January 31, 2023
"'Damn, damn, damn.'" That's me quoting Henry Higgins (My Fair Lady). I used the correct quotation marks.
At about 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, December 31, 2022, Kathy and I both tested positive for COVID. After dodging it for nearly three years, the bullet got us.
We go annually to our friends the Dixons' for a gourmet New Year's Eve dinner. It is one of the social highlights of our year. I have done so since the mid-1980s and Kathy with me since we met. That Saturday morning Kathy was feeling under the weather and had decided she would not be up for dinner. We both tested for COVID and were both negative. By later in the day, she still didn't feel good, but it seemed like an ordinary cold. I decided, in what I thought was an excess of caution, that we should both test again. Both tests were positive. That is when I quoted Professor Higgins.
I have always been irritated when dinner guests cancel the day of the event because they are sick. One cannot be irritated at the guests, of course; one is irritated at nature or the world or the fates. I felt doubly bad cancelling when we did, *an hour* before we were supposed to arrive. No surprise, however, the Dixons were glad we tested, because they certainly didn't want us there exposing them or the rest of the guests to COVID. (They forgave us; we've seen them since. And they sent dinner portions to us the next day, which were delicious, even though we would have enjoyed eating them more with everyone else!)
Our plans at that point also included leaving the next morning, January 1, 2023, for a three-day drive to Naples, Florida, for our three-month stay. Even if we'd wanted to leave, and even if doing so wouldn't ignore the medical advice to quarantine for five days after a COVID diagnosis, we weren't in any condition to drive to St. Paul, much less part way to Florida. For four days we both felt like we had a bad cold. We immediately got appointments for Paxlovid, and whether not because of that we don't know, but we were glad the symptoms were *no worse* than a bad cold. We also had no noticeable side effects from Paxlovid.
As it turned out, there were two silver linings to getting COVID, neither of which I could know when I was being peeved on New Year's Eve. First, by Thursday we were willing to contemplate travel, but I dreaded the three days of driving. I contacted my long-time travel agent and asked if she could find any last-minute deals on flights and car rental. We had decided last summer against flying and renting a car because I thought the rental charges were astronomically high—approaching the cost of renting a place to live in Florida! I was sure this was a fool's errand, but mirabile dictu, my travel agent came up with a decent airfare and a much better deal on a car. So I told Kathy I didn't want to drive; she didn't disagree. She doesn’t like the drive any more than I do.
Driving can make at least marginal financial sense (the airfare is probably about equivalent to the cost of gas, food, and lodging when driving, so the price of a rented car is the additional cost—and when it was over $6000 last summer, driving was more attractive.) The price of the rental car now was less than half what it was six months earlier, so suddenly the difference didn't seem worth the six days on the road (three to Florida, three back to Minnesota).
When I think a little further, moreover, I realize that the risks of trouble are far greater driving than flying: car mechanical trouble (which could delay travel for a day or more), stormy weather (we've seen that delay us), traffic backups (not likely an entire day, but they can be several hours), a sudden medical issue (e.g., I need a new crown), or a car accident (which could delay or terminate a trip). The risk of injury or death in flying are so small they are negligible. According to Aviation News, "Your odds of being in an accident during a flight is one in 1.2 million, and the chances of that accident being fatal are one in 11 million. Your chances of dying in a car crash, conversely, are one in 5,000." There are several versions of these statistics out there, none quite the same, but the gap in risk is always of the same magnitude.
Apart from the usual hassles of flying ever since 9/11/2001, we got to Florida. It was exactly eight hours door to door: my ex-wife Pat picked us up at 10:20 CST to take us to the airport and we walked in the door of our Florida condo at 6:20 CST/7:20 EST. That included a stop at Publix, the large local grocery store chain. (And standing in line for an hour to get the rental car. That was the most irritating part of the entire trip.)
I wrote that we are in a condo. It's one of four units in a two-story building that faces on a small lake (about a mile around) in a homeowners association. It's a lovely unit, one owned by a friend's sister; the sister and her husband decided to move to New Mexico but they kept this condo; our friend alerted them to our interest, and they rented it to us. We are on the ground floor so have a lanai and can walk out to get on the asphalt path that goes all the way around the lake.
As I may have written before, with their neatly-manicured lawns, well-maintained buildings, and everything sparkly-clean everywhere, these communities (homeowners associations, or HOAs) make me slightly uneasy. This one's not gated but it's still a remove from the "real" world. It is almost exclusively white. We know there are a few Cubans living in some of the units—we're having cocktails with some of them this Saturday—but by and large the only people with a skin color slightly different from mine are the grounds crews that come around. These are enclaves, of varying degrees of access, that are enormously popular here in Florida (and, I know, elsewhere in warm climates in the U.S.) that are mainly available to the affluent. That said, at least it's not like The Villages, up near Orlando, with over 80,000 residents and its own TV and radio stations as well its own grocery stores and clubs and every convenience and necessity and activity you can think of—one never needs to leave The Villages. I dunno, something about that seems artificial to me, but I can't quite decide why I find the idea aversive.
At the same time, these HOAs appeal to my sense of order and tidiness (which, in our house, I confess that I honor more in the breech than the practice). The messiness of the world—in all its senses—is held at bay. And of course we are extremely pleased that our friend's sister and husband rented their place to us—it's wonderful.
We are at the end of our first month here (well, it was supposed to be a month, but instead it's the first three weeks, even though it's the end of January, because of that irritating coronavirus) and life is serene. One could make a good argument that to be able to say that life is serene, in a warm climate away from the cold one we call home, is itself detached from the real world. Many are not retired, so cannot enjoy such a remove (even with WFH), and even many who are retired live on very modest incomes that would not allow a three-or-more-month residence elsewhere. Although I don't have any data or evidence to support this claim, my guess is that life is not "serene" for many retirees.
Not because of a fear of COVID, we are sticking around our place more than we have in the past. Kathy's hip is still on the road to recovery (doing perfectly well), so she cannot go on the hour-long walks that we took in parks and nature preserves and the like in prior years. We do walk part-way around the lake, at which time my routine includes feeding the ibises, moorhens, and fish. They are accustomed to people doing so: when I swish the little plastic bag with the Cheerios, the ibises and moorhens immediately come running. The ibises make a funny sound when diving in the grass for the Cheerios, something between a quack and a grunt. The moorhens quack, and one fluttered up by my hand to get fed, which startled me so much I jumped back. Moorhen:
Ibis:
Kathy, with her usual initiative, went on the local Facebook "Buy Nothing" website and found us a couple of free bikes. They aren't racing-class high-end bikes, but they have gears and brakes and they're the right size and they work. So we ride them. Interestingly, biking presents no problems for her hip. (For those of you not on Facebook, or are but haven't used "Buy Nothing," it's a great site. The rule is that anything you post you are giving away; no charging is permitted. At home in Minneapolis we have gotten rid of a fair amount of stuff using "Buy Nothing," in our continuing but not very successful quest to downsize. So Kathy looked to see if there were any bikes, and lo and behold, there were!)
The second silver lining to contracting COVID, which I just learned about in the past week, from a medical study out of Europe, is that it increases your immunity noticeably when you've also had the full round of vaccine and booster shots: it's hybrid immunity. You have some immunity from the vaccination and some from the coronavirus itself, but you have even better immunity when you have had both. So I guess we're in as good a shape as we can be.
As I finished composing this missive this morning, the air temperature in Minneapolis is -11 and the windchill is -33. (We just biked around the neighborhood.)
My best.
Gary
