’ve told them I’m feeling good. My shoulder ached the day of the vaccination and one day after, but at most it was a mild discomfort. I didn’t have any issues sleeping on that side. I really only noticed when I poked myself. But while it’s been all green smiley faces for the CDC, ever since Saturday I’ve been asking myself the same question: how am I feeling about all this?

I’m not coming up with any concrete answers.

For the last three months, most of my vaccination energies have centered around my elderly father. Connecticut might have been doing a good job of getting vaccines into arms since the first doses arrived in mid-December, but Virginia’s strategy has been decentralized and opaque. Cities and counties across the state were in different phases of vaccination. I was constantly baffled whether my dad was yet eligible, or when he should qualify, or even what agency might be able to tell him when he would be. In mid-January, Connecticut was in the top three or four states leading the way in vaccinations; Virginia was solidly third from the bottom.

I did what I could. I read to my dad over the phone the information I could find online. From r/RVA I gleaned the names of various databases local agencies that were collecting the names and numbers of the elderly and infirm, to be notified if and when they could register for an appointment. I’d go online to those databases, sign up in his name, and tell him immediately after so that he’d be on alert if they called. He had been given a number from his local doctor to call so that he could enroll for a vaccination with his local health care provider—but the number was in Ohio, and twice the automated call distributor kept him on the line for close to an hour without ever sending him to an actual live person.

At one point in January, my dad’s friends were relying on shady deals to get their injections. One of his colleagues had a daughter who heard through the grapevine that a Jewish community clinic had extra doses left over one afternoon; the daughter marched into the clinic and asked for the vaccine for herself and her husband, and then their two children. After the four had gotten their first shots, only then did the daughter ask if there were doses enough left for her eighty-odd-year-old parents. The retired professor with whom my dad used to work hopped in the car with his wife and managed to get injected within about fifteen minutes. Afterward, he asked if there was one more dose left over for my father—but no. He and his wife had gotten the last two.

Whenever I talked to my father on the phone, I could hear his rising frustration at the numbers of his friends who were getting inoculated thanks to knowing someone who knew someone who had a connection somewhere, or who had simply lucked out by calling the right place out of many places at the exact right time. But then, at the beginning of February, he called me to say that I could stop worrying. He’d gotten his first Pfizer vaccination. One of the several databases in which we’d enrolled him had suddenly given him a call and told him to show up at the racetrack at the old state fairgrounds. A friend drove him. Whatever organization was spearheading the drive provided golf cart transportation for him, so that he didn’t have to walk or stand for very long. From the time he arrived to the time he was taken back to his friend’s car, he said, was all of twenty minutes.

At the time I felt immense relief. True, it was only the first of two vaccinations, but the news had been reporting that the Pfizer vaccine offered a substantial degree of protection in one dose. Knowing he had some protection, and knowing he had an appointment for the final inoculation in March, felt like a big step in the right direction.

I was prepared to be patient for myself. My time would come. I didn’t know when, but I felt certain it would. In January, my physician seemed fairly positive that most people in the area could be vaccinated by May, but he had no solid information on when people my age, at my level of health, might be eligible. I put it out of my mind and went back to the same routine: staying at home day after day, exercising outdoors when the weather permitted, planning meals, and trying to figure out what to stream in the evenings. It had worked for a year. It could work for a few months more.

Everything was upended toward the end of February, though, when Connecticut announced it was breaking from CDC recommendations and inoculating citizens by age rather than priority groups. My eligibility rocketed from maybe by May to March first—a mere week away. I greeted the news with excitement: I had an actual timeline to look forward to. I’d been primed by my dad’s experience to expect nothing but bureaucracy in the vaccination search, sure, but fighting red tape feel a lot better than sitting and waiting. I’ve done too much sitting and waiting, both, over the past twelve months.

I developed a strategy. Our state representative weekly sent out emails with links to the major routes by which his constituents could sign up for vaccinations. I bookmarked them all. I’d stay up late on Sunday night, February twenty-eighth, I reasoned, and check all the sites after midnight, when the calendar flipped to March first. Maybe I’d get something, maybe I wouldn’t. But at least I’d have the satisfaction of having tried.

Sunday rolled around. I had my evening plans in place—dinner, the Golden Globes, then killing some time until midnight and my assault on the various websites I had bookmarked. I was considering a nap when my mail application chimed at me.

The CDC databases indicated I was now eligible for a vaccination in my area, the email informed me. Would I like to sign up for an appointment? A profile in the CDC Vaccine Administration Management System had already been created in my name, and if I would take a moment to verify my information, I could get the process started.

My initial reaction to the missive was skepticism. I was getting an email directly from the CDC? Sure, Jan. More likely it was some scammer attempting to get my social security number, right? When I checked the email’s full header information, though, it seemed valid enough. It wasn’t a spoofed address, at least. The link in the message led to a genuine government site. When I went upstairs to ask Craig if he’d received anything similar, though, he hadn’t. What’s more, he seemed to think I was playing some kind of practical joke, just by asking.

I returned to my laptop, thought about it a while, and then decided, what the hell. Turned out the whole thing was legit. The CDC had a profile with my name and address and email all ready. All I had to do was provide my cell number and ask for notifications to be sent via text instead of email. A couple of screens later, I was presented with a list of all the vaccination sites in a ten, twenty, or even one hundred mile radius, and the opportunity to schedule a first vaccination at any of the sites with available appointments.

None of the sites had available appointments.

Still. I was one step closer than I had been a few minutes before. My dad certainly never had it this easy. All through the evening I kept checking on the VAMS site to make sure it was real. We had dinner. We watched the Golden Globes. I played Minecraft after the final award, killing time to midnight. At 12:02 a.m. I logged back onto VAMS. For one of the sites nearest me, the closed Lord & Taylor in Stamford, dozens of slots had opened up for Saturday, the sixth. A couple of mouse clicks was all it took to claim a spot at nine-thirty in the morning. The site issued me a QR code to take with me that the site could scan to connect me to my information online. I had a vaccination appointment.

I went to bed that night feeling more guilty than exhilarated. The experience had been so easy for me. I hadn’t had to scrabble or negotiate, like my dad. At no point had I registered with anything—why I got in the fast lane with the CDC is still a mystery. Unlike Craig, who gave up on the other web sites when none of them opened up after midnight, I actually had a solid date. It felt a little like as the Titanic sank, I was being escorted to a well-appointed solo lifeboat, while it was every man for himself among the rest of the passengers. (The guilt lifted a little the next morning, when Craig walked into a Stamford clinic reportedly giving vaccines to walk-in patients, and he was given an appointment for only a few days after mine.)

Saturday we pulled into the Lord & Taylor parking lot shortly after nine. The National Guard ran the operation. Men and women in camo fatigues with iPads hanging from their necks directed cars into the various lanes snaking around the lot’s perimeter—first two lanes, then five, then right before to the drive-through vaccination stations, closer to ten. While Craig drove, I sat in the back seat so that the Guard could scan my QR code and check my driver’s license. Eventually a cheerful Guard approached the car and spoke to me through the rear window. He verified my name and birth date, filled out a vaccination record for me to take home, and told me he was going to ready the syringe. I had the short sleeve of my t-shirt rolled up when he returned. I felt the cold daub of alcohol, followed by the Guardsman’s gloved fingers he pinched my bicep for the injection.

Is it possible to attach too much importance to that moment the needle pierced my skin? In some ways, the entire year had been leading up to this very juncture between vulnerability and protection. Then again, how can a year’s worth of fear and worry, twelve months of isolation and hope and of mind-deadening sameness, be borne on the strength of a needle with a width measured in mere fractions of a millimeter? I’d spent the entire crawl through the Lord & Taylor parking lot fretting that I might do something embarrassing when my turn arrived. That I might sob unexpectedly. Not from the needle—at this point in my life I’m used to being jabbed and prodded by doctors. I worried I might burst into tears from the relief, from the overwhelming emotion of it all.

