D-Day + 46: April is the cruelest month

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

-T.S. Eliot

It’s cloudy out today.  Ed says the forecast tells us it will get up to 85 degrees (85!), but with the cloud clover, it just doesn’t seem likely.  The thing is, I chose Colorado as my home largely because of the 300 days of sunshine per year.

Today, I think I am getting gypped.

In reality, it’s only fitting that this final day of this particular month should be so gloomy.  After all, April bites.  With apologies to all those who think that April brings spring and flowers and longer days, well….it also brings rain and clouds and false hope of warm days.  And this year, the lingering coronavirus lockdown, more deaths, and more gnashing of teeth over what the new normal might be in the age of COVID-19.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that April is a month filled with a history of bad stuff happening.  This month, our daily “This Day in History” from the Denver Post has been full of terrors and disasters that happened in past Aprils.  I’ve written before about the Boston Marathon bombings.  But what of so many others?

There was the first major San Francisco earthquake (April 26, 1906).  The Virginia Tech shooter (April 16, 2007).  The Oklahoma City bombing (April 19, 1995). The Ludlow Massacre (April 20, 1914). The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 4, 1968).  The Chernobyl disaster (April 26, 1986).  Heck, Coca-cola announced that they were changing the formula of Coke and rolling out “New Coke” on April 23, 1985.  If that wasn’t an unmitigated disaster, I don’t know what is.

April 15^th is a particularly heinous day in history.  In addition to the Boston Marathon bombings, there’s a long list of other disastrous events.  The sinking of the Titanic (1912).  The assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1865).  And just last year, the Notre Dame fire in Paris.  And none of that is to mention the normal IRS deadline for filing taxes.

Notre Dame, 1987

 Closer to home, there was the Columbine School shooting on April 20, 1999.  I was in Dallas, managing a project, on the day of the shooting.  Most of my team members were people who lived in Colorado, including some with kids in school.  We started getting emails and phone calls about that horrific event, and spent a nervous afternoon getting updates.  I didn’t know Ed at that time, but he got calls asking him to come help film the event (for news outlets) as it unfolded.  He (so wisely) declined the offers of work.  Some things are just not worth any amount of money.  Mark Obmascik, one of my favorite authors, did not have a choice for opting out;  he was a reporter for one of the Denver daily newspapers.  He went on to win a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on Columbine, but it scarred him.  (We birders were blessed when his soul-cleansing project resulted in the book, “The Big Year” – all about birds and birders, nothing about disasters and whack-job disaster-mongers.) 

Most close to home, our friend Rick’s youngest daughter was a student at Columbine at the time.  She escaped, but was shot at in the process, and she still bears the mental and emotional scars from surviving something like that. Every year on April 20^th, Rick and his daughter get together.  It’s a tough day for her, understandably.  It’s a tough day for him, too.  This year, they shared a bottle of wine at his house, then she went home to her husband and kids.  Rick called us for a virtual happy hour afterwards.  It was clear he didn’t want to be alone.  How do you deal with social distancing when you desperately want to reach out and give someone a big bear hug?

As for me, the novelty of the shelter-in-place order is wearing thin.  The moth infestation of our closet, and then the rat infestation in our yard:  these things pretty well annihilated my sense of order and cleanliness and security in my own home.  The Clean-a-thon was always work, but it started out as a fun thing to do together.  Then reality set in, and the fun transformed into duty and drudgery.  The deep cleaning continues now at a snail’s pace, and the whole damn house is becoming dirty all over again.  Where does all the dust and dirt come from?  I appreciate our housecleaners more now than ever.

Alas.  There is really nothing to be done except to soldier on.  As the prospect of May – just a day away! – comes nearer, I’ll try to focus on the good stuff that happens in April.  For as many bad things happen in April, there have been some really good ones, too.  World Earth Day happens every April (first celebrated April 22, 1970), no matter how much our current administration is trying to destroy the earth.  We also have coronavirus to thank for lowering – if just temporarily – the effects of human pollution of the earth. Nelson Mandela was first elected as president of the Republic of South Africa on April 27, 1994, proving that despotic regimes don’t always last forever.  And, most fittingly, the World Health Organization was established on April 7, 1948.  We can only hope that when we get rid of our despot, we will again return to funding the WHO in order to help in the prevention and mitigation of future pandemics.

