Paul previously published parts of his article on Facebook but it is first fully available here on Litchatte.
It’s not the kind of diary where you write down what you ate for lunch every day or what the weather was like on Tuesday. It’s more like sitting down every few weeks and noting down some strange things you can’t get out of your mind. And there was plenty of time to think about those strange things during the first long year of the Corona Virus pandemic…
March 22, 2020: PART ONE, Where’s the Charmin?
I played in a poker tournament two weeks ago today. Everyone was shaking hands, hugging each other, kissing, and sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at the poker table as usual. I wore a mask around my neck but didn’t use it much except when I went to the bathroom or sat too close to someone. A lot of people made fun of the mask that day. They told me it wouldn’t work, and some asked me if I was sick. But it kept people out of my face, so in that way, it was a good strategy.
In normal times most people naturally shy away from someone wearing a mask. I was the only one of the 200 people playing that had any idea that a pandemic was headed our way. My intuition told me something bad was coming at us (probably because I had seen reports on TV about how quickly it was spreading in China.) The poker players thought it was nothing to worry about. They are part of the “whatever is supposed to happen will happen” crowd. It was still early and they were sure it was going to be no big deal.
A woman at my table asked me (in an accusatory manner) why I was using a mask. I told her it was defensive and when people saw the mask they kept away from me. The lady said she asked because she was undergoing chemo and she had to be careful. Then I noticed she was wearing a kerchief around her head and she had no hair.
The next day we held our regular poker game down in Boca, but that was the last time I played. It will be two weeks tomorrow. I still went to the gym once or twice more, but I started feeling fearful because people didn’t wipe down the machines and it just felt creepy to be around so many people who were so oblivious about what was about to happen. We have no idea yet how this disease is spreading or who has it, yet no one seems to care.
The Buddhists at the Lake Worth center had a Tibetan New Year celebration with 100 people, but I didn’t go. The next week, their lama came and they had a big program with pot luck but I didn’t go to that either. I wonder if they believe that their religion will make them immune.
inking that if even one person in that big group caught the virus, then everyone would have to quarantine for two weeks and how would I deal with that if I had gone. I’m not only responsible for myself, but I have my mother who is in assisted living to deal with and when she needs something, like toilet paper, toothpaste, Cetaphil, pull-ups, or Tylenol, she really needs it, and even if I didn’t get sick but had to be quarantined, I would have no way to get her supplies to her.
For almost a month, I have been staying home every day. I do my exercise alone. I ordered two 10 pound weights online because I didn’t want to go into the store unnecessarily even though I had to pay $10 dollars extra for shipping. I’ve been swimming every day in the community pool and jogging on the golf course in the morning since they closed it to players. I also take a long walk in the evening about 6:30 just to tire myself out so I can sleep at night.
In the evening, I try to find inspiring shows on the TV. I watched American Graffiti the other day and even though I saw it twice before, it made me extremely emotional; the music, the story, reminded me of my teenage years. It was intense.
On Thursday, they quarantined my mother who is 100 years old. She was born during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. She has to eat in her room, and her aides are wearing masks and rubber gloves. I hope they’re safe, but who knows. They take everyone’s temperature when they come into the building and if your temperature is over a hundred, you can’t come in. But that doesn’t make sense to me because most people get the disease from someone with no symptoms according to the doctors on TV. Taking one’s temperature seems like a waste of time.
I saw people on TV visiting their aged parents by standing outside the room and talking through the windows. My mother has double doors and she’s on the first floor so I co-opted that idea and started visiting her from the outside the building. At first, she objected, but I stuck with it, and now she’s used to it. I remind her occasionally that some people have nobody to visit them and at least she has me. She complains about the food, tells me what she read in the newspaper, and gripes about the poor quality of the only toilet paper I was able to find. (She prefers the Charmin extra-soft mega.)
There’s been no toilet paper, no water, no Classico spaghetti sauce, no certain types of beans, no rice, or over-the-counter drugs like Tylenol and Aleve. That was the first week anyway. If you go early in the morning you can find some of that stuff in limited quantities. One thing I noticed is that people don’t want to buy the last can of beans or the last jar of Tylenol. Nobody wants the last one of anything, so at least I can always find one to buy. I don’t mind buying the last one as long as it hasn’t been squashed or severely damaged.