But when the time came, I felt nothing. A small prick, a short wait further down the lot to see if I went into anaphylactic shock, and I was on my merry way. When I got home, I got a text from the CDC. Would I like to make the appointment for my second vaccine?

2.9 million people in the U.S. received vaccinations this past Saturday—a record day for the pandemic. I was one. I was not, however, one of the people on my social media feeds posting that I sobbed when it happened, or that I was overcome with emotion on the trip there. Perhaps I’ll feel something next month, when I show up in the Lord & Taylor parking lot for my second and final vaccination, new QR code at the ready. Maybe I’ll cascade into uncontrolled emotion when finally, one day in the not-too-distant future, I gather with others. When I wave at someone I haven’t seen since before the pandemic, or when I hug a dear friend whose presence has been reduced to an occasional post on social media or a quick text. Maybe it will be when I’m surrounded by the sound of strangers’ voices, by song and live celebration. That moment of release will come. It is more, though, than can be delivered by a single syringe and a friendly, efficient jab.

Until then, I’ll continue clicking on the smiling emoji the CDC offers up every day. I’m grateful to have received a vaccination. I’m lucky to have gotten it so quickly and easily. I’m good. Truly. I’m feeling good.

#MOC-19: Pandemic Cooking with My Father

I grew up cooking for my parents. I started with scrambled eggs at the age of seven, and was put on regular weekend breakfast duty as soon as I could prove that I wouldn’t set the kitchen ablaze, or burn the food. When I joined the Cub Scouts, I learned to make such delicacies as campfire hobo stew—chunks of meat and vegetables seasoned with salt and pepper and Worcester sauce, wrapped in aluminum foil, and tossed over an open flame. At the age of 9 when my parents were out, I attempted my first recipe from the checkered Betty Crocker cookbook—chocolate eclairs. They looked and tasted like eclairs. Pretty damned good eclairs, in fact. My ambitions betrayed me into service, however; since I could follow a recipe, I subsequently was assigned dinner duty for the two or three nights a week my parents both had afternoon classes to teach.

My juvenile culinary repertoire wasn’t large. I could form and broil hamburger patties, or pull off a variety of dishes involving ground beef and a box of Hamburger Helper or Rice-a-Roni (I still make porcupine meatballs using Rice-a-Roni to this day). I could bread chicken with cornflakes and seasoning and parmesan cheese from a shaker and set it to bake, and I could replicate a creation of my mom’s she called Chicken with Celery Soup, a casserole that required several cans from Campbell, two cups of Minute Rice, and an iron-clad stomach to keep it down. I could bread cubed steaks and fry them in oil, and serve them with mashed potatoes and grilled onions. By the time I was ten, I knew how to plan a meal and accompany it with starches and vegetables. I knew to remember to make rolls. My father insisted that it wasn’t a meal without a roll.

Rice-a-Roni meatballs aside, over the decades since I’ve left home I’ve become a much better cook. I enjoy trying new dishes and techniques. I scorn the boxes and mixes that defined my childhood. I make quarts of beans to freeze and use as sides or in other dishes; I’ve made my own jams and jellies. For years I had my own little kefir production facility. I’m proud that one of my skills is to keep a mental inventory of our pantry so that not only do I know at any given time what needs to be restocked, but if the week’s plans change, I can improvise meals on the spot. I make up many of my own recipes, and liberally improvise on others.

In October I left for an unprecedented five-week stay in Virginia, to take care of my father as he underwent radiation therapy for prostate cancer. In normal circumstances I wouldn’t necessarily have immured myself for so long; I could have arranged for drivers to take him to his morning appointments and spent a week here and there checking in. The pandemic’s tendency to throw the best-laid plans into disarray, however, meant that exposing my elderly dad to random Uber drivers, or having to venture out for his medicines, wouldn’t be a great idea.

My own doctor had told me in the middle of summer that given the situation with COVID-19, it would be best to bubble myself with my dad for an uninterrupted chunk, rather than travel back and forth or pass off the responsibility with my sister, week by week. I knew for some time that I’d have to be away from home for weeks  or months. I knew, too, that I’d have to be the caregiver in a number of ways.

I confess to being guilty of foolishness: I indulged in sentimental reveries about cooking for my father. Usually when I visit we rely on restaurants for meals. Those visits are a mere handful of days, however, and this trip to Virginia was to last several weeks. Preparing meals is a form of nurture, for me, and I couldn’t think of any better way to shepherd my dad through his weeks of radiation therapy than giving him a nourishing, warm dinner to enjoy every night. And leftovers! I’d make dishes that yielded bountiful leftovers that he could eat for his lunches, or freeze to use as dinners after I’d gone.

I prepared for the trip by packing some things I might need to create a variety of meals. A large sheet pan. A cutting board. My rice cooker. A heavy cast-iron Dutch oven. Tumeric. Basil. Adobo seasoning. At the last minute, Craig suggested I take the Instant Pot, since I make a lot of meals in that. With all my recipes in the cloud at my fingertips, I departed for Virginia, my mind alight with rosy visions of sliding steaming bowls of hearty fare onto one of my dad’s plastic placemats of Gettysburg or Harper’s Ferry or some other laminated memorial of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century American history, whereupon I would bask in the glow of a good deed well done.

My first full day in Richmond, after my dad’s treatment was done in the morning, I sat down with him back at his house and explained that we’d do something similar to what I’d been doing at home, all during the pandemic: we’d cook our own meals six days out of the week, and do takeout on Friday nights, to celebrate another week down of radiation sessions. He seemed agreeable, so we sat down to plan meals and make a list. “Is there anything,” I asked, “other than the two dishes you know I will refuse to make, that you would enjoy for dinner this week?”

“Liver and onions?” he said, with cunning.

I recognized the strategy. By naming something he loves, but knows to which I and any other sane person would object, he was hoping to get some bargaining leverage. “Is there anything,” I repeated, keeping my voice level, “other than the three dishes you know I will refuse to make, that you’d enjoy for dinners this week that we both would eat?”

“What are the other two dinners you won’t make?”

“You know what they are.”

“Meat pie?”

I nodded. He was correct. Briceland Meat Pie is a terrible heirloom recipe passed down within the family for generations that, if I have anything to do with it, will die out for good in my own. It’s a labor-intensive dish with absolutely no payoff whatsoever in taste. My mother would joylessly make it by cooking stew beef and potatoes in a rickety, hissing old pressure cooker; the mixture, which was completely unseasoned—not even with salt or pepper—would be spread atop one layer of homemade pie crust in a rectangular glass dish, then covered with another layer of pie crust, and baked. The resulting pie was basically a particularly bland pasty. Instead of eating it crispy out of the oven, however, each slice is placed into a bowl and then drowned with the liquid left in the pressure cooker. The jus, as it is grandly called, is gray and flavorless and tastes like dirty laundry water.

Again, I must emphasize that there is absolutely no seasoning in the recipe. The jus picks up all of the grease and none of the flavor of the beef. Once doused with hot scummy water, the pie crust becomes gummy. The whole thing is a mess. My father, however, loves Briceland Meat Pie. My mom would occasionally cave in and cook it for him because she was at times a good sport, but she and I would pick at it with our spoons and cast each other sympathetic glances across the kitchen table while he would tuck in with gusto.

“Correct,” I said. “I will never, ever make meat pie for you.”

My father paused, as if considering playing the Sick Old Man With Cancer card. Eventually he recollected how cold and hard-hearted I am when it comes to Briceland Meat Pie, however, and asked, “What’s the second dish?”

“You know what it is.”

“Brunswick stew?”