Still, for all that, I am looking forward to May, and the prospects of more sunshine and more good news about containing and eradicating COVID-19.  We still have virtual happy hours to hold with friends, and more Zoom calls with our extended families.  We’ll finish up the deep cleaning and pray that it’s safe sometime soon to bring our cleaning crew back in the house.  We’ve already told our favorite restaurant proprietor that we want to be the first reservation when he’s able to reopen.  In the meantime, April:  don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

D-Day + 38: More pestilence.

There’s really no other way to say this other than the blunt one.

We have rats.

There is no three-word sentence in the English language that I would have thought less likely for me to utter.  I love you.  That’s a good three-word sentence, maybe the best.  It’s beautiful today.  I’m on vacation!  Let’s go skiing!  Any number of three-word sentences that are pleasant enough to say out loud.  But “we have rats”?  Ewww. Even just typing those words gives me the heebie jeebies.  There’s nothing that makes my skin crawl more than the thought of brown, skinny-tailed vermin crawling around under (or on top of) our back deck.

But there you have it.  When we did our yard cleanup a couple weeks ago, we noticed multiple holes in our back yard, all heading right under the deck.  We had seen some small evidence of digging at the edge of the deck last fall, but we chalked it up to squirrels.  After all, we host tons of squirrels in our yard.  They are maddening, destructive rodents in their own right, but we’ve accepted that, since we feed birds, they are just part of the equation.  And, they can, sometimes, be almost cute.

But the amount and size of the holes we found that week, well, they clearly weren’t all the work of squirrels.  Ed said, “I’m afraid to say what I think this is”.  I knew it then, that it was bad.  If Ed couldn’t say it, I knew it was going to freak me out.

It should not have really been a big surprise.  Several weeks ago, as we walked through the park half a block away, we saw the carcass of a dead rat.  It was the first time I had seen a rat that close to a home of mine.  (I lived in downtown Denver for 15 years, and people talked – vaguely – of rats near the building’s dumpsters, but I never saw one.)  Then a week or two after the dead-rat-in-the-park experience, a neighbor across the street and several houses closer to the park told us – from a safe social distance – that she had rats under her front porch.  It was disturbing to hear, but hey, denial is a good place to be.  I read newspaper stories about how rats were rampant in the streets of some cities like New Orleans, now that much of their food source – the trash from restaurants and bars, now shuttered – was gone.  But I never dreamed that a home of mine would be infested.

We spent the next week exploring natural options.  We bought a “humane” rat zapper and caught one – mouse!  That just meant we are double infested:  we have both rats and mice!  Good Lord!  Ed worked on finding things to drive them all away.  Peppermint scented soaps.  Bay leaves.  Kitty litter (used, thanks to our two inside-only cats.)  He filled several of the burrow-holes with gravel.  We bought an ultrasonic thingy to try to drive them away.

All of those things just seemed to stir up the rats.  One morning, I finally saw a rat run across the back yard.  Then a day later, we saw two more in the same small back yard, and it sent me over the edge.  You know how The Sopranos series starts with Tony Soprano passing out with a panic attack?  Well, that’s kind of where I was.  Shaking.  Crying.  Ready to throw up.

One has to wonder how someone who grew up in rural Iowa turned out to be so squeamish about rats.  And mice.  And snakes.  And all kinds of vermin.  I didn’t get that from my mom.  Many years back, when I was in Iowa to see Mom, I went out for a run.  I passed a large dead snake in the middle of the road on the outskirts of town.  It freaked me out, even though it was clearly smashed and dead.  I told Mom about the HUGE snake in the road, and she wanted to see it, too, so we drove to the scene.  My mom looked at the snake and shook her head.  “Honestly, Judy!” she said.  (That’s what she always said when she was exasperated or annoyed with me:  “Honestly, Judy!”.  Not to be confused with the “Judith Ann!” that she would thunder when really upset with me.  Nope, this was just annoyance, and puzzlement.)  “That’s just an old bull snake.  And that’s not huge at all!”

But squeamish I am, and squeamish I remain.  It sure seemed huge to me.

Which means that, by the end of that first week, we called in the big guns, and had an exterminator come out and place bait traps around the back yard.  We were fearsome of the impacts of using poison; we’re both mindful of not contaminating the food chain.  The exterminator assured us that the poison metabolizes in the rat, and that it won’t harm other animals – even if, say, a hawk picks up a rat for food, it won’t kill the hawk.  The bait traps are too small for the squirrels or neighborhood cats to access.   We’ve been assured, but, like so much in this world today, we’re not completely sure we believe everything we are told.

