Category: Quarantine

Chapter 1

March 11, 2020, the world is in a pandemic.
A week before, and before government restrictions on air travel, I was mingling freely among hundreds of other folks at a public event in New York City. In retrospect, none of us should have been there. The event is an annual affair attracting exhibitors, collectors, and otherwise curious attendees from the world over to its venue. People were careful, in light of what was happening around the world, passing hand sanitizers as a manner of greeting, handshakes only offered inadvertently as a matter of habit. Only the Pence Dance (elbow knocking), or the Trump Bump (fist knocking) was jokingly offered as a substitute.
It was only after a few weeks that we realized the severity of the contagion and the danger we all shared at that annual event.
Upon returning to their respective countries, some of the exhibitors got sick and several tested for Covid-19. These were the same people who inhaled and exhaled the same air we breathed, touched the same surfaces many of us touched, and handled the same items we may have handled. Surely the virus did not stay with the people showing symptoms.
Although I liked, and still like, the TV show Monk, starring Tony Shalhoub, I found the main character’s mannerisms over the top, at times excruciatingly repetitive, and sometimes getting on my nerves. I liked the plots and liked Shaloub as lead, and I think he did a fabulous job portraying the maniacal obsessive Monk, I just wished he would get a hold of himself and get on solving murders more speedily.
I have become “Monk”.
Everything I touch is suspect, my alcohol spray is used profusely. I disinfect everything I bring home, wine bottles, cans, packaged meals. I alcohol spray door handles, I wear a face mask when grocery shopping, and I cross the street when I see another pedestrian walking toward me. I got upset, Monk-like, when in the parking lot of our condo loft, I saw a mother with a young child, blowing soap bubbles. What was she thinking about? Did she not realize that if she was infected, she would spread the germ around, putting countless people in danger of catching the bug? My fear and anxiety over the event sort of ended when I realized that soap kills the virus. But does it die if it is trapped in a soap bubble?
It’s now March 22, and fifty million American citizens are on lockdown, asked to avoid unnecessary travel and advised to practice social distancing. That’s right, six feet apart or six feet under. There are still people who are not convinced that the epidemic is serious, that it will pass, just like the seasonal flu. From the news we are getting out of Italy and Spain, the likelihood of the virus dying on its own is highly improbable. We have all seen on television, an army of Chinese sanitizers, all clad with fully protective equipment, spraying the streets and buildings with virus-killing disinfectant.
So here, we are starting to hunker down in our respective homes, waiting for the worse to come while the powers that be are either, lying to us, or foolish enough to reassure us of future treatments “soon to come”, in the same time contradicting health experts warning us to be vigilant, because there is no meds yet capable of curing the virus. We hunker down in fear and we become irrational (I am using the royal “we”), we hoard toilet paper! We clean the store’s shelves of essentials, we stock up on pasta and tomato sauce, and we fill our bomb shelters with Purel. The silver lining of this dark cloud is that it gives the producers a good idea about their item’s popularity. When all the shelves are empty, if your product is still there in abundance, it reflects poorly on its appeal, sending the message, yes, even during the apocalypse, we won’t touch your products!
For sure, this pandemic will change life as we know it forever. Since the Second World War, governments around the world have opted to secure peace and tranquility by building large weapons with the unthinkable power of destruction. How are these going to protect us in this pandemic? The threat to our very lives and civilization as a whole cannot even be seen, unlike nuclear silos and marching military parades. The enemy now is invisible and persistent, infecting by osmosis old and young alike. No weapons in our arsenal, as of yet, to eradicate it. And until now, no cohesive plan to fight the virus.
It’s times like this that highlight the importance of understanding the earth is not flat. The earth is a globe and what goes around comes around. With a flat earth, one could build a wall and possibly contain the virus. Not so easy a task when it is a sphere. Globalization, maligned by nationalists, is a fact of life. If you sneeze in Wuhan, the world gets sick. Same if you sneeze in Paris, Moscow, or Kalamazoo. It is a dire time for governments to shape up and rethink national security for the safety of their citizens.
The Metropolitan Opera broadcasts daily, to Carolle’s delight and my reluctant initiation to the art. Our loft, eight hundred sixty-five square feet big, does not permit more than one sonorous activity at a time. The beauty of loft living is the benefit of open space, but open space limits sound isolation. Monk would say “It’s a gift and a curse”. The experience will be a good primer for Jeopardy in the dreaded Opera category. Carolle used to go to the local theaters to watch the Metropolitan broadcasts, here in town or Nice when we visited. She will miss watching on a large screen and a better sound system. Carolle went alone, so, when she came back from a show, she would tell me about, the plot, two males love the same female or vice versa, she, he, or both die, most times a long and agonizing death, and that it was a great show. She knows most of the operas the Met has produced and has seen several of them, either at the Met or more recently at the movies, and here at home, the show is more a background music than a real attention getter, as we both multitask during it.
Time seems to slow down when your routines are disturbed and you are forced to isolate. It does not, of course, but it feels like it. The news does not help as it seems to only cover the pandemic. Social media Is another distraction to make time go faster. It does not, of course, but it provides a line of contact to your family and friends virtually, apart and prudent, to stop the contagion. Social media is also where you’ll find true human nature and its high and low characters, the whole spectrum of humanity.
Today, March 23, I went shopping for groceries at the large box store not even a mile away from our loft. I used a trail through the woods, a well-traveled way parallel and adjacent to our Mill and the large shopping plaza next to it. I found the frail exploring the area a couple of weeks back. It climbs to a small crest in line with the roof of the mill, into the woods to what seems to be, by the size of the boulders, the large number and the chaotic aspect of the scene, the remnants of a glacier. It’s snowing today and the air is fresh, the snow reminds me that we are in New England and that we can expect it until May. The rucksack I am using is light and convenient. In it, I placed the face mask I fortunately found in my son-in-law’s garage, a clean new box of two masks. I figure it’s better than nothing, and in light of the scenes in the store, I firmly believe I needed it.
In the store, loudspeakers inform you that the store is taking extra precautions against COVID-19, urge you to keep a social distance of six feet, and that the store does all it can to keep you safe. The store was not crowded and folks kept apart as best they could but as the loudspeakers repeated their safety announcement, five people were in close contact with a cashier, for several minutes trying to solve some problem. If that’s what that store considers acceptable in an epidemic, we are not gonna be winning the war anytime soon. At my turn at the cashier, I propped my bag of purchases to the belt. The fact that the clerk was handling the items with her bare hands made me wish there was a self-checkout station in that store. There was none, and, every time she scanned an item, and placed it on that cold stainless steel surface near her, I imagined loads and loads of viruses lying there in waiting.
The walk back to the Mill was a welcome distraction to the stress of shopping in a pandemic. Thoreau had the idea, that the serenity of the woods transcends the chaos of the industrial world. The light snow still falling, I crossed paths with a couple of robins foraging through dead leaves for whatever meal they may find. They shyly flew away at my approach. They are instinctively wary of humans, I don’t blame them. I understand.
When I got back from shopping, Tchaikovsky’s Opera, Eugene Onegin was on.
March 24, at noon the stock market is up almost 1500 points, trying to emerge from its recent plunge. Facebook provides distraction and perhaps too much of my time. I have the urge to push back on the town board against nonsense and clear propaganda. Propaganda has been around since Adam and Eve (only a euphemism folks, I’m strictly Darwinist), it’s been used for goodness and it’s been used for truly evil deeds. There are several movements here, even on the local level, who seem to think that a dictatorship would, after all, not be such a bad idea. We know how they are fueled, and we hear they talk louder, or text all in CAP, and we know what they feed to those who want to listen. So I push back on the Facebook town Board whenever I see propaganda. It’s been interesting. Of course, I’m a bit of a piñata now, but I think I can find a couple of MAGA members to intelligently push my arguments to.
