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 .
Wednesday, July 8, 2020
Friday, May 1, 2020
#MOC19: Thin-Skinned
At last week’s tail end I had my first medical appointment since this mess started. I was supposed to have had a dentist’s appointment in the middle of April, but the state’s dental board had recommended its members cancel all appointments and remain available solely for emergencies…so that was off. Religious flosser though I am, I’m missing that smooth-tooth feel I relish in the weeks after a cleaning.
Because I tend to be vague about dates on the calendar—as in when they are, what they mean, and why they should be of significance to me—I tend not only to enter appointments on my electronic calendar, where they’ll be propagated to all my many devices so I can summarily ignore them after they buzz and chirp at me, but also to leave the appointment cards fixed on the side of my refrigerator. In theory, I visit the refrigerator often enough (which is to say, way too often) that on occasion the card for the next appointment might catch my eye.
This month my backup strategy worked. I noticed the card for an upcoming dermatologist’s appointment a couple of weeks early, and I wondered to myself whether or not it would happen at all. Would I have to sit in a waiting room with other patients? Or had specialists followed the same path as Connecticut dentists, and shut down their practices? I could remember one of my friends remarking on Facebook that he’d had a telemedical session with his dermatologist for a suspicious mole. Sitting in a cold office in nothing but my shorts while a near-stranger peers at my skin for abnormalities is bad enough. Was I now going to have to contort myself like a circus freak, as I guided my phone’s camera over every square inch of my embarrassed naked flesh?
I started visiting my dermatologist about six years ago because of a condition that affects the sides of my face; I was breaking out in tiny bumps right along the bone surrounding the eye sockets, which would inflame and turn scarlet, leaving me looking like a raccoon. My regular doctor was mystified; the dermatologist had me test out a series of medicated lotions and gels that turned my redness into vivid scarlet crescent moons. Eventually we hit upon a combination of low-grade antibiotics and a sulfur wash that eliminated the outbreaks. “It’s not really rosacea acne, but let’s call it rosacea acne,” he told me. (My regular doctor: “I guess it could be. Dermatology is kind of a crap-shoot, isn’t it?”)
I’m grateful for the clear complexion I’ve had since, but the price for it is having to visit the dermatologist every six months—and honestly, I truly dislike my dermatologist.
Every time I visit my dermatologist I come away with some new grievance or horror story to share. He’s paranoid. He’s grandiose. He freaks out if someone misses an appointment, because it affects his bottom line. He’s also outright offensive: there were the multiple times he informed me that “Old folks like you are my bread and butter.” (Thanks, buddy.)
Once I had to sit in the waiting room and endure him chew out his long-suffering elderly receptionist because she’d booked an appointment for someone he had banned from his office for non-payment. On another occasion, I had to listen to him scream at top volume at the poor woman again because she’d told an elderly woman from the Nathaniel Witherell nursing home that she could sit in the office for a few minutes until the home’s shuttle picked her up after an appointment—then during my own appointment he raved the entire time about the grievance until finally he opened up the examination room door (with me clutching my t-shirt to my naked chest in horror) to yell at the receptionist, “I DON’T NEED SOME NINETY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD KEELING OVER IN MY WAITING ROOM.”
Yes, I very much dislike my dermatologist, but honestly, my appointments are short and he doesn’t seem to be doing me active harm. Basically I’m too damned lazy to try to find a new one and get my records transferred and start all over again.
So although I wondered whether I’d be seeing him at all last week, his service called to remind me that I had an appointment on the 24th, and to please let them know if I needed to cancel at least 24 hours in advance. Seven days in a row they called, while I stubbornly refused to dial them back because they said that I only needed to return the call if I was canceling. I drove to the guy’s medical complex, parked and tied on my mask, then was surprised to see him waiting for me at the top of the stairs inside.
“Come in, come in.” It was more of a demand than an invitation, really, but I let him pull open the door for me, then watched as he swabbed at the knobs on both sides with disinfectant wipes, and locked the door behind him. The waiting room was empty; the receptionist’s office behind the sliding glass window was dark. “It’s just me here. I’m only seeing one patient at a time…for obvious reasons.”
It made sense. He was masked as well, and as he washed his hands and disinfected, I started taking off my hoodie and shirt. My all-over body exam usually is in October; in the spring, he only looks me over from the waist up. “How has all this affected your—?” I started to say.
“I’m down to about ten percent capacity,” he interrupted. “I have to say, I’m very disappointed in most of my patients over this. They don’t seem to understand that I have a practice to maintain, and they just don’t show up to their appointments. Now, are there any changes in your medications?”