The exterminators also told us that the rats, once poisoned, would disappear from our property as they left in search of water – an effect of the poison.  But on the next Saturday morning, when they came back to check the bait traps, there they were:  two dead rats on the pathway in our back yard.  Have I said ewww?  Apparently, the extermination is underway.  Thank heavens the exterminator took the dead rats away with him.

We’re both extremely sad that we had to discontinue our bird feeding, since it is, no doubt, the bird seed that is the food source that draws the rats.  The exterminator tells us that we can start feeding again after 4 weeks, but, well, that just seems like a long time to abandon the birds.  Sigh.  I’m sure they’ll find food out there, but sheesh.  Nothing like running a full-on smorgasbord for our feathered friends and then closing the doors abruptly.

Empty feeders

All of this has been a huge distraction from the coronavirus crisis.  Our house deep cleaning project took a big slow down while we’ve been dealing with the Great Rat Infestation of 2020.  On Easter Sunday, we were both sufficiently depressed by the state of the world, including our rat crisis, that we decided to just shut it all out.  While it snowed outside, we turned up the heat, pulled down the blinds, and watched movies all day long.  When I looked outside, I didn’t see any rats.  Just pure white, beautiful snow.

D-Day + 32: Dancing with Disaster

Ed and I both like to read “This Day in History” in our local paper.  Yesterday’s entry, for April 15, 2013, caught my attention.  “Two bombs made from pressure cookers exploded at the Boston Marathon finish line….”

It took me back to that day in April 2013.  It was the first time in twelve years that I had not been part of that race.  Boston meant the world to me.  Boston was legendary even when I was a fledgling jogger, back in the mid 1970s.  It was an ideal.  I held no delusions that I would ever be able to run in that august event; I was never going to be that fast.  I was happy just to admire those who were that fast, and who completed that very difficult course on the third Monday of every April.  But then, after I had run my first three marathons, amazingly, I hit a day when I was that fast.  On a chilly day in early October 2001, in those scary days just a month after 9/11, I ran a qualifying time in the Chicago Marathon.  I was set for my once-and-done trip to Boston in April 2002.

Then something magical happened.  I ran my first Boston, and then I kept re-qualifying for the race.  Year after year.  It became a huge part of my life.  My friends and family all knew, too, how important it was to me.  Year after year; more people than I ever could have hoped for watched my progress through the on-line athlete’s tracker.  They knew that every April, on Patriot’s Day in Boston, I would be there for the race.

But time and life happened.  I ran Boston ten times, and ten times I finished.  Then I finished my goal of running a marathon in every state, in October 2011.  I was getting weary of all the training and all the racing.  My knee was hurting.  My mom died in early 2012, and that just killed my spirit, too.  I was single.  And lonely.  I went to Boston in April 2012, and, for want of a driving mission (and a bit of heat exhaustion), I dropped out of the race in the Newton hills.  It was my only DNF (did not finish) ever.

And it was my last marathon – Boston or otherwise – ever.

But my friends and family didn’t know all those details.  When the news of the 2013 bombing hit the airwaves, I started getting phone calls.  Texts.  Emails.  “Are you okay?”  “Were you there?”  It was heart-warming to know so many people cared.  It was also heartening to hear that my friends who were part of the race that day were all okay (albeit a tad rattled – or annoyed and angry – by the outcome).  And, while it was a huge relief to not have been one of the people injured or killed by the bombs, I was completely ambivalent.  Shouldn't I have been there?

This wasn’t my first experience courting disaster, and it wouldn’t be my last.  Over the course of my life, I’ve been racking up more than my fair share of near-misses, sometimes way too close for comfort.

There was the San Francisco earthquake of 1989.  I was there, in the heart of San Francisco, when the earth started shaking.  I was in the city for a doctor’s appointment, and the doc had just come into the exam room when the quake started.  While I tried to pull my feet out of the stirrups, he said, “we’ll just have to ride this out”, and that shaking seemed to go on forever.  The medical office was running late that afternoon, by a good thirty or more minutes, which, as it turns out, was my good fortune that day.  If they had been on time, I would have very likely been on the Bay Bridge, on my way back out of the city, when it collapsed.  As it was, it took me ten hours to get back home to Grass Valley, where Rome was waiting.  At 3 a.m., we walked across the parking lot to a grocery store (we had just returned back from a time living in the UK, and were staying in a motel), bought a bottle of brandy, and planned to get the heck out of California for good.