The news is trickling on the people infected with the virus, I read that on March 5, a glitzy birthday party in Westport included an international crowd of jet setters as well as a donor. As of today, infections from Westport reached 74. I was in a similar crowd a few miles away in NYC, and there too the virus was present. Unless of course, they brought it to the event I was at. Showing no symptoms, I am not too worried, I’ll stay six feet apart so as not to be six feet under, wash my hands like a surgeon, and spray my 65% appetizing alcohol bought at the beauty supply shop before my trip to New York, as a precaution upon hearing the news about Covid-19. Today, Governor Cuomo announced that 25,000 individuals were infected with the virus. He is complaining the federal government is sending a fraction of needed supplies. The president has not invoked the Defense Production Act, probably because the supplies pegged for that program have not been kept after the ending of the Cold War, to save money. Evoking it is bound to show the shortcomings of our country during a crisis like we have now. There is still no urgency in the message we get from the top, a mix of signals, half-truths, and deliberate lies, probably out of ignorance. There is a symptom of despair in the daily briefing we get from the leaders. I sense that there is no consensus on a plan, it feels as if they are trying to remedy a blood-gushing wound with a two-cent bandaid.
Today, Wednesday, March 25, we wake up with news of a two trillion emergency package to bail out the economy during this pandemic, together with the news of at least one case of COVID-19 confirmed in our town. The unfortunate person is a Marshall handling the jail in the courthouse basement. The Marshall’s union president deplores the lack of masks and the insufficient cleaning of surfaces. It’s a recurring problem, for healthcare workers, the people closest to the virus itself, first responders, our store clerks our post office clerks, and a myriads of other brave work force and our admirable first responders. They are the first ones at risk of getting infected with COVID-19, but there are still people oblivious to the threat of this epidemic, ignoring safety recommendations and in reprehensible selfishness, flaunting all recommendations of confinement for the good of all. It does not help to have a leader telling us that all will be fine, telling us that by Easter, a couple of weeks from now, he is telling us: “Wouldn’t it be great to have all the churches full?”, and, “You’ll have packed churches all over our country … I think it’ll be a beautiful time”. All health experts are telling us that’s horse feathers, that it will take much longer. I believe them, they are scientists with data in their hands, and their prognostic for eradicating the virus here is not so optimistic. Forty-five percent of us folks think our leader is doing a good job. I remember when we cake walked to the war with Iraq for phantom weapons of mass destruction, the propaganda at the time convinced me, and I was a vocal disbeliever at the time, 82% of Americans believed the war was justified. Polled in 2015, only 42% of our population believe there were WMDs in Iraq, half of them on the right side of the political spectrum, and half of those mostly tuning to the ultra-right news mediums. That so many people still believe today the fallacies fed by the neocons after 2001, is an indication that these folks would just believe anything they want just to further their agenda.
We are in a similar situation now, the difference is that we have to fight the war at home instead of overseas, something the American people have not experienced since the Civil War. The fear of the government lying to us is real. It’s real because, as we have seen already, lies can have disastrous consequences. Ask yourself, are we better now after the Iraq war? After 18 years, we are still at war. How many folks died or came back missing limbs, one for the “lucky” ones and several for others, how many came back with unseen brain injuries? The irony is that the USA went to war to get rid of bad Saddam (he used to be good Saddam before the neocons ran the show), and now the very same folks are idolizing a President with dictatorship envy, befriending leaders like the Russian dictator, who is seeking lifelong powers, the Philippine brute or the North Korean nut job. We live in troubled times indeed, and the future is grim, even as perceived by my otherwise optimistic mind.
I spend probably too much time on Facebook, the meter on my iPhone informs me that I used 27 minutes of my time on its platform. There is a “What’s on your mind post” circulating on my board today:
“Anyone else notices capitalism is currently asking socialism to save it from collapsing?”
( credit: Eric Milner)
The hypocrisy shows how perverted our politics are. To add insult to injury, some politicians are asking folks to sacrifice their lives for the sake of the economy (I kid you not). So, after not even a dozen days after some folks stopped working, the country is in dire need of a two trillion dollar shot in the arm? Does not it seem a tad strange to give the corporations all that money, considering they can’t survive without their workers, considering that they provide no cushion to a crisis like the one we have now? I have read a good post on Facebook: “Finance experts tell us to have a 9-month salary in savings in case of not being able to work” and those big corporations can’t follow that advice. And that couple of trillion should go to save their bottom line? There is not enough toilet paper in the world to clean that mess and the mess we are sure to get it again and again if we pursue this type of capitalism. Adam Smith warned us in his Wealth of Nations that rampant capitalism to enrich a few was doomed to fail. The title of his book talks of nations building capital and wealth to benefit all people, not only the very few, in percentage, the ultra-rich population of our planet. So, in light of the total despondency of our economic system, a system entrusted to the corporations for so many years, why trust them again with all that money? Didn’t we do that in the last bank debacle? Didn’t we pay mucho dinero to get the banks out of their mess, a mess they created as a matter of greed and lack of oversight? Do we want to go back to that well and again, and like the last time, end up with sand at the bottom? Wouldn’t be smart to try something different, and bring a different set of players into the game. If those huge businesses are down to their knees because their employees can’t produce, does it not suggest that in reality, those employees are more valuable than their second yacht or the 36 collectors’ cars, in a hospital setting, neatly displayed in the garage of their forty thousand square feet MacMansion? Do you know how much more money these folks could give their employees instead of spending 150 million bucks on a Renoir or if they gave up their pied a terre in Paris, London, and New York? Can they spare a couple of private jets? The question is pertinent, for the rest of us and the future of our country, and for the sake of our children and grandchildren, why should we give them that money if all they’ll be doing with it, is to enrich themselves? Why not give it to the source of their wealth, the workers themselves, they can’t do a worse job than the team we have now at the helm! The ship the folks in charge are sailing is sinking, and the plug is probably smaller than the hole, or if by miracle (something I believe not in) it is an adequate fix, what happens when the barely floating vessel bursts another hole?
After WWII, taxes in the USA were 91% for people making over $200.000. Even with that tax rate, the rich folks were not poor, go figure, taxed to the wazoo and still making money! They made money, they reaped the profits of the booming fifties, the most productive years in the recent history of our country. Some of that wealth followed families and descendants are now multi-time billionaires. In some ways, this was a working capitalist system. Never mind that a whole group of people were denied the chance, but that’s another story, altogether reminiscent of what is happening now with the wave of xenophobia pushing against our advances for equality.
Wagner’s Das Rheingold is on today, it’s only three hours long, an hour and a half less than yesterday’s Tristan und Isolda. The Dow is up eleven hundred points, and yesterday jumped over two thousand points, on the news of a rescue package. The sharks are circling waiting for the juicy morsels. The market senses it, the folks who took their chips out, like the few elected officials who dumped their stocks with previous knowledge of an economic crisis, all the while reassuring us that the sky was not falling, are probably betting on it again.
618, 71, 12 the numbers of COVID-19 cases, 618 infected, 71 hospitalized, 12 funerals. Those numbers, mostly the number of infected people, are still small only because the kits to detect the virus are still not readily available for massive testing. So osmosis has started here, and it’s getting more personal, I’ll need my Monk mojo to stay healthy!
Das Rheingold has superb set designs, and for some reason, they remind me of Marvel Comics graphics, mixed with Albers-like colors and shapes, the costumes, the action of the actors, more acrobats than singers, climbing Esher structures emerging from the moving floor. The dwarf transforms into a dragon, and of course, the fantastic story translates into fine entertainment. It’s not an antidote for the angst. The news from Italy is not encouraging. A couple of weeks after the lockdown, they clocked eight hundred victims for sixty million citizens. That’s 0.000013% of the population. After two weeks of our lockdown, if we transpose this figure to the population of the USA, we can expect 4550 casualties in a short time, once the virus takes hold here and people start getting sick. My son-in-law in North Carolina, tells me people there aren’t taking the threat seriously. They will eventually. I told him to stay home and keep the kids locked up as well. News of this lackadaisical response to the crisis is disconcerting and alarming. Can half the citizen suffer for the good of the whole country, while the other half treats the matter lightly, and go on with their lives as if nothing is happening, endangering the rest of the folks? Can the war on this plague be won if half of our citizens don’t respect recommended precautions?

