Day 22

Day 22, self quarantine:  And so starts week four of self quarantine.

Yesterday, I turned to Gary and said incredulously, “Do you realize this is the longest time we’ve ever spent one on one together, despite being a couple for like half a century?”

He stared at me and I could tell he was about to contradict me but then realized he couldn’t.  Even when we were teenagers, we went to school and had jobs.  The longest vacation we’ve ever had together since we graduated school and started working is two weeks.  I had a couple of months maternity leave but Gary didn’t.

So instead of saying anything prolific, Gary just opened and closed his mouth a few times and let it sink in.  Finally he just said, “Wow.”

“Yeah, I know.  Week four and we haven’t killed each other yet,” I said, smiling.

“I’m enjoying myself so far,” he said.

“Me, too.  But I’d enjoy it a lot more without the threat of death by choking on my own mucus.”

I didn’t say it, but we’d also enjoy it a hell of a lot more if we were actually retired, not thinking about our jobs, and could actually go out and physically do things.

But yeah, so far we’re doing okay.  We’re getting through it with food and music.  Which is exactly how we get through any day normally but this time we’re super conscious of it seeing as we can’t really do anything else.

Music is everything.  After our miserable first few days navigating bad dead celebrity daytime television, we switched off the tv and began listening exclusively to wxpn radio, which is our local public radio station out of the University of Pennsylvania. Their program director is also a rabbi, who by the way married Eric and Natalie.

Anyway, wxpn plays eclectic music, a lot of the stuff we loved as teens through now, and they also feature the top 20 NPR hits in heavy rotation, playing them at least twice a day.  

These top 20 hits have subliminally become our quarantine soundtrack.  

I’m pretty stoked to be hearing great new music from artists I really didn’t know about.  Early James.  Marcus King. The Lone Bellow.  Nicole Atkins.  Who knew?  I can’t fucking wait to get to a record store.  (One hopes.)

I’m obsessed with The Lone Bellow at the moment.  

Gary and I will never be able to hear any of those tracks without remembering this strange, scary time in our lives.  We’re deeply connected by and to music, we’ve got a musical milestone for everything.  

When we were first married, the song Baker Street was a huge hit.  We had a bright red MG convertible and to this day, I can’t hear Baker Street without remembering the warm sun on my face and my hair whipping crazily around in the breeze, feeling like Gary and I owned the world and no one had a better life than we did.

(I still feel that way.)

The song Moonshadow by Cat Stevens was playing in the delivery room when I gave birth to Julie.  Gary and I get choked up every time we hear it.

When Eric was six years old, he was home sick from school and he requested I put on some music.  He’d just gotten his first real drum set and climbed behind the kit.  I put on Eric Clapton’s I Can’t Stand It, and looked over at Eric as he naturally and brilliantly played along, and I know it’s crazy, but in that moment, I saw him clearly as an adult, and knew his future.  I hear that song, it’s 1993 and Eric is a a six year old superstar in-waiting.

I also have an entire soundtrack from Eric and Natalie’s wedding.

And for my own.  Oy, I have a whole story about my honeymoon and All the Young Dudes but that will have to be its own separate post.

Anyhoo...

I’m just hoping I get to look back as happily on this soundtrack.

https://youtu.be/1iBv76JOYYw

Day 20

Day 20, self quarantine: Yesterday was another tough one.  Bill Withers was a favorite of ours. So we had a little tribute at Casa Slick and listened to his music.  What an unbelievable artist.

And then because I’m death obsessed these days, my mind drifted to January, 2020, which already feels like a thousand years ago, when we were reeling from the shock of losing Neil Peart and Kobe Bryant.  Oh, and the apparent death of democracy but I won’t go there.  But yeah, remember January?  We collectively sighed Oh my God, when will this month be over and joked that it felt like a decade.

But then March, 2020 rolled up and said Yo, January, hold my beer.

April, 2020 stood in the wings, cackling and rubbing its infectious diseased hands together, and now we’re thrust into a strange new world of face masks and pop-up morgues.

Not to mention vacant cities that look like something out of a Mad Max movie.  Holy hell, downtown Philadelphia is boarded up because restaurants and retail stores are frightened of looters with food insecurities.

Wut? Food insecurities?

Here’s the official definition from the dictionary: 

“the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food.”

Welp, I’d never heard that term.  If you had asked me, I’d have thought food insecurities was a new eating disorder, one which I was likely to get.

“I can’t eat this chocolate chip muffin, Gary.  I like it but I don’t think it likes me back.”

Or:

“What the hell is that in my salad?”

Those are food insecurities in my world.  Oh, I forgot one.

“Are there any animal products  in anything I ordered?”

I’ve never really gotten over that time when Julie and I ordered banana bread pudding for dessert and learned, after devouring it, that it contained bacon fat.

Bacon fat in dessert.  Who does that?  

Yeah, yeah, I watch the Food Network. That doesn’t make it right.

Anyway, so assuming we live through the pandemic, the next stage of this apocalypse is mass looting by the starving, unemployed, i.e., everyone? You mean this here quarantine is the baby stuff?  

Cool, cool, everything is fine. I’m sure my excellent mental health will see me through this...NEVER.

I’m not kidding, the scope of this thing is blowing my mind.

I’m trying to imagine a post pandemic world and I can’t. Even more shocking was how suddenly everything just stopped, and in just three weeks, for nearly all of us, our lives completely changed forever and it’s only just started!  How can I even contemplate all the businesses that won’t be here anymore?  The weirdness of everyone wearing masks. Never eating at my favorite Indian buffet again - oy vey, can you imagine ever eating at a buffet again? 

Actually, I’m a food snob.  I hate buffets, they’re gross.  I make an exception for Sitar India but I honestly don’t know when I’ll ever feel comfortable in any restaurant again and  I’m not even a germophobe.  

And with all this on our minds, overshadowing everything are the daily prayers and thoughts and hopes and wishes that we and everyone we love stay safe and healthy.

Oh yeah, that.  Somehow my goal for 2020 was never Hey, I had a virus and I didn’t need a ventilator! 

Silly me.

Maybe if there’s a vaccine, maybe after we flatten the curve, all this will pass.  The question is when.

It’s the waiting that’s the hardest part.  For now, anyway.