As I hopped up on the exam table, I shook my head and told him everything was the same, although the previous week I’d had a mark on my neck that I thought was from using my clippers directly on—
But he was off on another tangent. “You know how they say a crisis is a crucible that shows people for who they are? Well, that’s what it’s done for my patients. Ungrateful, ungrateful people, all of them. It’s terrible how disgusting people are.” I closed my mouth and let him rant as he lifted up my left arm and gave it the once-over from all angles. “They’re bad enough under normal circumstances, but now I’m expected to be available to them at all hours of the day so I can look at their moles over Skype. Telemedicine sucks, I tell you. It sucks. It’s stupid. I didn’t spend years and years in medical school to look at people’s moles on a smartphone.”
I pointed to my neck again. “I did have a mark—“
“And it’s bad enough that during normal times I already think I’m being socially ostracized. Maybe I’m a paranoid person. Maybe I am. But do you know that no one in my social circle has called to check up on me? Here I am in the front lines, risking disease and death every day, and for what? Not a single call.” He laughs as though he hopes it’s amusing, this notion that anyone would ostracize him. I’m someone, however, who’s basically seen blood streaming from this guy’s eyes because a 94-year-old had to wait a few minutes for her ride back to the nursing home. So instead I’m sitting there shirtless, arms held out like the Vitruvian man, understanding how deeply possible his social exile might be, even despite his noble sacrifice of being a first responder on the dermatological frontlines with ancient folk like me. “I’m circling a red spot on your lower back because I don’t think I’ve seen that before.”
“And if you could look at this spot….” I say, pointing beneath my jawline.
“Already I’m the black sheep in my family. Everybody thinks that I’m a fool. But you know what? I’m the one with a medical degree. Do any of them have medical degrees? The answer is no. They don’t.”
I’ve heard this particular diatribe before, usually in my autumn visits right before Thanksgiving. His brother-in-law makes fun of him. His wife’s family treats him like he’s a joke. Even though I usually approach these appointments telling myself, Oh, he might not be so bad this time, I had reached the inevitable stage of the consultation in which I remembered exactly why I should be switching doctors, if only switching didn’t sound like so much wooooork, and if I weren’t such a lazy bastard. It’s only when he finally lets me put my arms down and he turns to his laptop to make some notes that I managed to say, “Last week I had a big red mark, here, on my neck. It was probably from using my clippers on the skin, but if you could look….”
“My synagogue,” he continued, seeming to ignore me. “My wife is on the board of my synagogue. Very important position. Very important position. But have any of the other board members ever invited us for dinner? Not now, of course. Are the rest of them inviting each other to dinner? I just bet they are. I bet they have dinner together all the time. But do my wife and I get invited to dinner? No. Even though she’s on the board.” I pressed my lips together, hoping the rant might climax more quickly that way. “They have an excuse not to invite us, now. But before. Did anyone invite us before? They did not,” he said, as if I were in danger of getting a word in edgewise and actually speculating an answer to the question. “I tell my wife that nobody is friends with us at synagogue, and that it’s making me crazy, crazy paranoid, and do you know how she replies? She says, ‘Well, I have friends.’ Yeah. Like that. ‘I have friends.’” I opened my mouth to speak again, but he turned around bearing an antiseptic wipe in one hand and a needle in the other. “That thing on your neck is just a pimple, probably an ingrown follicle, just keep it clean and it’ll clear up. But I am going to shave off this red spot on your lower back.”
It was a painless process of a small pinch, a light numbness, then a standard band-aid. All the while he continued talking.
“Do you think any of this is going to change once this COVID nonsense is over? It’s not going to change. It’s just makes me paranoid, I tell you. It just makes me paranoid.”
I hadn’t really said much of anything by the time our fifteen minutes were over—and yet I was exhausted. “Are you taking copays?” I asked, once I was dressed and itching to go. “Or will someone call me later?”
“I have to disinfect the entire exam room after you leave. By myself,” he emphasized, using the same tone my mom used when I was a kid and she would complain about having to clean all the bathrooms. I wondered if he expected me to grab a bottle of Scrubbing Bubbles and pitch in and help. “So no. I think you might even have a credit, but my billing guy will call you if he needs to. In the meantime, keep safe, and make sure you keep your next appointment.” Sotto voce, he added, “Unlike the rest of these ingrates.”
As I escaped down the stairs and out into the parking lot, I reflected to myself that if a crisis really does show who people are, this particular crucible had melted my dermatologist down to his bitterest essence.
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 .
Because I tend to be vague about dates on the calendar—as in when they are, what they mean, and why they should be of significance to me—I tend not only to enter appointments on my electronic calendar, where they’ll be propagated to all my many devices so I can summarily ignore them after they buzz and chirp at me, but also to leave the appointment cards fixed on the side of my refrigerator. In theory, I visit the refrigerator often enough (which is to say, way too often) that on occasion the card for the next appointment might catch my eye.