Yes. Brunswick stew. I’m always surprised when I have to explain Brunswick stew to anyone who didn’t grow up with it. In Virginia, it’s ubiquitous; they even serve the damned stuff at all the local Arby’s. Basically the dish is a chicken stew in a tomato base with beans loaded with other vegetables—but there I go making it sound almost edible. My father loves Brunswick stew, I suspect, because it reminds him of his college days at William and Mary, when occasionally he’d escape the campus and grab a dinner at Chowning’s in Colonial Williamsburg. I too attended William and Mary, but I have no fond memories of that vile mixture of stringy chicken, overcooked corn, mushy green beans, and horrifying nuggets of my least-favorite vegetables, lima beans and okra. As a kid I would press my spoon onto the mess and siphon the broth into the basin, leaving all the solid ingredients in the bottom of the bowl. Inevitably, I’d be ordered to finish it all, and I’d have to hold my nose and shovel unappetizing spoonfuls down my throat. To this day I can’t even think about Brunswick stew without a queasy stomach.

“Anything other than those. Do you have ideas?” I asked.

My dad’s ideas consisted of eking meals out of pre-cooked foods in his fridge. He had slices of Little Caesar’s pizza that were only a week and a half old that we could use for a meal. There were some frozen cooked hamburgers we could put on buns. He had a quarter of a rotisserie chicken breast from Food Lion we could divide and eat with, oh, he didn’t know. Potato chips?

“Never mind,” I told him. “I’ll take care of it.”

So I planned out a week’s worth of meals and went shopping. The next night I set down before him a bowl with one of my favorite colder-weather meals. “What is it?” he asked.

“It’s a cheese tortellini and Italian sausage soup,” I told him.

He sniffed at it. “Where’s the sandwich?”

“Sandwich? What sandwich?”

“Isn’t there a sandwich with it?”

“Why the hell would there be a sandwich?” I wanted to know.

“Soup needs a sandwich.”

“This isn’t broth,” I said, appalled. “It’s a hearty meal. It has cheese-filled tortellini and big chunks of Italian sausage. The soup part is more of an afterthought, if anything. This soup doesn’t need a sandwich.”

“Well.” He wrinkled his nose. “I always get a sandwich with my soup.”

The soup was delicious. It always is. But my dad spent the meal scooping up bits in his spoon, then asking, “What’s this?”

“It’s a piece of tomato,” I’d say.

“What’s this?”

“A sliver of onion.”

“What about this?”

“It’s a tortellini,” I’d growl, beginning to lose patience.

“What’s a tortellini?”

He finished his portion—mostly—but didn’t seem enthusiastic. “I had planned to have the leftovers tomorrow,” I said, as I collected the dishes, “but seeing that you didn’t like it that much….”

“I don’t eat leftovers the day after I’ve had a meal,” he announced.

I was shocked. Leftovers are the best part of cooking a big meal. Leftovers are the virtuous reward one reaps from cooking well. I’ll work hard on a more complicated meal solely to know that I can have even more of it the following night without any more exertion than it takes to reheat the stuff. What kind of crazy person doesn’t look forward to leftovers the next day? “How about the day after?” I said, modulating my voice to a level that definitely didn’t sound like a screech.

He shrugged. “I still think that if you’re going to do soup, you should offer a sandwich.”

So I learned several things from that first meal. First: I wasn’t serving soup any longer, because my father’s idea of a sandwich consists of two slices of white bread, mayonnaise, and a couple of wafers of that dreadful pressed-meat concoction that passes as a cold cut in his mind, and I’m sorry, but I’m prideful enough that that mess is not going to make it into one of my dinners. Second: I wasn’t going to be able to craft any dinners that resulted in significant amounts of leftovers, because my dad would turn up his nose at them.

Third, as I discovered when I attempted to make a sheet-pan meal, I couldn’t make anything that required baking or broiling, as the oven has a tendency to stop working without warning—so a whole another avenue of meal preparation closed to me.

Fourth, as I found out the next day after my dad had a painful night peeing, and as confirmed by his doctor, meals with tomato were off the menu entirely. Thanks to the radiation, the acidity of tomatoes irritated his urinary tract. Dishes with tomato—I mean, that’s half my repertoire right there. Suddenly I had to rethink everything.

I spent the following weeks grimly trying to imagine dishes that weren’t too weird or spicy, didn’t produce a copious amount of food, didn’t have tomatoes, and weren’t soup. (A pity. I make some damned good soups.) Any Norman Rockwell fantasies I harbored about steaming plates of savory homemade viands flew out the window, substituted by the grim reality of what my dad’s limited palate would accept, and what his cooker could produce. So I bought ham steaks and fried them in a pan and served them with Stove Top stuffing and green beans. I’d make penne (“What’s a pay-nay?”) with pesto (“What’s in pesto? Where on a pine does a pine nut grow?”) and frozen turkey meatballs and a salad and call it a day. I’d make fried rice with the inevitable ham steaks leftovers my father left on his plate.

One time I made Salisbury steaks in the instant pot in an attempt to justify having lugged it all the way down from Connecticut. Salisbury steaks and mashed potatoes—the staple of the classic TV dinner—should be right up my dad’s alley, right? They were delicious as all the times I’ve made them, but my father picked at his and asked for a catalog of every ingredient. Even though I halved the recipe, there were two steaks remaining that I suggested putting into containers with extra potatoes that he could freeze and heat up as small meals after I’d gone.

“No,” he said. “I’ll take care of the leftovers.”

Three days later, he announced that he’d eaten one of the patties. “Oh, you warmed it up with potatoes in the microwave?” I wanted to know.

No. He hadn’t. “I picked out the meat part and scraped off the gravy, and then I put it into a bun,” he told me.

“So you scraped off the delicious homemade mushroom gravy,” I sighed, “and turned the Salisbury steak into a hamburger.”

“I put a slice of cheese on it,” he offered, as if that made anything better.

Most of the meals I ended up throwing together during the rest of the long visit are what I think of as bottom-tier dinners. The kind of things I’ll toss onto the table when I’m tired and not totally willing to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Quesadillas with ground beef and olives. More pasta with sauce from a jar. Quesadillas with chopped chicken and olives.

Weirdly, the only two meals my father actually said he enjoyed were both improvised. I’ll occasionally make a dish I call Chicken with Hummus, in which I’ll sauté chunks of chicken breast with onions and snapped green beans and cumin and lemon and other spices. I’ll then serve it atop rice with a helping of hummus on the side. It has no particular recipe and tends to be accommodating to whatever vegetable leftovers I might have in the fridge. My father ate his entire plate and declared it a winner, surprisingly me greatly. (I’d by that point made peace with the notion that, as my mother had for years, I’d have to learn to live without a ‘good dinner!’ or ‘delicious!’ as my reward.)

The dinner he liked the most was probably what I thought was the single worst of my stay. At home I’ll occasionally make bowls similar to those they serve at the Chipotle chain—a bed of brown rice topped with either homemade seasoned black or pinto beans, topped with chopped chicken I’ll season with adobo and cumin and chili powder, then simmer in sofrito. Then I’ll top it with cheese and usually a homemade corn salsa. 

The version I made at my dad’s, thanks to a lack of resources, consisted of white rice, the sofrito chicken, and a warmed-over can of Bush’s Southwestern-style pinto beans, topped with shredded cheddar cheese. The beans were dreadful—mushy and one note, with that note being cayenne pepper. There was no corn salsa.

If I’d never been to Chipotle and someone had told me this was similar to what they’d served, Chipotle would never get my business. But my dad loved the rice bowl. Raved about it. Told his sister about it on the phone the next day while I winced and questioned why I even tried.

I tried, though, because that’s who I am. I tried because cooking for someone is a way I show I care. It’s just that as I had my option whittled down for me, I might have stopped trying quite so hard.

