“Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother, you’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive…”---The Brothers Gibb
Life In The Eye Of The Storm: Day One (Friday, March 13)
The world is different now, a whiter shade of pale. The baubles are gone, the shiny things are missing. The harbingers of Spring….the bustling gardeners’ sales, the botanical gardens expos, the Spring Arts street fairs have all been enveloped by a murky cloud and carried off to Nowhere. The crack of bat on ball is gone from the land. Worried citizens scurry to fill their larders, unsure what the future brings.
Airports once teeming with life have morphed into ghost towns. The Good Ship Lollipop is moored to the dock. March Madness has become March Sadness as empty arenas look out and shed a tear. Mickey Mouse has built a moat around his castle and pulled up the drawbridge. Noone is showing up for Bingo at the First Methodist Church.
People nervously huddle around TV sets for the bad news of the day, watching helplessly as one state after another is colored red, rooting for little West Virginia to hold on. They learn that something is amiss here, that testing equipment is woefully insufficient, that hospital space is inadequate, that no one has planned for such a catastrophe, that their country is being governed by the City Commission of Dogpatch.
Where just a few days ago there was talk of media excess, there is fast-growing acceptance of a grim fate. The storm is closing in and people have grasped that the fire in some of the grand souls they know will soon be extinguished and that no one is safe. One tiny mistake, one venture into the wrong supermarket aisle could bring damnation. No one will be excused by a note from his/her mother.
It’s time to batten the hatches, head for the inner sanctum and break out the Lysol. The tidal wave will break and cover the planet for weeks, perhaps months, demanding patience, stamina and a few good books. But it will eventually recede, as most horrors do, and life will begin to bud, then flower. Curious heads will pop out of the ground and discover the rebirth. Flash bands will gather in the Piazza della Signoria and tootle Ludwig’s Ode to Joy. And everyone will have a fine story to tell the grandchildren of The Day The Earth Stood Still.
Like A Hurricane
We Floridians know about disruption. Wicked windstorms dance around our coasts, toss lightning bolts in our direction, occasionally skitter through the countryside and lambaste a passel of trees and countless outbuildings. But we have our Generacs for such impositions. Dad slaps some plywood on the windows, Mom makes pina coladas and everybody listens to Jimmy Buffet songs until it’s over. No big deal. But this new critter is invisible, he bobs and weaves, you can’t find him….is he in the garage or over at the Millers’ place or shuffling off to Buffalo? The hurricane does his job and promptly leaves like a polite guest, but the new guy hides under the floorboards and whistles in the night. He’s like a giant boulder balanced on a teacup. You know the thing is going to fall on somebody but you can’t tell who or when.
We all have our schedules. We write them down in little appointment books so we don’t show up for our acupuncture appointment at the same time we booked our Kung Fu lesson. Some days there aren’t enough lines on the pages. Not any more. We turn the leaf to Monday and there’s nothing but glaring white space staring back. Everything is TBA, to be announced. Every time you turn around, something else is closed. Today, it’s the schools, tomorrow the restaurants. It’s like standing atop a tall building at night during a power failure and watching the lights gradually slip off all over town. The lights, of course, will be back, probably by morning. We have no idea when our personal lights will be back---30 days…two months…the 12th of Never?
Usually, during times of trial, we can retreat to our trusty TVs and catch a few innings of Red Sox-Yankees, NBA hoopla, Olympic diversions. Not this time. The Creeping Coronavirus has oozed its way over land and sea, always inching forward, contaminating everything it touches. Nothing is safe. It settles on arena seats, Sam Adams beer taps, the left-field wall at Fenway, always on the prowl for a human lung to snuggle up to. All television can offer by way of encouragement is an endless parade of fretters determined to scare the pants off their audiences.
So now you know how Davy Crockett felt, stuck in a tiny fortress, enemies left, right and center, knowing full well the cavalry was not on the way. You can’t leave or you will likely be stomped by the enemy. The Berlin Airlift is not dropping packages of yogurt and sardines. And there’s nothing on the radio but ranting evangelists and Rush Limbaugh. It’s enough to make a grown man cry. Where’s Roy Hamilton to sing “When you walk through a storm…” when you really need him?
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| "When in doubt, go shopping." |
Day Two (Saturday, March 14)
Eventually, of course, it becomes necessary to create a diversion, temporarily befuddle the enemy and sneak a lone soldier out the back of the fort to procure supplies. Saturday is shopping day for Siobhan and Bill and the horses, goats, cats and dog will inevitably grow hungry, unsympathetic with our plight. “I guess you could die,” opines Lila the Rottweiler, “but the world needs a few martyrs every now and then. We’ll put your statues up over there by the yoga field.”
Traffic in the Publix parking lot betrays no hint of a quandary. Inside, it’s a different story. Shopping carts are unusually scarce, perhaps being constantly sanitized, and shoppers are swirling through the aisles left and right, carts piled high with every imaginable sustainable. For some reason, there is a dearth of toilet paper. Is someone foolishly expecting a universal explosion of bowels? This virus is not interested---it prefers introducing you to its partner, pneumonia. You’ll be wishing you had mere diarrhea. Water is available, but in short supply. Perhaps everyone has forgotten they have faucets and the electricity is still on. Cleaning supplies are going fast. Siobhan is perplexed as to why there are no rutabagas.