This month my backup strategy worked. I noticed the card for an upcoming dermatologist’s appointment a couple of weeks early, and I wondered to myself whether or not it would happen at all. Would I have to sit in a waiting room with other patients? Or had specialists followed the same path as Connecticut dentists, and shut down their practices? I could remember one of my friends remarking on Facebook that he’d had a telemedical session with his dermatologist for a suspicious mole. Sitting in a cold office in nothing but my shorts while a near-stranger peers at my skin for abnormalities is bad enough. Was I now going to have to contort myself like a circus freak, as I guided my phone’s camera over every square inch of my embarrassed naked flesh?
I started visiting my dermatologist about six years ago because of a condition that affects the sides of my face; I was breaking out in tiny bumps right along the bone surrounding the eye sockets, which would inflame and turn scarlet, leaving me looking like a raccoon. My regular doctor was mystified; the dermatologist had me test out a series of medicated lotions and gels that turned my redness into vivid scarlet crescent moons. Eventually we hit upon a combination of low-grade antibiotics and a sulfur wash that eliminated the outbreaks. “It’s not really rosacea acne, but let’s call it rosacea acne,” he told me. (My regular doctor: “I guess it could be. Dermatology is kind of a crap-shoot, isn’t it?”)
I’m grateful for the clear complexion I’ve had since, but the price for it is having to visit the dermatologist every six months—and honestly, I truly dislike my dermatologist.
Every time I visit my dermatologist I come away with some new grievance or horror story to share. He’s paranoid. He’s grandiose. He freaks out if someone misses an appointment, because it affects his bottom line. He’s also outright offensive: there were the multiple times he informed me that “Old folks like you are my bread and butter.” (Thanks, buddy.)
Once I had to sit in the waiting room and endure him chew out his long-suffering elderly receptionist because she’d booked an appointment for someone he had banned from his office for non-payment. On another occasion, I had to listen to him scream at top volume at the poor woman again because she’d told an elderly woman from the Nathaniel Witherell nursing home that she could sit in the office for a few minutes until the home’s shuttle picked her up after an appointment—then during my own appointment he raved the entire time about the grievance until finally he opened up the examination room door (with me clutching my t-shirt to my naked chest in horror) to yell at the receptionist, “I DON’T NEED SOME NINETY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD KEELING OVER IN MY WAITING ROOM.”
Yes, I very much dislike my dermatologist, but honestly, my appointments are short and he doesn’t seem to be doing me active harm. Basically I’m too damned lazy to try to find a new one and get my records transferred and start all over again.
So although I wondered whether I’d be seeing him at all last week, his service called to remind me that I had an appointment on the 24th, and to please let them know if I needed to cancel at least 24 hours in advance. Seven days in a row they called, while I stubbornly refused to dial them back because they said that I only needed to return the call if I was canceling. I drove to the guy’s medical complex, parked and tied on my mask, then was surprised to see him waiting for me at the top of the stairs inside.
“Come in, come in.” It was more of a demand than an invitation, really, but I let him pull open the door for me, then watched as he swabbed at the knobs on both sides with disinfectant wipes, and locked the door behind him. The waiting room was empty; the receptionist’s office behind the sliding glass window was dark. “It’s just me here. I’m only seeing one patient at a time…for obvious reasons.”
It made sense. He was masked as well, and as he washed his hands and disinfected, I started taking off my hoodie and shirt. My all-over body exam usually is in October; in the spring, he only looks me over from the waist up. “How has all this affected your—?” I started to say.
“I’m down to about ten percent capacity,” he interrupted. “I have to say, I’m very disappointed in most of my patients over this. They don’t seem to understand that I have a practice to maintain, and they just don’t show up to their appointments. Now, are there any changes in your medications?”
As I hopped up on the exam table, I shook my head and told him everything was the same, although the previous week I’d had a mark on my neck that I thought was from using my clippers directly on—
But he was off on another tangent. “You know how they say a crisis is a crucible that shows people for who they are? Well, that’s what it’s done for my patients. Ungrateful, ungrateful people, all of them. It’s terrible how disgusting people are.” I closed my mouth and let him rant as he lifted up my left arm and gave it the once-over from all angles. “They’re bad enough under normal circumstances, but now I’m expected to be available to them at all hours of the day so I can look at their moles over Skype. Telemedicine sucks, I tell you. It sucks. It’s stupid. I didn’t spend years and years in medical school to look at people’s moles on a smartphone.”