At least at home, I can dive into the leftovers without shame.

#MOC19: On Reading Again

Once a week, my devices present to me a summary of how I’ve spent my screen time for the previous week—how many minutes I’ve spent listening to music, or watching Netflix, or using social media. Reading and Reference always seem to dominate my totals; I suspect if I had a magical app betraying how I’ve occupied all the hours of my entire life, reading would still be right up there at the top. In 2019, according to Goodreads, I was finishing about a book a week for a cumulative total of roughly 16,000 pages…and I thought 2019 was a pretty slow year for reading.

(I’ve just spent a pleasant few minutes off on a tangent, trying to figure out how and why in 2011 I consumed roughly twice as many books and pages as last year. But then I recalled I spent the first half of 2011 on my own in Detroit, not working while I waited for my house to sell so that I could move to Connecticut—and that the second half of the year I had just moved to Connecticut without knowing anyone or having much to do. Plowing through 30,000 pages makes sense in that context. I’m convinced that half of those belonged to the enjoyable, yet interminable, Little Dorrit.)

One might assume in these long days of social isolation because to COVID-19, all of which I’ve spent exclusively within the boundaries of my house for extended periods of time, reading would be the ideal pursuit for enforced leisure. Even writing that sentence, I envision chilly March days under a woolen throw with a book in hand. Or, as the tense early weeks of quarantine extended into warmer weather, languid afternoons on my front porch in the early summer, feet kicked up as I spend hours engrossed in a juicy novel.

And yet, since this virus shut down the world as I know it, I largely haven’t been able to read. Not at all.

Looking at Goodreads again, the site I’ve used for a decade to track and review the books crossing my nightstand, I can see that the year got off to a brisk clip. I very much enjoyed Dorothy Parker’s Complete Broadway: 1918-1923, an endearing, funny, and hefty collection of the acid-tongued writer’s Broadway reviews. I bounced through the third volume of N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Sky trilogy in three days; I read a manual of style, Dreyer’s English, from cover to cover and very much enjoyed its quirky approach to syntax (and appreciated its advice). I zipped through a biography of Elaine Stritch, then another autobiography by artist Peter McGough.

In March, doors began to shut. Businesses closed; what remained of Dorothy Parker’s Broadway shuttered. If I read, it was headlines about spiking death rates, or news stories peddling conflicting advice on how to keep safe during the maelstrom. My poor brain couldn’t take too much of the real world and its horrors, though. It proved easier to find activities that would focus my thoughts on a tiny subset of activity, like maneuvering pixels around the screen in a video game…or shut down my brain entirely, by streaming trashy shows on Netflix.

Reading isn’t as easy as flipping on reality TV and letting it blare away. Reading requires concentration. The pandemic seemed to make concentration impossible. Reading requires imagination, and my imagination was already on overdrive, day in and day out, conjuring nightmare scenarios in which I or people I loved got sick, or ran out of access to foods and medicines or their homes.

Oh, I tried to get into books. I had a biography on Churchill I’d started right before everything shut down. Reading about London in the Blitz, though, seemed too self-indulgently cruel an activity when it felt like a biological Blitz going on around us. I’d received another fantasy from N. K. Jemisin the second week of the shutdown that in better times might’ve taken me a day or two to devour. Engaging and often delightful though it was (and as prescient as it turned out to be, with its alien foe manifesting as an army of Karens weaponizing the NYC police force against its heroes and heroines of color), it took me two months to get through The City We Became. Though the book was good, compelling myself to attempt a page or two at a time left me feeling drained. I took no pleasure in the reading.

After that experience, I stopped trying to read altogether. Weeks passed. And then I remembered Little Women.

I’d read Little Women once in early grade school, liking the adventures of the March sisters very much until the halfway mark when Mr. March returns from the front and Little Women becomes Good Wives. When the escapades became meditations on married life and lectures on anger management, my ten-year-old self checked out. I’d revisited the book in my thirties and enjoyed it quite a bit, but in the years since, my memory of exactly what happens in the narrative had dimmed to the point that if you were to ask me the novel’s plot, I would’ve told you it was a Scarface-like examination of Concord’s underground barter economy and of Amy March, who had established herself tooth and nail as its kingpin by ruthlessly cornering the market in pickled limes. Then [spoiler alert] Beth dies. The end.

I don’t know why the pickled limes made such an impression on me. But over the holidays last year, in a vanished time when people gathered in crowds in dark enclaves to view flickering images on their walls, we saw the Greta Gerwig film of Little Women. I was astonished that the pickled limes were barely mentioned. The first half of the movie resurrected some dormant memories of Alcott’s story, but I found the Good Wives half—the grown-up part I’d pretended wasn’t there in previous readings—almost the more interesting. Sometime around the new year, I downloaded a copy of Little Women to my Kindle and made a resolution to check it out once again in the months to come.

In late June, when the temperatures soared and the afternoons seemed to stretch out along with them, I made some fitful attempts to read again. It had been a long six weeks since I’d finally clawed my way to the finish line of The City We Became. I thought dipping my toes into the new entry of a silly time-travel series I enjoy might rekindle my lifelong love of curling up with a good book. Apparently the book wasn’t good enough. I tried the Churchill biography again, but couldn’t take more than a page at a time without the contradictory pulls of listlessness and restlessness both. Many times I walked to the water’s edge with different new titles. I could never submerge.

Then I returned to Little Women. I lay stretched out on a lounge in the early summer heat, picked up my Kindle, and tapped on the title that had sat there since the holidays. “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” was the first sentence.

And I thought, Girrrrrl, I sure know that feeling. This entire year of 2020 feels like Christmas without any presents. Maybe I could sit a while with this fifteen-year-old life disrupted by a war splitting her country in two.

Alcott’s narrative quickly began working its magic. I zipped through two chapters. Five. Ten. I found myself finishing the book over the course of three lazy afternoons, weeping at Beth’s tender moments, cheering for Jo’s successes, sympathizing with the nuances of Meg’s marital woes, and finding a new appreciation for Amy. It honestly felt like I’d stumbled onto the joy of reading all over again.

Over the last several years I’ve been attempting to achieve a certain balance in my leisure reading habits; I keep an even ratio between novels and non-fiction; I try to intersperse some classics I never attempted along with the genre fiction to which I gravitate most readily. Though from time to time I’ll revisit volumes I’ve known and loved before, in my teens and twenties I was such a heavy re-reader of books I knew and enjoyed—like Little Women, maybe—that I’ve tried ever since to maintain moderation.

Then it occurred to me. Maybe it’s okay for me to take a break for a while from new titles. All of us in the midst of this pandemic face daily uncertainties and novelties. Every day seems to bring some new viral horror story, or an invasion of killer hornets, or a fresh anxiety to conquer. With enough ambiguity around me, did I knowingly need to chart unknown territory in my reading list, too?

Perhaps letting myself bask in the tried and true might be just the prescription I needed. Re-reading a novel isn’t a bad thing: if I’m not finding pleasure in new titles, why not return to the ones I know and love?

That’s why, after bringing to a conclusion my afternoons with the March sisters, I immediately jumped into Charles Dickens. David Copperfield is one of my all-time favorites. It’s the only popular Dickens novel I was never assigned to read during high school, college, or grad school, so I didn’t pick it up until my thirties. The earliest chapters captivated me immediately once again when I picked it up for this re-read. I laughed aloud at the absurdities of Betsey Trotwood. I cheered for loyal Peggotty and her Yarmouth relations who lived in a little land-locked boat. I shivered at the Murdstones, and smiled whenever the coach driver would assert, “Barkis is willin’.” Chapter after chapter I gulped down, delighting in the strokes with which Dickens paints his characters, admiring how even the most secondary among them gets to display moments of tenderness and humanity.

