Household

COVID-19 No. 12: Tumbleweeds in Place of Tellers

~ Tom ~ Leave a comment

monopolyMORE MUNDANITY RENDERED EXTRAORDINARY and bizarre by everyone’s favorite pandemic:

A trip to the bank.

The final paycheck from my previous job was delivered not via direct deposit but as a slip of paper that arrived in the mail. In ordinary times, that would necessitate a 20-minute lunchtime errand. In these times, it entailed a 5 a.m. alarm and a creepy drive through very dark, mostly deserted streets to the closest branch.

Per guidelines, if I have to be out, I want it to be when I’m least likely to encounter other people. While the introvert in me needs such solitude with regularity, my genial, more social side misses simple human interaction.

Depositing a check at 5:15 in the morning for the sole purpose of not running into anyone. Like I said, extraordinary and bizarre.

This typically banal daily errand didn’t fill me with the existential dread fostered by last week’s grocery-store run, but I was hardly comfortable. As I stood outside and slid my ATM card into the slot to unlock the door, I saw myself reflected in the glass.

Black jacket, black gloves, charcoal baseball cap.

Jesus, I thought. The cops are gonna think I’m robbing the joint.

All went uneventfully, though, and I was home and in the shower before long, trying to shake off the unease that shrouded me over the course of my trip. I’m so ready for the mundane to be mundane again.

I mentioned that the streets were mostly deserted. A handful of cars did pass me. And standing in the middle of a usually well-traveled road was a deer that seemed as startled to see me as I was her. Guess she didn’t get the memo about social distancing. | DL

COVID-19 No. 6: You Mean We Have to Create Another New Structure?

~ Tom ~ Leave a comment

HAVING SPENT THE BETTER PART of a workweek building a new daily structure to adhere to — all the more fun while onboarding at a new job — I’m now faced, as most of us are, with figuring out what Saturdays and Sundays are going to look like for the foreseeable future.

No trips to the dry cleaner.

No hanging out in coffee shops.

No browsing through bookstores.

No dinners out with friends.

No walking through the mall.

No ballgames to watch.

No Sunday-night visits to a favorite watering hole to conclude the weekend with a great friend, good beer, and the world’s best wings.

Hell, I probably won’t even be going to the supermarket for a couple of weeks. We stocked up a couple of weekends ago in anticipation of being housebound for a while.

As if we weren’t all making it up as we go along anyway, our viral lockdown has layered a whole new swath of What do we do now? onto our lives.

For me, I’m guessing that Saturdays and Sundays will include more reading and writing, more walking, more board games, more phone calls and texting sessions, more online shopping, more hanging out on the deck (thank goodness warmer weather is nearly here), more Wii and Xbox, more movies, more catches and soccer in the backyard. A lot of museums are opening up their digital collections to greater access, so I’ll probably check them out. And I have all kinds of work stuff I need to start learning.

How about you? What are you up to this weekend? | DL

H-2-Uh-Oh, or How a Water Situation Got Me Thinking About Others

~ Tom ~ Leave a comment

YESTERDAY MORNING, with temperatures in the single digits (which I hate), we woke up to diminished water pressure from every faucet. The water was coming out at about 60 percents, so the kitchen sink, bathroom facilities, and showers were still usable. But that’s the kind of thing you don’t mess around with. After I checked the basement pipes to make sure nothing was wrong there, I called a plumber and made an appointment.

Soon enough, the neighborhood social media chain was telling us that the problem wasn’t ours alone. A broken water main had either reduced pressure at or completely cut off service to about a thousand homes. One of our neighbors reported nothing more than a trickle dripping from her faucets.

We would literally die without water, yet we take for granted that we can have as much as we want simply by turning a handle. Our minor inconvenience got me thinking about those around the world for whom water — and food and electricity and shelter and other essentials — requires daily attention.

Fully three months after Hurricane Maria blasted Puerto Rico, parts of the island were still without power and clean drinking water. This is no far-flung, how-do-you-spell-that? country, but a United States territory less than a thousand miles off Florida’s coast. These are Americans, and they remain mired in terrible conditions, and we have just stopped caring.

Yesterday morning I had to stand for a little while longer under the shower head to rinse the shampoo out of my hair. For some of my fellow Americans that wouldn’t have been a pain in the ass but a dream come true. | DL