3.29.20
Sheltering in Place
Day 10
Life has slowed down. Way down. To a crawl. A creep. A slither!
We come from a hyperactive, mile-a-minute, eight-lane, unlimited-access, high-tech world and are now living in Monty Python’s farcical Middle Ages where a handcart vendor roams the streets slapping a stick against an iron triangle shouting: “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!”
My favorite line in that film comes when the grim reaper, his death cart full, says without a trace of irony:
“See you Thursday!”
Ok it is not the middle ages. But we live in a different time than we did three-weeks-ago.
The world that we now can touch and feel is suddenly very insular, very small. There is no where to go, no one to see. Certainly there is no where to go in a hurry.
We live, by choice, in the boonies. So my three-mile, daily walks are along streets with no people, few cars, roaming chickens, cows and sheep safely behind electric fences and the occasional scary dog. Yesterday across a 10-foot invisible barrier I spoke briefly with a young neighbor. My opening line was: “Hi, it is so nice to talk with someone not related to me.”
It was then that it struck me. Family! We are tribal. We exist in clans, virtual if not physical. Family is again the most important form of government or at least governance in our lives. If it were not for the Internet and cable news it would be the only form of governance in out lives in this locked down world.
Our second son and his girlfriend are in Brooklyn, but I am keeping them close. I have texted them daily, telling, asking, cajoling, begging, bribing them to get the hell out of there. Come here! We have lots of room, acres to roam. They stubbornly remain on the front lines in Brooklyn, the epicenter of the epidemic. For now they plan to ride out the modern-day-plague there with their 8.7 million neighbors.
I am so proud of them, they are doing what Governor Cuomo has asked, staying home. My son has told his brother he does not want anyone else to get sick because he might be carrying the bug. He will not come here because he does not want us to get sick. He does not want his brother and his young family up the hill from us to get sick. In the small world that is our family, they are heroes.
The Internet and other modern communications keep us connected as a family. My immediate family lives in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. My extended family, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews, are in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, Florida, California, Washington, New Mexico , Oregon Ireland and Thailand. My oldest and dearest friend is in Alaska.
In other words we are a mobile, far-flung family, connected by high-tech communications and pulled closer by hard times. My wife’s uncle, discussed in an earlier blog, is a family beacon, someone to look to and rally around. Beacon is a perfect term for him, his children affectionally refer to he and his partner as the “great whites,” with all connotations of the term acceptable.
At 98 he has bridged the electronic divide that separates the generations. He is the oldest person I know to have a Facebook page. He regularly uses Zoom to play ukulele duets with his second son in New Hampshire. Their band has a name:
“The Ragin’ Contagions.”
Last night our youngest son and his Thai wife in Boston, another hotspot, surprised us with a Facetime call. They were working elbow-to-elbow in their kitchen busily making a Thai dinner while we chatted about the day. Nothing too important was discussed. It was just family touching each other for a brief moment. I felt so close to them, I could almost taste the sticky rice and my daughter-in-law’s special dipping sauce, which she tells me is different every time she makes it. The call was the highlight of my day.
As I write this my wife is playing Bach’s French Suite #6 on the baby grand in our living room. We once had three pianos and an electronic keyboard in this house. That was an earlier time. I sit at the dining room laptop, blogging, picking away at the free-standing keyboard conected by bluetooth to my iPad.
So I have to ask myself if I have nowhere to go and certainly nowhere to go in a hurry, why do I still get up before six am? What is the big rush?
Why do I immediately grab the iPad to check the overnight news, read the grim new-case and death stats and record them in a spread sheet I created way back in California?
I suppose the answer is, like many people, I cannot fully adjust to the new reality. The world around me is still moving at breakneck speed even as the world in which I reside has slowed considerably.
Like many I have a morbid Monty Python fascination with the pandemic. In the three and a half hours since I left my bed, 14,458 new Covid-19 cases have been reported worldwide and another 1,076 people have died. It is terrifying and fascinating.
So how do we best deal with this new reality?
Incrementalism!
Life has always been incremental. Few win the lottery, yet most succeed, one baby step at a time.
Should we “aspire” to be free of the virus by Easter? No we should aspire to live our lives one day at a time as fully and completely as possible. We should aspire as always to make the world better when we leave it than when we arrived.
Charles Dicken’s opening lines in a “Tale of Two Cities” are often quoted in times of crisis. I prefer something he penned later in the same passage.
“...it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us...”
It says to me; we have choices to make.
And miles to go before we sleep.