I’d breathlessly devour every chapter, then turn the page to the next. An hour or two would pass before I realized how mesmerized I’d been by the words on the page. Losing myself like that in a good story, reveling in the printed words—I’d feared I’d lost those things for good with the pandemic.

Even now, in the middle of David Copperfield’s adventures, I can’t help but think about what favorites I’ll be reading next, just to relive the glow of excitement they cast upon me years ago. The delightful social absurdities of E. F. Benson? Patrick Dennis’ acerbic satires? A deep delve into the fantasies of Anne McCaffrey? I don’t really know, and it doesn’t much matter. I’m simply thrilled to have recaptured a relish for reading again—and, thanks to Little Women, to have given myself permission to spend the next few months with stories I’ve long loved.





This essay has been written as part of the Mass Observation: COVID-19 writing project. If you'd like to join our volunteer writers, visit our Call for Volunteers at https://bit.ly/3aes2AQ .

#MOC19: One Bad Night

1.
It’s eleven-forty-five on the last Saturday night in March, nineteen days into my isolation. I’ve been lying in my bed for fifteen minutes, trying to will myself into sleep. But something’s isn’t right.

I feel the wrongness at my core, deep in my gut. It begins as a sense of unease—a conviction that my body has gone awry. Yet for the life of me, I can’t pinpoint exactly what. My soles suddenly feel clammy. I ease my feet over the side of the bed and out from under the blankets to give them air. Now my feet are cool, but the rest of me seems to be growing warmer. Do I have a fever?

Even as I allow myself to wonder, my skin flushes all over. My soles are dry, but the sheets are beginning to cling to the rest of my body. I didn’t feel hot when I got into bed. Maybe my fear is what’s making me perspire. Yet is it fear I feel in the pit of my stomach, then? Or is it something more? Something…contagious?

Is this it, then? Is this the day it happens to me? I thought I’d done everything right. I’d washed my hands, I’d kept my distance. I hadn’t congregated, hadn’t mingled. For nineteen days I’ve been nothing but good. And now—?

What in the world is happening to me?


2.
When did I first hear of this disease? I remember sitting alone in the waiting room of my doctor in mid-January, waiting for my six-month check-up, sleepily regretting my choice of the day’s first appointment. When my doctor finally strides in from the hallway, hand outstretched for a shake, I look up from the news story I’ve been reading on my phone. “Have you heard about this virus from that market in China?” I ask, as I slip the device into my overcoat pocket.

“The coronavirus?” he says. Perhaps it’s a doctor’s habit, but he’s always making statements into questions. “You’ve been reading up on that, have you?

“Is this something you need to be worried about?” Infectious disease is his bailiwick, so it makes sense he’d be drafted into action if this virus spread beyond China. I suppose I’m really asking, though, Is this something I need to be worried about?

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he says, as he maneuvers me into the exam room. “You know, I don’t even know how they test for that, does it even say in there?” He explains that there are standard tests for a variety of viruses, but coronaviruses are so different and exotic that he can think of only one hospital on the east coast that maybe would have the equipment to detect it. While he talks, I roll up my sleeves for the blood pressure cuff and open my mouth for his thermometer. “I don’t think it’s anything to worry about right now? But I’ll be keeping an eye on it? But how are you feeling?”

“Great,” I tell him. “I’m feeling great.”


3.
I’m definitely not feeling great. Now it’s after midnight. I’m sweating profusely, but if I don’t move, I can pretend I don’t notice how damp my sheets have become. My feet are now freezing. I pull them back beneath the covers.

Do I have a cough? Am I short of breath? I know the symptoms of COVID-19. My lungs are free of fluid, though, and I can breathe without effort. That’s good, right? That means I’m okay? But this sweat upsets me. I shouldn’t be steaming beneath the blankets like this. The thermostats are programmed to keep the house cooler at night, and my bedroom window is cracked open a few inches for ventilation. On the back of my neck I can feel the cool air from outside. It makes me shiver. Chills—that’s a sign, isn’t it?

Maybe this is it. Dramatic scenes begin to flicker in my head, Me, shivering in bed. Me, coughing and wheezing. Me, wearing an oxygen mask. Me, on a ventilator. I don’t even have a clear picture in my head what a ventilator looks like. But I know they’re scarce, and they’re a last resort. Even the word ventilator terrifies me.

Oh god. I’m starting to sweat even more.


4.
Throughout all of January, the only person concerned with this new virus is the woman who cuts my hair—Melanie, a tiny Latina who never hesitates with her opinions. “I’m turning away anyone with a cough,” she tells me, when I see her a few days after my doctor’s appointment. “You’re not coughing, are you? You better not be coughing.”

“You know the coronavirus isn’t in this country yet,” I say, as she buzzes my head with her clippers.
“You don’t know that!” She stares at me in the mirror and repeats the words. “You don’t know that! I don’t care. If they walk in here and I hear them cough, nuh-uh. Not having it. Someone else can take them.”

She’s laughing when she says the words, but I know she’s serious. I’m laughing, too.

When I return for another trim shortly before my birthday, neither of us are laughing any more. “You know we went to Las Vegas last week,” I say, as I sit down.

“You’re crazy,” she tells me, as she flourishes the apron then fastens it around my neck. “Are you sick? If you’re sick, you’ve got to leave.”

“I’m not sick, I’m not sick. I was careful. I sanitized the heck out of my airplane seats,” I reassure her. “I washed my hands. But you know, we had a layover in Dallas, at O’Hare, on the way out there, for like, four hours. And I was sitting in my seat, watching the TV in one of the lounges, and they said that someone carrying the virus was reported to have passed through O’Hare only the day before…and I thought to myself….”

“You thought to yourself Melanie is right,” she interrupts, lifting the clippers from my scalp.

I nod, and our eyes meet in the mirror. “I thought to myself, Melanie is right.”


5.
Why am I so hot? Is it because I’m lying here after midnight, in the dark, in the quiet, wondering if I have a fever? Will I cool down if I open the window an inch or two more? Worse—what happens if I crack the sill wider and nothing changes?

I’m not a hypochondriac by nature. I don’t balloon colds into life-threatening illness; I don’t experience an itch and investigate WebMD until I’m convinced I have a brain tumor. Ever since this virus, though, I’m constantly on the watch for symptoms. My day’s-end survey consists of a string of self-evaluations: Am I coughing more than normal? Am I unusually short of breath? Am I fatigued? No, am I really fatigued, or am I just everyday-stress-and-strain tired out?

Tonight feels wrong, though. I’d felt fine earlier in the day. My appetite had been healthy. I’d gone for my usual exercise, done nothing out of the ordinary. How suddenly is the coronavirus supposed to hit? All I can think about are the celebrities who’ve been in the hospital, the accounts from the infected of how painful it is for them to breathe, the reports from the medical frontlines of weary doctors and nurses who’ve seen patient after patient flatline.

The longer I lie here, the more difficult it is not to panic. Yet I’m afraid to move. Moving would only confirm how damp I’ve made the sheets. How hot and feverish I really am.

So I lie still, and make mental calculations. How long has it been since my last night out?


6.
It’s the ninth of March. We’ve had these tickets for Company for some time—the new staging, with Katrina Lenk as a female Bobbie and Patti LuPone singing “The Ladies Who Lunch.” Greenwich has already begun to shut down: the schools have closed, my classes have been canceled. I shouldn’t be taking this risk. But c’mon, it’s Patti LuPone. I can’t imagine not going.

I’ve got strategies, of course. On the Metro North train, I wipe down my seat, and the grips in the headrest in front of me. I sanitize my hands. My ticket’s on my phone, which the conductor reads with a glance. No contact there. During the journey I sit very still and read my book on my device, being very careful not to touch or rub my face. And when I get to Grand Central, I walk cross-town to the theater. No crowded subway shuttle. No cab. Just a straight walk there. Once I arrive, I immediately wash my hands in the restroom, and take my seat.