Today, March 26, the headline in my Google newsfeed, tells me that Global cases reached at least 416,686 and Global deaths about 18,589. Here in the USA, the Center for Diseases Control, claims that total cases of infected individuals is 54,453 with 737 death.
Of course, the nation is still short of tests kits and the numbers of people tested is still very low. When more testing is available, we can expect the curve on the covid-19 graph to rise considerably, just as it did in China, Italy and Spain. That curve on the graph will continue to rise until folks really take this illness seriously, or, when scientists find a vaccine or a cure. So far, there are no projected time when that will arrive. We have no vaccine and we have no pill. The healthcare community is despondent in face of this pandemic. Our President, who I am pretty sure has no training in medicine, advances hopes that a medication for malaria could well work against covid. It has already lead to one death, a couple on hearing the name of the drug decided to self medicate with a bacteria killer used for Koi’s, because the product shared similar ingredients with the meds mentioned by the president. The wife lives to tell us that they got the idea watching the daily briefings from the White House. Her husband died. The daily briefings continue, although a couple of news networks have dropped them from their broadcasts on account of the blatant lies and the propaganda the President of the United States is delivering us. His constant hyperbolic rhetoric, and the grim faces, some often looking at their shoes, of the various experts on the podium with him, together with the body language, shoulder down or hands held prayer like, is anything but reassuring that this epidemic will be gone in two weeks, as he is inferring. Most experts warn us that it’s not so and from the ways some folks are acting, literally putting the community in mortal danger, this lockdown will eventually last much longer.
So here we are , waiting for the bump, we are watching the covid graph, the chart with the curve determined by the health data generated by the spread of the virus. The important curve, the one on the graph pertaining to the number of folks infected, must reach its apogee before we can expect any sort of grasp on the disease. We are looking for the bump on the graph and hope it will show up sooner than later.