The worst thing to think about is the fear of what could happen. The news has been just terrible; they make it sound like everyone’s going to die. Even the good news stations. I’m trying to keep positive thoughts in my head because if I extrapolate the bad thoughts, it could get depressing.
I talk to people at the pool for company, and when I’m jogging, if I run across somebody I know, I chat with them from a distance. In the evenings I try to think of somebody to call the phone, if for no other reason than to give myself something to think about the next day.
I saw a doctor on TV say that you should only use a tissue once and I was trying to figure out what that implies. If you blow your nose, why could you not use the tissue more than once? Would you somehow contaminate yourself from blowing your own nose? Doesn’t makes sense.
Stupid H__ called to tell me that he had rubber gloves if I wanted to play poker. I don’t know how that could possibly help prevent Covid if you weren’t wearing a mask. He also told me he heard the virus could last for up to a year on packages. I asked him how could anybody possibly know that because the virus has only been around for a few months. He agreed that it was a dumb idea. (Note: H— later got long-haul Covid and dropped out of sight.)
I am a painter so I paint four hours a day instead of two hours a day to fill the idle time, I edit my book at night, do yoga every day, play my guitar once in a while, and I take my time doing everything because I have more time than usual. It’s very Zen. In some ways I feel calm because there’s nothing that needs to be urgently done, no appointments to be kept, only visitation to my mother twice a week to bring her supplies.
When I visit her, I go around to her glass patio doors to give her the supplies rather than going in the front where they ask a lot of lame questions and make you use that awful-smelling, perfumed Purell on your hands. I talk to her on the phone from outside her apartment sometimes. Happily, she’s in a decent mood so far. She still complains about the food all the time, but then again, she always did that. She told me that for breakfast yesterday she had something that was either French toast or pancakes, she couldn’t tell. Then, laughing, she told me that if you put enough syrup on it, it tastes pretty good.
April 27, 2020: PART TWO, Lockdown
The board closed down the pool today which sucks because it’s very hard to get the Corona Virus from a pool; the chlorine is said to kill it and besides most of the time, nobody but me ever swims there anyway. But I know better than to argue with them because they said that the State of Florida mandates it. So for now, I will just jog twice a day, do yoga, and use my two 10 pound weights for exercise. Damn! I’m really going to miss that pool!
When I first started wearing a mask everyone made fun of me, now everyone wears masks. Old ladies in my neighborhood who walk dogs by themselves wear masks even though there are no other humans anywhere in the vicinity. My neighbor came out to check the mail wearing a mask yesterday. What does she think is happening? Is she afraid the virus is floating through the air by itself now? I even see people driving around alone in the car wearing a mask. The fear is unbelievable (and in some cases irrational).
The doctors on TV say that when the weather gets warm the virus will clear up, yet Miami, which is always warm, is having a terrible outbreak. How do they explain that one? I don’t believe it’s going away in the spring, especially if people aren’t careful, which they aren’t. Why do the news anchors not ask the questions that seem so obvious to me?
They are only testing people who have symptoms here. Yet they say the virus is spread primarily by people who have no symptoms. They don’t want us to congregate with more than 10 people, yet it only takes one infected person to spread the virus to all 10 of them. When are they going to get enough testing to just test everybody and keep testing everybody all the time? That’s what I would need to feel safe. Or how about a vaccine?
By doing a little math, I figured out that one out of 500 people has Covid in Palm Beach County. It used to be one out of 10,000. That means if you’re in the store and there are 100 people shopping, there is a good possibility that no one has it. Theoretically, you would have to go into five stores to find one person with Covid.
If that’s true, why do I feel so unsafe in the market? Every time I go in there I just want to go home, remove my shoes and clothes, wash my hands in boiling water, clean the steering wheel, the shift knob, and the trunk opener with alcohol, then wipe off the doorknob that I used to get in from the garage, and when it’s all over I want to wash my hands again for 20 seconds. After that, I feel fairly sanitized.