The theater is crowded as curtain time approaches. Shortly before the lights go down, a couple arrives to assume the last pair of seats in my balcony row. The woman coughs as she sits—a deep, bronchial rattle of her lungs. Simultaneously, everyone in the vicinity swivels their heads in her direction. Every face registers concern. The woman makes a show of covering her mouth with her Playbill, then lets out a smaller, less dire, cough.

Is she six feet away from me? Six-ish. Maybe. The lights dim, and the curtain rises, and I allow myself to forget the people around me.

We walk straight back to Grand Central after. In the archway of Track 27, a man in a trench coat stands reading a newspaper. His face is completely obscured not only by a mask with twin respirator filters on either side of his jaw, but also by what looks like a pair of welding goggles over his eyes. I can’t help but stare. Overkill, maybe?

Melanie might not think so.

As I dig for my hand sanitizer and prepare to disinfect my space on the train for the trip home, I realize that tonight is the last time I’ll be out for a very long time to come.

The next day there’s a report that one of the ushers at the show next door to Company has been diagnosed with COVID-19. My close calls are getting closer. I’d pushed through that show’s crowds on the walk back to Grand Central. Had the usher infected anyone who’d been in that throng—no. I willed myself to stop thinking about it. Anything that had happened, had already happened. I’d find out soon enough.


7.
I can’t stand it any longer. Stewing in my fears and sweat isn’t doing me any good. I at least have to get up and check to see what’s wrong. I fumble for my spectacles on the night stand, swing my legs out from beneath the blankets. I’m definitely covered with perspiration; I can feel the cool air of the bedroom raising goose flesh on my shoulders where my skin is dampest.

Something happens the moment I’m upright. That feeling of vague unease at my core solidifies. My stomach flips, then burns. I have one of those sudden convictions that I need to get to the bathroom as quickly as humanly possible. I pad quickly out of the bedroom, across the hall, and land on my knees in front of the toilet. My abdomen compresses; my chest expands. I begin violently hurling the contents of my stomach into the john.

And yet, the entire time I’m doing it, I’m thinking to myself Oh thank god. Vomiting isn’t a primary symptom. I’ve just got a stomach thing. I don’t care how terrible it feels in those moments to be losing what feels like several days’ worth of meals. I don’t give a rip how awful the ejection sounds. I’m just relieved that in the lottery of symptoms, I hadn’t drawn a dry cough, or shortness of breath. I’m happy that I might have dodged a bullet.

When I’m done, I wipe my face and mouth with a wet washcloth. I rinse with mouthwash. Then, still on my knees, I grab the thermometer from the sink, press the button to activate it, and stick it beneath my tongue. It beeps a moment later.

“Ninety-nine point four,” I say aloud.

Curiously, even after what I’ve just been through, I feel immensely better. I’ve probably eaten something bad, I tell myself; Whatever it was seems to have been purged from my system. More comforting still is the proof I still hold in one hand that my body’s heat isn’t elevated in a serious way. I’ll check my temperature almost hourly for the rest of the night, but I’m okay. A little wobbly, but okay. For now, anyway.

I’ll take that ‘for now,’ though. I’ll take it and try to make it last as long as I can.





This essay has been written as part of the Mass Observation: COVID-19 writing project. If you'd like to join our volunteer writers, visit our Call for Volunteers at https://bit.ly/3aes2AQ .

#MOC19: Pandemic Games

I’m a grown-up. I know that I’m supposed to be employing these enforced stay-at-home leisure hours with sedate pastimes suitable for a gentleman of more than half a century. What pastimes are those, exactly? Bonsai? Numismatology? The Jumble? Sitting in an easy chair, wearing a sweater vest, gently chuckling over the collected essays of Jean Shepherd?

Nah. I have been spending my time in isolation playing video games. I’ve loved video games since I first reverently slipped a quarter into a cabinet edition of Pong at the 1974 Virginia state fair. Shoved in among the pachinko units and the Bally pinball machines in a dirty tent toward the back of the midway, Pong’s electronic bloops and bleeps as its square slowly volleyed between two rectangular paddles mesmerized me deeply as a ten-year-old. To lure me back outdoors, my father had to ante up promises of an elephant ear, then sweeten the pot with promises of a trip to the fun house.

As a teen I spent my after school hours at the Station Break arcade in the louche neighborhood bordering my parents’ university, saving doomed cities in Missile Command. When I was a high school sophomore, I saved my lawn-mowing money to purchase my first home gaming console, an Atari 2600. My memory of my college junior year consists almost entirely of hunching over the Crystal Castles machine in the Tinee Giant convenience store across from my dorm. It’s safe to say that I have a lifetime love of video gaming.

And now, in these days in which the long hours seem to fill all too easily with emptiness and anxiety, for me there’s no greater antidote than allowing myself to be soothed by pixels dancing across an LCD screen. (Hey, the World Health Organization said I should.)

Some might imagine that video games are by their nature isolated from the events of the world. Super Mario is forever chasing after Princess Peach in yet another castle; Ms. Pac-Man is doomed to spend her multiple lives munching pellets down the same hallways, haunted by the same ghosts. Neither of them receive news reports of pandemics in the worlds outside the boxes they play upon. But there’s actually a lot of spillover from the real world into those universes behind a glowing screen.

And vice-versa. Years ago, I had a love affair with World of Warcraft, a virtual universe in which hundreds of thousands of players at a time occupied a world together, questing and grouping up together or ignoring each other as each went about his business. In 2005 there was a famous incident known today as the Corrupted Blood Plague—a programming bug gone rogue, in which players who’d finished the newest group dungeon returned to one of the game’s metropolitan centers infected with a fatal disease. Infected players would rather explode into a gout of blood and then die as a pile of bones.

The problem was that the plague was highly contagious; anyone who’d been in contact with one of those plagued dungeon divers could catch Corrupted Blood. The newly-infected could then spread it to someone in proximity. Very quickly, as Corrupted Blood leapt from one player to a nearby other, the major cities in the game became a landscape of corpses. Of course, death isn’t permanent in WoW. But players would try to run their spirits back to their bodies to resurrect, only to catch the plague from someone nearby once again. Entire servers ground to a halt as players died, revived, then tried to run a few feet, only to die over and over again as they attempted to escape the plague-ridden city streets.

I remember being online trapped between the capitals of Ironforge and Stormwind when the plague hit, intrigued but panicked at the communications from friends and guild members. Don’t go near the cities! they’d warn, as they’d frantically type out descriptions of the scenes of carnage around them. Those of us fortunate enough to have been somewhere rural and isolated when the plague began were spared a bloody death, but we were far from unaffected. All the banking was in the cities. The shops, the houses in which we could put our goods up for auction, the inns where some of us made our homes—all in WoW’s expansive metropolitan areas.

Our reactions as players ran the gamut as well. Some numbskulls gamely would hitch a griffon and fly into the havoc just for the LOLs of it. (Obviously, these would be the same folk in Florida crowding the beaches today, or congregating for coronavirus parties.) Other more noble souls playing classes with healing skills attempted to brave the cities in an attempt to cleanse as many sick people as they could of the disease, while shielding themselves as long as possible from the plague’s deadly affects. They too eventually perished. Many simply attempted to isolate themselves as best they could in remote areas, socially distancing themselves from the plague and from anyone else who might bring it to them. Or else they logged off—the best social distancing of all.

The Corrupted Blood Plague was quite a phenomenon at the time it happened; it was one of the first times I recall that the social aspects of a video game made mainstream news. More interestingly, epidemiologists studied the event, including scientists who used the in-game plague recently to make projective models of how COVID-19 would spread in the real world, and of the degrees of seriousness with which real-life people would take the epidemic.

