CORONA SPRING

A SEASON OF DELIRIUM

1. SPRING AHEAD—THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER

It’s easy to lose things. Until the moment we know they're gone (which often happens well after the fact), we're so sure of having them that we don't know they're missing.

What we believe we have becomes a part of us like our skin, our habits, the ticking of our brains. But when we know what's lost, we must reconcile ourselves to our losses.

After Covid-19 entered our lives, it was hard to miss what was missing. The medical uncertainty confiscated many things. The disease ousted our habits and pastimes, the flow of our lives and whatever security we had.

It left us with a choice—to try to recuperate our losses or to be reconciled to losing things and make losing as intrinsic to us as our customs and traditions.

We had to learn a new way to be ourselves, and to mark our days.

For a month to six weeks, from the start of the shutdown until the apex of the curve and down the back end of April, my city was a hushed war zone.

One felt disoriented by the rupture in routine. Yet despite the dire novelty of circumstances—the general assault on public health—the first weeks of the shutdown felt familiar. The stoppage of normal activity—in late August and late December—is a cyclical phenomenon we’ve all experienced.

Meanwhile, violent storms with high winds and heavy downpours have crashed our lives at various times. In the beginning, Covid-19 loomed as such a disaster—inconvenient, disorienting, but transient. Surely it would pass and we’d pick up where we left off.

But swiftly and abruptly, Covid-19 ceased to be an evanescent event and became a permanent guest, terrifying and implacable, as it buried hospitals under body bags.

2. EARLY SPRING: CHAOTIC EQUINOX

During the first weeks of mass-quarantine, anomalies in behavior marked a society on enforced bed rest—streets with no traffic, people loitering in attenuated lines outside markets.

A pall settled over us, punctuated by sirens. Dog-walkers chaffered in their masks under the windows. We wandered grocery aisles anxiously seeking food and supplies on barren shelves, while commerce formed fistulas on the streets. 

One afternoon, a man hoisted multi-packs of toilet paper into a building on my block. The hatchback of his double-parked car was ajar. Jumbo stacks of precious tissue were in view. The unmarked vehicle indicated that the driver was not making store deliveries, but selling “gray market” toilet paper.

Rather than “squeeze the Charmin” this wildcat supplier squeezed his customers. He had hoarded the commodity to produce a shortage so he could sell his cache for a steep profit. Bathroom hygiene fell to the mercy of “rugged individualism.”

That phase of the Covid-19 occupation is now over. Many necessities have returned to shelves and more cars and people are on the streets. A new phase, adaptation, has settled in.

3. SPRING CLEANING: ADAPTATION

Like all things that enter the human mind to be absorbed and processed, Covid-19 has become a routine. I’ve learned to take what it gives and as the weeks pass I start to forget what life was like before.

Forgetting former pastimes is an anesthetic. My selective amnesia prevents me from feeling too low, from longing too much or doing myself harm with a misstep.

I’ve improved in one respect. I no longer wonder how this could happen. Or what it means for the rest of my life. I adjust to new facts.

There are many challenges, large and small, to learn about and fine-tune. For instance, my body temperature is higher now. Global warming has nothing to do with it.

A mask and gloves raise my thermostat ten degrees or more. Breath is hot and body heat has fewer vents when face and hands are covered. Every room is a steam bath. Sixty degrees feels like 70. Eighty may feel like 100.

I’ve learned a few tricks. At first I fumbled pitifully, but now I tie a bandana as nimbly as I tie my shoes. I wear the red triangle because the protuberant mask under it, which covers my nose, mouth and chin, makes me look like a mutant anteater with a conical proboscis. The bandana also offers an added layer of droplet protection.

Yet even in turmoil and confusion, some things can be counted on. The news is bad. A government stimulus check never comes. But Publishers’ Clearing House always delivers a chance for millions in a scavenger hunt of stamps, envelopes and certificates—amid offers to buy magazines, microwave plates, cooling hats and military steering wheels—all at incredible prices.

Meanwhile, loud arguments persist between pessimists and optimists, stern disciplinarians and footloose libertarians, with voices raised to the highest decibel.