Then there was the emergency landing on a flight home from Dallas in 1999.  I was on a project there, traveling back and forth on a weekly basis.  One Thursday night, I caught a flight with a couple of my colleagues.  At about the time we were supposed to be approaching Denver, the captain told us we were making an emergency landing in Oklahoma City.  Huh?  It turned out that one of the engines had a leak, and we could see jet fuel spewing out behind the wing of the plane.  I didn’t realize how serious the situation was until, once we were on the ground, the captain parked the plane at the far end of the runway – as far away from the terminal as possible – and had us go down the slides.  Fire trucks came screaming up and started spraying fire-retarding foam.  Emergency crews yelled at us as we emerged from the slide, shouting at us to move as far away from the plane as we could.  It’s amazing to figure out, only later, how much danger you were in.

That wasn't my only scary flight experience.  There was the time, back in the early 1990s, when I was on an aborted takeoff;  nothing wakes you up from a pre-flight nap like having the plane come to a screeching halt just at the time it should be airborne.  It turned out that the flight control panel went completely dark, and the captain (and all of us on the flight) would have been in deep trouble had we been in the air.

And there was the time, just last December, when we were in New Zealand, and the White Island volcano erupted.  Ed and I, along with our Kiwi host Delwyn, had plans to be on the tour of White Island just a few days later.  What if?  We had just arrived in NZ the morning that the volcano blew;  Delwyn texted us to tell us the news.  She was shaking, she told us, as she looked at the brochure for the tour that she had on her countertop.  

Also in December, we heard news of a helicopter crash on Kauai, on a tour of the Na Pali coast.  Ed and I had just visited Kauai in early November, and had taken that helicopter tour.  We had not flown with the same company, but does it really matter?  All the choppers line up at the same spot at the airport, and they all cover the same flight pattern.  Again, what if?

There are times, it seems, that I have been dancing with disaster for much of my life.  Perhaps it all goes back to the fact that I might not even be here today if it weren’t for disaster – disaster in the form of the last pandemic to hit the world, the Spanish flu of 1918.  You see, my maternal grandmother was married at the time, and was a young mother, in southwestern Iowa.  In the early fall of 1918, her husband took a train journey across Nebraska to look at homesteading opportunities in northern Colorado.  He contracted the Spanish flu and died.  Grandma later remarried and had a new family with my grandfather.  The collection of molecules that is me would not be here if not for the Spanish flu and that fateful trip for her first husband.

But here I am in April 2020, watching it snow outside, and fairly content to be sheltering-in-place.  The Boston Marathon for 2020 was originally scheduled, as usual, on Patriot’s Day:  April 20^th.  The coronavirus has changed all that.  It’s now set to occur on September 14^th instead, and I’ll be praying that things have improved enough by then for it to come off.  Somehow, this whole pandemic is giving me renewed inspiration.  I had a dream last night that I ran a marathon. I didn’t qualify for Boston, but who knows?  I’ve been known to have some pretty darn good luck in the past. 

D-Day + 24: When Coronavirus Hits Home

John Prine is gone.

My brother Dave put it most aptly.  “We shed some tears last night when we learned John Prine had passed away.  Coronavirus was somewhat abstract until someone we cherish so died.”

Ed and I have talked about this many times in the last several weeks:  the inevitability of having someone we know and care about – family member, friend, colleague, neighbor – get the virus.  And, the harsher reality, having someone whom we know and love die from the virus.

As it is, we know several people who may have had, or may currently have, the virus in a mild form.  My friend Molly came home to Colorado from a work conference in Nashville at the end of February, and had many of the symptoms;  her physician – on a phone call – advised that it sounded like she had the virus, but since she was coping okay, she didn’t get tested.  A birding friend of mine in the Springs thinks she has it.  A running friend in KC is pretty sure she has had it.  Our mailperson thinks she had it back in January.  Ed just told me he learned this morning that his business partner’s brother and kid both had it.