The games I play now might be a haven from my real-world anxieties, but neither are they completely sheltered from the realities of what’s going on around us. One of the games in which I’ve immersed myself for the last year and a half is Fallout 76, an online multi-player entry in the Fallout series of post-apocalyptic roleplaying games. 76 takes place twenty-five years after a nuclear war that brought civilization to a standstill, set in the deserted hills and slag heaps of West Virginia. Across the expansive map of West Virginia, only twenty-four players co-exist on any single server at a time, questing, killing mutated creatures, and participating occasionally in events that bring them together.

I’m fond of 76’s serene, permanently autumnal setting and its lonely solitude. Mostly, though, I’m in it because it’s a game in which I can find stuff, search for stuff, pick up stuff, look into containers for stuff, and then turn stuff into other stuff. For me it’s basically a game that allows me to become a digital candidate for Hoarding: Buried Alive in a way I’d never allow myself in my real life.

I venture out into the deserted dead world and scavenge in ruined houses and deserted amusement parks and ski resorts and farms for abandoned items of clothing, for beer bottles and tin cans, for boxes of scouring cleaner and old teddy bears and boxed food and acetone canisters and turpentine and old typewriters and desk fans. Then I lug my precious loot back home and scrap everything for parts. From those parts I can craft walls and floors, roofs, furniture, and all manner of lighting and decorations for the little homestead I’ve scraped together and established on a silent road outside of Morgantown. I also get to create vending machines to sell homemade armor, food, scrap, and baked goods to other players passing through.

Yes, basically I play Fallout 76 as a post-nuclear variation on The Sims—I make it a decorating and house-building game with occasional irksome yet necessary jaunts to clear out nests of deathclaws and Super Mutants so I can bring home more stuff with which to decorate my little holocaust gas station, where machines vending baked goods stand where the gas pumps ought to be.

One of the reasons I like 76 is the unrelenting cheerfulness of the player base. I’ve been playing online games long enough that I’ve seen the gamut of bad behaviors. Temper tantrums. Dog-piling. Misogynistic and homophobic name-calling. And in WoW, enough ganking—the mean-spirited in-game bullying of low-level players unable to defend themselves against the more experienced high-level warriors—to make Heathers look like Little Women. Fallout 76, though, isn’t a particularly popular game. It has a reputation, perhaps earned in its early days, of being exquisitely buggy to the point of being unplayable. It didn’t review well. Its aficionados could have spent their tenure in Appalachia wandering around shell-shocked and defensive, but just about everyone I encounter on the servers is cheerful, good-natured, and helpful.

People stop by my roadside gas station and let me know how much they love what I’ve built; they’ll shop at my machines and lounge on my sofa and we’ll play the piano and bass upstairs together in my little parlor. Instead of ganking level 1 players, those at 100 or above descend upon them bearing gifts of armor and weapons and plans for them to learn; we’ll buy out whatever nonsense junk a new player puts into her vending machines, just so she’ll have a little cash of their own. For a game that’s essentially a first-person shooter set in a radioactive hellscape, Fallout 76 is pretty much the next friendliest little community next to Mayberry R.F.D.

One of the things I noticed in my daily Appalachian encounters, about two weeks ago when life started shutting down, was how frequently visitors to my camp were wearing protective facewear. Once my real-life social distancing had started, in the game I dug out from the depths of my inventory a plague doctor’s mask, and paired its beaked nose with a leather cap and an body-covering outfit that included gloved hands. After that, day by day, I witnessed players changing their everyday outfits to correspond with what was happening in the world around them. Instead of road leathers or power armor, more and more people began visiting wearing fuzzy robes, pajamas, and slippers, their faces covered with medical masks. There were a handful of plague doctors like myself, and others stopping by in hazmat suits that protected them from head to toe. Gas masks suddenly became popular. Everywhere in West Virginia I’d travel, players were dressing themselves up in out-of-the-usual clothing that indicated their tangible isolation and—judging by the handkerchiefs and bandanas worn over their mouths—a certain consideration of the pandemic driving us into the virtual world.

Toilet paper has become a popular item in 76 as well. Part of my routine, every time I log in, is to scavenge through the various public restrooms in buildings through the world to collect rolls of toilet paper—which I’ll then put into my vending machine. With the real-life shortages of toilet paper across the country, everyone’s hopped onto the hoarding of virtual toilet paper. We’ve basically a player-created mini-game within the game itself in which we log in, peek in restroom after restroom, and fill our inventories with toilet paper rolls to sell in our vending machines at exorbitant prices. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. No one poops in Fallout 76. Videogame toilet paper serves no real purpose. But occasionally someone will buy several rolls of bathroom tissue from my machine for a cool 2500 apiece, and I’ll return the favor by visiting her vendor to see how much of her toilet paper I can buy. It’s a silly time-waster—but then again, what else do we have to do?

Even in the bucolic landscape of the cartoon-y Animal Crossing series, the latest installment of which released just as much of the world retreated into hiding, I’ve seen player after player donning respirators and surgical masks before they visit another player’s village—and I’ve seen a lot of home islands created this last week with the name ‘Quarantine.’ People playing Minecraft post photos of the hospitals and emergency services tents they’ve been building in their games.

Video games might be a retreat from the stresses of the world. At the same time, they can’t help but be part of it. Any game that gives players agency to create their own narratives is going to see this pandemic woven into the stories that players choose to create with their names, their mode of dress, the ways in which they interact with each other. Reflecting aspects of real life in virtual worlds gives players an outlet for creativity and commentary. It reminds us that there are frightened people behind the plague doctor’s masks. And ultimately, there’s real solace to take in knowing that in this virtual community of strangers, all of us have foremost in our minds the same fears and anxieties.




This essay has been written as part of the Mass Observation: COVID-19 writing project. If you'd like to join our volunteer writers, visit our Call for Volunteers at https://bit.ly/3aes2AQ .

#MOC19: Supermarket Shopping in the Time of Coronavirus

One of the standard so-called jokes I make with students, at the beginning of each semester, is that I encourage them to contact me any way they’d like for the class’ duration. Email, social media, old-fashioned voice calls, texting, a letter written on parchment with quill and ink and sealed with blood-red wax. “But if you see me at Shop-Rite,” I add, “It’s probably best you just move to the side and get out of my way.”

I say it’s a joke. It’s not—not really. For some reason during every weekly visit to the local supermarket, I encounter not only students, but a random sample of everyone else I know. School administrators. People from church. Neighbors. My physician. My physician’s receptionist. Random writers from workshops I attended years ago. And every single one of them to a man or woman, with hesitant expressions, has told me later when they encounter me elsewhere, “I saw you at the grocery store but I was afraid to say hello to you because you looked so…um…intent on your shopping.”

It’s a kind way, I think, of telling me how manic I seem when I’m behind the wheels of a shopping cart.

To say that I’m focused when I’m prowling for groceries is underselling. Upon crossing the threshold of Shop-Rite, I transform into a falcon—my eyesight becomes eight times sharper than any mere human as I peer from the produce section to see what’s on sale at the deli, or as I fly into the bread aisle to spy if potato buns are in stock far at the other end. In every aisle I’m like one of my cats on squirrel patrol in a window, no longer a cuddly layabout but a vicious feline, pupils at their widest, whiskers bristling, tail whipping, my head unmoving as I keep my quarry of the last flank steak in unwavering focus. I am the king of the lions, cutting at top speed through the lesser species of the supermarket savannah in pursuit of my quarry. Behind that cart I become a grocery predator—and I like to savage and capture my prey and return to my den as quickly as humanly possible.

