July 16, 2020
Thursday afternoon
Greetings.
I have not
written in some while because I didn't have the inclination to do so. I've been
keeping a COVID-19 diary (that's not focused entirely or even primarily on the
coronavirus). I've been emailing with a number of friends on living during a
pandemic and the impact on our mental health and daily activities. I have not
run across any interesting or fun research that I have felt inclined to pass
along. It is true to say that I am subconsciously preoccupied with the pandemic,
which is really a waste of thought. Today is day 125 of quarantining/distancing
for us. Our last social event out was at a restaurant on March 13.
Apropos of being "productive"
or useful (or not) in retirement years, my "coronavirus angst" in my earlier
message. (I wrote that my late ex-father in law told his grandchildren at one
point that his productive and useful years were over.) As I commented to a
friend, and forgot to mention, I've also had a contrary thought about being
productive. By any reasonable standard I had a productive career at the University
of Minnesota for ~43 years. So who says, or what ethical or social expectation
is there, that I must continue to be productive? The obvious answer is "no one and there
isn't one." That makes me step back and say to myself that it's OK just to
enjoy myself even if I'm not contributing anything to the greater good. I did "productive"
for over four decades. The dilemma is that just enjoying yourself can become tedious
even without the coronavirus. Doing nothing but eating out with friends,
traveling, gardening, reading, playing bridge, and so on can be a meaningless
rut, too. (If you know anything about
them, it's the lives of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, aka Wallace Warfield
Simpson and the abdicated Edward VIII from the late 1930s until his death in
1972.) Family is an exception, but as I've said, Elliott's got his job and his
girlfriend and his own life, so I can't--shouldn't--be a big part of it. I like
spending time with Kathy, of course, but we need to have alternatives to each
other, too!--as does every married couple, I would think.
There's another element to the
coronavirus circumstances that I neglected to include in my original musings.
Perhaps this is just me, but I find myself to be intellectually lethargic
during this period. I can't concentrate on novels. For awhile I couldn't summon
up the energy to do even these short blog posts/epistles that I like to write.
I can do online bridge and I can do emails and I can putter in the garden, but
there's not much beyond that. Except reading the news and articles on various
subjects, and most of the news is even more depressing. So instead I ordered a
new book that has gotten fabulous reviews, A History of the Bible by
John Barton. I've almost finished it and
found it well worth the effort, although I couldn't read more than about 10
pages at a time. I won't say it was a slog because that's a negative term, but I
can say it's dense reading. It's a
combination of history and textual analysis and the scholarship behind the book
leaves me awestruck. I have learned a lot.
I read the precis of a study out of
Michigan State. The authors surveyed 75,000 Americans, Dutch, and Germans about
optimism and found that most people are optimistic most of their lives, even in
the face of traumatic events. When they start to move toward being elderly,
however, their optimism declines. "While the elderly aren't full-fledged
pessimists . . . there is still a noticeable change. 'Retirement age is when
people can stop working, have time to travel, and to pursue their hobbies. . .
. But very surprisingly, people didn't really think that it would change the
outlook of their lives for the better.'" I hadn't thought about it before,
but I can see why it would be true that retirement would not make you more
optimistic, even though many look forward to it. Combine retirement with (1) a
pandemic that severely restricts your life and (2) the most corrupt,
destructive, incompetent administration in the history of the Republic, and you
have an excellent recipe for depression and pessimism. Especially for retirees
with children, thinking about the world we're leaving them. Oh yes, I forgot to
mention climate change. . . .
Shortly after Krystin died in
October 2017, Kathy bought me a paint-by-number kit (I think it was a Christmas
present). I thought at the time, "this is silly and a waste of time."
But since it was a scene that Elliott and I (and Kathy and I) had walked--on
the Quai de la Tournelle about where the Rue de Pontoise runs into it, looking
northwest, with the rear of Notre Dame on one side--I thought, "what the
heck, I'll do this one." (Yes, I had to go look at a Paris map to figure
out the location, and no, I did not have faintest idea what the street names
were.)