Another day, another chore, today is shopping. Usually Carolle does the shopping, she knows what she wants and practically do all the cooking, and even if I tag along from time to time, I am not a savvy shopper and I need a list. As it turns out, making a list of the items you need before leaving the house is what is recommended to do, as a precaution. The gist is, if you have a list, you can zoom to the item, grab it, place it in your caddy, and go on to the next item on the list, saving store time exposure. That’s pretty good in theory, the practice is chancy.

Shopping requires special precautions like gloves and a mask. It’s uncomfortable but I believe very prudent. In this environment, real Monk would not go out without a hazmat suit. The gloves are utility gloves that I sanitize with alcohol after use. Call me crazy. Perhaps. Anyway, here I go, list in hand, to the big box store up the hill. As a club member, I am greeted by two employees, one with mask, the other not. I zoomed to the first item on the list and went on according to a well laid plan. It turns out the list probably cost me more time in the store. I really had no idea where anything was and had to wander around aisles, two or three times, before I could spot the item I was looking for. Then I spotted an item on the list, tucked in on a refrigerated shelf in one corner of the store, the chicken section. I was looking for chicken thighs to complete my list, and had to hold back on account of five or six people definitely not six feet apart, taking their time in that rather confined space of the store, a corner. It’s the last item I laid in the caddy that by that time, was already full of stuff. I didn’t not spent anymore time on the carrots Carolle asked for, small and with the leaves still attached. I did not opt for the finger like orange plugs that stores bag as carrots, never trusted they were, and really never enjoyed eating them. I did not get the soup either as I could not fit anymore in my caddy. I could have, if I had a larger caddy, or if I had shopping bags, but I forgot to bring bags. Could have had more room to spare if the items I was buying were not family sized. Six chickens were sacrificed for the only size package left on the rack, the two dozen eggs package and the two double size cereal boxes practically filled the caddy with little room left.
Most shoppers tried to stay away from each other, with various amount of success and sometimes caught in a spot, like it did by the chicken shelves. There was a young man wearing a construction mask, often on the phone and probably asking advice, shopping, and seeming as disoriented as I was. I saw a young couple wearing latex gloves. I had already seen them in the parking lot, cleaning the store cart handle with wipes. I saw an older person do the same on my way back to the car. Otherwise I did not see other folks taking extra precautions. It was time to pay and I chose the far self register. It turned out to be an annoying automat, sometimes repeating several times instructions that you understood perfectly well the first time you heard them, and, because the encumbrance  gloves and mask of my hazmat outfit, it made it difficult to scan each item in a timely matter. The silly machine asked to place the item on the adjoining table after scanning. Could I do that without knowing that surface was clean? Who knows really, seeing the lack of concern of some of the shoppers. I asked (nicely) one of the idle cashier to  clean it before I would proceed. Yes, call me crazy. At first she dismissed me saying that it was clean. When I insisted, she obliged, altogether telling me that she was pretty sure it was clean. I told her I was not that sure and thanked her for the cleaning. Not only was I Monk, but I was becoming a pain in the ass Monk. Nevertheless, I felt better when I saw the spray squirt out of the cleaning bottle and the disposable wipe the nice lady used, altogether wishing the spray was adequate.

Scanning the items with my hazmat suit proved to be a laborious process. With impaired vision because of the mask, in competition with my glasses that fogged up periodically, the gloves and the size or shape and weight of the item, made it difficult to scan according to my plan: not having the item touch the sku reader plater. The more time it took for each item, the more the robot cashier felt it should remind me that it I was done scanning, I ought to choose a form of payment and finish my transaction. Let me tell you that’s downright annoying. And it happened every two items , or so it seemed. Anyway, once done, I placed the purchases back in my caddy and headed to the parking lot and home. The greeter at the door kept her distances and let me through without foraging through my caddy. I was glad for that and wished her well.
Wagner’s Valkyries was still on the tube (isn’t that very twentieth century, my hey boomer moment), four and a half hour of a pretty intriguing plot that includes incestuous twins, brother and sister. Wagner is complicated. From the singing, one feels great drama for the gods and the various characters, their wife’s or daughter’s. Besides the entertainment and the background music, it’s not easy to stay focused for such a long time, specially for me, but it’s comforting to see that gods have bigger problems than I have.

