It’s Different Now

Here in this (almost unbelievably) 3rd  spring of the pandemic, it’s different now, especially when you are choosing the right thing to do, also the title of book my brother wrote, almost 25 years ago.

I mean there’s not that crushing fear of getting sick, like there was in the first months. Even more I have this feeling that everything’s falling apart – institutions and businesses that we used to, if not trust, at least be able to expect them to get the job done are failing us. Like the post office and the government and the CDC. Not enough teachers or airline pilots or daycare workers – so many people have justifiably said wait a minute this situation sucks and I’m not going to work in it anymore.

And instead of making us stick together and help each other out, instead there’s so much hatred and dissension, “I can’t stand you because you think our kids should mask up in school” … “Learn about Black history” … “admit to white privilege”.

Of course there is the factor that since we’ve all been in our holes for so long, no one knows how to act in public anymore now that we’re crawling out and I think that is certainly contributing to a general level of rudeness and incivility. And car crashes.

On Monday night I stayed up late to make a King Cake so I could share slices of it at work on Fat Tuesday. And simmered some red beans with a ham hock so we could eat them for dinner, mildly wondering why I was doing it, except I always bake a King Cake. I mean I’m not from New Orleans. But like lots of people, I love the city’s food and music and have had a number of significant visits there, usually during American Library Association conferences – in 2006, the ALA was the first big conference to be held in New Orleans after Katrina, although you can see attendance, at barely 17,000, was on the low side.

I do try to uphold holiday food traditions, cookies at Christmas, matzoh and chicken and flour-less desserts for Passover, King Cake for Mardi Gras.

Here’s this year’s, and a selection of other years, 2021 (when I did a slideshow of the production of the cake), 2019, and 2017.

[portfolio_slideshow pagerpos=disabled size=large]

But more than anything, this excerpt from a book called One Dead In the Attic that a friend posted on Facebook, about the aftermath of Katrina, made me feel like I had chosen the right thing to do.

Starting this week we all get to choose whether to wear our masks, except on public transportation. I am mostly choosing to, in public shared spaces, especially retail. I mean, I’m only in there a few minutes but the people who work there have to be there all day with tons of people like me, and riskier than me, passing through.

And, I’ve really enjoyed not getting any colds for the last two years because masks work despite F’ing Ron DeSantis saying they don’t. Dickhead.

It’s funny, we’ve been suspended in amber for 2 years, feeling stuck and locked down, but actually within those years things have changed a lot. Or maybe just gone back & forth.

Back in pandemic I used to be sure to turn on our rainbow icicle lights on the front porch every night so neighbors would know we were here and OK. Like the people putting rainbows in their front windows and colored hearts in the shape of rainbows and all the other little signs like, “hey we’re here, we’re OK”. After I turned on the lights I went into Al’s old room to pull down the blind, the student room but we didn’t/couldn’t have one in 2020-21, and I could see the lights reflected in the neighbor’s windows. Now we have another set of lights that are plain, kind of greenish, and when I turn them on, I see them reflected in living room windows instead.

And we have different neighbors now, that we know less well.

John and Julie and their cute dog, Sofia, their unbearablely cute little curly haired pandemic puppy who grew into a young dog, moved a little farther west to be nearer their daughter. The bike guy who used to rent next door also moved.

So for me that makes things like bringing in the papers and taking out the trash when I might run into one or the other of them and chat, less fun, because they’re not here anymore.

I have a new oven, so that’s different too. There’s no place to hang dishtowels on the door, but I keep going for it. I did hate the fussy 2-level racks as I predicted so I spent $130 and got three plain racks and they’re in there now, and the fussy ones are in the basement. I guess it’s the downside of online ordering. I could see that the oven I ordered came with the fussy racks, but I thought I’d be able to cope and didn’t really realize what a pain they’d be until it was in the house. Now I’ve got the racks I want but it burns me that I had to pay that much extra on top of the handsome price the oven already commanded. I wish I could give the fussy racks back, but I don’t think I can. Mark thinks I should try to sell them on nextdoor.

The oven’s got an app, which is hilarious, and it sends me a text when it’s preheated, and I can turn it off from afar. I can even get a video feed of the inside.

Some things still look the same. I made scones today, dried cranberry, and they look like these from Feb of 2020, but because our student can’t eat nuts, the 2022 ones have cream cheese instead of marzipan and no sliced almonds on top.

They’re one of Belinda’s favorites. They moved too, they went to Louisville, in late summer. We had eaten the scones sitting outside on a warm day at Colectivo, in February of 2020, after Belinda & Stephens baby shower. Belinda got Covid in the Fall, she thinks from one her patients at the VA in Louisville, and she said she knew she had it because one of these scones they had made from the recipe I gave them, tasted like sand.

My sourdough looks pretty much the same too.

Earlier in pandemic I feel like I was more careful to record my reactions. Now I feel like it’s all slipping away because I’m not writing it down, but I also feel like who cares what I think. Although where would history be without rather ordinary and probably privileged people like me writing it down … the other day in a meeting I started talking about how I filled in and entered the course schedule years ago, so I have logins for one of the more unfriendly computer systems on campus, and they said, “oh you can’t retire” (and take all that knowledge with you).  And what I wanted to say was, hang on I’ll just keep telling stories like this about how it used to be and you’ll get so sick of it you’ll be happy to see me go. In 50 or 100 years maybe I’ll be interesting again, but not now.