From the hallway closet I take out a small cardboard box. Inside are the hottest items on the planet. A small stack of N95 masks that I ordered back in late February. Along with these are a larger stack of painter’s masks that I snagged from Walmart in March.
I’ve had to ration these out as carefully as possible as they’re functionally unavailable anymore. In the bathroom is a box of nitrile gloves. These came from the hospital back in 2017 when my dad spent a couple of days under observation.
“might as well take’em” said the nurse, “they’ll charge you for them anyways”
I’d quite forgotten about them till I realized I hadn’t any and needed them.
Checklist before leaving the house. Mask, gloves, tiny hand sanitizer bottle in the car, shopping list in the front t-shirt pocket along with the credit card.
I leave a wad of paper towels and a bottle of Clorox disinfectant prepositioned by the back door for when I return from the market.
I have to say that I find my settling into this new temporary normal is somewhat disturbing and comforting at the same time. When this whole mess began to unfold in earnest back in February and I had to accept that this was not going to be confined to the other side of the world but come crashing home I have to admit that the whole situation was surreal and frightening as no one, least of all the government, seem to have any clue as to what to do.
I imagine that it is the feeling of living on a coastline and seeing a tsunami form far off in the distance and seeing it come closer and closer knowing that there is nothing you can do about it.
My anxiety and fear about the virus has calmed since the initial days back in early March but on some things I can’t become complacent. Back in those early days all I would do is watch the bad news roll in on the television and it seemed that every time I refreshed the websites counting the deaths that the numbers would just climb and climb. Information overload anxiety, if that’s not a psychological term I’m sure it will be soon. The root of my anxiety centered around my mother.
My own death doesn’t frighten me as much as the thought that somehow my mother would contract the disease. Worst of all would be if she became ill through some thoughtless action of mine. To top everything, I got the flu in early March and spent some sleepless nights checking my temperature, distancing myself from my mother, and watching her for symptoms without looking like I was checking on her and getting her panicked. All of this led me to be somewhat stricter about exposure.
My mother begins her customary complaint about the mask and of course I am adamant on this point. No mask, no trip to the supermarket. She is a bit claustrophobic and as she puts it, the mask makes her feel like she’s drowning but I won’t relent. So far we’ve fared fairly well over the last 2 months and I am not about to ruin things.
Traffic has picked up. I was last out in mid-April and the streets were empty. Some traffic now flows but the bus stops are empty, and you don’t see that many people on the streets.
We park and don the masks and gloves before getting out of the car. The local supermarket has finally gotten all their COVID-19 measures in place. A cashier wearing a mask and gloves and standing behind a plastic shield looks at me as I enter. Hard to read people with half their faces covered but he seems a bit anxious.
The supermarket has a few shoppers already. Most wearing some sort of mask or bandanna over their face but one man coming toward me is wearing nothing at all over his face. Whether this is due to bravado, stupidity, or just a lack of material to cover his face I don’t know. I pass him by as quickly as possible.
Some people still don’t believe in the virus. To some it’s part of some conspiracy, a plan to exert control over the populace, others refuse to see it as a big problem, and yet others express a nihilistic worldview that whatever happens will happen and we can’t or shouldn’t try to thwart fate.
Part of this can be attributed to the leadership, or lack thereof, in this country and the refusal to treat this seriously back in January. The current regime in power holds science with so much disdain that this attitude percolates down to the regime’s supporters, and this has led to some to question whether the virus exists at all or is somehow related to cell phone towers.
Of course, this anti-science attitude predates the current white house occupant by decades, but the sentiment has blossomed under his watch.
Produce is still plentiful at this point. Hardly touched if I’m being honest. My mother sees this as a typical supermarket trip and takes her time choosing the best produce possible. This by the way is the reason that she is here. I could knock out this shopping trip in less than fifteen minutes, but she insists that I “have no eye for proper produce” and she had to pick out the produce herself. I just think she wants to get out of the house and see other people.
I’m fairly calm about her taking her time. Back in mid-March not so much. My attitude back then was let’s just grab anything and go. Of course, I had to resist the urge to express my irritation with her for not treating this as seriously as I thought it should be. Keeping all that anxiety bottled up and not expressing it hasn’t been easy. I’ve had to learn to not react when something upsets me.
Sitting and doing nothing is not something that most people do well, particularly not Americans. We want to come to grips with a threat, buy war bonds, plant victory gardens, invade other countries.
Some talented people have turned to making cloth masks as a way to “fight back” and provide protection to those that don’t have protective gear. Others have taken to social media to “police” the space and keep real information flowing while attempting to squash false information. But the only really effective thing that most people can do is to sit still and not go out.
Maybe we can sit still for a few days and let a hurricane or tornado pass by but looking out the window and seeing the sun shining and the birds chirping it’s hard to believe that so many people are getting sick and dying.
And again, it’s hard to shelter in place when the leadership isn’t really giving any good guidance or reassurance about the situation.
Meat has become a bit more scarce, flour has disappeared, but prepackaged bread exists. The canned goods isle is fairly ravaged, but the paper goods isle is making a comeback as you can now find toilet paper once again. Weird what people prioritize.
Spray disinfectant can’t be bought at any price. I suspect all the supplies are going directly to the government or to medical facilities. It is the one item I have at the top of my shopping list and I can never find. We had two cans of it in early March and we’re down to one and I have to constantly ask my mother to limit the use of it while keeping the anxiety out of my voice.