I pointed to my neck again. “I did have a mark—“
“And it’s bad enough that during normal times I already think I’m being socially ostracized. Maybe I’m a paranoid person. Maybe I am. But do you know that no one in my social circle has called to check up on me? Here I am in the front lines, risking disease and death every day, and for what? Not a single call.” He laughs as though he hopes it’s amusing, this notion that anyone would ostracize him. I’m someone, however, who’s basically seen blood streaming from this guy’s eyes because a 94-year-old had to wait a few minutes for her ride back to the nursing home. So instead I’m sitting there shirtless, arms held out like the Vitruvian man, understanding how deeply possible his social exile might be, even despite his noble sacrifice of being a first responder on the dermatological frontlines with ancient folk like me. “I’m circling a red spot on your lower back because I don’t think I’ve seen that before.”
“And if you could look at this spot….” I say, pointing beneath my jawline.
“Already I’m the black sheep in my family. Everybody thinks that I’m a fool. But you know what? I’m the one with a medical degree. Do any of them have medical degrees? The answer is no. They don’t.”
I’ve heard this particular diatribe before, usually in my autumn visits right before Thanksgiving. His brother-in-law makes fun of him. His wife’s family treats him like he’s a joke. Even though I usually approach these appointments telling myself, Oh, he might not be so bad this time, I had reached the inevitable stage of the consultation in which I remembered exactly why I should be switching doctors, if only switching didn’t sound like so much wooooork, and if I weren’t such a lazy bastard. It’s only when he finally lets me put my arms down and he turns to his laptop to make some notes that I managed to say, “Last week I had a big red mark, here, on my neck. It was probably from using my clippers on the skin, but if you could look….”
“My synagogue,” he continued, seeming to ignore me. “My wife is on the board of my synagogue. Very important position. Very important position. But have any of the other board members ever invited us for dinner? Not now, of course. Are the rest of them inviting each other to dinner? I just bet they are. I bet they have dinner together all the time. But do my wife and I get invited to dinner? No. Even though she’s on the board.” I pressed my lips together, hoping the rant might climax more quickly that way. “They have an excuse not to invite us, now. But before. Did anyone invite us before? They did not,” he said, as if I were in danger of getting a word in edgewise and actually speculating an answer to the question. “I tell my wife that nobody is friends with us at synagogue, and that it’s making me crazy, crazy paranoid, and do you know how she replies? She says, ‘Well, I have friends.’ Yeah. Like that. ‘I have friends.’” I opened my mouth to speak again, but he turned around bearing an antiseptic wipe in one hand and a needle in the other. “That thing on your neck is just a pimple, probably an ingrown follicle, just keep it clean and it’ll clear up. But I am going to shave off this red spot on your lower back.”
It was a painless process of a small pinch, a light numbness, then a standard band-aid. All the while he continued talking.
“Do you think any of this is going to change once this COVID nonsense is over? It’s not going to change. It’s just makes me paranoid, I tell you. It just makes me paranoid.”
I hadn’t really said much of anything by the time our fifteen minutes were over—and yet I was exhausted. “Are you taking copays?” I asked, once I was dressed and itching to go. “Or will someone call me later?”
“I have to disinfect the entire exam room after you leave. By myself,” he emphasized, using the same tone my mom used when I was a kid and she would complain about having to clean all the bathrooms. I wondered if he expected me to grab a bottle of Scrubbing Bubbles and pitch in and help. “So no. I think you might even have a credit, but my billing guy will call you if he needs to. In the meantime, keep safe, and make sure you keep your next appointment.” Sotto voce, he added, “Unlike the rest of these ingrates.”
As I escaped down the stairs and out into the parking lot, I reflected to myself that if a crisis really does show who people are, this particular crucible had melted my dermatologist down to his bitterest essence.
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 .
Monday, April 13, 2020
#MOC19: Kitchen Disco
For the last three Friday afternoons, British pop star Sophie Ellis Bextor has been streaming mini-concerts from isolation in her home in London—the Sophie Ellis Bextor Kitchen Disco, she calls the event.
Sophie spangles herself in sequins, wearing sleek dresses heavy with feathers and faux furs. Beneath a glittering disco ball she dances and twirls like the glamorous, posh pop goddess she is, all the while surrounded by the disorder of her three children (is it three? They run around so much that sometimes it seems like a hundred) and the prosaic disarray of her tiny kitchen. She’ll spin to her propulsive disco hit, “Murder on the Dancefloor,” while in the background two of her boys roughhouse and leap up and down on the window seat like their personal trampoline; she’ll change the lyrics to her hit cover of Cher’s “Take Me Home” to “Stay at Home,” crooning the entire song into a microphone in her right hand, while bouncing her toddler in her left arm.