I always take exquisite care with my meal planning. Every dinner gets plotted out on the calendar; I leave a blank space for the traditional Friday night dinner out. I’m always disposed to meals that provide leftovers, both because I like them, and because they’re an opportunity for one less night I have to spend at the stove. From the calendar I create extensive lists to save on my phone, covering ingredients not only for dinners, but for our usual grab-and-go breakfasts and lunches. I’ve always kept a well-stocked pantry of staples to have at hand—rices, beans, boxes of pasta and jars of pasta sauce and sofrito, spices, flour, sugar—for my regular use and in case there’s a need to improvise a meal.

Improvisation is my last resort, though. Sure, I can whip up a last-minute spicy fried rice with pantry items, an egg or two, and remnants of the Christmas ham from the freezer—but isn’t it nicer to avoid that last-minute uncertainty by putting on the calendar and making certain I’ve got frozen edamame to include in it? I’m willing to eat a lazy-ass one-man cacio e pepe any day of the week when I’m on my own. I’ve always got pasta in the cupboard and parmesan in the fridge. But for two does such an easy dish really, I hear in my mom’s distant voice, constitute a proper meal?

For years meal planning has been my bedrock. It’s what I do first thing every new week. In a way it’s my sanity, the one thing I know will kick off even the gloomiest of Monday mornings. I plan our meals, I make my list, I hit the supermarket like a man possessed. I buy every item on my list—nothing more, nothing less—and then I return home to store away my foodstuffs. The structure of the week is settled. The hunter-gatherer in me beats his hairy chest and is pleased.

Only that’s all changed now, in this era of pandemic, hasn’t it?

I hadn’t at all been surprised at the notion of COVID-19 reaching New York City and Westchester; I didn’t expect, however, for it to arrive so suddenly. When I’d been on my own the first week of March, the prudent planner in me thought he was doing enough by buying extra-large bags of both white and brown rice, as well as a few extra boxes of dried pasta. However, when Connecticut started to shut down the second week of March, and we’d heard from friends that the store shelves were emptying rapidly, it was plain that we really hadn’t stocked up enough on food that would get us through a long period of isolation, if necessary.

It’s not as if our fridge was empty. (It’s not as if our fridge is ever empty.) My pantry of staples was fairly well stocked, and I certainly had two heavy bags of rice and all that pasta with which to work. Inside my chest freezer were a number of portions of black beans that I’d pressure-cooked in previous weeks, as well as several divvied-up half-pounds of ground beef and, for some reason, frozen veal patties enough for two months’ worth of dinner. Also frozen: three kringle pastries we’d received as a Christmas gift, several pounds of leftovers from that fabled Christmas ham, and multiple containers of an unsuccessful Mexican noodle dish (even typing those last three words out, I now ask myself, why?) I’d attempted whose leftovers weren’t tasty enough to consume immediately, yet weren’t awful enough to justify throwing away. We weren’t going to starve.

Maybe some of that mainstream panic seeped in, though. Over the weekend we felt an increasing sense of urgency to get to the supermarket. To stock up. Toilet paper was sold out everywhere, we’d heard—fine. We still had the better part of a Costco bulk package of that stuff. Disinfectant wipes? We’d snagged a large five-tub pack only a few weeks ago when they were on sale. Hand sanitizer? We’d bought dozens on sale before the Christmas holidays, and still had most. Somehow when it came to food, though, we felt an urgency to get what we could, while we could.

I made a meal plan for two weeks. So the word was that entire aisles of Italian food were cleaned out save for lasagna noodles? Well, I make several different very good lasagnas, and with the leftovers those suckers can last for four entire meals. So I put the ingredients for a lasagna on the list. I could make porcupine meatballs with the rice and beef I already had, and that would cover a couple of meals. I could buy a pound of fresh chorizo and use half to make Craig’s favorite chori-pollo, then freeze the other half for another meal down the road.

The act of planning, in the face of a pandemic, gave me a sense of security. We would triumph over this uncertain time through the magical power of lists! Thinking about dropping every one of those items in my cart, accompanied by the satisfying tap of checking off that ingredient in my shopping app, made me feel safe against the encroaching epidemiological tide. In your face, coronavirus. We went to bed that night pledging to get up at seven, when Shop-Rite opened, to beat the crowds.

Then we actually got to the store.

At seven-thirty in the morning, Shop-Rite wasn’t crowded. There weren’t hordes of panicked shoppers crashing into each other. The parking lot was fairly empty, in fact. Inside, people went about their business—mostly at a distance of six feet from each other—as usual. Yet while the shelves weren’t completely empty (except in the paper goods aisle, which was completely cleaned out), I think it’s fair to say that I almost immediately recognized my careful meal planning was going to face certain, well, challenges.

There was fresh produce aplenty. The deli meats section was stocked about as well as usual. When we rounded the corner to survey the refrigerated meat section, though, I was shocked. I’d expected maybe certain cuts to be sold out, but there was nothing whatsoever to be had. Nothing. Just long empty open refrigerated shelves. The Italian food aisle was hit-or-miss with sauces and tomato products, but had been stripped of every noodle—except lasagna noodles, which I collected. Shoppers had also avoided any dried pasta made from chickpeas, or whole wheat, or vegetables. The bread aisle was sparse, but the long tiers of snack food barely had been touched. There were plenty of dairy products and cheeses and eggs, but the frozen foods were hit or miss. The dried beans and rices had been devoured entirely.

So there I was in Shop-Rite, behind the cart, my senses alert and quivering, my focus intent, my list on the phone in my hand. For the first time in a very long time, I was completely adrift. Very few of the meals I’d planned upon were viable with the hodgepodge of ingredients left on the shelves. All my planning had let me down.

It was the first time since I’d heard of COVID-19 that I started to panic. Part of me wanted to snatch whatever random items were left and bang them into the cart. Could I live for a month off of Sour Patch Kids and white cheddar popcorn. That’s possible, right? With some Chef Boyardee?

Unwilling to betray my internal hysteria, though, I clamped down and juggled decisions in my mind. Okay, so there was no Italian sausage for the lasagna—but I did have ground beef at home I could use, and here were some pre-cooked links of turkey Italian sausage in the prepared foods section. I could slice those thinly and make them work. Okay, so I couldn’t make chori-pollo without either the chori or the pollo, but maybe that could be the night I broke out a couple of those veal patties instead. This package of chicken sausages could be cooked like hot dogs, and served with homemade fries. That was a meal I hadn’t planned. What about a pancake dinner? Those were always fun.

I suppose I became focused in another way entirely. Instead of zipping from item to pre-planned item like a man on a mission, I took stock on what ingredients were at hand and made on-the-spot mental calculations about what components might be stockpiled, what might be substituted (could I use pasta sauce I already had at home for the porcupine meatballs instead of out-of-stock tomato sauce? Why the heck not!), and what meals needed to be jettisoned altogether.

We haven’t had to return to the supermarket for the last two weeks. We haven’t starved. I keep imagining headlines like Couple Found Dead of Malnutrition Had Twenty-Five Pounds of Veal Stockpiled in Freezer, Police Say, but our diets haven’t been particularly monotonous. My on-the-spot strategy of recalibrating my perfect disaster planning was successful, overall.

But I hated it. I know that the next time we have to venture out to Shop-Rite, I’m not going to be able to zip through the aisles on my laser-focused hunt for precisely twenty-four items that will comprise our meals for the week, but that I’ll have to do it with an ‘open mind’. With ‘flexibility’ as my biggest priority. (Picture me saying those words with mocking finger quotes and a sneer on my face.)

But I know unless things have drastically changed for the better at the supermarket, in the two weeks we’ve not been out of the house, that careful scheduling and planning will not be the bulwark never failing that I’ve relied upon in the past. For the indeterminate future, uncertainty at the supermarket is an unwelcome guest.

I dread its tenancy.




This essay has been written as part of the Mass Observation: COVID-19 writing project. If you'd like to join our volunteer writers, visit our Call for Volunteers at https://bit.ly/3aes2AQ .