A long due walk to the post office, after the opera played its last note and the credits scrolled down to the bottom of the screen, gave us the chance to exercise and get some fresh air. When we visit Nice, we walk everyday everywhere, or we use transportation. Here, we use the car to go everywhere. The walk from the Mill to the Post Office takes about 15 minutes, straight down Main Street then left past the Police Station. About a mile long, the walk is easy and pleasant. The sidewalks, some neglected and showing it badly, are otherwise walkable. Once arrived at the P.O., I told Carolle to stay put outside, as a matter of prudence, forty feet away from the entrance, and I went in to collect the mail, and gloves on, placed it into the shopping bag I had brought for the purpose. I would later on, in plain air, separate the junk mail to recycle, and keep the important mail to bring home, about three to one ratio. Perhaps this pandemic will make advertisers think twice about stuffing our mail boxes with junk mail. That goes for political mail as well. Describing my triage process would be too tedious and frankly just boring. Just imagine Monk doing the task…
Returning home, we took a different way, continuing past the Post Office to the next street and turned left towards home. The walk through the street gave us a glimpse at spring finally waking up, and the first blooms of the year. Crocuses in full bloom and daffodil leaves are trying hard to break the monotonous bland backgrounds of winter cityscape. Their scarcity still bring us joy at the sure sign of a warmer weather to come, dissipating the angst we share about the pandemic if just for a moment. Walking a neighborhood opens your eyes to more details than driving by. The mostly Victorian houses, vestiges of a more opulent era when the town was a hub of industries, line up the streets in different states of  grooming. Some not quite blighted, most decently kept and other pampered and quite beautiful. The later usually have more bloom showing in the manicure yards. The streets crosses a couple of small streams, most likely small confluents of the East Branch of the Naugatuck, the mighty small river flowing along side of our Mill. I have becomed attached to that river. The house we owned on Main Street had a large back yard with 150 feet frontage to the river. When we bought the house, one of the first chore (actually a lot of fun to be wadding in the water), was to clean my stretch of water of debris. Shopping carts, half a dozen of them, in various shapes of disrepair, tires, plastic bags, cans, bottles and whatever gets dumped up steam. I call it a mighty small river because I have witnessed its strength. In five years I witnessed a four hundred pound granite stone travel fifty feet down the river bed. In very cold winters, the ice engulfing these large stones and boulders literally gives them buoyancy when the river level rises, inching the blocks of granite along the river bed.
The walk did us a lot of good, when we returned home, I noticed the ornamental cherry trees, growing outside our ten foot tall factory windows, were showing buds. Mother Nature does not give a dam about covid, no lockdown planned for Spring!

Twelve days after the first recommendations for a shutdown, the virus continues to spread and the death count has reached a first milestone, a thousand dead, together with the number of infected folks, and swiftly, our country is leading the world in the number of cases, more cases than China at the height of the epidemic. Twenty one deaths in Connecticut including a young health worker whose colleagues have deplored the lack of protective gear. Sad and scary for the younger folks, it’s not only a boomer thinner, covid is an equal opportunity killer. In the meantime, our leader still waffles and pushes mix messages on just every aspect of the crisis. His motto “like you’ve never seen before”, repeated time and time again with different wording, “like the world has never seen before”, a passe partout sentence usually uttered for big things to come, economy, tax breaks, wall, Iraq, whatever his mind is fixated on at the time, can now describe his response to the pandemic. We now have a crisis “like the world has never seen before”, and a president bungling it “like you have never seen before”. It’s actually not a surprise to see him nearly despondent as he his facing this crisis. He shot himself in the foot when, pushed by his base and the will of the Republican Party to further inequality by cutting taxes on the higher tax payers, and by stripping the different systems designed to help the nation in case of a catastrophic event, he and his administration have left health responders shortchanged in personnel and supplies. That virtual bullet will hurt him more than the bone spurs he suffered, the same bone spurs miraculously helping him to obtain several deferments  of the drafts for the  Vietnam debacle. He was finally declared exempt of serving our nation. It is mind boggling  that the politicians showing the American flag pin on their lapels and preaching their love of the flag and the nation, would line up and pledge full blind support to someone who showed such poor patriotism when the country was looking for bodies to fight a war. But they bow to him with a cowardice “like no one has seen before”.

Anyway, Siegfried, the third part of Wagner Opera is on. The elaborate sets, the medieval style of the costumes is just eye candy from the tv screen. I find the music more lifting than the two previous parts of the ring. The scene of Siegfried and the birdie is adorable. Never mind that it turns into a bloody slaughter, the whole act is riveting. Staying put is not that bad in this environment.
As Siegfried winds down, a wave of sadness engulfed me, and my thoughts went to Nice, as this is where Carolle and I were supposed to be today. But that’s pre-covid, before we cloistered and the airlines and the borders shut down. I will miss la Rue Catherine Ségurane, the street of the Antiquaires, directly bordering the Vieux Nice, five minutes away from the Port and the Mediterranean walking South, two minutes away from Place Garibaldi walking North. When in Nice, it is definitely a neighborhood worth spending time and discovering. I enjoy visiting the Marché aux Puces overlooking the Port de Nice. As a habit, every Monday I visit the Antiques Market at Cours Saleya, and  the Marché aux Livres by the Palais de Justice, held bi-monthly, in the Vieux Nice. We are sure going to miss Nice this spring.
Earlier in the day, idleness leading to thinking, and of course, a lot of my thinking is related to the virus, covid is always not very far in my mind. Actually, my thoughts were not only fixed solely on covid, instead I was thinking about viruses in general and he bubonic plague in particular. Then my thoughts went from ethanol to Eau de Cologne back to the plague, and wondered if they had ethanol in the Middle Ages. So I went to the Encyclopedia Britannica  (just kidding) and l looked up on ethanol, and besides learning that folks started bottling it eons ago, I also found an allusion to its use during the plague. Eau de Cologne is about 70 to 90% ethanol. Good enough to kill viruses. A note to survivalists out there looting the stores, when all virus are gone from the pharmacies, the last store to raid is the beauty store, but stick on with the best, the most alcohol content, don’t be cheap and buy the weak stuff, it will not protect you.

Today, March 27, the news of the day trumpets that Congress just passed a 2bn dollars bill, the buoy to keep the economy afloat, over the objections of a lone Republican objecting to the procedure. He was concerned about the deficit, go figure, I thought that objection to deficit was a ghost of the past for the party. His pleas, drowned by both sides of the chambers, earned the world a new word: masshole, soon to be perused in your favorite dictionary.