She’ll take a moment to wander into the garden and attempt an artsy pose against a trellis while singing one of her ballads, only to have to interrupt her gentle serenade to bellow at the boys in a tone that every child recognizes to mind the dog. Then she’ll bop around in the kitchen once more to sing a cover of Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” while trying not accidentally to kick the baby as it scoots around on the floor. (Spoiler: sometimes she accidentally kicks the baby.)
I love Sophie Ellis Bextor’s Kitchen Discos. I love how she’s hauling out elegant ball gowns from the depths of her closets to show them off surrounded by the everyday clutter and disarray of the kitchen of any mom with three young kids. I love how she hands the microphone over to her two oldest boys so they can rap for the audience at home. They rap about as well as any ten-year-olds, which is to say, horribly—but the segment gives Sophie a chance to scuttle off to a nearby alcove, where we can audibly hear her unzipping one silver concert dress and changing into an extremely short sheath of canary yellow silk. “Costume change!” she’ll announce with equal measures of excitement and exhaustion both, as she’ll trip back on her stilettos to resume the show.
As much as I need and look forward to that Friday afternoon respite as I lie on my living room sofa, phone in hand, peering at the screen as the Kitchen Disco proceeds, I suspect it’s important for Sophie Ellis Bextor as well. It’s obvious she looks forward to changing out of her mom clothes and into something glamorous, to perform for her online audience, just as it’s clear her kids relish the chance to goof around with their mom. They’ll pretend to be backup singers and dancers one moment, squabble with each other the next, then chase each other like maniacs around their mother, as kids do, while she tries not to laugh too much. It’s chaos, and comfort, rolled into one sparkling mirror ball of a half hour.
Other entertainers have been streaming from their homes during the last month as well. Ever since Broadway diva Patti LuPone sang a song or two during her appearance in her basement on a Rosie O’Donnell streaming special, giving those watching a startling view of the enormous jukebox in one corner and, more improbably, the racks of cassette tapes on her walls (Patti LuPone still listens to cassettes?), she’s popped up from time to time to give tours of the basement and entertain viewers with her frank LuPone-isms. Comedians have been doing live sets on Instagram Live; drag queens have been streaming their shows on YouTube. Another of my favorite musicians, Rod Thomas of Bright Light, Bright Light, has moved his weekly Romy & Michelle’s Saturday Afternoon Tea Dance from the cramped confines of Club Cumming to Facebook, where he DJs from his apartment and takes requests from viewers in the chat window.
For over a month now I’ve been isolated in my home. My days here don’t vary much. Meals are the milestones of my weeks; the evenings pass by in half-hour or hour chunks, depending on what TV show I’m watching. Watching livestreams from real people in other places—familiar or famous faces even—as they dance or sing or show off their perfectly ordinary basements littered with cassette tapes reminds me that I’m not the only person or family whose days have a perimeter of a few rooms. So I come away smiling after each Sophie’s Kitchen Disco, or each Romy & Michelle Tea Dance, feeling almost as if I’ve been gamboling, or crushed with no social distancing at a concert, happy for a few minutes to have forgotten our world’s troubles. In a week in which mass graves are being dug for the deceased, and in which uncertainty still reigns, there’s more than a little comfort in reinforcing the notion that we’re all in this together.
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 .
Sophie spangles herself in sequins, wearing sleek dresses heavy with feathers and faux furs. Beneath a glittering disco ball she dances and twirls like the glamorous, posh pop goddess she is, all the while surrounded by the disorder of her three children (is it three? They run around so much that sometimes it seems like a hundred) and the prosaic disarray of her tiny kitchen. She’ll spin to her propulsive disco hit, “Murder on the Dancefloor,” while in the background two of her boys roughhouse and leap up and down on the window seat like their personal trampoline; she’ll change the lyrics to her hit cover of Cher’s “Take Me Home” to “Stay at Home,” crooning the entire song into a microphone in her right hand, while bouncing her toddler in her left arm.
She’ll take a moment to wander into the garden and attempt an artsy pose against a trellis while singing one of her ballads, only to have to interrupt her gentle serenade to bellow at the boys in a tone that every child recognizes to mind the dog. Then she’ll bop around in the kitchen once more to sing a cover of Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” while trying not accidentally to kick the baby as it scoots around on the floor. (Spoiler: sometimes she accidentally kicks the baby.)
I love Sophie Ellis Bextor’s Kitchen Discos. I love how she’s hauling out elegant ball gowns from the depths of her closets to show them off surrounded by the everyday clutter and disarray of the kitchen of any mom with three young kids. I love how she hands the microphone over to her two oldest boys so they can rap for the audience at home. They rap about as well as any ten-year-olds, which is to say, horribly—but the segment gives Sophie a chance to scuttle off to a nearby alcove, where we can audibly hear her unzipping one silver concert dress and changing into an extremely short sheath of canary yellow silk. “Costume change!” she’ll announce with equal measures of excitement and exhaustion both, as she’ll trip back on her stilettos to resume the show.