Hell, I got seriously sick at the tail end of our New Zealand vacation in late December:  it started with a horrible cough and was unlike any cold I’ve ever had.  Could it have been present in Kiwi-land even before people really knew about it anywhere outside of China?

In all these cases, the people have recovered.  Or are recovering.  No hospitalizations.  No difficulty breathing requiring oxygen.  No ventilators.

No deaths.

But the specter is there, and it feels that much closer today.  I can’t help hearing Jackson Browne singing, from “For a Dancer”,

I don't know what happens when people die
Can't seem to grasp it as hard as I try
It's like a song I can hear playing right in my ear
But I can't sing
I can't help listening
I can't help feeling stupid standing 'round
Crying as they ease you down

It’s times like these that I envy the deeply religious among us who have a certainty about what happens when people die.  I love the idea of a heaven where we’re all reunited with our loved ones;  I just don’t really believe in it.  But I would like to.  And maybe, as so many people seem to do, as I get older, I’ll embrace that thought more.  After all, Pascal’s Wager says that rational people should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God.  If God doesn’t exist, there’s really no loss, and perhaps a reward of living a better life.  If God does exist, there are infinite gains.  Including, maybe, a heaven where we’ll find all our old friends and family and, presumably, our musical idols.

Several months ago, an article made its way around the internet about the coming death of a host of rock legends.  The article starts out with this dire prediction:  Just about every rock legend you can think of is going to die within the next decade or so.  The article acknowledges the icons we’ve lost already, a too-long list that includes John Lennon and Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin.  Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, George Harrison, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson.  Glenn Frey. Prince.  And more, and more, and more.

Then the article goes on to say, “Those losses have been painful.  But it’s nothing compared with the tidal wave of obituaries to come….All of which means there’s going to be a lot of mourning going on”, and ends with a list of rockers who are currently in their 70s.  Bob Dylan.  Paul McCartney.  Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.  Carole King.  Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.  And on and on and on.

The article doesn’t mention John Prine specifically, maybe because he was one of those guys who flew under the radar.  But it doesn't mean he will be mourned any less. The New York Times refers to his music as country-folk; maybe that’s why a list of more traditional rockers missed him.  I mostly knew of John Prine through his songs that were covered by other artists, most prominently “Angel from Montgomery”.  While I didn’t much know of him as a performer, I still have a piano book of his music from the very early 1970s; the picture on the cover is of a very young man.

But then Dave told me, once, ten or more years ago, that I needed to see him in concert.  Dave said, “trust me.  He’s a great storyteller and performer.”  The next time that John Prine came through Colorado, he played Red Rocks.  My concert-going buddy, Denise, and I snapped up tickets as soon as they went on sale and got most excellent seats.  The man who played that night had gray hair and a very gravelly voice.  We were blown away by the music.  And the stories.  The laughs. And the tears.  We were impressed by the hard-core fans who sang every word to every song that he sang.  We didn’t know them all – not even close – but left the concert with a long list of songs to download from iTunes.

This morning, Dave texted, “We will miss his music and homespun style.  Listen to Lake Marie and remember him.”  Lake Marie just happened to be the song I most loved from his live performance.  It’s playing in my head, all day long, with a picture of him in that magical place.

Lake Marie

Standing by peaceful waters
Peaceful waters
Standing by peaceful waters
Peaceful waters
Aah baby, we gotta go now

D-Day + 21: Coronavirus Curses

Pandemic

Contagion

Infestation

Pestilence

Vermin

That pretty well sums up our weekend, the fourth such weekend of our shelter-at-home days.

It all started innocently enough.  Our housekeepers, who come every other week, do a good enough job.  But not really a good job.  We accept the status quo because they are reasonable, reliable, fairly priced, and very fast.  But in our day-to-day lives, we frequently comment on the things that they miss.  The dusty baseboards.  The cobwebs not removed.  The dusting that only goes so far. 

We had been thinking about the need to do a deep cleaning sometime soon.  After all, we moved into this house five years ago, and have not really done a serious cleaning since then.  So when we asked the cleaners to stay away when their normal cleaning day rolled around a couple of weeks ago, we took this as the opportunity for us to tackle the whole enchilada – just like millions of other Americans.