Needing fresh air and distances from the depressing news, we attempted a walk around the neighborhood, but after less than ten minutes walking, Carolle tripped on the uneven sidewalk and we had to walk back to the loft. She was holding on to me and did not fall, but still, twisted the leg that suffered  a hamstring a few month ago. I hope the fear of being stuck inside was more distressing that the pain. That’s one of the problems with sidewalks here in town, the maintenance is left to the adjacent property owner. Snow removal is left to them and every winter bring a strange basket of obedient owners shoveling  snow  from the walks and having to return, sometimes several times a day, shovel  at work to remove the snow plows threw back unto the sidewalk while clearing the streets. It happens every winters,     for every snow days, the same ritual. Sysiphus is not alone.The silly ordinance leads to a cacophony of substrate in various states of decay. This dereliction by the town and state government, in lieu of saving money makes for a poor and obviously dangerous  pedestrian environment. It was a terrible idea from the start and now it’s an expensive problem to solve. But, if maintenance was taken back by the states and the towns, it could put tons of folks to work, employment would translate to collecting more taxes to grease the gears of the capitalism machine. Capitalism for the people, and for all to benefit. Besides, not only homeowners do not own the sidewalks but they must also provide a right of way for the town and the state, adjacent to the walk. They don’t own that small parcel of land, but they are responsible for it. What’s the rationale behind that?

My ranting about broken sidewalk seems somewhat silly in view of the coming apocalypse but in a strange ways, bring me back to mundane daily life. And yes, despite covid, life goes on. David Brooks on television, tells us that “…so we have sort of seen an institutional failure from the White House on down.”

The spike on the graph pops up like a mean acacia thorn. Covid is claiming bodies at a fast rate. Still, our quixotic leader insist on fighting wind mills. His ego always in the way, he is now using his loved quid pro quo as he deals with the governors asking for help. The ones praising him get his ear and he is deaf to those complaining about the lack of equipment or criticizing his response to the pandemic. It’s a daily litany of fuckups. The health community is stretched already thin and we are only a few weeks into the spread of the virus here. For the virologists, we are in for a long time. For the administration, all may be fine by Easter, less than two weeks from now. It’s with conflicting informations and projections that we live our lives. It’s scary. It’s scary because, in a crisis, be it a catastrophic event, a natural disaster, a war, or as now with this pandemic, citizens expect the experts and the government to work in unison. It’s scary because we are in a situation where our leader believes his gut feelings and whatever motivations ferments in his brain, are more in line with the way the quarantine should be orchestrated and than what the experts are recommending. The experts have no specific  time line but they have the data and the projections calculated from covid casualties in China, but also most importantly, from Italy, where the data may be more accurate. Adding to the fact that test kits are still not readily available, our curve is not expected to flatten any time soon.

Every day we wake up feels like a nightmarish Groundhog Day, unfortunately without Bill Murray.

I try to sleep longer but still wake up around the same time before 6am. So far, isolation has not been a big bother, there are enough undone chores to be completed, stuff to do that procrastination bumped to the proverbial tomorrow. Covid’s silver lining, if there is one,  gives us plenty of time to tie up loose knots. Having moved into our loft only a few months ago, we still have multiple boxes and totes of unpacked items . We moved from a thirty five hundred square feet house to an eight hundred square feet loft. Even though  we sold or gave at least two thirds of our belongings, the process of emptying the house still required several fifteen feet box trucks. My bookbinding studio alone, in the oldest part of the house and overlooking the garden, a space that had been used as bulbs and other plants in need of storage,  took four trucks of machinery, cabinets, file drawers, supplies, tools and other stuff relating to the trade, all that was moved to storage, paid a year in advance, thinking that, in a year time, I would dispose of it. The plan was to work at it this summer. It is now derailed by covid. The studio did not include books and artwork which took a full truck to move. We still have a lot of stuff stored at my son in law’s garage. I slowly bring it to the loft, a couple of boxes at a time, to sort through. Quarantine time is a good time to do that. It cuts into the doldrums of the day in this time of confinement. Unpacking brings memories and longings of the near past, before the virus descended upon us. Nostalgia can deal a languorous sorrow to someone living in a cage. I did not know how easy my life was.

Twilight of the Gods, the fourth and last part of The Ring of the Nibelun has started. The first scene shows women weaving the rope of Destiny and predicting the destruction of Valhalla. The virus is destroying our Valhalla. It is the danger facing us now. It will take a concerted effort, “like nobody has seen before” to overcome this pandemic. There are signs of people working towards that effort. Yankee ingenuity picks up when necessities are short, like ethanol. A distillery nearby is turning its spirit production to disinfecting grade ethanol. Quilters and sewing hobbyists are sewing masks, pop stars posts songs, or other pertinent messages from their homes, giving us free entertainment and lifting our mood.

I can now tell new tv broadcasts from reruns, pre-covid, hosts and guest are close together, since covid, they stand or sit six feet apart. More nostalgias. The choirs of men on the tv screen, plotting to kill Siegfried, some fifty or sixty of them, reminds me of the artists stranded in New York City, and the rest of the New Yorkers and I felt sorry for them. I spent close to twenty years of my life in Manhattan and still have a great love for the city. I miss the hubris. New York adopted me when I arrived in the USA, I have memories of the place, bad as well as good and sublime, and some tragic. New Yorkers are resilient, they’ve suffered greatly not so long ago. They bounced back and will again.

Another grim milestones today, came from Italy. Ten thousand have died so far. It’s a miserable day outside, grey sky and drizzling. Although the temperature has not changed on the nest stuck on the wall, it feels cold in the loft. Our governor is on the news, looking as confused as we are, and telling us about it in no uncertain terms, about a muttered line by the president today, something about a possible three states lockdown in strict quarantine. He is kept in suspense and in the dark as much as we are. In the meantime, the spike on the graph rises sharply. A military hospital ship is sailing towards New York harbour to help house the sick if needed.