They reserved the first hour of shopping from 8 to 9 o’clock in the morning for seniors only. I went a couple times but the seniors here (Florida) are so oblivious that they walk up the clearly marked aisles in the wrong direction and don’t keep their distance from you when they’re taking something off the shelf. I don’t know why they’re so screwed up. Can’t they see the color-coded arrows on the floor? I think because they don’t feel sick, they think they don’t have it, and therefore nobody has anything to worry about. They come right up behind you without warning. One old guy took my shopping cart by mistake and started to walk away and when I told him he had my cart, he came within three inches of my face to apologize.
The aisles are clearly marked with arrows and Xs. You’re supposed to go up the one with the arrows and not go down the one with the Xs. It is so simple, but many people are doing the opposite of what they are supposed to do. If they want something from the wrong aisle, they just disregard the arrows altogether. So when somebody is coming out the wrong way, you have a hard time figuring out what you’re supposed to do. If you follow the green arrows as designated, you will smash right into these people going the wrong way. Meanwhile, you’re trying to properly social distance. If you go the other way to avoid them, you’re going the wrong way too and if somebody comes around the corner going the right way, you’ll smash right into them. I think it’s better to go to the market at dinner time when these old people are (hopefully) home eating dinner.
When I walk on the sidewalk here, people with no mask barrel right toward me, walking smack in the middle of the sidewalk. They don’t go to one side, and if I go way off the sidewalk to give them room, they don’t say thanks. They just keep walking like they own the world. It’s hard to figure these people out. They seem to live in a selfish, myopic world, all of their own.
There’s still no toilet paper in the stores. You can find paper towels sometimes and you can find the small square (expensive) boxes of tissues but you can’t find decent toilet paper anywhere, especially the Charmin extra-soft mega that my mother likes. It’s been almost 2 months and still no toilet paper. Where has it all gone?
May 4, 2020: PART THREE, Survival
In only one hour, I wrote down the following schmaltzy phrases from advertisements on TV:
1-We may be apart, but we’ll all be together soon.
2-You’re not in this alone and until then we’ll be here to help with flexible payment options.
3-During this challenging time, we understand that hardships may arrive and we’re willing to help.
4-Though miles keep us apart, we’re all on the same team.
5-Our spirit is what unites us (Chrysler Dodge)
6-Together we can help save the restaurants that we love.
7-Soon lights will come on, and life will move forward. (pay.com)
Some things may change but will always be here no matter what tomorrow holds.
8-We will remain invested in you. (Charles Schwab)
9-It’s the simple moments that unite us. We’ll get through this together. These days, staying connected is more important than ever. You’ve been there for us now we are here for you.
10-Many of life’s moments are being put on hold. You have a lot to take care of, so let us take care of you.
May 15, 2020: The guys on TV tell you to wipe down your groceries when you come home from the store and the same guys say it’s okay to eat food from restaurants because cooked food doesn’t carry the virus. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t think they know what the hell they’re talking about but they really know how to scare the s___ out of you.
And when is it best to take your gloves off? Do you take them off when you come out of the store or do you wear them till you get home and unload the food and put it away? I usually take them off when I get out of the store. That way I don’t have to wipe down my car as much. It’s like putting together a thousand-piece puzzle!
I live alone but I can imagine if there were four people living here. They would all have to go out once in a while and every time they went out, they would come in contact with other people. How long would it be before one of them brings home the virus? Right now living alone seems like the optimal way to go. I’m the only one in the house and nobody can contaminate my environment unless I allow them to. Of course, I’m lucky I don’t have to go to work in the middle of this. Those are the people I really feel empathy for.
Around here, golfers drive their carts past you as fast as they’ll go. They come way less than 6 feet away with no masks. Bicycles do the same thing. You have to think like a football player running downfield with the ball. I always look to the front and the back to see what’s coming and I go way out of my way to avoid them because these other people are not looking out for me, that’s for sure.
My dreams have been more intense than usual lately. I try to wake up and write them down but I only remember snippets and they are more like snapshots than full-length movies:
Dream: April 1-I had two Asian girl trainees in the marketplace (where I worked in Hawaii) and I was up in a high-rise talking to my old boss and I suddenly realized that I had left the girls alone in the shop. I couldn’t remember if they knew what to do so I rushed back in a panic. Fear.