As much as I need and look forward to that Friday afternoon respite as I lie on my living room sofa, phone in hand, peering at the screen as the Kitchen Disco proceeds, I suspect it’s important for Sophie Ellis Bextor as well. It’s obvious she looks forward to changing out of her mom clothes and into something glamorous, to perform for her online audience, just as it’s clear her kids relish the chance to goof around with their mom. They’ll pretend to be backup singers and dancers one moment, squabble with each other the next, then chase each other like maniacs around their mother, as kids do, while she tries not to laugh too much. It’s chaos, and comfort, rolled into one sparkling mirror ball of a half hour.
Other entertainers have been streaming from their homes during the last month as well. Ever since Broadway diva Patti LuPone sang a song or two during her appearance in her basement on a Rosie O’Donnell streaming special, giving those watching a startling view of the enormous jukebox in one corner and, more improbably, the racks of cassette tapes on her walls (Patti LuPone still listens to cassettes?), she’s popped up from time to time to give tours of the basement and entertain viewers with her frank LuPone-isms. Comedians have been doing live sets on Instagram Live; drag queens have been streaming their shows on YouTube. Another of my favorite musicians, Rod Thomas of Bright Light, Bright Light, has moved his weekly Romy & Michelle’s Saturday Afternoon Tea Dance from the cramped confines of Club Cumming to Facebook, where he DJs from his apartment and takes requests from viewers in the chat window.
For over a month now I’ve been isolated in my home. My days here don’t vary much. Meals are the milestones of my weeks; the evenings pass by in half-hour or hour chunks, depending on what TV show I’m watching. Watching livestreams from real people in other places—familiar or famous faces even—as they dance or sing or show off their perfectly ordinary basements littered with cassette tapes reminds me that I’m not the only person or family whose days have a perimeter of a few rooms. So I come away smiling after each Sophie’s Kitchen Disco, or each Romy & Michelle Tea Dance, feeling almost as if I’ve been gamboling, or crushed with no social distancing at a concert, happy for a few minutes to have forgotten our world’s troubles. In a week in which mass graves are being dug for the deceased, and in which uncertainty still reigns, there’s more than a little comfort in reinforcing the notion that we’re all in this together.
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 .
Monday, April 6, 2020
#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 .
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 .
Monday, March 30, 2020
#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 .
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
#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 .
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 .
Monday, March 23, 2020
A Call for Volunteers—Writers, Diarists, and Thoughtful Observers Welcome! #MOC19
We are living through a time of worldwide crisis. It’s easy to feel helpless. But you—yes you!—and your thoughts and stories can make a difference.
Are you a blogger? Do you keep a personal journal that you are willing to share? Are you a writer who recently has felt the urge to narrate your rapidly-changing world?
All of us are witnessing massive upheaval in our lives. COVID-19’s exponential spread has disrupted our routines, our employment, and our incomes. The outbreak has forced vast deviations in the ways we work and interact. Perhaps worst of all, this emergency has compelled us to isolate ourselves when we need each other most, with no assurance of certainty in the weeks or months to come.
I am recruiting volunteers to join me in recording our stories of this era of anxiety.
Mass Observation: COVID-19
The original Mass-Observation project rose to prominence during World War II in the United Kingdom. In a decade of nightly bombings, food shortages and rationings, blackouts, and vast social upheaval, five hundred diarists volunteered to record their day-to-day wartime experiences in notebooks shared with social scientists…and later, historians.
Sometimes the volunteers followed directives, responding to questions developed by the Mass-Observation organization. Mostly the diarists wrote what and how they wanted.
A diary is a valuable historical testimony. We all are witnessing history in the making, right now, day by day. Personal narratives can be exceptionally candid and open in ways that other documentation cannot.
I’m proposing that writers of all experience levels use this time to record their perceptions and share them with others, forming a collective of witnesses worldwide: Mass Observation: COVID-19, or #MOC19.
There is no better time than now to share your unique story.
How Can I Participate in #MOC19?
If you have an existing blog or website on which you publish your journal, you’re already ahead of the game—please continue writing and sharing just as you have in the past.
Are you new to keeping a blog or online journal? Simply set up a blog that can be publicly viewed at any site you choose. There are dozens of easy-to-use free or low-cost options—WordPress, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr…you pick. #MOC19 is platform-agnostic.