Finally, we’re at the checkout line. This is where I’m most concerned about possible transmission. The market has laid down some strips of tape at 6-foot intervals to spread people out at the checkout line and shoppers for the most part honor the interval. The cashier and the sacker are friendly and do their jobs quickly and efficiently. I suppose that they have become accustomed to all of this and have resigned themselves to come into work everyday and do their jobs despite the risks.
Driving home we pass a convenience store.
“Masks and hand sanitizer for sale”
What were 80 cent N95 masks are now up to 5 dollars and cheap 10 cent surgical masks are at about $1.50 apiece. This is what the president meant when he told the states, and by default everyone else, that they were welcome to make their own arrangements. Sellers will charge what the market will bear and if the market’s life is in jeopardy it will bear quite a bit.
I remember a story from the Spanish TV news about “entrepreneurs” in the Dominican Republic that went dumpster diving at hospitals and resold used masks on the streets. This makes me wary about buying from just anyone.
We get home and go into our carefully arranged unloading process. The gloves go into a garbage can in the garage. I wipe down every car surface that I’ve touched with my hands with the disinfectant and paper towels and then the door handles of the house.
Inside we wash our hands. By the way, I knew the 20-second hand washing rule years ago and adopted the 2x birthday song as my guide to washing hands.
Now we unpack. Some online acquaintances insist on washing the food packaging as well, but I don’t. Cardboard will keep COVID 19 alive for a day and plastic for 2 or 3 days. Everyone has to make peace with a certain level of risk. But at least we’re good on food for another couple of weeks.
I crank up the oven and bake the masks at low heat for 30 minutes. We have to preserve what we have as best as possible. This is the second time that we’ve used these particular masks. Next time they’ll have to go in the trash. Tonight I will have to do a search for more masks and hope I find something besides scam artists.
I grab a sore throat lozenge from the medicine cabinet. A side effect of wearing the mask. I freaked out the first couple of times I had a sore throat after wearing the mask but I found out online that some people got sore throats from wearing masks. Something to do with rebreathing warm moist air and microscopic particles from the mask irritating the throat. The sore throat usually eases up overnight.
I hope that this doesn’t turn into some sort of cancer 20 years from now but that’s a worry for another day.
The transition from “normal” life to “quarantine” life hasn’t been as much of a shock to my life as it has for others. I’ve worked from home since 2010 so I don’t miss things like office softball or gossiping around the water cooler, or office politics. My routine really hasn’t changed much.
My mother wants to make sopaipillas for my brother and take them over to his house. He’s had it rough. He’s a manager at a supermarket and has had to risk exposure throughout this whole mess. Back in early April he felt ill and had to stop working. His COVID test took a week to come back negative but he still felt ill. His doctor told him it was stress and high blood pressure. He had worked 21 days straight without a break. He took 2 weeks off but is back at work now.
My nephew is another “essential”. He’s a police officer and at one point the department made him and other officers sleep in the station in case things began to break down and they needed the extra manpower. Luckily things have remained fairly calm and he’s just had to deal with the same problems that he is accustomed to dealing with.
Open up America and get back to work. The mantra of the investor class. I say the investor class because as far back as March they were the ones urging the government not to quarantine. The rallying cry is now heard from protest groups around the country urging state and local governments to get back to normality, but I have suspicions that these “grassroots” groups are organized and bankrolled from somewhere outside of the grassroots.
It’s simple really. The investor class lives off of their stocks and at the core, the value of those stocks is predicated upon millions of daily cash register transactions and millions of things being made. A haircut here, a movie ticket there, a gallon of gasoline everywhere. The lower classes WOULD go back to work no matter how risky it was.
On the flip side the lower classes were out of money. Remember that factoid bandied about since the 90s? Most Americans don’t save money and couldn’t even afford a $400 emergency. We’re way past that. I doubt most people want to risk exposure, but they need the money for basics like rent and food.
We drive to my brother’s house and along the way we pass a church. The city had set up a local food bank. A 3-block long line of cars waited for a box of food that would have to tide them over for a week or two.
The state suspended all eviction processes till the end of the emergency but that just postpones what may become a mass enlargement of the homeless population. Hopefully, people will sort it out before that happens but there are no guarantees.
We arrive at my brother’s. After putting on one of my painter’s masks, I grab the box of sopaipillas and run to his door leaving the box there and ringing the doorbell before running back to the car.
A moment later he emerges wearing his own mask and waves at us. My mother waves back and yells out “Be careful at work”. He nods and stands there to let her see that he’s alright. I know she wants to go out and hug her son, but we can’t, at least not yet. I look down, purse my lips before starting the car. We drive back in silence.
But we’re going back to normal. Back to the situation that we’ve had for the last few decades. In a year or two all of this will go into the history books just like 9/11 is now part of history. Maybe some monuments will go up and maybe even a national day of Remembrance will be declared to honor the fallen. In a decade or two it will be hard to remember what life was like before COVID-19.
But will we really learn from this experience? I don’t mean the scientists, the crisis managers, the politicians, or the rich people. They’re already analyzing, and planning based upon the experiences now.
I mean us. Will we learn what’s really valuable in life? What’s real and what’s just fantasies that we’ve made up to get through our day? Will people continue to value dollars more than human lives? Does returning to normal mean going back to the situation that got us here in the first place?
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