March, 2020 Archive

The New Routine

Monday, March 30th, 2020

30 March 7:23 A.M.

The big space in journaling accounted for by relative lack of change. Jan and I are still comfortable with social distancing, mitigated by her ongoing interactions on Facebook and my daily visits to the farm which include live interactions with co-workers Shane and Tree, fellow farmers Abimael, Javier and Katie, volunteers Claire,  and Anneke. Continuing harvest for the Food Bank, reorganizing the field map, planting the thousands of starts donated by Green Heart, feeling the ground softened by mini-miracle March drought busting rains makes time there more precious than ever, though often exhausting.  Daily routine includes nap, dinner prep with harvest or dutiful restaurant takeout, and entertaining screen time. With students gone and populace on lockdown, the streets and freeway are quiet, the downtown empty.  The absences are filled with birdsong and screaming headlines, the most recent being that the national lockdown will continue at least until April 30.

The vocabulary word reminder:

  • Social distance
  • Self quarantine
  • Isolation and self-isolation
  • Lockdown
  • Shelter at home

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Art in a Time of Plague

Sunday, March 29th, 2020

29 March [to Kathleen Balgley]

After the lockdown started I began a journal to record thoughts of what seemed like unusual urgency in the face of unprecedented transformations. But within a couple of days I lost motivation, thinking that even if some new insight emerged, who cares, since both audience and author are likely to be eradicated in the approaching tsunami. Better to just keep working in the garden, prepare good dinners and drink hard while watching movies.

That sentiment was captured in this quote by an Oxford Shakespeare scholar in today’s NY Times:

René Girard, the French critic, wrote in a famous essay that “the distinctiveness of the plague is that it ultimately destroys all forms of distinctiveness.” Mass burial pits for plague victims were one visible symbol of the way the disease erased social, gender and personal difference.

But then she goes on:

Elaborate plots, motives, interactions and obscurities focus our attention on human beings. No one in Shakespeare’s plays dies quickly and obscurely, thrown into a communal grave. Rather, last words are given full hearing, epitaphs are soberly delivered, bodies taken offstage respectfully.

Lots to learn from writers and artists these days after all.

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Covid 19

Monday, March 16th, 2020

March 16, 2020 7:25 AM

The greatest instability in my 78 years—maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 or the Columbia strike of 1968 can compare—and it’s already become a routine. No mindblowing headlines this morning, no new directives for today—the schools all shut down, seniors supposed to stay indoors, stock market crashing again—Jan and I resolved to stay home without company, finding most stimulation in watching old TV shows.

I still go back and forth between fantasizing about how to pull the plug if I get really sick in compliance with my advance directive and thinking that the probability of being affected is less than dying of the seasonal flu.

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St. Fratty’s Day

Sunday, March 15th, 2020

Our next door fraternity boy neighbors, who are careful not to have parties at night and are friendly and courteous, threw what in SLO is a traditional “St. Fratty’s Day” 8:00 AM bash the Saturday morning before St. Patricks Day.  They had told us of the plan the day before and neither of us were concerned, since we had planned a Saturday morning rendezvous for 6:30.  Once the festivities started I went up the hill in back and looked over the fence and gave a thumbs up, which produced this response:

They urged me to join them, which I did, thinking I was being  discreet by elbow bumping instead of hand shaking.  Sky high on endorphins from the earlier activity, reinforced by avid attentions of the sorority girls, I did not resist many much closer contacts and couldnt help thinking if the end of the world was near, this was the way to go.

When I got back home Jan was not amused.  She’d been reading the morning’s news about the urgent necessity for “social distancing,” and told me immediately to take off all my clothes and put them in the washing machine and to shower thoroughly, soaping everywhere.  I did as she said, but still felt the glow of being a “celebrity””their word”among the neighbors, and so sent you the photos.  Fortunately I left it at that, though Jan put her picture from our yard up on Facebook.  But as the day went on and the news got steadily grimmer, she  got more and more pissed at me, and I felt stupider and guiltier, realizing that the party itself, and my succumbing to it was precisely what the Surgeon General and even the President now was cautioning against. We’ll only know in a couple of weeks whether that lapse will have led to serious   consequences.  But Jan did acknowledge this morning, that though she chose not to join me at the party, she didnt try to stop me going.

As of Friday all schools in the County are closed until April 15, and our burgeoning educational Farm programs are shut down.

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