Doomsayers dwell on grim facts and dismal forecasts—deaths, infection rates and new presentations of the disease. They reprimand anyone who attempts to return to normality. For these pessimists, the disease is the credo of a new faith.

They believe we won’t be able to return to activity for two years at least —or maybe never again. We’ll be isolated until further notice and every attempt to resume normal life will be at risk of death.

Meanwhile, optimists base their hope on a simple slogan, “We don’t know.” They base their faith on the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, which lasted a little more a year and disappeared after a great swath of death.

4. RITE OF SPRING: DRUMBEATS

At a time when we are all called inward to self-isolate and shut off all air exchange, community is more to be craved and savored.

Every evening at seven, I play a tambourine in the street, to raise spirits with a rataplan and a susurrus of bells. Buses and cars honk in time to my beat. People clap. Small children crank their heads to watch and listen to the tattoo of the little drum.

I play for five minutes and lose myself in the commotion, then withdraw behind doors, more tranquil than before. I’ve had a workout. My arms are sore.

At first, this 7PM demonstration was a tribute to health workers, but the cheers, claps, horns and drums seem to do everyone good.

Like the blast of the shofar during the High Holidays or the cannon that fires at a Ramadan sunset, the 7 PM ruckus announces we’ve survived another day.

But banging and shaking a hand drum means more to me than a tribute or celebration. I do it in all weather, like it or not, to remind me that healthcare workers do their jobs regardless of how they feel or the danger they’re in.

Now I drum not just for the healers and survivors, but for the thousands who fall ill and for the ones who die. Self-isolates and health workers, the living and the dead: I play for them all.

5. SIGNS OF SPRING: NEW FACES OF 2020

As I settle in under the occupation of a cunning invader, I realize certain words have meaning. Like prioritize—to know what matters most.

When I first self-isolated in early March, in response to the first Covid-19 patient nearby, I decided what was most important in my life and cut away the rest.

Shelter in place was not a term in circulation then. Renouncing so much of my routine felt like an emotional amputation, yet in retrospect, it might have saved my life.

Words and phrases like “core” and “what’s most important” are windy pieties we use, believe in, but never comprehend. How can they mean anything when life flows with little disturbance or variation, and provides no context for feeling them?

Covid-19 has hypostasized these homespun platitudes for me. Knowing what matters most makes it possible to adapt. It allows me to stop pining for my prior life-style, my old pastimes and haunts.

Normal life is all about details, things one has, needs and wants. But a catastrophe is a hose that washes away superfluity. All things attached but not intrinsic go down the drain.

Simple truths have meaning only when they are felt. Important stuff doesn’t fall away like boiled meat from the bone. It abides when the storm abates.

One constant is identity. My face is draped, but anyone who knew me before the viral curtain fell on us still says, “Hello” or nods their head. One person at the supermarket where I shop, asked, “How are you, my friend?”

Facial recognition is apparently overrated. I may look like a character in a B-movie who had plastic surgery to avoid arrest but those who know me can fill in the blanks.

Meanwhile, streets full of masked faces resemble a Christo installation on such a vast scale that the artists could not have envisioned it.

Faces are transfigured, physically and symbolically. They’re vestigial, and as distinctive as the tops of hat racks. Consider an ironic twist only nature could devise: after 15 nations banned facial coverings, we all wear them now.

I exchanged salutations with a friendly porter, “How can I recognize you when you wear a mask?” I asked. He reflected for a second and pointed at his Yankees cap. We laughed.

So much that was is now in storage, artifacts of the past. When I muse on what used to be, it’s like I’m staring at my neighborhood from an airplane that gains altitude. What was granular and distinct is now a mosaic of multi-colored splotches and squares—more like a circuit board than a snapshot.

Maybe this is how the rest of my life will be. I try not to think about it or what it will mean. From the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex, where doubts are spun like spider’s silk, there are whispers: “What will this do to me in a year or two—or five—if I live that long?”

The morbid thoughts form a crowd. It’s time to enforce mental distancing. I’ll wrap yellow tape around the future and padlock the gate, like the Parks department did to the renovated playground across the street.

There has never been a better time in my life to live in the present. For now, I’m content in a few rooms, with a project to work on and good, simple food to eat. My health is fine and my gratitude is deep.