As coordinator for this project, I am asking our volunteers to follow a few simple guidelines for the project:
1) Depending on the number of volunteers, I am hoping to maintain a publicly accessible list or page of participants in #MOC19. Please send me a message or an email (grandiose@mac.com) to let me know your blog’s name, its address, and your country and state of origin.
2) Tag your posts with #MOC19 in the title or somewhere in the body of the post. If you share links to your posts on social media, please include the hashtag there, too!
3) Write daily, or often, or at least consistently!
4) Most importantly, write your truth. Share what you are thinking during this crisis. What you’re experiencing. Your everyday routine. Your feelings. Your narrative is unique. Your story is important.
#MOC19 Questions and Answers
Do I have to be a professional writer to participate?
Nope! I envision our Mass Observation movement including anyone who wishes to put pen to paper (or fingertips to a keyboard, more probably). Novice writer, secret diarist, aspiring journalist, bestselling-author, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with a platform of millions—all are equally welcome to volunteer!
What should I write about?
Your blog or journal or diary should be the story you want to tell. Share your daily struggles, your triumphs great and small, the activities that are keeping you busy, the thoughts that run through your mind in quiet corners of the day. Describe your community’s reaction to this crisis. Write about your personal worries, your anger, your hopes. Anything goes.
I will be coordinating writing prompts for inspiration as needed. Some of these might suggest core essays anyone can attempt, while others may be periodic challenges in which we all turn our scrutiny to the same topic—just like the original Mass-Observation project. Keep in mind, however, that these prompts will always be optional. It’s your journal.
Is there an age requirement to participate in #MOC19?
Follow the guidelines of whatever platform on which you’re publishing your entries. That should be fine.
Do I have to associate my name with my blog? I want to remain anonymous.
Neither I nor anyone else need to know your real name. Make your blog anonymous or use a pseudonym if you desire.
Am I ceding any sort of rights to my blog or essays?
Absolutely not. Your blog is your own and will remain so. The original Mass-Observation organization appropriated volunteers’ notebooks as well as the rights to them; #MOC19 will do no such thing.
All I propose to do is maintain a list of #MOC19 participants and provide links to cooperating blogs, so that participants may investigate and discover other writers volunteering for the project.
Wait, who are you, exactly?
I am Vance Briceland, a novelist and instructor of creative writing. I live in the metro New York City area, in Connecticut. Since I was 14 I’ve kept a journal. As reluctant as I am to admit to my advanced years, that’s over four decades of diary-keeping, and a lot of notebooks and computer files.
After my spring semester of writing classes was shut down because of the advance of COVID-19 in early March of 2020, I found myself searching for ways to keep the writing momentum of my own students on a forward track. My journey for their inspiration caused me to stumble upon the original Mass-Observation movement, then led to a conviction that there is no better time for a collective of writers—no matter the level of practice or experience—to turn our eyes upon a rapidly-changing world.
So what's next?
Continue writing in your blog—or start one for yourself. Email me at grandiose@mac.com
and let me know you’d like to participate in Mass Observation: COVID-19, and include your own email address, a link to your website or blog, and your country and state of origin. Use the #MOC19 hashtag in your blog titles and social media. It’s that simple.
Also important: please share this information with your friends and family, your students, your writing groups, your favorite story-tellers!
If you know someone whose writing and insight would make them an ideal diarist, particular in the unusual and stressful months to come—let them know about the Mass Observation: COVID-19 project!
If you are aware of individuals who are willing to write from their unique perspectives, encourage them to share their testimonies.
Even if you don’t feel moved to participate in #MOC19 (and why shouldn’t you?), please pass on this information to others, any way you can. A copy of this call for volunteers may always be found at: https://bit.ly/3aes2AQ
Remember: even in isolation, every new day affords prospects for fresh insights, for close study, and for narratives to be shared.
Your story matters. Now is the time to write, and to record history as it happens.
Are you a blogger? Do you keep a personal journal that you are willing to share? Are you a writer who recently has felt the urge to narrate your rapidly-changing world?
All of us are witnessing massive upheaval in our lives. COVID-19’s exponential spread has disrupted our routines, our employment, and our incomes. The outbreak has forced vast deviations in the ways we work and interact. Perhaps worst of all, this emergency has compelled us to isolate ourselves when we need each other most, with no assurance of certainty in the weeks or months to come.
I am recruiting volunteers to join me in recording our stories of this era of anxiety.
Mass Observation: COVID-19
The original Mass-Observation project rose to prominence during World War II in the United Kingdom. In a decade of nightly bombings, food shortages and rationings, blackouts, and vast social upheaval, five hundred diarists volunteered to record their day-to-day wartime experiences in notebooks shared with social scientists…and later, historians.
Sometimes the volunteers followed directives, responding to questions developed by the Mass-Observation organization. Mostly the diarists wrote what and how they wanted.