I went to bed feeling depressed, but woke up in the same mood I always have, happy to open my eyes and see what today will bring. I knew already that another Wagner Opera would be on the schedule today, this time a lighter story taking place in Nuremberg, a town I knew well. In my early twenties, I travelled around Germany studying life and drawing Madonnas with colored chalk on the sidewalk. The town had been mostly destroyed by allied bombardments, but rebuilt faithfully after the war. The sets on the screen brought back memories. Nuremberg is a city with ample walking space and pedestrian shopping area. When drawing on a sidewalk, chalk is the perfect tool for the task, cheap, easy and ephemeral.  I would pencil a grid on the original to be copied, usually a postcard. The postcard was divided in a grid of equal squares, and the same pattern was transferred to the sidewalk. That method, classic for painting murals, helped me keep the drawing proportionate and true to the original. Once the rough sketching was done, the rest was easy, a bit like a glorified paint by numbers. This type of work was not done in a day. I would set up early in the morning and choose a spot. By noon, the painting was laid out and some color was already applied. I paid attention to the faces, often a Madonna and Child, because people’s attention was more likely to be retained when they saw eyes or a mouth born out of the sidewalk. As the chalk evolved and the drawing progressed, crowds of people would gather, distracted from their shopping. They often appreciated my efforts, enough to leave a coin or a banknote in the box.

The large paintings, four feet by eight, took three or four days to finish. If the weather was good, without rain, and the forecast was clement, I would linger a bit longer, slowing down the completion of the painting. At dusk, I would cover the art with a transparent plastic tarp, secured by tape on all edges. Many mornings, coming back to the drawing, I would find bills slipped under the plastic, five, ten and even twenty Deutschmarks notes, left there since the evening before. The German people respected art in all its forms, I liked that. When the painting was done, it was time to move to another town and start again.
Sometimes, when I was gone, leaving the painting to the elements, a homeless person would sit by and collect a few coins. Eventually, elements erased the artwork, cleaning the concrete until only a ghost of an image remained and eventually totally disappeared. There was something soothing about that, not unlike the Tibetan colored sand paintings that, once finished, are destroyed.

Meistersinger, Wagner’s Opera on the podcast today, is over four hours long. There must have been quarantines when he wrote it, plenty of time to think about circumvoluted plots when one is locked up.
Earlier on, this Sunday  morning, we drove to Litchfield to my son law’s house, were we still have stuff stored. A young couple from Europe, who used to rent an apartment from us, will occupy it for the next few weeks. They are more or less stranded here between an expiring lease and travel plans cancelled because of covid. They are moving in and we are still moving out after three months. I should have listen to George Carlin’s litany about “stuff”. We were still occupied when they showed up at the door. With all the reservations we had about close proximity in this covidian time, it was a pleasure  to be with familiar faces, and I think we all appreciated the moment. Never mind that we looked each other a bit suspiciously, the immense pleasure to be close to friends made us loosen our guard. It must be hard to be Monk. When we came back to the loft, Carolle settled down with Wagner and new boxes of stuff to sift through. I donned my hazmat suit and went to the liquor store for wine. I went through the routine, taking all precautions. This time I came in with a double bag that I used to carry my purchase to the the cashier who insisted to have me sign the credit card receipt. I told her that I would not touch the pen she was holding with a gloved hand. A quick look at the glove and one could bet they had not been changed for awhile. She was adamant and as was not going to convince her, I asked to see the manager. He agreed, my chip card did not need signature. I was good to go, in time to pick up a pizza on the way, sidewalk order only. When I got back Wagner was still on. The sun did not shine today, but it turned out to be a great day.

After weeks of vacillating decisions and the lack of a clear path from our leader, today, March 30, the last day of the month, three weeks after our voluntary social distancing and  isolation, he was finally convinced to extend the lockdown until the end of April or longer if necessary. From my visit to the post office, it’s an optimist time line. There are three different sets of doors at the post, each door has two handles for a total of twelve handles used to open the doors. There are hundred of people using this post office everyday. Wouldn’t it be prudent to leave the doors open? I feel sorry for the workers, I have no idea how they cope but it must be unnerving to be stuck behind a counter in these scary times. The killer is invisible. I wear a mask everywhere I expect to be around people, so did the young woman ahead of me at the store’s cashier. She had the civilian hazmat suit on and kept rigorous social distance while we encountered each other in the aisles. Most shoppers were following the six feet rule, an encouraging sign that most folks are taking the matter seriously. A lot were wearing gloves as I did. There was a peaceful civility in that strange ballet. Troubled only by my concern for the employee’s welfare, for they, like the clerks behind the post office counters, are at the front of this battle against the virus. If I believed in any sort of god, I would pray deeply for their safety. There are not pop star or sports star salaries worth that could these folks for the jobs they are doing now for all of us. To shop, I used the caddy again. I now keep it in the car when I am done. It does not enter home as I unpack it’s contents outside our entrance door. Nothing that comes home is not properly cleaned or washed before been shelved. It’s getting to be easier as I am getting better at it.

I know that there are cases in town, the virus has already claimed a victim in a nearby nursing home were my friend Paul has spent his entire adult life. The death of a patient and the confirmation of other cases near him is frightening. I have not looked at the latest figures as it does not make a difference in my new habits. There are dreadful projections of hundred to two hundred thousand deaths. Hospitals are been erected in Central Park and the Javits Center in Manhattan and the hospital ship has arrived. New Orleans is badly touched by the virus, a result of the last Mardi Gras. Churches here and there, and their pastors, ignoring the threat and comparing the virus to Satan, tell the flocks to pray for protection, while gathering thousand folks in the same building, elbow to elbow. A school called their students back for study resulting in a dozen contaminations. These folks have to be stopped if we want to eradicate the virus. Or, send the churches the bill for the care they’ll need when infected.