Dream: April 20-I needed one more course to graduate college and I couldn’t pass it so I wanted to take an easy one, but I’d already taken the easy one and I knew the teacher would bust me if I took it again. Doesn’t sound scary, but it was. Fear.
Dream: April 24–I’m at a party and only men are there and no one’s social distancing. R___ is there and another guy that scares me. It’s an apartment on campus. I get angry and leave. Anger.
Dream: On April 28-I lived in a big house high on a mountain but I rented it to a young Vietnamese family to save money and I moved into a smaller place in the back. I feel foolish doing that. They move in and when I come home, I see their car in the garage and some tomato plants in their living room and I start to regret having moved out because I traded money for lifestyle again. Sad.
June 13, 2020: Band-Aid announces they will come out with ethnic skin color appropriate Band-Aids. (Not relevant to the Corona Virus necessarily, but interesting to the times.)
June 14, 2020: Anderson Cooper is doing a one-hour special on bats.
July 15, 2020: Florida is one of the worst states now as far as the virus goes. It seems to be raging out of control. I see people on the golf course riding in separate cars, then standing close to each other face-to-face talking on the green.
Some people are more worried about sports being canceled than they are about their health. Watching sports and talking about sports is their whole life and without it, they’re lost souls.
Now they opened the pool again, but only two people can swim at a time which is fine with me. A board member sits and watches to make sure the rules are being followed. That’s fine with me too; gives me someone to talk to while I’m swimming laps.
The old ladies don’t wear their hearing aids at the pool so they talk to each other from about 6 inches apart. I could literally see them spitting in each other’s mouths. I try to stay away from them and if they get too close, which they do, I hold my hand out with my palm facing them to keep them away. If I didn’t do that they would come right up into my face.
Palm Beach County has finally reached the point where one out of hundred people have the virus. A few months ago it was one out of 10,000. That’s how far it’s come. Testing is still very limited and a lot of people ignore masking and social distancing, especially the younger ones who feel invincible…That’s Florida, my friends!
I don’t see this being over quickly although the stock market seems to think it will be. Every time a new vaccine is talked about, the market goes up 600 points even though business on the street is still terrible. Nobody seems to care as far as the stock market is concerned. Lot’s of speculation I think.
Well, at least there’s plenty of toilet paper and tissues now. It’s not cheap, but you can find it everywhere. And bottled water too.
My mother made it to her hundred and second birthday somehow. She broke her leg and/or her hip three or four times since I came here, four of her teeth chipped out in the front, she has been evacuated to Orlando in her wheelchair on a bus twice for hurricanes; she can’t hear, she can’t walk, she can hardly go to the bathroom, and she’s in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century and still she lives on and on (somehow.)
Every night I write and edit my book. I’m calling it a book now because it looks a lot more like one than it used to. It’s almost 300 pages already. I’ve even started preliminary research on publishers. There’re a lot of people self-publishing these days. It’s a self-publishing jungle out there folks.
Meanwhile, the virus is 10 times worse than it used to be and people are ignoring it just because they’re tired of staying home. Everywhere I go, I see people removing their masks when they talk to friends or wearing them on their chin or just on their mouth and not in their nose. It seems like they’re trying to fool the virus and from the statistics and the arc of illness, I would say that they’re not having much success. Rather the virus is fooling with them.
December 20, 2020: PART FOUR: The Vaccine
Yea…the vaccines finally came out but I haven’t been able to get one around here yet. People in my community are driving 50 miles (or more) to get vaccinated and I keep hearing that you still have to wear a mask after taking the vaccine, but I’m not sure why.
Today, as I was leaving my garage to go for a walk, a lady and her husband were walking by holding hands (but not wearing masks.) I greeted them and they both dived into their pockets and put on their masks as if it was some kind of toxic emergency. I told them not to worry, I was at least 10 feet away from them, but they nervously told me to walk ahead because they walk slow.