Anyway, this was not my grandmother's
paint-by-number. (She really did do paint-by-numbers in her 70s. I had saved
two of them, and when I asked Elliott if I should toss them or if he'd like
them as a memento of his great-grandmother, he said—he the painter--that he
liked them. Up close they are clearly amateur, but at a slight distance, he
said, they were attractive, so I framed them for him and gave them to him. But
hers were pretty simple, not a lot of colors and not a lot of tiny areas to be
painted and about 8.5 x 11 inches.) The one Kathy got me had perhaps 25 colors,
it was like 11 x 14, and I had to use a magnifying glass to paint some of the
spaces. There were well over 1000 numbered points on the canvas. It took me
about four months, working 2-3-4 hours per day, pretty much. I had a colloquy
with Elliott about whether or not it was even "art." He maintained that paint-by-number is certainly
art, it's just not creative.
It turned out, of course, that that
was an excellent distraction for me in the months immediately after Krystin
died. (And unlike my usual habit, that was a time when I played a lot of
classical music while "painting.") It required little mental energy,
only the ability to match paint color number to number on the canvas. That's a
long-worded story about how I occupied my time when situationally
depressed--and I'm wondering if I should do something like that again, even though
there's nothing creative about it.
A friend
wrote back to me about the disquiet of seeing some of our remaining time
constrained by the coronavirus.
I had been having similar thoughts
to you about having to spend some of my diminishing allocation of time in
quarantine - and I'm no longer heading towards 70, I'm already a few years on
the other side of it. I'd also been comparing my situation with that of our
kids, both millennials. I'd come up with the rather more upbeat conclusion
that, however long the lockdown lasts, it will be a relatively small proportion
of their remaining years - even if the rest of their days have to be lived out
in times of relative economic hardship. However, I also recall, from growing up
in the 1950s and early 60s, the sense of hope and excitement about the future
that follows a period of catastrophe (in this case World War 2). So at some
point this crisis will be over, and I hope the millennials will be able to
enjoy a similar period of hope and excitement as things are rebuilt.
I like that attitude. That's how I'm going to think about
the future.
I and everyone
I know—I can't think of any exceptions—believes that the distancing and
quarantining will not end until there is an effective and widely available
vaccine. We will not go to restaurants, we won't go to indoor social
gatherings, we won't go to cultural events. Friends who love sports can't go games
(even if they are ever played, which remains an open question, varying by
sport). Those strictures are tolerable in the summer, when we can see friends,
one or two at a time, outside on the deck, and when we can go walking by the
river or in a local park. We shudder at the thought of being cooped up all
winter, however, so we have rented a house in Bonita Springs, Florida, for the
months of January and February. We will be snowbirds for the first time; we'll
have to see how we like it. (Kathy is retiring on September 4; the University
offered a retirement incentive that was too good to pass up. So we'll be free
to be gone for an extended period.)
Yes, Florida
is a coronavirus basket case, at least right now. Unless something weird
happens, that situation won't change our plans. We wouldn't do anything in
Florida that we wouldn't do here. But it will be green and warm and we can go
out walking, including on beaches. We have a number of friends up and down the
Gulf Coast, so our lives will not be hermitic. As with our lives now in
Minnesota, we can gather in twos and threes outdoors.
In general,
however, it certainly appears that the prospects for the upcoming winter are
bleak (and I don't mean the weather). More and more COVID-19 cases, more and
more deaths. The CDC reports on the 1918-19 flu pandemic:
There were 3 different waves of
illness during the pandemic, starting in March 1918 and subsiding by summer
of 1919. The pandemic peaked in the U.S.
during the second wave, in the fall of 1918. This highly fatal second wave was
responsible for most of the U.S. deaths attributed to the pandemic.
At least some of the public health experts are predicting a
similar second wave this coming winter, although it may be arguable that we
never got past the first wave because so many states opened up so soon that they
just continued the first wave. We can hope that any second wave will not be as
deadly as the 1918 second wave was. Given the idiocy of certain public
officials in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, and a few other places, however,
it would not surprise me if the infection and mortality rates skyrocket by the
end of the year. Illnesses and deaths that would be entirely preventable given
appropriate public policy decisions.
Kathy and I
have not been reluctant to go out to stores—as more and more require masks. We
didn't return to Costco until they required masks. The City of Minneapolis
requires masks in all public places, an ordinance that seems to be mostly
followed. We just got back from Costco a short while ago and encountered the
same irritating behavior by a few people that we've seen elsewhere: wearing a
mask that doesn't cover the nose. Those people are ignorant or careless or
defiant. No matter the reason, I resent them.