A diary is a valuable historical testimony. We all are witnessing history in the making, right now, day by day. Personal narratives can be exceptionally candid and open in ways that other documentation cannot.
I’m proposing that writers of all experience levels use this time to record their perceptions and share them with others, forming a collective of witnesses worldwide: Mass Observation: COVID-19, or #MOC19.
There is no better time than now to share your unique story.
How Can I Participate in #MOC19?
If you have an existing blog or website on which you publish your journal, you’re already ahead of the game—please continue writing and sharing just as you have in the past.
Are you new to keeping a blog or online journal? Simply set up a blog that can be publicly viewed at any site you choose. There are dozens of easy-to-use free or low-cost options—WordPress, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr…you pick. #MOC19 is platform-agnostic.
As coordinator for this project, I am asking our volunteers to follow a few simple guidelines for the project:
1) Depending on the number of volunteers, I am hoping to maintain a publicly accessible list or page of participants in #MOC19. Please send me a message or an email (grandiose@mac.com) to let me know your blog’s name, its address, and your country and state of origin.
2) Tag your posts with #MOC19 in the title or somewhere in the body of the post. If you share links to your posts on social media, please include the hashtag there, too!
3) Write daily, or often, or at least consistently!
4) Most importantly, write your truth. Share what you are thinking during this crisis. What you’re experiencing. Your everyday routine. Your feelings. Your narrative is unique. Your story is important.
#MOC19 Questions and Answers
Do I have to be a professional writer to participate?
Nope! I envision our Mass Observation movement including anyone who wishes to put pen to paper (or fingertips to a keyboard, more probably). Novice writer, secret diarist, aspiring journalist, bestselling-author, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with a platform of millions—all are equally welcome to volunteer!
What should I write about?
Your blog or journal or diary should be the story you want to tell. Share your daily struggles, your triumphs great and small, the activities that are keeping you busy, the thoughts that run through your mind in quiet corners of the day. Describe your community’s reaction to this crisis. Write about your personal worries, your anger, your hopes. Anything goes.
I will be coordinating writing prompts for inspiration as needed. Some of these might suggest core essays anyone can attempt, while others may be periodic challenges in which we all turn our scrutiny to the same topic—just like the original Mass-Observation project. Keep in mind, however, that these prompts will always be optional. It’s your journal.
Is there an age requirement to participate in #MOC19?
Follow the guidelines of whatever platform on which you’re publishing your entries. That should be fine.
Do I have to associate my name with my blog? I want to remain anonymous.
Neither I nor anyone else need to know your real name. Make your blog anonymous or use a pseudonym if you desire.
Am I ceding any sort of rights to my blog or essays?
Absolutely not. Your blog is your own and will remain so. The original Mass-Observation organization appropriated volunteers’ notebooks as well as the rights to them; #MOC19 will do no such thing.
All I propose to do is maintain a list of #MOC19 participants and provide links to cooperating blogs, so that participants may investigate and discover other writers volunteering for the project.
Wait, who are you, exactly?
I am Vance Briceland, a novelist and instructor of creative writing. I live in the metro New York City area, in Connecticut. Since I was 14 I’ve kept a journal. As reluctant as I am to admit to my advanced years, that’s over four decades of diary-keeping, and a lot of notebooks and computer files.
After my spring semester of writing classes was shut down because of the advance of COVID-19 in early March of 2020, I found myself searching for ways to keep the writing momentum of my own students on a forward track. My journey for their inspiration caused me to stumble upon the original Mass-Observation movement, then led to a conviction that there is no better time for a collective of writers—no matter the level of practice or experience—to turn our eyes upon a rapidly-changing world.
So what's next?
Continue writing in your blog—or start one for yourself. Email me at grandiose@mac.com
and let me know you’d like to participate in Mass Observation: COVID-19, and include your own email address, a link to your website or blog, and your country and state of origin. Use the #MOC19 hashtag in your blog titles and social media. It’s that simple.
Also important: please share this information with your friends and family, your students, your writing groups, your favorite story-tellers!
If you know someone whose writing and insight would make them an ideal diarist, particular in the unusual and stressful months to come—let them know about the Mass Observation: COVID-19 project!
If you are aware of individuals who are willing to write from their unique perspectives, encourage them to share their testimonies.
Even if you don’t feel moved to participate in #MOC19 (and why shouldn’t you?), please pass on this information to others, any way you can. A copy of this call for volunteers may always be found at: https://bit.ly/3aes2AQ
Remember: even in isolation, every new day affords prospects for fresh insights, for close study, and for narratives to be shared.
Your story matters. Now is the time to write, and to record history as it happens.
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