But millions of other Americans are not project managers.  Unfortunately for Ed, I am.  That means that I put on my PM cap, and out came the scheduling plan.  To better ensure success, I knew we couldn’t go with the Big Bang approach, where you have one task that is “clean the whole house”.  Nope.  I went with a task deconstruction that loosely follows the Agile approach which is the rage among project management philosophies these days.  Now we have a schedule with every room, and every subtask by room – all broken down by phases.

Like any good project management approach, there are metrics associated with completion.  I run a daily stand-up meeting (pretty much with myself, sometimes including Ed; good staff is so hard to come by these days) to determine what tasks to take on next.  This flexibility helps to ensure that we continue forward progress even when the resources make themselves scarce. The project has been running pretty well to plan (the only deadline is to get the damn house cleaned before we both give up, or – hopefully – get released from this quarantine).  

We started out with an easy room – the dining room.  Easy Peasy.  Nothing much there except, well, the usual dining room stuff:  table, chairs, rug, windowsills, a couple of shelves.  The success of that task led us to take on increasingly more complicated and difficult tasks.  Bathrooms.  Piano room.  Guest bedroom.  Our master bedroom was the first real test of our fortitude.  We took the bed apart and pulled it out from the wall.  Our two cats had deposited a prodigious amount of fur under the bed, at the baseboards, anywhere they could.  But thanks to a hardworking vacuum cleaner and fresh attitudes, we got ‘er done.

Then a week ago Saturday, we tackled the library.  It’s a small room.  But some imbecile (I plead the fifth on this one) decided that we needed to take all the books off all the shelves in order to properly dust the room.  The other moron on the team decided to use the unshelving/reshelving process to ensure that our alphabetic filing system was accurate.  A full day and 1300 books (give or take a few), we survived.  It’s amazing how decisions about books one will never read (or never read again) become easier as the shelves get fuller and there’s really no place else to store them.  Goodwill will thank us.

Our next big weekend challenge awaited us this past Saturday:  the HPC.  The HPC is our Harry Potter Cupboard under the stairs.  We don’t have a basement, so this handy closet on the first floor is our catch-all.  It’s chockful of stuff.  A few tools, spare lightbulbs, futon mattresses for the pullout couch, bedding (ditto), old towels, rags, spare cutlery and water bottles.  The big air mattress that we use once every ten years or so.  Cat carriers.  Extra cat food. A little of this.  A little of that.  You get the picture.

We knew that the HPC was going to take all day.  But that was before we discovered that little brown moths had infested the closet.  Little brown moths, moth nests, and – most disgusting of all – little white worms trying to become moths.  Ewwww.  Dear Lord.  Our Saturday was spent pulling every single thing out; vacuuming the bejeebers out of all the surfaces; washing down all the surfaces and spraying everything with a concoction Ed made out of water, isopropyl alcohol, and lavender oil.  We ran 8 or 9 loads of laundry in hot water.  We filled our trash dumpster with wrapping paper and bows and tissue paper:  for some odd reason, those gross little buggers loved the tissue paper.  So out it all went.

At the end of the day, we got the HPC reassembled.  It’s all nice and shiny now, and there is actually room on some of the shelves.  There’s room to walk into the closet now.  We even rearranged so that stuff is mostly easier to access.

It was a big job, but by Saturday night, the rest of our living space on the first floor looked livable again.  We rewarded ourselves with a happy hour out on our front porch, opening one of the bottles of wine that we had rescued from the HPC.  We settled in a bit later with some dinner and a movie on Netflix.

Before going upstairs to bed, we went to the HPC and opened the door to – again – admire our handywork.  And there – up high – on a wall that was beautifully clean and white just a short time earlier – was a freaking little brown moth.

Son of a bitch.  Coronavirus Curses.

D-Day + 18: Silver Linings in the Time of Coronavirus

My husband’s BFF, Derr, has an incredibly positive outlook on life and the twists and turns that it presents to him.  He has an uncanny way of finding the bright side of things.  To wit:  many years back, he had a bad fall on a trampoline, and broke his neck.  Yes!  Broke his neck!  His reaction:  well, there’s my good luck!  I could have ended up paralyzed, and I just had this little broken neck instead.

It’s a gift, to see the silver linings in things, and not a gift I always possess.  But in these days of the coronavirus pandemic and all the sad – and angry - stories that are coming out of it, I sometimes stop and try to put on my Derr hat and see the good.

