With each day, hoping this virus will end

The Boston Globe

I am writing this on the last day of March. The “In like a lion, out like a lamb” month. But that was before. When the lions of March were a sweet myth with an exit date.

March? April? Tuesday? Friday? The days blur now. And they inch along. “Is it time for lunch?” “Is it 5 o’clock, yet?” And yet, come night, each day feels too short somehow. Stunted. Where did it go? What did I do today?

Time. Reality. Yesterday. Today. They’re all smudged. I wake up every morning thinking this day will be different. Today I will accomplish something. Today I will work in the yard. Today I will rake the leaves out of the flower beds. I will clean my office, read over old journals, organize photos, learn Photoshop, something I have long wanted to do. Something I have said I would do if only I had time.

Now I have time.

But I don’t learn Photoshop. I get up, make coffee, and while it is brewing look out the window at a world that looks scrubbed clean, that is clearer than it’s ever been, in high definition, the whites, even on an overcast day, like the whites in Santorini, so bright that they make you squint. And then I sit down and drink my coffee and read the morning news. And the contrast between what I read — more people sick, more people dying, convention centers and ships turned into hospitals, cities all over the world shut down — and what I see from my window, makes the desire to learn Photoshop, to learn anything, to have to concentrate, vanish.

All I want to do are mindless things: play Monopoly with my hunkered down family and Words with Friends with anyone. I make the bed. I shower and get dressed. I go for walks, cook, bake, do laundry, read, and watch TV. But I am like the wind-up doll my Uncle Buddy sent from California when I was a child. She walked and she talked a little, but even my dog knew she was missing something. There was a hole in her back, under her dress where you inserted a key and with a few quick twists she’d be off, strutting her stiff-legged self across our red-checked, linoleum kitchen floor, her head moving from side to side, her arms synchronized, too, her words eclipsed by the sound of the mechanism that propelled her.

That’s me. That’s all of us. Head moving, arms moving, speaking, doing normal things in these abnormal times. But eclipsed by a bigger picture, by all the unknowns that propel us.

I keep looking for answers or at least for clues that will tell me about these unknowns, about how and when this virus will end. I’m used to knowing the ending. I skip to the last pages in books. I read spoiler alerts. At the very least, past experience has always been a teacher. But there is little past experience for this. A century-old influenza is as close as it gets.

I listened to a podcast the other day. “What I Learned When My Husband Got Coronavirus,” written by Jessica Lustig, a deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine. Lustig’s husband is 56, has asthma and COVID-19. But before he contracted the virus he was fit and strong. He routinely went on five-hour bike rides. At the time Lustig wrote her essay, which would become a podcast, her husband had spent 12 days in isolation in his Brooklyn bedroom. Weak and nauseous with an escalating fever, he had started coughing up blood. The podcast ends when he is diagnosed with pneumonia and given an antibiotic. We don’t learn what happens next. Again, no ending.

Lustig said about the days in isolation: “It’s as if we are in a time warp in which we have accelerated at 1½-time speed while everyone around us remains in the present — already the past to us — and they, blissfully, unconsciously, go about their ordinary lives, experiencing the growing news, the more urgent advisories and directives, as a vast communal experience, sharing posts and memes about cabin fever, about home-schooling, about social distancing, about how hard it all is, while we’re living in our makeshift sick ward, living in what will soon be the present for more and more of them.”

“What will soon be the present.” Maybe. Maybe not. I hear my grandchildren playing Monopoly in the next room. “That’s not fair!” Charlotte yells. Then laughs. And I laugh, too, because Adam is a tough opponent. A brother and sister laughing. COVID-19 has upended their worlds and separated them from their friends, canceled sports, plays, parties, and trips. Yet neither has said, “That’s not fair!” And neither is consumed with endings.

They live in the present. They live in the right now. Teens are so often reviled for this. Maybe in this new world, they should be revered.