Wagner, yes again, a short Opera, only less than four hour, is our entertainment today. Tannhäuser, the Opera in question, greeted me when I came back from shopping. It spins a story involving Venus and the Virgin Mary. That’s some combination! I can’t explain anymore, my attention to it is quite sparse, the music in the background is enough to admire without really knowing who did what to whom. To tell you the truth, I would prefer some Mozart or Bizet, but it’s the Metropolitan’s season and we are watching it as produced.
The news are fixed on covid. One of the story circulating from the start of the crisis, and still maintained by the CDC and the administration’s health experts, pushing folks not to wear masks, supposedly because they may be placed incorrectly or because they would induce the wearer to touch his or her face more often then not. That position, taken without any serious study or data, was basically fake news. Imagine that, from an administration whose president, the man who determines his course of action from an anchor at a propaganda machine. It would be almost comical if that disinformation did not costs lives. The question is why? Why would they feed us such dangerous propaganda? I tried to find an answer, started writing and after hundred words, edited all, as I have no sane answer. It leaves me with great sadness to see my adopted country act in such an unethical way. And you may think I am naive. Perhaps, but endangering a whole population of the United States takes us to another level of crass. You may say I am exaggerating but I am not, everyone of us is at risk, so far no body is immune to the virus. Perhaps our president did not want his citizens to wear masks. That would have made us look too much like people in some countries in Asia, using masks to filter the coal polluted air they breathe. Perhaps it has to do with his love for “clean” coal, who knows, the one thing we know, is that, in this administration, the rules come from the top.

I am glad now that I followed my gut feeling, seeing folks in China, in Korea, in Italy and now the rest of Europe, with masks on their faces. I only have the two found in the garage, I keep them clean by spraying alcohol and letting sit for 15 minutes. I do that in the car, it feels safer and I use the heat ports on the dashboard, with heat at full blast, to remove any trace of humidity. I believe I can keep those for a long while by alternating their use.

There are news from Italy that the curve may be showing signs of flattening. That would be long overdue good news and I hope for my friends in Italy that it’s true, my old friend Corinne, who is one of three friends I still connect with online. Then there is the couple of artists, husband and wife and traveling companions, Laurie and Blair, two expatriates living now in Italy, too close to covid. I do hope the curb flattens and that covid is defeated. My hopes turns into the reality of news. If we project the Italian data to our population, the prospects of a quick quarantine gets grimmer and grimmer. A new expression has been created, Darwinian Federalism, or the dereliction of duty of an administration putting the onus of responsibility on States. Some states are totally oblivious and take very few protective measures while others sacrifice for the good of all. So we sit, and wait, hoping the measures we take individually keep us from infection.
Today, no Wagner. Dialogues of the Carmelites by Poulenc is on the program. Carolle, had already seen it and found it depressing, and not inclined to watch it again. After a dozen hours of Wagner, I was ready for something different. My other reason was that I knew Carmelites, they had a convent in the town I was born and were I spent my youth. Out of the Carmelites came a saint adored world wide, Sainte Therese de l’Enfant Jesus, the weakly child of a jeweler and watch maker. The Carmelites taught Sunday School in my neighborhood, the bicycle tires I flattened one day after school, belonged to a Carmelite. Adding that the story takes place during the French Revolution, it made sense for me to watch it. Carolle was right, the story is downright depressing, with the Nun Superior exhaling her last breath for what seems an eternal time, and in excruciating pain just about renounces the Almighty. The Opera ends when all nuns are beheaded. I did not like my Carmelites when I was a kid, specially the part of kneeling on a square ruler, but I did not wish for them to be shortened. From the first glance at the first scene of the first Act, Blanche’s (the heroine) father sits in a chair reading a book. The decor is eighteen century French, the actor wears appropriate brocades and is reading a book. He was not wearing sneakers and I wonder why then was he reading a book made in the late twentieth century. A book from the period can be bought for only a few bucks, why use something that is totally out of of place on a set? That bugged me almost as much as those old Ralph Lauren ads in which books in disrepair are shown in luxury settings. Poulenc’s Carmelites is much shorter than any of Wagner’s works we have seen so far, but still long enough to fill a couple of hours of background sound.

As the sun showed up, clearing the sky of the clouds we’ve had the last couple of days, and with Carolle’s leg fine after all, we took a stroll around the neighborhood, this time  a long loop that paralleled the highway. The houses bordering the streets are vestiges of an opulent past when the mill by the river was in full production, many decades ago. That’s when workers and bosses lived near the factory, the more modest houses nearby and the more stately further up on the hill, were the owners lived. There was no commuting then, life was simpler. Today, the robins were busy, with plenty of them around at this time of year. One of them was pulling a worm from the ground. I had forgotten how comical the image was, with the worm stretched out like a rubber band and the bird pulling until the worm finally gave up, ending in the beak of the robin who immediately flew away. Just like the first crocuses we spotted last time we walked, the birds helped us forget, for an instant, the dreadful virus. Two hens in a yard, pretty birds, surprised us. Here we were in the middle of town, certainly not expecting to encounter farm animals. Perhaps they were pets. The owner, busy cleaning the yard, waved at us and we waived back. Daffodils and forsythias were more visible now that March was turning into April, and the trees pushing out of dormancy, are starting to look greener. The long walk was welcomed, and now that the weather becomes more clement, we can enjoy more excursions in our newfound neighborhood. Life is not that bad when one can walk.

On the news, the numbers related to covid are climbing, people and politicians are finally starting to recognize the threat covid presents, it’s not a Dems hoax anymore.