Like the daily exchange we see with neighbors up the street.  We see Eric (the dad) and his 5-year-old Knox outside now every day, kicking or throwing balls of various shapes and sizes.  Down the street the other direction, our neighbors built a front yard little climbing wall for their two young kids (5 and 3?  Or maybe 6 and 4?  Never matter; Josey and Paulie are as cute as they come).  The entire little family congregates regularly in the front yard, the kids playing, mom and dad with coffee mugs.  We see more of this family unity on our daily walks through the neighborhood, too.  Who knew there were so many families, and so many families now spending quality time outside on the soft spring days we’ve had.

And more simple things:  watching the yard light up with color, bit by bit, as all the spring bulbs bloom.  It seems that I almost always end up traveling for work in the spring bloom time, and so miss much of the color – color that I’ve anticipated big time while doing the fall planting.  Not so this year.  I get to see it all.  And is it my imagination, or are the birds singing more vibrantly this year?  So far there are no new species in our yard, but that’s okay.  I’ll just revel in the fact that our resident European Collared Dove appears to have acquired a new mate, and I’ll thrill to watch the goldfinches at the feeders outside my office window, as they molt into their bright yellow breeding plumage, little by little.

When the shelter-at-home order came about, one of the first things that I feared missing was my weekly Pilates class.  But the Pilates studio quickly figured out how to provide classes over Zoom.  We’re doing mat Pilates instead of reformer Pilates, something I wasn’t sure about to start out.  But there are so many benefits!  Now I can take multiple classes a week.  There’s no longer a need to factor in drive time.  The bigger change, though, is that with online classes there’s no limitation on participants – a limitation that was imposed by the number of reformers.  Many classes I’ve wanted to take in the past were full by the time I tried to register;  now there is no limitation to the number of participants.  And, oh!  The workouts!  I’ve not been this sore after exercise in ages.  It’s the good kind of sore:  where you know that you got a seriously good workout.  

I’m grateful for the teachers who now have their own challenge.  Teaching reformer Pilates, they just tell us what to do and adjust the springs, occasionally demonstrating a move, but not participating as a member of the class.  Not so with mat Pilates.  They demonstrate and perform the entire workout with us. There’s a popular meme that says that if you think Fred Astaire was a great dancer, consider Ginger Rogers, who did everything that Fred did, only she did it backwards and wearing heels.  That’s the spirit of our Pilates instructors these days:  not only do they do every exercise and move and pose that they tell us to do, they do it while talking us through the moves, and doing everything in a mirror image.  They are my heroes of the week.

By the way, that Zoom thing?  Ah, yeah.  The first time we had a class via Zoom, everyone had technical issues, and it took a while to get going.  The next time, the issues were mostly resolved, but now everyone was shy, turning off their own video feeds.  By the third or fourth class?  We’re all now old pros.  Cameras on, having a nice face to face chat before class starts, and then we all get to watch everyone else go through the motions of the class.  Nothing like change being forced on you to make you adapt.

Back in the mid-1980s, two of my graduate school classmates got married – to each other.  We became friends when they were my partners in several class projects, so Rome and I went to their wedding.  The wedding was in one of those old grand mansions in Denver that had been converted to an events venue.  It was early summer, and the ceremony was held in a pretty garden off to the side of the mansion.  Midway through the ceremony, it started to sprinkle, a few drips at first, moving quickly to outright rain.  Everyone started looking around, wondering if we should run for cover.  The minister – a female Episcopalian priest – didn’t miss a beat.  As she prayed, she added, “and let us thank God for the rain today”.  Rome and I looked at each other and laughed. It was summer in Colorado; a little rain was not going to harm anyone, even if they were in tuxes and bridal wear.  Everyone was a little damp by the end of the ceremony, but once the champagne started flowing (inside the mansion!), all was well.

As I write this, it’s raining here in Denver.  It’s not a nice summer rain, but rather, an icy spring rain that feels more Midwest or east coast in its dampness and bone-chillingness.  But inside, I’m warm and safe.  I may not thank God for today’s rain - although here in Colorado, we pretty much always need the rain, so, well, okay, I’ll thank him for that after all.   But more to the point, I’m definitely thankful for the fact that the coronavirus has caused me to be more connected to family and friends in multiple ways, far more than the old normal.  Keep them coming:  text chains, FB messenger chats, phone calls, emails.  

And remember, always look at the bright side of life.