I think
that many of us have loosened up a little bit since the onset of the pandemic.
At first we were all scared to death about how the coronavirus spread and how
long it lived on various surfaces and whether we could get it from food and so
on. As more evidence about it has accumulated, it's become clearer where the dangers
lie and where they do not. We no longer wipe down the steering wheel with Clorox
after we go to a store. We don't clean off groceries when brought into the
house. We don't worry about seeing friends outdoors when we can be spaced 8-10
feet apart. Of course we wash our hands repeatedly and follow the other public
health suggestions, but we aren't petrified that we're going to get COVID-19.
How are you
occupying your time? I'd be interested to learn. I know that some are reading;
one friend said he's on the way to reading 100 books by the end of the year.
Wow; even when I was reading a lot I don't think I read more than 25-30 books
per year. One new-fangled way to entertain ourselves is something friends of
mine and I do: play online bridge a few times per week. (It's something I can
only do for about 90 minutes, after which I have online fatigue. That's very
different from real life, where we play for perhaps 3 or 3½ hours without any
fatigue—but we can get up and walk around, grab a snack, chat briefly. We don't
have a computer spitting out bridge hands as fast as we can play them.)
We've also
taken up walking in nearby regional or state parks. "Forest bathing"
is the term, and it is a pleasant way to spend part of a day. It seems like a
contradiction that we drive 10-15-20 minutes to get to someplace where we then
walk for an hour. We're sort of wimps, however, because we won't go out when it's
90 degrees or more (nor will we go out in the rain, of course). So this has not
been an everyday activity because we've had a lot of heat and rain.
Kathy, when
she's not working, is selling her button collection on eBay. Earlier in her
life she amassed a considerable (to me, anyway) collection of buttons (as in
clothing). It's a fascinating collection; I had no idea that there was such an
amazing diversity of buttons. Some of them are incredibly ornate or detailed,
others are strikingly beautiful, others are intriguing. She decided, however,
that that element of her life is over and done so it's time for them to go. At
about 20 eBay lots per week (both groups of buttons and single buttons), I am
not sure she'll get everything sold by the end of 2020. Yeah, there are a lot
of buttons. (I suspect that as Kathy becomes more and more irrelevant as her
date of retirement draws closer, and others take over her responsibilities, she'll
have more time on her hands.) I have a collection of buttons, too: presidential
campaign buttons. I'll never part with them because Elliott is interested in them.
Kathy's son
Spencer is still recovering from spinal column fusion surgery last November 1.
The bones have not fully fused, so he must walk and walk and use some gizmo
that's supposed to spur bone growth. If they have not fused in 3-4 months, a
second surgery will be required.
Elliott &
Martha are settled in their new apartment (on University Avenue in St. Paul,
not too far from Minneapolis, about a ten minute drive from our house). It's a
reasonably upscale place, although the apartment is not large. They have a well-equipped
exercise room (which no one has been using during the pandemic, of course) and
roof-top facilities for grilling and partying. They also have an underground
garage space. So an attractive place for a couple of millennials.
On the
matter of loosening up, Elliott & Martha are now proposing to invite us to
their apartment for dinner. There's no way we could really be distant—apart a
few feet, but not distanced. They were
very cautious to start with (primarily to protect us), like the rest of us, but
also now conclude that occasional interactions are not threatening when all
involved have been careful. We look forward to it, because Martha was a baker
earlier in life and loves to cook, and Elliott, who rarely cooked anything when
he lived at home, has now become a moderately gourmet cook. Every once in
awhile he texts me pictures of a dinner they have just made, and they look delicious.
Never did I imagine my son would become a foodie.
I wish Elliott could find a better
job. Taking care of lab animals is way below his talent and educational level. He
says that right now, when many of their friends have either had work reduced or
lost their jobs, he's satisfied to stay in a job that will likely never be cut
and that provides excellent health coverage and a decent retirement plan (the
state plan for public employees). Martha works for a small PR firm as a
technical writer; her job is secure; she's busy as heck. But at least on the
income and job front, the two of them are doing well.
Have a good weekend.
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