Be safe!
Sheltering in Place
Day 10
Life has slowed down. Way down. To a crawl. A creep. A slither!
We come from a hyperactive, mile-a-minute, eight-lane, unlimited-access, high-tech world and are now living in Monty Python’s farcical Middle Ages where a handcart vendor roams the streets slapping a stick against an iron triangle shouting: “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!”
My favorite line in that film comes when the grim reaper, his death cart full, says without a trace of irony:
“See you Thursday!”
Ok it is not the middle ages. But we live in a different time than we did three-weeks-ago.
The world that we now can touch and feel is suddenly very insular, very small. There is no where to go, no one to see. Certainly there is no where to go in a hurry.
We live, by choice, in the boonies. So my three-mile, daily walks are along streets with no people, few cars, roaming chickens, cows and sheep safely behind electric fences and the occasional scary dog. Yesterday across a 10-foot invisible barrier I spoke briefly with a young neighbor. My opening line was: “Hi, it is so nice to talk with someone not related to me.”
It was then that it struck me. Family! We are tribal. We exist in clans, virtual if not physical. Family is again the most important form of government or at least governance in our lives. If it were not for the Internet and cable news it would be the only form of governance in out lives in this locked down world.
Our second son and his girlfriend are in Brooklyn, but I am keeping them close. I have texted them daily, telling, asking, cajoling, begging, bribing them to get the hell out of there. Come here! We have lots of room, acres to roam. They stubbornly remain on the front lines in Brooklyn, the epicenter of the epidemic. For now they plan to ride out the modern-day-plague there with their 8.7 million neighbors.
I am so proud of them, they are doing what Governor Cuomo has asked, staying home. My son has told his brother he does not want anyone else to get sick because he might be carrying the bug. He will not come here because he does not want us to get sick. He does not want his brother and his young family up the hill from us to get sick. In the small world that is our family, they are heroes.
The Internet and other modern communications keep us connected as a family. My immediate family lives in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. My extended family, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews, are in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, Florida, California, Washington, New Mexico , Oregon Ireland and Thailand. My oldest and dearest friend is in Alaska.
In other words we are a mobile, far-flung family, connected by high-tech communications and pulled closer by hard times. My wife’s uncle, discussed in an earlier blog, is a family beacon, someone to look to and rally around. Beacon is a perfect term for him, his children affectionally refer to he and his partner as the “great whites,” with all connotations of the term acceptable.
At 98 he has bridged the electronic divide that separates the generations. He is the oldest person I know to have a Facebook page. He regularly uses Zoom to play ukulele duets with his second son in New Hampshire. Their band has a name:
“The Ragin’ Contagions.”
Last night our youngest son and his Thai wife in Boston, another hotspot, surprised us with a Facetime call. They were working elbow-to-elbow in their kitchen busily making a Thai dinner while we chatted about the day. Nothing too important was discussed. It was just family touching each other for a brief moment. I felt so close to them, I could almost taste the sticky rice and my daughter-in-law’s special dipping sauce, which she tells me is different every time she makes it. The call was the highlight of my day.
As I write this my wife is playing Bach’s French Suite #6 on the baby grand in our living room. We once had three pianos and an electronic keyboard in this house. That was an earlier time. I sit at the dining room laptop, blogging, picking away at the free-standing keyboard conected by bluetooth to my iPad.
So I have to ask myself if I have nowhere to go and certainly nowhere to go in a hurry, why do I still get up before six am? What is the big rush?
Why do I immediately grab the iPad to check the overnight news, read the grim new-case and death stats and record them in a spread sheet I created way back in California?
I suppose the answer is, like many people, I cannot fully adjust to the new reality. The world around me is still moving at breakneck speed even as the world in which I reside has slowed considerably.
Like many I have a morbid Monty Python fascination with the pandemic. In the three and a half hours since I left my bed, 14,458 new Covid-19 cases have been reported worldwide and another 1,076 people have died. It is terrifying and fascinating.
So how do we best deal with this new reality?
Incrementalism!
Life has always been incremental. Few win the lottery, yet most succeed, one baby step at a time.
Should we “aspire” to be free of the virus by Easter? No we should aspire to live our lives one day at a time as fully and completely as possible. We should aspire as always to make the world better when we leave it than when we arrived.
Charles Dicken’s opening lines in a “Tale of Two Cities” are often quoted in times of crisis. I prefer something he penned later in the same passage.
“...it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us...”
It says to me; we have choices to make.
And miles to go before we sleep.
Be safe!
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