Then the wife called out to me that I should be wearing a mask whenever I leave the house. I told her that I usually did except when there was nobody near me. She said I should wear a mask anyway and at the pool too. I told her the only reason I go to the pool was to swim and after I swim I leave right away. For the most part, there’s never anybody there. She said it didn’t matter. I should still wear a mask all the time.
I tried to tell her that if there was nobody at the pool, then there was no reason to mask up, but she insisted that I should be wearing one just in case somebody showed up. That didn’t make sense because I was either swimming or leaving, so what the heck. I tried to wear a mask once while I was swimming because this paranoid lady told me to, and it got drenched. I could hardly breathe. When my neighbor kept arguing, I told her I felt like I was talking to my mother and her husband laughed.
When I first saw the couple, neither one of them was wearing a mask. They only put them on when they saw me come out of the house, yet she was scolding me and saying that I should always wear a mask even when there was nobody around. If that makes sense to you then you’re a much better psychologist than I am.
I guess she was coming from a place of excessive and irrational fear and there’s no way to argue with that because, it’s based on pure emotion, and how can you argue with what somebody is feeling, even if they are irrational.
January 26, 2021: Biden became president on January 21. 500,000 people have died so far and there’s a new variant of the virus which is more contagious (whatever that means.) Does it mean it spreads further? Does it mean the virus lasts longer outside the body? Does it mean that there are more germs per sneeze or cough? I haven’t heard anybody explain what it actually means to be more contagious or less contagious. That’s another question that the newscasters don’t ask.
I finally got up the nerve to get my teeth cleaned…The dental hygienist was wearing a cheap ten-cent mask from Walmart. (Meanwhile, the dentist charged me $10 extra for PPE.) When I went in for my cleaning she didn’t have a plastic shield on so I asked her where it was. She said she would put it on when she started cleaning. I replied that she was still breathing air in that tiny little room so she should put it on now. She didn’t like that and gave me stinkeye, but she put it on.
In the middle of my cleaning, another hygienist came in with no gloves on and started messing with the tools on the little table. She had no shield either. I told the hygienist that if the other lady didn’t get out of the room immediately, I was going to get up and leave. They both really didn’t like me and I really didn’t care.
February 25, 2021: It’s been almost a year now since this thing started. Finally, the amount of people dying and getting sick is starting to go down. The vaccines are getting out, although I haven’t been able to get one or even get close to one yet… Maybe it’s because I’m in Florida, but there’s nothing around here that I can get, although some of my neighbors got vaccinated already and my mother got hers too.
I’m reading The Plague by Camus. I’m surprised at how similar the current situation is to the one in his book except for the whole thing about the rats. The trajectory of the disease in the book, as the one now, gets worse and worse and then the variants come out. Then the city gets quarantined and people try to sneak away. The way they feel and act in the book is familiar.
Now I’m going to share my shopping cart technique for standing on the checkout line: If you stand in front of the cart you can push the people behind you back, otherwise, they will come right up behind you. I don’t know if it’s just the people in Florida, but people have no idea what 6 feet looks like. For them, 2 feet is good enough on a line. But if I keep the shopping cart behind me I can always keep them 4 or 5 feet away from me, which is better than nothing.
How I finally got my vaccination: I signed up with the state and county and they called me once a week by robotics to tell me they don’t have any vaccine yet. Then I saw on Facebook that my friend Pam had a birthday, so I wished her happy birthday (as one does) and saw on her feed that she got a shoutout in the newspaper for helping 100 seniors get Covid vaccines.
I messaged her and asked her if she could help me get one. She took down a bunch of information, and a half-hour later she called and asked if I could go to Walmart in the next two hours. I told her yes, I could get there in twenty minutes (6 miles away.) She told me to ask for Lester at the pharmacy so I went down there and he made me register on the Walmart website which I did (with a lot of trouble) and got the J&J shot which I hope works. I had chills the first two days but that’s about it.
Lester said I have to wait 20 days for it to be effective. He heard of a few cases of people who got the virus right after they got the shot. It’s been about 10 days for me so far, but even then I don’t see what I could do that much different than what I’m doing now. I still have to wear a mask everywhere I go, but at least I’m alive and healthy after the first year.
End of year one…drop me or Editor Murray Ellison a line in the dialogue box below.
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