The Publix staff, usually a merry bunch, is heavily taxed and showing it. Irene the cashier, typically buoyant and conversational, is terse and moody. Erroll the bag man is downcast and flagging. Donna the jolly Bakery Queen is on sick-leave and unavailable to rally the troops. The lines are long and winding, with no sign of abating anytime soon. We gather up our two weeks supply of sustenance and strip off our purple gloves as we exit the store. Bill will later spray the haul with decontaminating mists before placing it on the shelves at home. It’s off to the much safer animal feed emporium and then back to the fort. We’ve timed it to arrive while the enemy is on siesta.
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| Irish Eyes Are Absent. |
Day Five (Tuesday, March 17): It’s A Long Way To Tipperary
“I’m washing my hands more than damned Lady MacBeth.”---Bob Simmons
The light has finally dawned on most of the dawdlers, the naysayers, the conspiracy junkies, even the would-be President of the United States. This Coronavirus business is not just a Chinese plot to upset Trump and his worm-ridden applecart. The last straw was the closing of Disney World, which shocked doubters to their cores and sent them home to rope off their properties and pull in the welcome mats. They sit around their old Victrolas now, forlornly chewing on Skoal and listening to old Jim Nabors records, waiting for the world to end not with a bang but a whimper.
With the gym temporarily on hold, Siobhan and I are walking a timed mile each morning after breakfast. It’s surprising how much of the neighborhood you fail to notice when cruising by in a car. Yesterday, we were accosted by two zooming dogs, the benefactors of sloppy gatekeeping. I dispatched mine with a knee to the kidneys while Siobhan showed her assailant a Lassie Fan Club badge she acquired as a child. The hounds ran off, showing a new respect for passers-by. Their mistress promised it wouldn’t happen again. We’ll be ready with spray bottles of Eau de Thioacetone next time.
Today is St. Patrick’s Day in case you haven’t noticed. Deprived of our formal parades, we hearty Irishmen will be parading around our yoga fields blowing on New Year’s Eve noisemakers and hoisting a few Murphy’s Irish Stouts. Many Irish pubs are still open, of course, but if you’re trying to avoid mere droplets from your neighbor’s orifices you’ll be doubly terrified by the awful possibility of regurgitated green beer. Better to stay home, put on a Celtics cap and warble a few bars of Danny Boy.
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| Encouragement on the morning walk. Nothing lasts forever. |
The Sun Also Rises
There are benefits in isolation. Siobhan will have time to read some of those six books her husband bought her for Christmas, Bill will save a lot of gas money not attending sports events. That ostentatious wedding or dweeby social event you really didn’t want to go to is probably cancelled. If not, your doctor forbids you to attend in your delicate condition (being 70+). You can run around naked in Times Square because nobody’s there. There are hundreds of seats on the subway. Everybody at the airport is pre-checked and you can arrive ten minutes before your flight. You can finally get a box seat in Fenway Park. The Jehovah’s Witnesses will not be coming down your driveway. You’ll have the Grand Canyon all to yourself.
In the 1980s, the Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani, after many years of reporting across Asia, holed himself up in a cabin in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. “For a month I had no one to talk to except my dog Baoli,” he wrote in his travelogue A Fortune Teller Told Me. Terzani passed the time with books, observing nature. For the first time in a long while he felt free from the incessant anxieties of daily life. “At last I had time to have time.”
Increasingly, scientists are approaching solitude as something that can prove therapeutic. “When people take these moments to explore their solitude, not only will they be forced to confront who they are,” says Jack Fong, a psychologist at Cal State Polytech, “they just might learn a little bit about how to outmaneuver some of the toxicity that surrounds them in a social setting.” In other words, when people remove themselves from the social context of their lives, they are better able to see how they’re shaped by that context. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and writer who spent years alone, held a similar notion. “We cannot see things in perspective until we cease to hug them to our bosom,” he writes in Thoughts in Solitude.
Existentializing moments, mental flickers of clarity which can occur during inward-focused solitude, promote self-reconfiguration. Many great thinkers have championed the intellectual and spiritual benefits of solitude, including Lao-Tzu, Moses, Nietzsche, Emerson and Woolf. Matthew Bowker, a psychoanalytic political theorist at Medaille College, laments that most modern humans seem hell-bent on avoiding it. “Every time we have a chance to go running, we plug in our headphones. Every time we sit in the car, we turn on the radio. Students today tell me they can’t go to the bathroom without their phones on.”
Few of us have been presented with an opportunity like this before. It may never happen again. We have two months, maybe a little more, to explore ourselves, make personal breakthroughs, important discoveries. Take advantage of it. Carry yourself to places you never knew existed, you’ll be the better for it. After that, well, let’s just hope we don’t have to cancel the goddam football season.
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
